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Authors: Lawrence Scott Sheets
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some white or red. I went home with my pockets filled with the loot. Then he showed us around the facility, including a “rest area” with several showers. A few emptied bottles of cheap Soviet sparkling wine adorned a table. It was obvious the work breaks included more than coffee; a middle-aged man and woman were just emerging with wet hair with wide grins pasted on their faces. We parted ways with Pavel, the foreman proudly pushing more souvenir buttons into my hands.
Ellie and Lena were waiting for us when we returned to their communal. Vova again picked up his rant about the sorry state of the empire, reading jokes from a newspaper. Self-deprecating ones, expressing the misguided perception of the time of America-as-paradise.
Vova read aloud: “An American and a Russian are talking to each other. The American says: ‘I have three cars. One I drive to work, the other I drive to my summer house. And the third I take with me when I go to Europe.’
“The Russian says: ‘To go to work I take the tram. I go to my summer house in a bus.’
“ ‘And how do you get to Europe?’ asks the American.
“ ‘To go to Europe I ride a tank,’ says the Russian.”
After he caught his breath following another convulsion of cackling, Vova sighed and offered to take me downstairs and hail a taxi. It was late, almost 4 a.m.
But Lena would have none of it. “Why, Vova, it’s so late. There’s plenty of room here. My bed is big. He can sleep on the other side.” Vova sized up Lena quizzically. Lena was warmhearted, but I sensed an elaborate game of innuendo and revenge from her. Vova grumbled something and Lena pulled the door shut, with Vova and Ellie on one side of the wall, Lena and I on the other. As I lay on one side of the bed and Lena on the other, paranoid thoughts crossed my mind of Vova’s losing it in an act of uncontrollable rage or suspicion, bursting through the door to strangle both of us to death.
Instead, I heard only what must have been a nightly ritual: a girlish voice from a Russian border town rejecting Vova’s sexual advances. Next to me Lena lay in silence, still awake and listening to it all, no doubt contemplating her unusual fate.
The next morning, Vova was less than his cheerful self. Lena made no attempt to tease him or suggest anything improper had transpired, but he was circumspect with me. After a perfunctory tea for breakfast, we went downstairs to the street.
Then Vova, the former Button Factory worker turned black marketer turned Leningrad midlevel mafia enforcer with two wives and an uncertain future, gave me a perfunctory “Poka!” (See you later!).
VOVA DID, HOWEVER , accomplish one of his goals: “liberating” Pavel from himself. The day after our night visit to the Button Factory, the management summarily fired Pavel on the grounds that he’d shown a foreigner an “industrial facility with potential military applications.”
Less than a year later, Pavel called me and said he had saved enough money to visit the United States, which he had always dreamed about. He asked if he could come to Chicago, where I was staying at the time, adding that he planned on being there for “two or three weeks.”
Pavel’s two- to three-week Windy City stay turned into two months. Then two years. Then twenty. He left his family behind, first working illegally at a junkyard owned by a Ukrainian slave-driver owner. He soon moved up, landing a gig as a busboy. Pavel developed a cocaine habit, was robbed on the Chicago elevated train (twice), married a Polish immigrant, divorced her, became a roofer, moved to Florida, and found a second Polish wife.
The last time I talked to Pavel, he had joined an Evangelical church and told me I’d end up doing the same someday once I found God.
As for Vladimir (Vova), I never saw him again. About a year later, after arriving in what had re-become St. Petersburg, I headed over to the communal apartment where he and his “wives” lived. I ascended
Ellie and Lena were waiting for us when we returned to their communal. Vova again picked up his rant about the sorry state of the empire, reading jokes from a newspaper. Self-deprecating ones, expressing the misguided perception of the time of America-as-paradise.
Vova read aloud: “An American and a Russian are talking to each other. The American says: ‘I have three cars. One I drive to work, the other I drive to my summer house. And the third I take with me when I go to Europe.’
“The Russian says: ‘To go to work I take the tram. I go to my summer house in a bus.’
“ ‘And how do you get to Europe?’ asks the American.
“ ‘To go to Europe I ride a tank,’ says the Russian.”
After he caught his breath following another convulsion of cackling, Vova sighed and offered to take me downstairs and hail a taxi. It was late, almost 4 a.m.
But Lena would have none of it. “Why, Vova, it’s so late. There’s plenty of room here. My bed is big. He can sleep on the other side.” Vova sized up Lena quizzically. Lena was warmhearted, but I sensed an elaborate game of innuendo and revenge from her. Vova grumbled something and Lena pulled the door shut, with Vova and Ellie on one side of the wall, Lena and I on the other. As I lay on one side of the bed and Lena on the other, paranoid thoughts crossed my mind of Vova’s losing it in an act of uncontrollable rage or suspicion, bursting through the door to strangle both of us to death.
Instead, I heard only what must have been a nightly ritual: a girlish voice from a Russian border town rejecting Vova’s sexual advances. Next to me Lena lay in silence, still awake and listening to it all, no doubt contemplating her unusual fate.
The next morning, Vova was less than his cheerful self. Lena made no attempt to tease him or suggest anything improper had transpired, but he was circumspect with me. After a perfunctory tea for breakfast, we went downstairs to the street.
Then Vova, the former Button Factory worker turned black marketer turned Leningrad midlevel mafia enforcer with two wives and an uncertain future, gave me a perfunctory “Poka!” (See you later!).
VOVA DID, HOWEVER , accomplish one of his goals: “liberating” Pavel from himself. The day after our night visit to the Button Factory, the management summarily fired Pavel on the grounds that he’d shown a foreigner an “industrial facility with potential military applications.”
Less than a year later, Pavel called me and said he had saved enough money to visit the United States, which he had always dreamed about. He asked if he could come to Chicago, where I was staying at the time, adding that he planned on being there for “two or three weeks.”
Pavel’s two- to three-week Windy City stay turned into two months. Then two years. Then twenty. He left his family behind, first working illegally at a junkyard owned by a Ukrainian slave-driver owner. He soon moved up, landing a gig as a busboy. Pavel developed a cocaine habit, was robbed on the Chicago elevated train (twice), married a Polish immigrant, divorced her, became a roofer, moved to Florida, and found a second Polish wife.
The last time I talked to Pavel, he had joined an Evangelical church and told me I’d end up doing the same someday once I found God.
As for Vladimir (Vova), I never saw him again. About a year later, after arriving in what had re-become St. Petersburg, I headed over to the communal apartment where he and his “wives” lived. I ascended
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