David Bezmozgis - The Free World

For Alec, it was in this apartment that much of his courtship with Polina transpired. Sometimes they would sneak away during the lunch break; other times Polina would invent an excuse delaying her after work.

The apartment, which lacked a stove, chairs, carpets, and wallpaper, had almost everything else. There were two little beds in the children’s room, and there was a larger bed, albeit without linen, in what was to be Karl and Rosa’s bedroom. A velour couch and coffee table occupied the main room. Karl made some token effort to tidy the place up, but there was usually an array of dirty ashtrays and empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter. To Rosa’s and his mother-in-law’s objections, Karl responded that he would resume living a normal family life when they moved into the apartment.

Rosa refused to make what she considered a premature move. For months there was, between her and Karl, a rancorous impasse. It was finally breached when, one afternoon, Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator arrived unexpectedly at the apartment. When Rosa opened the door she was confronted by a distressing tableau. The tableau featured Karl in the foreground, on the sofa with a uniformed policewoman in his lap; and in the background, Alec, with his shirt unbuttoned, framed in the doorway to the boys’ bedroom. Alec recalled the terrifically stunned expression on Rosa’s mother’s face, a look of total incomprehension, as if she were witnessing something altogether alien, which her mind simply couldn’t process.

— Oh my God, Alec heard her say, he’s gotten himself involved with the police.

Alec also recalled the scandalized expression on the face of the interior decorator, a tall middle-aged woman, prim and self-possessed, wearing a beige polyester pantsuit, the height of fashion. She looked at Karl and then Alec as if at moral garbage — coarse, low people.

Rosa, meanwhile, turned white.

Karl regarded her with the sublime equanimity of a Chinese.

— You have only yourself to blame, he said.

The policewoman extricated herself from Karl’s lap and smoothed her uniform. Also, Polina emerged quietly from the boys’ bedroom, and thus earned herself Rosa’s unwavering enmity.

— Taking up with common sluts, Rosa said, the tears starting to flow. I’d expect this of your sex maniac brother, but never of you.

— Now, now, Karl replied. No need for insults. Besides, Tatyana has recently been promoted to the rank of investigator, and Polina is a graduate of the polytechnic and a valued employee of the VEF mechanical engineering department. Hardly common.

Alec couldn’t remember where or how Karl had met Tatyana, and that day in the apartment represented the first and last time he ever saw her. Still, because of her uniform, and the capricious, vindictive authority it represented, her role in the episode acquired a special prominence. Mostly, Alec felt, this was because of the way Rosa had behaved. An ordinary person would have been intimidated by the uniform but, to Rosa’s credit, she had been entirely unmoved. And despite the insults she directed at him, Alec admired her subversive integrity.

— I’ll never forgive you for this, Rosa whispered. I wanted to make a beautiful home for us and instead of thanking me you’ve humiliated me in front of my mother, our children, and Alla Petrovna.

— Look, don’t overdo it, Karl said. I told you a thousand times, I’ve had it living with your parents. We finally got an apartment and all I asked was that we move in. And what did I get instead? Alla Petrovna. By the way, Alla Petrovna, since you’re here, perhaps you could update me on the progress? Any word on our chairs? Our carpets? Our stove?

Flustered, Alla Petrovna was slow to respond.

Rosa’s mother spoke for her and alluded to the item Alla Petrovna was holding in her hands. Everyone turned to look and saw that, yes, in her hands was a thin sample roll of wallpaper. Alec noted a constellation of brown spheres on a pale yellow background.

Considering it, Karl screwed up his face in disgust.

— You’re telling me we waited three months for this revolting pattern? Looks like shit floating in piss.

— What a despicable bastard you are, Rosa sobbed.

Nobody spoke for some time. Karl shook his head ruefully and emptied the contents of a bottle of plum brandy. Everyone seemed to contemplate the next step. It was then that Alec decided to walk Polina out of the apartment. He started to button his shirt. As he did so, the policewoman broke the silence.

Speaking in the declarative, forthright manner of her profession, she said, Karl, you are mistaken. It is a very attractive pattern.

Three days later, Karl, Rosa, and the boys moved into the apartment. The fecal-motif wallpaper went up. A stove was procured. Someone donated a carpet; someone else, chairs. Karl stopped drinking, playing cards, and chasing after women. Finally the master of his own house, he devoted himself to home improvement, a preoccupation more arduous and demanding than fist-fighting or bodybuilding. Just to wangle ceramic tile for the bathroom, a man pitted himself against the mighty arsenal of the Soviet state. In effect, it was as if Leonid Ilyich was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom. It was the supreme challenge, eclipsing every other human endeavor — sport, sex, philosophy, art, and science. Karl, a pragmatist by nature, had always been inclined this way. And had he remained in Riga, his future would likely have been as a shady, jittery operator in the mold of Alter Schlamm. But instead Karl caught the break Schlamm never had. For the bargain price of five hundred rubles, the state allowed him to forfeit his citizenship and book passage to the fabled, capitalist West, where speculation was neither a dirty word nor an indictable offense. Where — had he not been confounded by history — a man of Schlamm’s considerable talents would have owned city blocks and factories, not to mention a limousine, a mansion, and a yacht.

Alec didn’t doubt that Karl would attain all this. Though, at present, he was engaged in a lot of petty hustling. Boris the Bodybuilder had departed for San Francisco and bestowed his cart upon Karl as a parting gift. Thus Karl had succeeded Boris in the relocation industry. In the afternoons, Rosa could be seen taking a shift at Piazza Marescotti, holding Boris’s old sign: MOVING SERVICES. MAN WITH CART. Karl also acted as broker for some landlords in Ladispoli and Ostia. He made his mandatory appearance at the Americana on Sundays. And then there were additional involvements of a more abstruse nature, about which Alec knew no more than what he heard via rumor — of moneychanging, of used automobile sales, of an illicit traffic in icons.

His brother was tireless and liable to appear anywhere, selling anything. On the day of the pope’s inauguration, Alec had expected to see him among the scores of peddlers dotting the streets leading to St. Peter’s Square. He saw other Russians, some familiar, who were taking advantage of the unique fiscal opportunity. As in the case of the papal funeral, there were many religious knickknacks on offer, as well as postcards depicting the outgoing and incoming popes. Their presence was drowsily tolerated by a cordon of green-clad policemen who ensured that the peddlers kept a prescribed distance from the square.

Alec, Polina, and Lyova pressed forward as far as the crowd would allow. Lyova took the lead, banking on Christian goodwill, and tried to plow his way through the Catholics. When someone objected, Lyova pointed to Polina and delivered a short speech in Italian that caused everyone within earshot to gaze at her with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy.

— What did you say to them? Polina asked, when they’d advanced moderately forward.