Fiction from The Literary Review

Entering

Angela Charlton

It begins with the podyezd, the entryway. The assault of stench, the shuffle of cockroaches, the chipped stairs serve warning. The journey into Russia is under way.
          To foreigners, the podyezd is symbol and significance. To Russians, the podyezd is backdrop, unchosen and unloved, the entry hall of an apartment block assigned to them by a state housing official. This podyezd or that one, what’s the difference, the design and dreariness are indistinguishable from Vladivostok to Prague. Meaning and hope lie elsewhere.
          Children preoccupied with snowball victories fly past the podyezd’s missing light bulb and the grime thickening on the banister. Alcoholics urinate and disintegrate in its corners. Contract killers target and abandon their victims on its landings. Lovers, too, grace the podyezd, borrowing its shelter from a snowstorm to steal kisses full of damp hair and promise.

1. Her First Podyezd
Ulitsa Dubki (Oak Street), Moscow, January 1992. Three weeks earlier, six kilometers away, Mikhail Gorbachev had signed away his job as president of the ussr, snuffing out a nation that had been exploding and imploding ever since he assumed control seven years earlier, or perhaps ever since it began.
          That first whiff of a Russian podyezd—milk just starting to sour, stale urine, potatoes being fried in garlic, soggy animal fur, spilled vodka, hair spray—is heady. Literally, it makes her head spin. Mostly organic, the smell is not quite nauseating but quite overpowering. Do American apartments have smell-proof walls? At first she associates the smell with this particular building, where she shares a two-bedroom apartment with four adults, two collies and a thousand books. Later she discovers that the basic ingredients of the podyezd perfume are the same everywhere, though the proportions and additives differ.
          The entry hall suffocates her visually, too, summoning surges of panic and despair for the human condition. Its walls reveal layers of paint chipped and ripped away, ochre, olive, and a suicidal shade of gray, all smeared, scraped and sprayed with graffiti of anger and narcotic-induced indifference. The tin mailboxes hang unevenly, several with doors flapping open, others rusted shut. Two holes stare from the wood-slat front door where the handle once jutted out, their edges well-worn by fingers—gloved, bare, calloused, wrinkled—tugging their way into the building.
          The woman who houses her, Larisa, claims that the Soviet podyezd was dismal by design, to put the apartments upstairs in high relief, make them appear palaces instead of cramped public housing. Larisa’s son Igor disagrees. No, Mama, he sighs, the podyezd is our disdain for communal property forced on us by the Soviet state, and sometimes, our disdain for ourselves.
          But first, before the discussion of disdain, before the broken shot glasses and lies and reconciliation soaked in laughter and feet soaked in mustard water to cure a cold, first came the Three Questions. They confronted her everywhere those first months in Russia. She could not answer any of the three.
          How much does a kilo of sausage cost in America?
          I grew up vegetarian, she thinks. If I were to buy sausage, it would be prepackaged and I probably wouldn’t notice the price per weight. And it would be weighed in pounds, not kilograms. And it would be priced in dollars, not rubles.
          What’s your father’s salary?
          Um, I’ve never asked. And probably never will. It’s not something we do, she thinks, and for the first time wonders why.
          How much is your student stipend?
          I don’t get paid to go to college, she thinks. I pay them. She’s taken out $15,000—five, perhaps fifteen times Boris Yeltsin’s official annual salary—in loans for school. Money for food and housing comes from waiting tables and answering phones at two jobs that leave her just enough time to study and sink into bed.
          Larisa and Igor are acutely aware of answers to all three. They can barely afford sausage, without which no Russian kitchen is worthy of its name. The ruble has just been freed, and prices on many staple groceries are rising for the first time in 30 years. Larisa’s salary, 450 rubles a month, has barely budged, but it is suddenly expected to cover real costs. Stipends of all kinds, compensation for the microscopic pay accorded to the Soviet work force, are shriveling and there’s even talk of introducing fees for university.
          So, 450 rubles a month, she thinks. That’s between 4 and 10 dollars, depending on how black the market is conducting the exchange. The gulf she thought she was breaching by traveling here grows deeper by the day.

2. First Kiss
October 1993. Boris Yeltsin is shooting at parliament from tank guns. She watches it from across the Moscow River in her $65-a-month apartment, and feels confused. She’s watching history unfurl. She has a job where she speaks English all day to her American colleagues and encounters Russia primarily through the English-language local press. She’s neither here nor there. Waving down a gypsy cab to try to get home before the curfew imposed in these uncertain times, she realizes she doesn’t know where home is. The gulf remains.
          She meets Jason in line for beer at a barbecue restaurant across from the Mayakovsky statue on Triumfalnaya Square, run by an ex-car salesman from Pennsylvania. Jason is where she fears she is heading. Bloated by his expat tax auditor lifestyle, ensconced in a four-bedroom apartment with reliable plumbing and a view of the Kremlin, summoning company drivers to ferry him home from strip bars and business meetings. Russia to him is just a place, a string of orange Sheremetevo Airport stamps in his passport, on his way to a life of even larger apartments. She tastes his world, feels in turns guilty and virtuous, then leaves him to his future.
          She meets Alex while getting a diphtheria shot at the American clinic. He is where she wants to be. He spends his evenings smoking with Russian friends on windowsills in communal apartments at end-of-the-line trolleybus stops, discussing Stalin and Jack London’s socialist writing and serfdom. He buys sausage by the kilo. He wears a gray karakul hat over his blond curls and curses without an accent. He’s both enlivened and wearied by the Russianness he’s bathed himself in.
          His shot done, her shot done, they sit side by side with bandaged arms. Waves of fraternity and certainty from within or without or another life wash over warnings and worries, carrying them out of the clinic through the metro through the gantlet of gypsies at Kievsky Station through slush and over black ice to her podyezd. The hefty odor, thicker with rotting food than usual, jolts them awake, reminding them of their otherness to their surroundings, and of the freshness of their acquaintance.
          I used to think my podyezd was the only one that smelled this way, he says, hands dug deep in the pockets of his gray wool coat.
          So did I, she says, hands digging deep in her green wool coat for keys she hopes she cannot find. So—
          Yes, he interrupts, So—
          And now they’re entwined, planting kisses on all available skin—not much during Moscow’s nine-month winter—and clinging in a way they never would have in New York or Sacramento. He says good night, but neither says goodbye.

3. First Fight
1995. She and Alex share a podyezd. And an apartment, with a bedroom the size of their bed and a bathtub the size of his feet. They spend weekends with Russian friends, cross-country skiing in the woods that surround the behemoth of Moscow, woods that in the U.S. would be suburban sprawl. They marvel at Andrei and Alexei and Lena and even little Sanya, skiing all day on ancient wooden skis with no Gore-Tex and no water. Sasha brings a tea kettle and they boil snow for tea, over a fire of birch and beech twigs. They drink vodka from plastic film canisters, sing Russian songs around the fire, learn Russian tongue-twisters and make everyone laugh by failing to say them successfully, whisper to each other in Russian and ride home, shivering, sore bottoms shifting on the wooden benches, thirsty, and still singing.
          They write articles in English for readers at home, trying to translate this world, he growing more disillusioned along with the Russians he befriends and interviews, she growing more excited about the future, hers and Russia’s.
          One night, home late from work, she is accosted in their podyezd. She presses the button for the elevator, and when it opens, it reveals a violently drunk man in a striped undershirt. He lunges, grabs her wrist. She wrests herself away and darts for the stairs. He bounds after her, yanking her and her bag down on top of him. She extracts herself, abandons the bag and flies up to their eighth floor apartment, dizzy with euphoria at being alive, unscathed, free. An elderly neighbor finds her bag and returns it to her, minus the few thousand rubles inside. He is genteel and apologetic when he hears what happened, and invites her over to play the piano he once treasured, but that he is now too arthritic to enjoy.
          Soon afterward, a prominent politician, whom she and Alex both had met, is killed in a podyezd in St. Petersburg. It is not the first contract hit to use such a setting, but it is the most high-profile. The character of the podyezd darkens, now treacherous and haunted as well as bleak.
          Life here is cheap, and it’s only getting cheaper, he says.
          But they’re only now learning to live, she says. Let them taste how sweet life can be, and they’ll come to value it.
          They’ll never value it the way you and I do, the way Americans do, he says. They even value our lives more than theirs. Moscow officials send flowers and condolences when an expat dies, but they’re happy to let their own rot in morgues for months if the families can’t afford a coffin.
          Soon they’ll grow bitter with Americans, she says, and realize we’re no more worthy than they are. They’ll stop noticing us on the streets, stop assuming we’re rich and lucky, and grow preoccupied with their own prosperity. You’ll see.
          They argue, then slip into bickering over the dirty laundry of shared existence. The warnings and worries they ignored that first day haunt both of their dreams.

4. Farewell
1997. It stemmed from the question of nash, nashi. The words translate as “ours,” but when spoken by a Russian mean much more: our guys, the Russians, the perpetually persecuted and persecuting, the temperamental and troubled, the artistic and fatalistic. Nashi vygrali, our team won. More of nashi were killed in World War II than anyone else. Nashi were first into space.
          For a week she and Alex debate whether or not an American could ever become nash.
          Yes, she insists. Though I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a compliment.
          No way, he counters. Nor would I want to be. It carries too much responsibility.
          Their Russian friends find the question amusing and offer no conclusion.
          She and Alex increasingly ask, Would we ever have found each other in America? If so, would we have noticed? Would we have mattered?
          At the end of the week, she decides to move to Siberia for a research project. He decides to move to Turkey. Their trajectories, suspended by a love strong and constant but more parallel than passionate, resume course.
          He wants to accompany her to the train station, but she chooses the podyezd for their farewell. She looks at her feet shifting on the cracked green tile, then at him. They sit on her suitcase for a moment of contemplation before parting, an adopted Russian ritual. Neither says goodbye.
5. Death
1999. Alex is killed in Chechnya, covering the heavy cost on Chechens and Russian troops of a war that neither wanted but that all considered inevitable. Russian officials send flowers and condolences to his family, but not to those of the scores of Russians and Chechens killed in the same week.
          Awkwardly, his parents treat her as a widow. She had staved off feelings of loss after their separation, feelings that flooded her now, unstoppable, unknowable, unbearable. How she longed to share with him everything, the icy challenge to her throat of ice cream on Red Square in February, the sorrowful shine of the sun giving in to a rainstorm, the weight on her chest as a Rachmaninoff symphony climbs to crescendo.
          And her news: She’s about to marry Anton, a Muscovite who calls her lyubov and moya dorogaya. Who embraces her Americanness and makes her embrace it as she never had. Who made her realize that some gulfs can never be bridged, but that the joy is in the reaching.
          And she’s carrying his child, who will be half-nash whether he likes it or not, who will never be a foreigner, or always be one.

6. Afterlife
The child was never born. In grief, she wanders the streets she shares with Anton, ducks under a carved arch in the shadow of the Maly Theater and finds herself in the courtyard of the building she shared with Alex.
          Look, she wants to tell him, no one cares now that I’m an American. No one notices me in the street anymore, no one approaches me speaking English. Russian women now wear jeans and shoes without heels, prosperous and confident. I’ve changed too, becoming more discriminate with my smiles and bundling more efficiently against the wind and perpetual snow. The podyezds don’t scare me the way they used to, because the villains know it’s not the Americans, but the nouveau riche Russians to go after.
          Another winter, another interminable season of dark and gray and of slick sidewalks that skid into another March she thinks she cannot bear, and another child is conceived. Another half-breed, half restless Russian, half dislocated American. This one is born, blond and blue-eyed and fierce-browed and confident and curious and having no idea of the clash and drift and questions churning in his mother’s belly as she carried him.
          Bringing him across the threshold of their apartment building, she looks at him and thinks, Maybe you will invent the new generation of podyezd. One that welcomes instead of warns.