Mark Blair: Stroika

‘What can I do for you, Mikhail Dimitrivich – another internal travel permit?’

‘Not this time – two exit visas and an import permit. How long will it take?’

‘Three to four weeks,’ said Gleb flatly.

Misha pulled a face. ‘Two. No more.’

Gleb stared down at the table and rubbed his cheek. ‘You could wait months if you used normal channels.’

‘But I’m not.’ Misha looked at him expectantly.

‘Okay, but it will cost – one hundred a visa and the same for the import permit, half up front, US dollars.’

‘Roubles?’

‘Not interested. You know how it is.’ Misha knew no self-respecting black marketeer wanted to be holding the rouble. He counted out one hundred and fifty dollars, handed them to Gleb and left.

Outside, Misha looked at his watch: seven thirty-five. He took the metro south and got off at Narvskaya.

Block upon block of anonymous sixties’ apartment buildings stretched in every direction. Groups of youths loitered at apartment entrances and derelict exercise yards. A prostitute, who called herself Lily, waved as he passed and signalled he had company. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a tall wiry teenager with a shaved head a few paces to his left. The crunching of grit alerted him of another to his right. Misha slipped his fingers through a knuckleduster deep inside his jacket pocket and spun round to face them. Better, he calculated, to confront them out here in the open than be jumped down some side alley or stairwell.

‘Good evening, comrades.’

The two stopped a metre apart and a few paces behind. He hadn’t had sight of the teenager’s friend until then. Misha guessed him early twenties, a little shorter than his partner with the same shaved head. A snake tattoo curled its way round his forearm and silver studs decorated his nose and eyebrows. Stud-man was clearly the more powerful of the two. Broad-shouldered like a boxer, he wore a plain black sleeveless T-shirt to show off his overdeveloped biceps.

Stud-man took two steps forward and shoved his face inches from Misha’s. His breath stank of beer.

‘Enough of this comrade shit,’ said Stud-man through gritted teeth and he went to grab Misha with his right hand.

Misha stepped back and in one swift movement swept his right leg under Stud-man, felling him heavily like a tree. He hit the ground hard. The knuckleduster broke Stud-man’s nose and front teeth as he struggled to get up. Stud-man’s friend froze to the spot.

‘I suggest you pick up your friend and beat it.’

The boy hesitated until Misha took a few steps back. Warily, he helped a dazed and bleeding Stud-man to his feet and haltingly started back in the direction of the metro. When the two of them had disappeared from view, Misha returned to his course.

It took him only a few more minutes to reach the entrance to his building, a faded brown ten-storey prefabricated block etched with rust marks from broken guttering. An overflow pipe gushed water from the third floor, pooling on muddy ground with nowhere to go.

Ignoring the faulty lift, Misha climbed the five flights to his doorway. The key and a hard shove and he almost fell into the room. He switched on the unshaded light that hung above the kitchen table, walked over to the fridge and extracted a plateful of cold sausage and cooked cabbage. Grabbing a fork from the sink, he rinsed it under the tap, sat down and began to eat. He was hungrier than he thought.

The sound of a key turning in the lock and the door being forced behind him scarcely gave him pause.

‘It’s security,’ Misha said without turning around. Misha felt a large hand grab his shoulder. He lifted the plate of sausage and offered it to his flatmate. Ivan took one and swallowed it in two bites.

‘Have another; you need to keep your strength up.’

The tricoloured flag, hanging limply in its wall mount, identified the elegant three-storey house as the Italian consulate. Could Italian bureaucracy, Misha wondered, be any worse than Russian? That morning, their answer machine giving opening times had cut off its announcer midstream.

Ivan touched his shoulder and pointed in the direction of a man in a car parked across the street.

‘See, now they make their lists, later they arrest us… Perestroika is just a ploy to flush out dissidents.’

Misha knew Ivan was only half joking.

Reception was a large tiled area on the ground floor with sofas and the occasional chair scattered around. Misha approached the reception desk and took a number.

They only had to wait a couple of hours, a record by Soviet standards. Misha threw down the copy of Vogue he had been studying and the two of them made their way to the door marked VISAS. He was glad now he had put on his best and only suit, even if it was slightly frayed around the buttonholes.

A dark-haired woman in her mid-forties, smartly dressed, bid them to be seated. The nameplate on her desk displayed the name ‘Valeria Gambetti’. He awkwardly straightened his jacket and caught her staring at him over her glasses as a headmistress might a delinquent pupil. The two of them must look very different to the apparatchiks he had seen in reception.

‘And what kind of visa is it you are after?’ she said in heavily accented Russian.

‘Business,’ Misha shot back confidently. He knew if he stumbled here it would all be over. ‘Clothing… fashion,’ he said, before she jumped to another conclusion, ‘importing from Italy.’

Misha sensed her reappraising him. Her voice softened. ‘You’ll need an invitation.’

From a used and scribbled-on white envelope, Misha pulled out a fax from Venti Settembre signed by Luigi Crisi, their sales director.

‘ Perfetto ! What else do you have? Passports, photos?’

Misha emptied the contents of the envelope on her desk: birth certificates, passports, proof of residence.

‘ Bene .’ She sifted through them, made copies of what she needed and placed them in a file. She filled out an application form and had him and Ivan sign it in black ink.

‘How do you want to pay? Roubles?’

Misha nodded.

‘You’ll be pleased to know you don’t have to queue again. Just call again in a week.’ She gave him a slip with a number.

Misha and Ivan stood up.

She held out her hand. ‘ Buona fortuna ! Good luck!’

Misha reached for hers. He would need all the luck he could get.

‘I don’t know why you don’t just take his money. He’d lend it to you if you asked,’ Viktoriya said with some frustration. She could not understand why Misha was so stubborn sometimes. She fanned herself with Misha’s procurement wish list. The summer heat was sweltering, the city airless. Even sitting at an open-air café on the Moyka made no difference.

‘You know where he gets his money from. There would be strings attached.’

She shrugged. ‘Hasn’t the system made criminals of all of us?’

Surreally, a barge drifted by with a peacock on its deck in full iridescent display, its blue-and-green plumage cupped behind it like a shell. The waterman at the tiller waved at her.

‘You don’t seriously believe Konstantin makes his money through some small black market operation?’ he said, more of a statement than a question. ‘He’s thick with the military here in Leningrad, ever since he got back from Afghanistan.’

‘Moneylending, debt collecting…’

‘And the rest… prostitution, drugs. No, I’d rather make it on my own… start small.’

Viktoriya looked at her old friend and narrowed her eyes exaggeratedly.

‘I’ll just have to work harder, faster.’

He would have to, no doubt, she thought. But Misha was not entirely wrong. She had stopped asking Konstantin how he made his money. He would tell her nightclubs, debt collecting, unofficial pawnshops around the city. The reality was that she didn’t want to know. While Misha ran around on public transport and borrowed the odd vehicle, Kostya ran a fleet of Volgas, had his own large apartment close to Nevsky Prospect and a coterie of bodyguards. By comparison, she had only once ever visited Misha and Ivan’s depressing flat share and vowed long ago not to repeat the experience.