Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

I phoned Yulia from the Moscow station and asked if she wanted to go for a stroll along the Oka river with me? After forty-five minutes, she emerged from the metro station where I was warily waiting, making sure nobody had tailed me again. We went for a walk up the bank of the Oka river, arm in arm, passed the Yarmarka and the Alexander Nevsky cathedral and enjoyed the sunshine. I told her nothing of the morning’s intrigue with the British Knight. We spoke of the coming May holidays and what each of us would do with two weeks free from school. I told her about Hans’s new girlfriend. She was just as put out as I was. She said she never wanted to meet her. I described her a gold-digger. Yulia used a different word.

When I finally arrived back at my apartment, Babushka was sitting outside with her friends and acquaintances peeling potatoes into small tin pots with red embroidered cloths over their laps and with their summer headscarves on. All the old ladies greeted me politely, and I them in return. Before I could pass to go into the building, Babushka told me that some of my friends had just been there to ask for me. As I had just been with Yulia and I knew Hans would be very busy with his young beauty that evening, I couldn’t think of who it could have been.

“Had you seen them before?” I asked Natasha.

“Nyet. Two boys in a car. I’ve never seen your student friends in cars before.”

“A black car?” I pressed.

“Yes. Do you know them?’

“No, they are not my friends. What did you tell them?” I pressed further.

“Luba there told them that you don’t live here anymore,” and she giggled with her lady friends who were masters of neighborhood misinformation, “that you had moved to the student dormitories.”

“Many thanks, ladies!” I looked each of them in the face and gave them a smile.

“Hooligans!” Luba replied. “Just hooligans. They think they can drive right up to our door and demand information from us like they are the KGB! fu fu fu. The youth of today. We weren’t like that in my day. We were polite and respectful to the grandmothers in the village.”

I spent the evening at home with the curtains closed and kept my light off, spending time talking with Raiya and Babuska in the kitchen as we cooked and ate a late dinner together for the first time since I had come to live there. I felt for the first time that these were my true friends, the simple people of the town without a hidden agenda, who I could trust to protect and help me as needed. I had to be careful not to put them in harm’s way when it came looking out for me again.

I spent most of Sunday indoors with my curtains closed and spent the day reading in English to distract me from the growing commotion surrounding my research and Del’s hotel and apartments project. I wrote a letter home but only mentioned that I had seen old friends on the river boats and that Yulia and I may go for a voyage again at the start of the summer holidays in July. I mentioned that I was busy with a research project but didn’t mention any details. I was becoming suspicious of who was reading and listening to all my correspondences. I kept the letter short and vague.

Around four-thirty that afternoon while I was cooking in the kitchen, the doorbell rang. Babushka toddled into the kitchen to ask if I was expecting any company, Yulia maybe? I confirmed that I was not waiting for guests. She said it was better that she go to the door.

“Nobody will hurt an old grandma,” she said and cackled as she waddled again to the door. The bell rang again with impatience. I stirred the vegetables in my fry pan.

After a few moments, I heard raised voices come down the hallway that could be heard over my stir frying dinner. I turned off the gas and walked with care and concern into the hallway to see Natasha with her back to the door pushing it closed while a foot was keeping it open and somebody was pushing on the other side. Babushka was yelling for them to go away, to leave and that nobody else was in the apartment. She motioned for me to get out of sight and continue to push on the door with her old, bent back. The shouting from outside grew louder and the door started to open further. Babushka was too small and frail to get the door on the latch. With my kitchen knife in my right hand I pulled Babushka out of the way of the door and let it fling open and met the assailant on the other side with my lunging stiff arm to his chest, palm thrust onto his sternum pushing him back out the doorway and in the stairwell. With a raised kitchen knife over my head in my right hand I was yelling and demanding that they leave. There were two others behind the man whose raised arm I was about to slash with my knife.

“Stop, Police!” the front man shouted at me.

I stayed my arm and lowered the knife, but not my hand on his chest, palm open, pushing him out still across the threshold of the apartment.

“You show me your documents now or leave!” I yelled at him, adrenaline pumping through my arms with each heart beat, I raised the knife higher.

“We are the police, we are all detectives!” the third man screamed at me.

All three revealed their concealed badges from their suit coat pockets and then let into me with a verbal barrage of accusations and questions. Babushka started crying in the hallway. The lead detective yelled at her like he was yelling at a whining dog to shut up and go to her room. She obeyed and disappeared into her bedroom.

“What do you guys want? Pushing in like this and frightening old ladies?” I spoke to them in a way that one would speak to somebody angrily on the street or the market, not as one would speak to police officers.

“You will call me, Sir! You will call him Sir and him Sir!” the senior officer pointed to each one of his colleagues, in turn, to make it clear that my near attack on them and my lack of respect was weighing quickly on their patience.

“We have shown you our documents, we now demand to see yours,” was the command from the detective.

I produced my passport and visa from my jacket hanging in the corner and waited silently for their verdict.

“American citizen, student visa, registered in Nizhniy Novgorod,” he spoke to his colleagues so it was clear who and what I was.

“What are you studying, young man?” the questions were short and exact.

“History and Linguistics, sir,” I found my polite voice as the adrenaline was subsiding.

“Do you have proof of this?” he asked again quickly with suspicion.

I found my student card in my book bag and handed it over calmly.

“Seems to be in order,” was his commentary as he handed the documents to his partners for a confirmation of his conclusion.

“Do you usually greet people at your door with a knife?” there was an inference in his question.

“I apologize. My babushka has been harassed yesterday by hooligans. I thought they had come back to rob the place now that it’s getting dark,” I said demurely.

“Did you report this to the local police,” he asked dryly without any intended irony.

“No, sir. I was not here to witness anything. She only told me about it and asked me to stay home tonight in case there were further problems. I was cooking in the kitchen when the bell rang,” I lied.

“You know that I could arrest you right now for assaulting a police officer?” he was trying to scare me, and it was working

“As I said, I did not know you were police officers. None of you are in uniform. I could not see any markings. I stopped when your colleague identified himself,” I replied humbly.

The other two detectives were looking around my room as I was held captive to the questioning of the lead officer. I was conscious of them while not looking away from the interrogator. Luckily, I had sealed the letter to my mother and put it in my school bag and my notes on Mr. P were in the same bag zipped up by the door, not on my desk where the police were looking. On the head of my bed was a novel by Maxim Gorkiy with a bookmark somewhere in the middle pages. A large Russian-English dictionary was open on my table with last week’s translation work next to it. In my window sill were a few English books I had brought with me from the States. There was a growing stack of The Economist magazines in the corner of the table with highlights around every article about Russia’s transition economy and mixed with that my printed articles from the American library. My shortwave radio and cassette player stood quietly next to the wall with a Russian group in the breach. It looked like the room of a studious student.