Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

As Hans tried to get out the bar he stumbled on his drunk legs and was collared by the bouncer and thrown out of the club on his face by both of the thugs with a violent shove. He was lucky not to have gotten a beating before he was ejected.

I helped Hans stagger home. He wasn’t moving very swiftly after being kicked and hitting his head, as well as being wasted from vodka. It was eleven-thirty on Saturday night and I wish I had brought a hat with me to the club. The wind was sharp and cold again after two warmish days. My ears were burning with the night’s wind chill.

Sitting at Hans’s kitchen table under a dim light with a mug of hot Nescafe and some ‘tabletki’ for his aching head, we sat in silence and listened to the pendulum on the living room wall swing and click, swing and click.

“It vas vorth it!” Hans smiled.”it felt so good in my hand…” He held out the offending hand and squeezed the air slowly.

“Shut up you idiot,” I quipped, “You could have gotten us both pretty badly beat up.”

“Yes, maybe you are right. I heard Mr. P. had been in jail for beating somebody dead in somebody else’s night club,” Hans commented through his drunken slurring.

“Really!?” I asked intrigued.

“This iz what ze students say,” he confirmed.

I looked away from Hans’s stupid expression in disgust and also to avoid his rank breath. Why did Russian alcohol have to smell so bad?

Hans was snoring and sweating at two in the morning. I could hear him and smell him and made me think back to Vitaly, my roommate from the dorms. Why did it have to smell so bad? Between the clock hanging over the couch above me, Hans snoring in the next room and my mind swimming in everything I learned that evening before at The Monastery, certainly a place I would never want to return to, there was little chance of me sleeping for at least another hour. I tossed and turned as I mulled over Olya’s revelation that she knew I was being watched. What concerned me more was her warning not to do things that would be misunderstood by those watching me. Was Mr. P. really an ex-convict or just a wannabe? What had the Dean wanted me to pay attention to in particular last night? What had I missed that I should have been looking for? Who was my personal tail, my perverse guardian angel, from the city secret police? What had I really said to mother on the telephone the last time I spoke to her? Would Mr. P. beat me to death if was to learn what the Dean was suggesting I do? What was the Dean suggesting I do, expose him and his thug friends in a university publication? Why? Why would the Dean ask me to do that? Maybe Mr. P. can’t read? What specifically was his racket anyway? Why should I be interested in a local thug anyway? I was more interested in exposing the swindles with the privatization process more than the rise of a local crime boss. What influence was Mr. P. trying to build up locally, I wondered. It seemed to me he was just an overgrown pimp. Just an alpha hooligan with a protection racket in town. Probably didn’t even control the drugs being used in his own club.

Trying to sleep I could only see all those ‘girlz’ behind my eyelids dancing and twirling their dresses on the dance floor. They all had looked very pretty tonight! Indeed, all of them.

I returned home on Sunday afternoon after brunch at Hans’ place. He hadn’t remembered much of the night and he cringed when I told him what had happened. He rubbed the back of his head as perhaps some of the more poignant moments were coming back to him. What a fool.

Babushka was up and busy in the early afternoon in our apartment when I turned the locks and shuffled in from the dark stair well. The hall light was on. She could see that I had slept about as well as Hans had looked that morning and offered to make me some tea.

“Nu shto?” was Babushka’s only question as we sat silently around her stunted refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Nothing, really nothing. I slept very poorly that’s all,” I tried to justify my ashen face.

“Drank too much did you?” she accused.

“Baba — you know I don’t drink,” I puffed my breath at her for her to smell.

“Good boy, Golden boy”. she nodded and rubbed her hands on her apron.

I smiled warmly at this woman who had assumed the role of my real grandmother.

“Yulia came to visit last night,” Baba commented.

“Yulia, she was here?” I asked pleased, hoping that the ice had thawed.

“Pretty girl! I had to tell her that you were away for the night. She seemed sad that you weren’t home. Been a long time since she has been here. You should be careful,” was the matchmaker’s advice, “said she would come back today sometime to find you, but today our family is coming to visit. My niece and her children, Raiya’s older sister,” she informed me.

“I will be very quiet in my room. I promise,” I said accommodatingly.

“Da, nyet. The children will have to be quiet. Children should be quiet and obedient,” she said as she twirled her hands continually through her apron hem.

Moments later the bell on the door rang and Babushka shuffled to the door in her tapochki. With the door open I heard the voice of children greeting their great aunt. Kisses on the cheeks and the youngest, a girl, maybe six years old could be heard squirming away from the old lady’s kisses with a giggle. The nephew, nine years old was a bit more formal and respectful, being the only man in the group.

Everybody was dressed in their Sunday best and the children brought flowers, not a bouquet, but a few scrawny flowers for Aunt Natasha and Aunt Raiya. The conversation between the three ladies didn’t have a single pause in it. I couldn’t understand a word of it. Were they speaking Tatar?

I put on some soft music to drown out the chatter of the Tatar trio next door, found a clean page in my writing block behind my other research notes, dug through my school bag for a pen and started to sketch out what I had learned about Mr. P. the night before. I wrote down every detail I could remember about the club, the cars, the appearance of the drivers, the bars, those in attendance who were not from the student body of the university. The woman Hans groped was certainly not from the school! Who was she? Imports from Germany and Korea, the body guards, the bouncers, the drugs, the booze and the young prostitutes. I wrote it all down in as much detail as I could remember. When I finished I had about three pages filled with scribbles of handwriting. On rereading it and reflecting on it I started asking questions. I started with, “Why open the night club up for free, free drinks, free drugs, free girls? Why?”

Deep in thought and a bit parched I reached for a bottle behind the curtains in my window sill, chilling nicely next to the window. As I swatted the curtains open to reach my bottle without having to stand up, I could see the bright afternoon sunshine, and for the first time, grass in front of my window. I stood up to look at it. While I could still see the breath of people passing by my ground floor window, and there were still patches of snow on the ground outside in the trees, I was so thrilled to see that indeed there was green grass showing from under the snow! Much to my annoyance too, there also was the neighborhood dog there doing his business on the grass and his owner standing between the birches, looking the other direction while smoking. It always annoyed me in Russia how nobody understood the practice of conservation. It seems that as soon as the grass shows the people think: Quick! let a dog leave a pile on it! As soon as there are new light bulbs installed in the stairwells, somebody has already nicked them before night fall. The examples go on and on. As the lady with the stupid expression saw what must have been my disapproving look regarding her dog she threw her cigarette away and whistled to her dog and walked off out of sight toward the metro station.