Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

On Saturday evening, after a day of sleeping-in, watching the TV, and fried chicken, Hans and I put on our cleanest casuals and ventured out to the upper embankment to the night club called The Monastery for what had been hyped up to be one of the best events for the University students for a number of years already. Everybody was excited. Big act names from Moscow and St. Petersburg were usually on the stage; groups or artists that would otherwise never perform in the provinces.

Neither Hans nor I had been to the club yet and so it took us a bit of looking to find the right street. It wasn’t where I had imagined it would be from the descriptions of the other students.

“Any idea why it’s called the The Monastery, Hans?” I puzzled.

“No, because I hope zat zere vill be lots of girlz zhere. No girlz? No Hans!” he proclaimed with a put-on over-zealous German accent.

I stood still to click my heels in and shouted his proclamation to all the passersby. “Achtung! Keine Meidschen, Keine Hans!”

“I did not know that you can speak German, Peter,” he looked so shocked and surprised.

“Eh! A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” I replied shrugging my shoulders.

As we were coming to the end of the street and very near the edge of the bluff overlooking the Volga there was nothing to see but a large old church with three green domes sitting in a church yard surrounded with several outbuildings. There was still some snow in the shade of the trees as the twilight turned to dusk.

“That can’t be it, can it?” we asked each other simultaneously and then laughed at ourselves.

Then a door to the church opened and some stage hands dressed in black moved some crates into the building. Out of the door poured a stream of deep electronic bass drum thuds and other sounds of electronic dance music. As we approached we could hear the music coming from inside the church and heard a group milling out behind in a courtyard between the chapel and the outbuildings. Yes, this was the place.

“Now I know why it’s called The Monastery,” Hans said slapping me in the chest with a backhand.

“This can’t be real! This is wrong on so many levels,” I stood mute and glued to my place on the ground looking around with disgust and disapproval.

Throughout the church yard were parked several very gaudy automobiles, with their drivers milling around smoking, some wiping mud and dust off of fenders and doors with damp rags. The cars were mostly German with a long, chunky Mercedes being the model of choice from different years. There were some older BMW 5 series with random body damage in an unfinished state of repair, but also what looked to be there in the dark, a pristine stretch 7 series BMW with all the trimmings, its parking lights on. Its paint shined even in the dark. There were some Range Rovers and other luxury sport utility trucks, but they looked Asian, not European. The drivers were dressed like models from a BOSS commercial with the hair to match. These were no sloughs taking on a driving job at night. They looked more like bodyguards the closer I tried not to look. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out they were all armed, packing heat of one sort or another in a belt or a holster under the arm, as many of the Mercedes were the bullet-proof kind. The license plates were all from Moscow. As I took all this in, I remembered the instructions of the Dean on Friday afternoon, “keep your eyes open….” A little shark was holding an open house for all to see.

Hans and I made our way to the courtyard where the students were gathering under a suspended awning with heat lamps. There were stand tables where drinks were being served for the reception. As we came closer a bouncer appeared from the shadows and asked to see our student cards. With no further questions, we joined the reception and were served drinks of our choice by skinny waitresses in black short skirts and heels as tall as their own tibulas were long, with hair pulled back into a tight, slick ponytail. They walked like they were on stilts made of toothpicks.

The group was already near one hundred, maybe more. Many of the faces I recognized but certainly not by how they were dressed. Being used to seeing them in bulky sweaters, scarves and boots, tussled hair in the thralls of winter weather, I barely recognized many of them as they looked so formal and professional with little black dresses or dark suits on, hair beautifully done in feminine curls or slicked back with oil. The atmosphere was light, but also felt false. These didn’t look like the same people I studied with, as if they were actors on a set. The night was getting a bit cold, even under the awning and heat lamps. This was still Russia and it wasn’t April yet!

After a short speech by somebody I didn’t recognize from the university’s administration, thanking this person and that, a short, stocky man dressed in a very fine suit and shoes, head shaved smooth, was introduced: Mr. P., the proprietor of The Monastery and tonight’s host. A round of polite applause came up from the crowd. I recognized him immediately.

“Ladies and Gents, I welcome you to The Monastery as my guests tonight. You are very welcome. Please come and dance and drink with me and my friends and none of you can go home earlier than three o’clock! Your exams are done. You have no lessons to finish before Monday. Tonight, we have a lot of ********** fun!” A round of barbaric cheers swelled up from the crowd of students, like heathens who had just been given the order to fall on their foes and to pull them from limb to limb until the sun came up.

With the host leading the chorus, the crowd chanted, “one… two… three!” On three, the doors of the chapel-club were pulled open by thuggish bouncers in gaudy, what looked to be iridescent suits that shimmered in the disco lights like in some sort of perverted theme park way. The sight was so surreal and unexpected that I laughed out loud at the sheer folly of what seemed to be the purposefully overdone effects. There was no was frivolity in this pageant. Everybody was taking themselves very seriously, almost solemnly, as the students rushed in to their own Pleasure Island, for a night of uninhibited, unsupervised vice.

The interior of the chapel had not been renovated much at all. The ceiling paintings were still visible, in poor repair after seventy-five years of communism’s neglect, but even in the black lights of the disco floor one could see the saints and patriarchs looking down giving a scornful scowl at the revelers below. There was in the center of the church, directly under the church’s central dome which is crowned with three onion shaped copulas, the DJ had set up his tools of the trade. The crowd was already encircling the raised stage set up with mixing tables and blaring speakers, and bobbing up and down. Behind the stage into the apse where an altar would have been, another stage was ready for a live performance of a mystery guest who had yet to be announced. It was a tradition to leave that a secret until performance time leaving the guests in suspense until the last minute. The bars were set up in the side aisles and the music worshipers were left to dance and frolic in the space where the pews for the faithful had once stood now void of prayer books and sacraments. I didn’t even want to know what happened inside the confessionals.

As I pushed my way through the crowd from the narthex into the nave I bumped into Pasha’s back and pushed him into Marina who was already dancing up a small storm. When I turned to apologize to Pasha for having bumped into him and he recognized my face, his lit up as well as Marina’s and we laughed off the collision in the dark. After some spoken greetings Marina took my hand and said that she would like to introduce me to somebody. I let her guide me through the crowd to one of the side chapels which had been filled with tables and benches along the curved walls. Sitting at these tables, drinking their drinks surrounded by very well-dressed women of exceptional figures and faces, were undoubtedly the owners of the fleet of luxury cars parked in the church yard. Marina, almost skipping through the crowd brought me directly to the host of the night, Mr. P., and introduced me as her ‘American friend.”