Yuri Druzhnikov
Honeymooning at Great-Grandma's
or
The Adventures of a Genatsvale from Sacramento
A Micronovel
1.
They announced the wedding all over California and far beyond its bounds. Six hundred guests gathered, police types for the most part, which didn't at all surprise the local fans of large-scale festivities. The former sheriff lent a hand in inviting the former governor, none other than President Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Truth to tell, they couldn't make it, but they sent their congratulations to the newlyweds. There was a life-sized plywood Reagan there, though, to greet the guests. He stood on the lawn with a foaming glass of champagne in his hand.
So there I was, too, quaffing the mead, because the woman who was getting married was a student of mine. But the story here isn't about the wedding proper—there wouldn't be anything in that to surprise the reader: almost everybody has been through one, and there are even some who like to repeat the ritual, over and over. Why not, anyway?—since life is short and it's nice to absorb as many deep feelings as possible. What we're getting into here is the deep feelings after the wedding proper, and the delights of the honeymoon.
As everyone knows, no one in this day and age in America is in any particular hurry to get married, except foreigners who want to stay, while in Russia everyone gets married except those who contrive to leave—for someplace where they can get naturalization papers. Like lots of other universities, ours has an exchange program. A group of our Americans goes to Moscow for half a year, and then students from there come over here. As you might imagine, we pay the university in Russia very well for every one of the students that we send: for their lodging, for food, for their studies, and their cultural program. In addition, our students have to take money with them for such sundry purposes as getting hot water out of the shower, obtaining a working lock for the room, buying back a stolen camera, or simply to be able to get in the door after eleven at night.
And when students from Russia arrive here, who pays? You guessed it—we do, yet again. They don't have the wherewithal. And since it's hard times economically speaking in California, and therefore at the university, we have to clamp down. This last time we sent over twenty students, and then accepted in return—you'll have to pardon us—only two: Marina and Lyuba. Our finances just wouldn't stretch any further.
About that return business, now: so far there has never been any instance of an American student staying on over there. On one occasion, a lad from California did get left behind, but that was because his Russian friends had organized a farewell bash right before his departure. The American partied hearty with the natives and—from his lack of special training in the sphere of vodka usage—collapsed on the way back to his dormitory, coming to his senses in the drunk tank. And then he had to spend another month in hospital detoxifying his internal organs.
Usually it happens the other way around. Twenty of our students went to Moscow and twenty-three came back—or, more properly, twenty-three and a half. Three of them had gotten married: a boy and two of the girls. One of the girls had even succeeded in getting profoundly pregnant in Moscow, and soon gave birth back here. But her young Russian husband took off for some other state, and one a long way off, as it so happens. In general, lots of them soon get divorced, since Americans, like certain other nationals, are not so much a luxury as a means of transport. And children don't really come into this at all.
But we don't have to be so cynical. There have been positive exceptions, romantic ones. Sometimes even eternal love. Well, maybe not eternal (a kind of graveyard chill wafts from the word), so let's call it, more pragmatically, prolonged love.
So when students from Russia arrive in America, as you might already have guessed, only a certain percentage goes back. Or, as it happened with those two aforementioned students of mine from Moscow, zero percent went back. Clever, freckle-faced Marina married an elderly American, a professor of the Japanese language, a tennis player and vegetarian. Marina immediately asked everyone to call her Mary.
No sooner had the professor gotten married than it turned out that Mary had left her two children behind in the old country, and she flew home to fetch them. They let her back into the States without any trouble, and that just goes to show that there aren't any obstacles to true love. Then the professor's youngish mother-in-law arrived for a visit to size up the state of her daughter's happiness. This mother-in-law, it was explained, had worked as a full-time Party organizer in the Moscow Central Directorate of Restaurants before the collapse of the U.S.S.R.. After the collapse, she had lost faith, as she put it, in communism, and had made a generous payment to the guy who selected the most talented students for the trip to the States.
Once here, the professor's mother-in-law soon declared that imperialism as the last stage of capitalism was in no way worse than communism as the last stage of socialism, and that a bird in the hand was easily worth two in the bush. She decided to stay here for good and find work in her specialty. Since we have nothing here in the capital of California along the lines of a Sacramento Central Directorate of Restaurants, his mother-in-law said she would be willing to work as the secretary of the Party organization in any restaurant. Her son-in-law asked her: "What party?"
She answered that one firmly: "Any one. Whatever they want me to do. Just as long as it's a full-time job."
Of course she already had a full-time job. Mother-in-law.
"Mama," Marina-Mary asked her, "when you come into our house, would you say 'Hi!' to my husband?"
After this, whenever the professor arrived home from work, his mother-in-law would say to her daughter: "Mary, say 'Hi!' to him."
"Where did your Mary learn such brilliant English?" I asked her once.
"I taught her from her earliest years," the mother-in-law said expansively. "I had a feeling it would come in handy. Not for that alcoholic first husband of hers—I'll still make him pay alimony from there, the bastard!—but just in case Communism went bust."
And then I understood why the professor had gotten married. He did it to get rich on alimony payments from her former husband in Moscow—in rubles, yet.
I lost contact somewhat with the professor, since he acquired a tenured position in another university soon after this and departed with his young wife, their two frightened daughters, and his youngish, full-time mother-in-law. She was insistent about living with them, so the professor had to pull out all the stops. He told his mother-in-law that the police came around at night to check and see if parents were living with their grown children, something against the law. His mother-in-law looked him right in the face, thought for a moment, and answered: "I get the hint."
So the professor rented her a separate apartment, not far away.
A colleague told me that the mother-in-law had already had a card printed up that said "So-and-so, full-time secretary, Professor So-and-so's mother-in-law." I also heard that the mother-in-law's mother from the city of Tobolsk was getting ready to join the professor. And that she had a half-Siberia-full of her closest relatives who had suddenly taken an interest in the American standard of living.
Leaving aside the mother-in-law, I'd say among other things that sometimes children from a former marriage are absolute requirements for new wedding contracts with foreigners. Not so long ago an actress from the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater married an American playwright who was on a tourist visit to St. Petersburg and had fallen in love with her on the spot. Everything was fine, except for the language thing. She didn't speak any English, and he didn't have a word of Russian. But she had a seven-year-old son from her first marriage, who was going to an elite foreign-language kindergarten, and he became their translator. He made his mama a proposal that she accepted. Then he translated that his mama was agreeable. Now they're in America, and her son goes on conscientiously working as a translator between his mama and his new papa from morning till night. Nights, at least, they get by without any interpretation. But, excuse me, I'm digressing here a little.
The other student of mine from St. Petersburg, Lyuba, married a policeman named Patrick Warren, from the same city of Sacramento. He's no ordinary cop, either, but an air-patrolman, the kind who flies helicopters over the highway. And where is a Russian girl going to make the acquaintance of a policeman? That's obvious: never miss the chance, when you're getting a ticket. Lyuba had just gotten her driver's license and had borrowed a friend's car to go for a spin. When Patrick stopped Lyuba for breaking the speed limit, it turned out that she didn't even know where the car's speedometer was. He wrote her out a ticket, and then, as soon as he could get her phone number off the police computer, he called her up. It gave Lyuba a fright.
"I'm really worried for you," Patrick explained to her. "You already know perfectly well how to drive fast, but now you've got to learn how to drive slow." And, right there, God gave her the notion to pronounce the most importance phrase of her life.
"So who's going to teach me?" she asked, coquettishly.
It's obvious what Patrolman Warren replied. Their slow-driving lesson went on way past midnight and ended up in Patrick's bed. The next morning he was completely blown away by the aromatic Turkish coffee that Lyuba had made while he was sleeping and brought to him in bed. After breakfast there was nothing left for Warren to do—and him an inveterate bachelor—but to figure out how to propose to his guest. This was how he wound up having to pay the fine for the ticket he'd written out for Lyuba.
Lyuba, I must say, was rather an uncomplicated girl, but attractive, and not at all dumb. Dark eyes, chubby cheeks, and a figure somewhat disposed to fullness; Monsieur de Maupassant, that expert in such matters, would have called her "plump." And she didn't have any children back home, either, it turned out.
In short, Lyuba Sydelkina walked into the church and half an hour later came out Mrs. Warren. The stream of guests at the wedding looked like an Easter parade. A cart full of glass vases for floral bouquets was quickly emptied, as everyone had brought flowers with them. The block was surrounded by patrol cars and motorcycles. Some guests arrived on horseback. Holstered pistols, nightsticks, and handcuffs hung off the hips of the milling well-wishers. The guests drank and talked, seated at tables set up right on the grass of the meadow that adjoined Patrick's house, holding glasses in one hand and walkie-talkies in the other. The sheriff even gave permission for a rifle-squad salute in honor of the event, and his friend, the mayor of the city, gave the order for a fireworks display. The city firemen's brass band struck up a tune, and it seemed to me that there could well be an unscheduled earthquake now, from all the crashing of the cymbals gleaming in the spotlights.
Not counting guests from the university, the bride was the best-educated person in this crowd: she'd almost graduated from Moscow State University when she got her six months at the University of California. I ran into the Japanese-language professor at the wedding, and his wife Marina-Mary, who had come to congratulate her friend. They had flown in for a few hours, leaving the children with the mother-in-law. The professor let me know, among other things, that he no longer had the time to play tennis and that he had stopped being a vegetarian: his mother-in-law had decided that it was bad for him.
"I'm so glad for Lyuba," Mary whispered to me. "With her poor English she didn't stand much of a chance of getting married."
Just as the wedding party was in full swing, a wind swept over the tables. It was coming from a roaring, hovering dragonfly—well, a police helicopter—and a stern voice proclaimed from the heavens: "In the name of the law—you're all under arrest!"
The voice suddenly coughed, and, deciding that that was going too far, went on to elaborate: "Nah, only those who don't like my buddy Patrick Warren, and his wife, Looba."
No one getting arrested, a wave of universal love flowed over the meadow next to the house of Patrolman Warren. Hundreds of little white carnations on tiny parachutes floated down from the helicopter. These were gathered up from the ground and stuck into the empty champagne bottles. News of the wedding was broadcast on radio and television, and everyone heard about it. It was rumored that speeds on the highway grew deadly, without the police helicopter and patrol cars on the job.
At the end of this super-bash, somewhere around midnight, when my wife and I were getting ready to slip away, the happy bridegroom bounced up to us. Enveloping my hand in his enormous palm, as big as the scoop of an excavator, Patrick shook it for a long time, thanking me for coming and pronouncing various polite, dutiful phrases. Finally, he shared his joy with us. Lyuba (he pronounced it "Looba" too, of course) had told him that she had a great-grandmother, a Georgian, who lived in Sukhumi.
"They've got beaches there better than in southern California, and the hills are prettier than in Italy. Sounds like a wonderland! And I really like shish kebab. Only there they call it kishlak ..."
"Shashlyk," I prompted.
He looked at me with delight.
"It sounds like music! But the main thing," Warren continued, "is that I collect tobacco pipes. I've got three hundred and seventy-two."
"You've smoked every one of them?"
"I don't smoke at all! It's just my hobby. But Looba's great-grandmother in Sukhumi, believe it or not, has a pipe that Stalin himself smoked. Maybe I could buy it or swap something for it, what do you think? I'll take a pipe with me that the chief of one of our Indian tribes here in California used to smoke."
In a nutshell, he and Lyuba had decided to spend their honeymoon at her great-grandmother's, and travel around Abkhazia. Lyuba, it is true, tried to talk him out of it, but the head of the family stood his ground.
"But there's a civil war going on there," I remarked, cautiously.
He flexed his muscles and laughed.
"Read about that in the New York Times. By the way, I am a graduate of the police academy. But as far as it is possible that Abkhazia could be a peculiar-enough place, I'm not planning on renting any airplanes there."
Once I heard that, I realized that my mission as a consultant was over and done with.
Patrick was in fact a first-class hunk. His dark tuxedo seemed to be literally splitting at the seams. His orange-flowered bow tie seemed like it could scarcely make it around his oak-like neck. A descendant of gold prospectors in the central valley, he seemed to exude robust health. Medicine had never been developed for the likes of him, he seemed in no need of insurance—it was criminals who needed the insurance when they ran into policemen like that. One of the guests at the table had been relating over his walkie-talkie how this past year the bridegroom had disposed of five criminals, two of whom were professional boxers, all by himself. Using the night-vision device in his helicopter, Warren had noticed some trouble at a roadside Mexican restaurant. Robbers were laying hands on the day's proceeds. Patrick brought the helicopter down on the restaurant's parking lot. Before his back-up arrived, Patrick had had to rough them up a bit. All five were taken from the hospital to their arraignment.
The following day, caught up in my own affairs, I forgot about Patrick and Lyuba. Exams were coming, students were getting nervous, and their tension communicated itself to me. A file of students stood in the outer office or sat in the corridor, either in need of consultation or eager to demonstrate their profound interest in 19th-century Russian literature. A few wise guys had been clever enough to get themselves a certificate of mental retardation, so that they could take four hours instead of two to finish their exam.
Then came the holidays, and I sat down to work on my unfinished book.
2.
A month had probably passed since the wedding when my phone gave an innocuous ring. At first I couldn't even imagine who it was. Patrick Warren had returned from his wedding trip.
"Well, how was it there on Lake Ritsa, Pitsunda, the ape nursery, Mt. Akhun?" I tried to remember some more places, but my store was exhausted.
"Wonderful! I got a whole bunch of impressions," he said. "Can I come over and see you?"
I imagined the police helicopter coming down on the roof of the foreign languages department, but it didn't happen that way. Warren simply came in and sat down across from me. He was so big that it suddenly got crowded in my office. One of Patrick's eyes and part of his cheek were dark blue. I didn't even have to ask: Warren himself launched into the whole story, in detail.
They had painstakingly gotten everything together, whole suitcases full of presents. Lyuba had visited her great-grandmother Maniko in Sukhumi the summer before last. Her two-story house—built by Maniko's deceased husband, who had served as gardener at the dacha of Comrade Kaganovich, one of Stalin's henchmen—stood on the very shore of the sea, surrounded by a vineyard. There (at great-grandmother's, not only at Kaganovich's) the sea wasn't very far from their bed: they would just have to wake up, and—sploosh! By the way, the pipe that had gotten Patrick so excited had been given to Kaganovich by Stalin. But when Kaganovich's dacha had been taken away from him, the gardener, Maniko's husband, had found the pipe and claimed it for himself.
The house and the surrounding outbuildings were full of vacationers in summer—eighteen families. Great-grandmother herself lived where it was a bit quieter: in a little shed on the edge of the orchard, spreading her bedding out on the floor. Her feet didn't fit inside, so, as the old woman put it, they got to sleep out in the fresh air. In that little shed there, she kept her money in a big old pot that she'd hidden in a hole in the ground. If she sold any fruit or collected some rent from her boarders, Maniko would spread apart two of the floorboards in her little shed, lift the lid off the pot, and stuff in more rubles, Ukrainian karbovanetses, Georgian kupons, Kazakh tenges, soms, lats, zaychiks, and other freely convertible currencies. Maniko never did trust banks. She understood the word "money," but inflationary problems—that was nonsense that didn't bother her in the least.
Peaches and grapes grew in the orchard. The trees were somewhat stunted from their great age, but the fruit was sweet. Formerly, Great-grandmother Maniko used to trundle the fruit down to the marketplace, but now, grown old, she would set up a stand at the traffic circle near the last stop of the No. 4 bus. The drivers would dig money out of their cash boxes, re-attach the wire seal, and buy Maniko's fruit. On the other side of the house, behind the orchard, ran the highway, and beyond that the railroad; further still were the mountains, whose gentler slopes had once been covered with vineyards. After Gorbachev issued his prohibition law, the local administration had uprooted the vineyards entirely. Now, when the wind blows, clouds of dust blew down onto the villages and the beaches.
Lyuba told her bridegroom about all of this when he would come home from work in his Thunderbird and sit down to dinner, in the first few days of their marriage. Patrick devoured it all, along with his dinner. He said that he loved exotic things. He'd chuckle now and again, and could hardly wait to leave on their honeymoon.
Telephoning Sukhumi turned out to be impossible. They sent letters, but no answer came. So the newlyweds decided to spring a surprise on Great-grandmother. If worst came to worst, Maniko could kick some of the boarders out of one of the rooms for them. That's what Lyuba thought, and she taught her husband what to say:
"Say, 'Zdravstvuite, my iz Ameriki,' and I will add, 'Maniko, I want you to meet my husband Patrick. He doesn't speak a word of Russian, or Georgian, or Abkhazian." You say, 'Privet!' Then of course great grandma will answer: "Well, finally! If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake!" She always says that, and kindness just shines from her eyes. At this point you astonish her with the Russian phrase, 'Ochen priyatno.' And things will take their own course after that..."
Looking at the map, Patrick thought they would flying by way of Istanbul or Teheran, but the travel agency sold them tickets to Sukhumi via a transfer to Aeroflot in Moscow. There they could drop in on Lyuba's aunt, her mother's sister. Lyuba's grandmother, Maniko's daughter, had died long ago and for some reason there had never been a grandfather. Lyuba's parents had died five years before when her father, after buying a Zhiguli car, had run into an oil tanker on the way to the Caucasus. Or the tanker had crashed into them, with the number of victims being the same in either case. Her aunt and her aunt's husband both taught at Moscow State University. They had even helped Lyuba get to America, and now they were very glad their adopted daughter was no longer running around single.
Before their departure, Warren had looked around Sacramento for an appropriate T-shirt. A salesman convinced him that the trendiest thing now would be to wear the two-headed eagle with a Russian inscription that went something like this:
Happy days they were in Rus'
When kopeks two would buy a goose.
Even though Lyuba translated it for him, Patrick didn't quite grasp what the text meant, but he liked the eagle a lot. In Moscow, Patrick was enraptured by the eternally live Lenin in his tomb. He also wanted to stop by McDonald's, but Lyuba was in no shape for standing in an even longer line.
The airplane from Moscow to Sukhumi didn't get off the ground for a long time, and then when they'd gotten there, they took a long time to land "due to the weather conditions." Patrick was quite pleased that they weren't fed anything on the flight.
"Russians are better than we are at dieting," he explained to his wife. "I like that a lot."
They landed at night, after the wind had dispersed the clouds. The air smelled fresh on the airfield after the thunderstorm, and the stars shone as brightly as they did in California. Nobody was there to meet Lyuba. It was likely that Maniko hadn't received the telegram they had sent from Moscow. Nor was there a taxi. But the driver of the airport garbage truck, once he'd learned that these were Americans, agreed to take them. Lyuba conducted negotiations as to how much. The driver asked for five hundred dollars, but settled for three dollars, demanding them in advance.
The moon appeared to be resting on the edge of the mountain, quietly illuminating the village. It was doing the job of the streetlights. They weren't working. Lyuba searched out the traffic circle where Bus No. 4 made its turnaround, and Great-grandmother Maniko's house beside it, and they unloaded their present-filled suitcases from the garbage truck.
Lyuba had spent every summer vacation here from early childhood on, and knew not only every tree and every bush, but all the cracks in the asphalt and every missing knothole in the high ramshackle fence. Lyuba had often climbed over that fence with her neighbor Givi, the son of the jewelry-store salesman, when Maniko wouldn't let her go out strolling in the evening. Lyuba had something going with this neighbor, and not just in the evening, but in the daytime as well, when the jewelry store on the riverbank was open and there was nobody at home but Givi. She didn't want to remember this now, though. She walked along the fence, Patrick behind her, carrying their two enormous suitcases.
There was the crooked gate. Lyuba thrust her hand gropingly through the crack, shifted the bar, and waited for Timur to start barking. He always used to bark at any rustling sound, assuming that mischief-makers aimed to snatch the peaches that hung down across the fence.
The hinges creaked, but there was no bark from Timur. Clotheslines stretched the length of the path, but the shorts and bathing suits of the numerous inhabitants that usually hung on them to dry were missing. The outbuildings, usually full as beehives with wild vacationers, were dead. Apart from some birds alarmed in their nest, there was a deathly silence.
"Oh, look!" whispered Lyuba.
The black mouths of broken windows gaped from the house. Moonlight fell upon a tile, part of it broken off.
"Maybe they've built a new house, and they're tearing this one down," suggested Patrick.
Without answering, Lyuba hurried to the little shed where Maniko slept during the summer. The door was open, and from inside came the smell of a camp stove, and dampness. A buzzing swarm of disturbed flies flew out the door.
"What a disaster... I simply can't imagine what's happened, or what we can do." Tears appeared in Lyuba's eyes. "It's 2 a.m. The neighbors are asleep, there's nobody to ask..."
"Hang on ..."
Patrick lowered the suitcases to the footpath and took a flashlight out of his pocket. Lighting up the ground at his feet, he went into the house. In a few minutes he came back out.
"Looks like there's been an explosion. Furniture's ruined inside, and kids' toys are all over the floor. Maybe we should call the police?"
"The militia," Lyuba corrected him. "The telephone was in the kitchen, but Maniko always had it turned off in the summer, so the boarders wouldn't make any calls. I'll go look."
Patrick lit her way as they entered through the doorway. The door lay to one side on the grass. A patch of sky with the moon in it was visible through a hole in the roof. There was a gas range on the left and a kitchen table behind it. Beside that was a nightstand, on which stood a telephone. Lyuba took Patrick's flashlight, lifted the receiver and listened for the tone—the phone was working. She dialed 02. For a long time nobody picked up, then someone, coughing, said something in Abkhazian. Lyuba explained in Russian that she had arrived to visit her great-grandmother, but there was no house. That is, there was a house, but it was destroyed. How could she find out where her great-grandmother was and in general what was going on?
"Lissen, dear," the wheezy voice replied, switching to Russian, "you fink you're de only one? Effrypoddy's house here is wrecked. Nopoddy has no great-grandmovver. What else is new? You call in the middle of the night, you don't let the man on duty sleep—you understand? We'll arress' you, if you try calling again!"
Short beeps sounded in the receiver.
Lyuba pressed herself against Warren.
"Maybe we should wake the neighbors? The jeweler used to live on this side, and Grandpa Rezo, Maniko's son, used to live on the other…"
"You know what," Patrick decided, "it's not long till morning, maybe four or five hours. I'm used to not sleeping at night. It's easy for me. In any case, we still have our whole honeymoon ahead of us. I'll lay these suitcases down flat now, with my coat for a mattress, and you lie down. I'll sit for while and look at the moon. The moon here is fabulous."
In the morning, voices could be heard in the house where Rezo, Maniko's son—that is, Lyuba's great-uncle—lived, and a sleepy Lyuba jumped up and ran over there. My lord, what that started! They recognized her straight away and started wailing. Children and women, most of whom she didn't know, milled around Lyuba. Several of them ran to fetch Patrick, who didn't understand anything, and they brought him and the suitcases back.
"Zdrasvee-ooy-tee, mee iz America," said Patrick. "Oshen pree-atno."
"So where is Maniko?" Lyuba asked.
"We'll fetch your great-grandma right now," Grandpa Rezo answered. "She hasn't gone nowhere." He was hunchbacked, toothless, gray-haired, and long unshaven.
"So she's here? Thank God!"
Rezo went out to a shed and walked slowly back with a gray, disheveled old crone in a white night-shirt that reached to the ground. She was leaning on a crutch as she walked.
"Maniko!" shrieked Lyuba, and flung herself on her neck.
"Who's this?" asked Maniko, and a spasm flicked across her face.
"Why, it's Lyuba," said Rezo.
"What Lyuba?"
"Your great-granddaughter Lyuba."
"I don't remember."
"After the explosion, Maniko's memory went astray," Rezo explained, turning to Patrick for some reason. "She's not quite herself. But nobody's himself here. Haven't you seen what's been going on? But meanwhile you sit down, genatsvale, justice don't stand around on its hind legs."
Patrick smiled at the warmth of the Georgian word for "buddy," but understood neither it nor the Russian around it, and for that reason did nothing else.
"What's wrong with him, is he deaf?" asked Rezo.
"No, he's an American."
Patrick sat himself down on a bench at a large table under a tree.
"He's a real American?" said a dark-eyed little girl with two slender braids, her curiosity piqued. She walked up to Warren and touched his knee. Patrick patted her on the head.
"A real one, a real one..." Lyuba answered for him. "But where's Timur?"
"A tank squashed the dog," the little girl answered, "not very long ago."
"Never mind Tiiii-muuuur..." Rezo stretched it out. "They killed our neighbor the jeweler and his whole family. They were looking for gold at his place. At least we're alive for the time being..."
"They killed Givi?" Lyuba blurted out.
"Givi was the first one they killed. He'd hidden his father from them."
Lyuba was horrified, and she pressed closer to Maniko.
"Who's this?" her great-grandmother asked again.
"They've told you already, it's Lyuba!" Rezo said angrily.
Lyuba kissed Maniko, sighed, and decided to distribute the presents they'd brought with them. She opened a suitcase, only to find it half empty. It was the same with the second one. Both suitcases held a pair of hefty stones, for weight. Patrick fingered the locks.
"See how they're broken? Somebody at the airport, either in Moscow or in Sukhumi, took away a chunk of our things with him.
"That happens quite a lot these days," said Grandpa Rezo. "Good thing they didn't take everything. They tore Maniko's money-pot right out of her hands. Lucky she's still got her hands."
There weren't enough presents for everyone, and tears began to flow. Two little girls started fighting, and one of them said: "It would've been better if you hadn't brought anything. Then it'd be the same for everyone."
Lyuba didn't even bother to translate this for Patrick. Noticing that the gate was swaying and about to collapse, he picked an ax up off the ground and, propping up the post with his shoulder, undertook to figure out how to make it stronger. Silently Rezo brought him a couple of boards and some nails.
Then they sat down at the table for breakfast. Rezo kept on apologizing for the fact that they had nothing but goat-cheese and bread. There weren't even any peaches from the tree.
"There's a war going on here," he said. "Brother against brother ... A shell dropped on mama's house. Good thing it happened in the daytime, everybody was scattered about, only two people were hurt, they were taken to the hospital, and mama, you see... she was a bit shell-shocked."
"Did you see the doctor?" Lyuba asked, trying to hug Maniko, but she just pulled away from Lyuba, as if she were a stranger.
"The doctor promised that Maniko might get better," Rezo continued. " She's lucky to get off so easily. The Abkhazian militia was driving Georgians out of their homes into the street. Our boys are worse than the Nazis, they're like some kind of animals. God took away their brains. They're ready to kill their own relatives for the right cause. And who the hell knows whose that is? Who is a Georgian, who's an Abkhazian, who's a Russian, who's an Ossetian—who's half-and-half, who's a quarter something? So there you are—me and two of my brothers are married to Abkhazians. So what are our children? You understand, genatsvale?"
Lyuba translated; Patrick nodded.
"So you came here for a vacation? Oh-ho-ho! What kind of a vacation are you going to get around here now? The house is a wreck, there's nothing to eat. The sewage system is ruined and everything spills out onto the beach. Of course we're very glad to see you. But I tell you, it's better to get out of Sukhumi and go somewhere else."
"What's her name?" Great-grandmother Maniko asked and shook loose a mass of long-uncombed gray hair.
"Lyuba, this is Lyuba!" Grandpa Rezo flared up, and then repeated, "Get away from here before they start up again..."
"But where to?" Lyuba asked, in dismay.
"I think," said Rezo, "it'd be better to go in the direction of Sochi. It's closer to Russia. They're not killing so many people there."
"Looba," broke in Patrick interestedly, " ask them where's the closest place to rent a car. That'll be the most convenient for us, now..."
When he heard the translation, Rezo smiled sadly.
"Then maybe somebody might sell us a used car?" Warren wasn't going to give up.
"Lyuba, explain to him how complicated all this is," said Rezo patiently. Then he hesitated and suggested: "You know what? There's a Moskvich that belongs to my son Otar in the shed. He's in Tbilisi and seldom comes home anymore. He's been declared an enemy here. The car's just sitting around, anyway, no use to anyone. There's no gasoline. Besides, they've been saying that they're going to confiscate everyone's car for the army... Take off in it, son. As long as you can get it going. Who knows, they might even give some gas to an American."
"But how will we get it back to you?" Patrick asked. "Come back here?"
"Not on your life! My Otar is married to a Russian; her mother lives in Dagomys, right next to Sochi. Lyuba knows her. You can just leave the car in her orchard when you leave. Lyuba, did you understand?"
The youngsters held a short conference. Patrick laughed and shook Grandpa Rezo's hand for a long time.
The Moskvich was parked in the shed. You couldn't say it was brand new, but you could still make out traces of its light-blue paint job in various spots. Patrick had seen cars like it at antique-car shows, and they were worth a fortune.
"So be it," Rezo decided. "I've got half a can of gas stashed away. You'll leave it with a full tank, okay? If the traffic police ask you for the car's papers, slip them a few dollars: that's even better than papers, understand? Here's a couple of blankets for you, too, in case you can't find a hotel. It's not so bad sleeping in a car, either, especially if you've got a young wife, eh?"
"Thanks, you've been very kind to us," said Patrick politely, and Lyuba translated. "I'll never forget this. Come visit us in California, and I'll lend you my T-bird, and you can take it up to Lake Tahoe."
"Children!" yelled Rezo. "Bread's rationed, so they won't be able to buy any anywhere. Bring them a loaf of bread from the cellar and a jar of apricot jam…"
"Could I get just a glimpse of the water?" Patrick asked cautiously.
When he grasped what the American wanted, Rezo took him by the arm and led him through the bushes to the bluff. There the blue distance opened out, pure and quiet. Somewhere out on the very horizon, a tiny ship floated, trailing smoke from its stack. At the foot of the bluff, the surf swished over the rocks.
"You can take a look." Standing behind him, Rezo shook his head. "There's the sea. But there's no way you're going to go swimming. That water's poisoned with sewage."
They went back to the orchard.
"Looba, I've got a real important question for Maniko," said Patrick. "Could I get to see the pipe that Mr. Stalin smoked?"
Her great-grandmother shrugged her shoulders in silence. Grandpa Rezo answered for her:
"Well, now, I know that pipe well. Mama treasures it as a memento of my father. When I was young, I used to smoke it on the sly, out of her sight, and I used to let some of my friends smoke it, because everybody was curious about it. People even said it was magic."
"Well, where is it, then?"
"Mama caught me smoking it, and hid it somewhere, but just where she did has slipped her memory. I've already looked for it... Maybe she'll come to her senses and remember... Sorry, genatsvale!"
While saying their goodbyes, Patrick, a bit saddened, pulled out his video-camera and started taking pictures of everything, one thing after another: the sea, the overgrown, untended orchard, Maniko's wrecked house, the remarkable Moskvich automobile, still unaware of the honeymoon journey in store for it, and all his new relatives, who lined up in a long file along the fence, faces suddenly stony.
The most difficult thing for Patrick turned out to be getting into the car. The door was a bit too small. Once in, he found he took up one and a half of the two front seats, so there was only half a seat left for Lyuba. There was no way he could straighten out his legs, but he could still drive. But the motor didn't want to turn over. Patrick, laughing, lifted the hood, monkeyed with the spark-plugs and carburetor for half an hour, and the Moskvich came to life.
Everybody stood up and waved after them. Great-grandmother Maniko was weeping, although she still hadn't recognized Lyuba. They drove out onto the turnaround of the No. 4 bus. At long last, their honeymoon had begun. And that honeymoon, as Patrick now described it to me, was like something out of the movies, even though it was just life.
3.
Lyuba showed Patrick where to go. The Moskvich screeched and banged, yet boldly rolled along the devastated asphalt road between the desert-like beaches and the mountains. They drove on through the suburbs, past the dachas of people who were well known not just in Sukhumi: Beria, Stalin, Kaganovich, Mikoyan. At the city center, Warren looked in astonishment at the ruined buildings, the tanks in the streets, and the crowds of people around the stores.
"Everything's so weird!" Patrick would exclaim every now and then. "It looks like you and me are the only tourists here."
They got stopped on the way out of Sukhumi. The road was blocked by two trucks and a police car.
"Patrol!" yelled the mustachioed lieutenant, and ran down the list: "Weapons? Cartridges? Grenades?"
"These are your colleagues," Lyuba explained. "The police."
They were ordered to open the trunk.
"What's in the suitcases?"
The suitcases were almost empty: everything that hadn't been stolen had already been handed over.
"And what's this? It's forbidden to take gasoline out of the city."
A policeman snatched up the gas can and handed it to another one, who quickly carried it off somewhere into the bushes.
"What are you doing?" Patrick inquired politely.
He didn't get any answer.
"Get a move on: block traffic and we'll fine you, as well."
Once again the road wound around above the sea, one wonderful vista after another.
"You know what," suggested Patrick, "since there is a war on here, Rezo is right: we've got to get ourselves over to Russia and vacation there. Judging from the map, that's another hundred miles or so. Look how beautiful this is. I just love mountains."
For a long time they dodged along the winding mountain road. Armored personnel carriers were parked in the villages. Here and there, they could hear shooting. If you stopped pedestrians on the street and asked them anything, they looked at you in fear. Stores and restaurants flashed past, their windows boarded up, marketplaces all deserted. In a house not far from the highway they bought two empty bottles to get some water from a spring.
The sun had passed its zenith when they turned off the road, parked the car near an abandoned orchard, slid down a little hillock, and spread out their picnic under an overhanging apple tree, gone wild. There wasn't a soul around. The spring water and the bread and jam Rezo had given them tasted wonderful. Patrick, tired by now, stretched out on the dry grass. Lyuba lay her head on his chest. They had spent the night sitting up, and now they both fell asleep.
Noise from the road woke up Patrick. Three heavy black limousines with dark windows, tires crunching on the pavement, had rolled slowly down from further up the mountain and come to a stop. Warren shifted his eyes from one car to the other but for a long while none of them showed any signs of life. Then two batches of youngish bodyguards in black suits and neckties spilled out of the first and third limousines and, surveying their surroundings, spread out into a semi-circle. The front door of the second car opened. A baldish general with gold shoulderboards climbed out onto the side of the road, glanced around, and opened the rear door, bowing obsequiously.
For a long time nobody appeared. Then a brilliantly shiny black boot lowered itself to the ground. After a while, another boot stood beside it. Both boots moved slightly, the legs hidden inside them stretching. Out of the darkness came a wheezing sound, and a masculine voice with a Georgian accent cursed and asked:
"No people aroun'?"
"Not a soul," the general barked. "Everything's been checked out."
Leaning on the door and the supportive general, an old man emerged into the light. He had a pock-marked face and a mustache hanging down around his mouth. He was in a threadbare white service-jacket with a high, buttoned collar and two pockets on the chest, and he had a white military-style hat on his head. The old man frowned at the sun and said:
"Son of a bidge, it's hod as an oven today!"
Wheezing and shaking, the old man went around behind the automobile and, unbuttoning himself at the rear tire, began to take care of his needs. Patrick slid a confused look at Lyuba, but she was sleeping sweetly. The old man finished his important mission, breathed a sigh of relief, and, buttoning up his fly with arthritic fingers, walked to the edge of the road and pushed his hat to the back of his head. He looked at the mountains, pulled a tobacco pouch out of his pocket, then his pipe, and began to fill it, tamping the tobacco with his thumb.
His bodyguards were spread out in a wide circle, attentively watching the surroundings. The general was already holding a lighter in readiness. The old man stuck the pipe into his mouth and smacked his lips as he lit up. At this point Patrick suddenly realized who was in front of him. He leaped up, realizing what luck this was, and that he'd never get another chance. And he yelled out:
"Mister Stalin!"
But Warren had scarcely moved when the guards flung themselves on him, piling on top of him, grabbing his arms. Of course Patrick could easily have thrown them off in a few moments, but instead he hurriedly thrust his head between two of the youngsters holding him by the shoulders and introduced himself.
"An' thiz is my so-galled perzonal bodyguard?" the old man said to the general, spat furiously and stamped on the spittle with his boot. "Whad does the Peoble pay you salary for?"
"Guilty, Comrade Stalin!"
"Let's do a swap, Mister Stalin," Patrick hurriedly shouted. "I'll trade you an Indian tribal chief's pipe for yours."
"For me, the chief of all progrezzive mangind, you offer the pibe of the leader of some sord of peddy tribe?"
"Well, according to the legend, this pipe gives not only power, but immortality as well!"
"Thad's all nonzenze! We are Margzists—atheists. But sinze you are so eager to have the pibe which Comrade Stalin smogued himself, go on, tague it. Led him go. General, give him my pibe."
Wheezing, the old man crawled back into the back seat of the limousine.
The guards flung Patrick to the ground, and immediately piled into their cars.
"As for those young peoble on the grass..." the old man said to the general. "He's an Amerigan. I have still been thinking a bid, and I have decided: why should the segret servize of the Unided Stades know that Comrade Stalin now lives in a dacha in Abkhazia?"
"Should I give the order to let them have it with a Kalashnikov?"
"Whad for? Led our visidors rezd peazefully. But when they have rezded, let Comrade Beria tague care of them withoud any prejudice. I thing id is not nezezzary they should return to the lair of imberialism. Sudge a physigal and strong Amerigan can do some worgue for socialism. And the pibe will return to its real owner. Led's go!"
The engines squealed to life. Patrick was holding the still-lit pipe in his hands. Then he woke up for the second time, this time for real. When he opened his eyes, Warren saw that he was holding a dry twig in his hand, picked up off the ground. The noise from the road and the smoke really did exist. Their Moskvich had been expeditiously turned around and was rolling off, jam-packed with shaven-headed people.
Patrick jumped up quickly and was on the asphalt in three bounds, but the car was already out of sight. There wasn't a single passer-by on the road; the highway seemed deserted. It would have been stupid to run after them. His hand went instantly into his pocket: his car keys were gone.
"The pipe, Looba!" groaned Patrick.
"What pipe?"
"The Indian chief's pipe that I wanted to trade for Stalin's pipe. It's gone."
Not just the pipe. Their clothes, Patrick's video-camera, the blankets—everything that was in the Moskvich's trunk—was gone. The wallet in his back pocket was still there, though, since Patrick had been lying on it.
The reader can rest assured that I'm trying to get across what Patrick told me word for word, without adding anything of my own. And if, regarding his meeting with Comrade Stalin, he exaggerated a bit for the sake of a well-turned phrase, I can hardly be held responsible for that. Not long ago I read in some quite serious journal that even long dreams pass through our consciousness in an instant, so Warren might well have dreamed about the chief's pipe while the thieves were already revving up the motor of his Moskvich. Patrick decided not to say anything to his wife about his strange dream.
Lyuba sobbed and said that she didn't want to spend her honeymoon this way. Patrick comforted her: why, their vacation was only just getting underway. Lyuba thought it was already done for, though. On the grass under the tree lay their jar of apricot jam, bees clustering all over it, and half a loaf of gray bread.
On the path leading down from the mountain into the apple orchard there appeared a little white-bearded old man with a sack slung across his shoulder, looking like a beggar. He stopped and asked for a piece of bread. Lyuba gave him half of what was left. He began to eat it ravenously. When he heard what had happened, the old man said:
"It's those criminals they let out of the prisons. They do as they please now, you see."
"And where do you live?" Lyuba asked.
"Nowhere, now. I'm a Greek, and the Abkhazians have driven out the Greeks just like they did the Georgians and the Armenians."
"Where are you heading now?"
"Everybody's running away from here. I'm heading for Batumi to try to cross over into Turkey. Maybe things are better in Turkey; they're very bad here."
"Are we very far from an airport?" Patrick asked all of a sudden, looking at the tear-stained face of his wife. She translated for him.
"Airport? Right now you're not far from Gagry, but the only airport around here is near Adler. That would be across the border already, that is, in Russia. The buses aren't running anymore. Cars don't pick up hitch-hikers, 'cause they're scared. All that's left is to go on foot. You can get there in a day and a half, two days."
So Patrick and Lyuba went their way, clutching the jar with the remains of the jam, their two empty bottles, and the piece of bread. Whenever Patrick heard the sound of an approaching car behind them, he would try to flag it down, but nobody stopped.
Toward evening they came to the village of Gantiadi. All the while, Patrick had been converting kilometers into miles, and it turned out that it was still another twenty or twenty-five miles to the airport. Lyuba had rubbed both her feet raw and couldn't walk any further. Patrick offered to carry her, but plump Lyuba knew what her weight was, and declined.
In the twilight, shooting had started up. Somewhere artillery rumbled. There was a clatter behind them and an armored personnel carrier pulled up alongside. Someone inside yelled out something in Georgian.
"Who could this be?" Patrick mused aloud. "Abkhazians? Georgians? Russians?... Well, at least they're not thieves. They couldn't have stolen that tank..."
"They're Georgians," said Lyuba.
Flashlights played on Lyuba and Patrick from various directions.
"What do they want?" Patrick asked Lyuba, as couple of dozen soldiers in masks leaped from the vehicle, surrounded them and begun to argue about something in Georgian.
"What do you want, young men?" Lyuba asked. "Who are you?"
One of them switched to Russian and said:
"Document check, girl. Georgian Popular Forces. Passport, passport!"
The whole unit stared animatedly, catching on that they had a foreigner in front of them.
"Looba," said Patrick uncomfortably, "go ahead and tell them, so they'll let us go."
Lyuba translated.
"Tell him not to twitch a muscle or we'll arrest him," another soldier broke in quickly. "He's got to hand over dollars, dollars! No dollars, and we don't let you through."
Patrick didn't scare easily, but he looked nervously at Lyuba, not knowing what they might get up to in a pinch like this, in weird old Abkhazia.
"Give them ten dollars," ordered Lyuba.
They shone a light on the bill.
"Ten? Not ten; let's have a hundred. You got lots more over there, and we got none here."
Patrick handed them several more bills, and they gave him back his passport.
"Hey, genatsvale, how about renting us your girl?"
Lyuba wasn't about to translate that question for him.
The soldiers started to laugh, clapped Patrick on the shoulder, but then someone bellowed from the armored transport. They piled into the vehicle and they drove off, waving their machine-guns and shouting.
It was time to find a haven for the night. The Warrens decided to forge ahead until they found something. A lot of homeless people like themselves were walking along the road, both towards them and overtaking them from behind, singly and in droves. Many of them had no idea where they were wandering to, or why. Nowhere would anyone let them stay the night. So they plodded on down the side of the highway, stumbling and finally settling down on the ground to rest until dawn. The honeymooners passed through the sleepy, leafy little town of Leselidze without any obstacle, where they were told it wasn't far to the Russian border. Patrick and Lyuba took heart and even laughed when they looked at each other: the mosquitoes had bitten both of them so badly that their swollen faces were hardly recognizable.
The next day they had almost made it to the Russian-Abkhazian border, and they were walking now past a copse of trees, now past an ancient park, when suddenly, with a laugh and a whoop, a crowd of young hooligans surrounded them.
"Hey, man, give us some smokes!" the youngsters yelled.
"He doesn't smoke," said Lyuba.
This swarm of locusts, obviously all escaped from places of detention, bellowing and whining for money, romped around the couple, stoned out of their heads on freedom, drugs, and the absence of punishment. They shoved them, knocking Patrick and Lyuba off their feet, and then proceeded to walk right over them. Patrick stood up and grabbed one of them up by the collar and the seat of his pants, lifting him up to chuck him out of the way, but the brat kicked Patrick in the eye. Patrick hunkered down in pain.
The swarm disappeared into the forest as suddenly as it had appeared.
"My wallet!" it occurred to Patrick. "Our passports, tickets. Our money..."
They had also ripped off Lyuba's handbag, with what was left of the apricot jam. Patrick's cheek and eyebrow swelled up, suffused with blood. His eye swelled shut, but, thank God, it was in one piece.
The bridge across the river Psou was blocked off by armored personnel carriers. The Abkhazians were on one side of the bridge, Russian forces on the other. They were interrogated for a long time by both sides, but now Patrick did all the talking by himself. And even though nobody understood a word he said, his utterances had a hypnotic effect. Finally they were even given water to drink and had directions to the Adler airport explained to them.
They walked slower and slower, sitting down and taking breaks more and more often. Half-clothed, and starving by the time it got dark again, the last of their strength fading, they finally made it to the airport.
In the courtyard in front of the terminal a woman was putting a heavy lock on the door of a kiosk above which hung a crooked sign saying Pelmeni—meat dumplings, like ravioli. Lyuba rushed up to her.
"My dear woman, please, please, give us something to eat. We haven't eaten for two days."
"Can't you see? We're closed."
"We're from America—there he is, an American—and hungry."
"Has he got any dollars?"
"No, he hasn't," Lyuba hesitated, but suddenly (and where does a Russian woman's wisdom come from?) she remembered. "I'll give you an American brassiere. It's brand new. I just now put it on." And she undid the front of her dress's tunic, so that the woman could make sure of the brassiere's quality. Patrick, understanding neither the conversation nor the gestures of the two women, embarassedly took his eyes from his wife, who seemed to be performing a strip-tease for the sake of some pelmeni. Lyuba took off the brassiere and held it out to the dumpling-lady. The latter turned the brassiere over in her hands without any special enthusiasm, skillfully tucked it away in her handbag, took the lock off the door and disappeared inside. She soon emerged, carrying two plates in front of her, loaded with the dumplings, and a piece of bread.
Lyuba and Patrick settled themselves down at a table set into the concrete in front of the door. The pelmeni were cold, the fat had congealed, but it made no difference. They quickly wolfed them all down.
"For breakfast I still have my American panties," said Lyuba happily, "but what'll we do after that?"
"After that … I have underwear too," Patrick said modestly.
Patrick and Lyuba weren't exactly greeted with flowers at the airport. Only passengers with tickets were admitted into the waiting room. It smelled like a stable. People slept on sacks or wandered around, stepping on the sleepers. Long lines of people crowded the ticket-windows. What were they supposed to ask for at the ticket-window, anyway? The cashiers they appealed to didn't want to talk to them. Patrick used his mighty torso icebreaker-style to open a path through the crowd to a door under the sign saying " Shift Chief." Lyuba tried to explain that they were from America and had to fly to Moscow right away.
"Everybody has to fly out of here right away," the elderly chief interrupted her, with a sidewise glance at Patrick's puffy black eye. "But when they actually will, I don't know. They keep postponing the flights: there's no fuel. Passports!"
"They were stolen from us in Abkhazia."
"Tickets?"
"Them, too."
"Then there's nothing I can do; go to the police. Next!"
At the police office they had to start everything all over again from the beginning, but then somebody high-ranking came out and invited them into his office.
"It's a hard thing, I know... Well, okay, since you're American tourists, we'll make an exception. We'll try to help, but you'll have to pay. Pay well, and in hard currency only."
"But we were robbed, don't you understand? We were robbed."
Lyuba burst into tears.
"Then that's your hard luck. Ask your relatives for some money, or otherwise there's nothing we can do to help."
They weren't permitted to stay indoors. They went out to sleep in the meadow next to the fenced-off airfield, bedding down on some mats, and leaning their heads against a pillar ringed with barbed wire. The world isn't without its good people: the soft-hearted cleaning lady had brought them a couple of the mats that she had, stashed away in the terminal building's second-floor VIP lounge. She did it because her beloved grandson had gone off to America.
In the morning, hungry and restless, they again slouched around the air-terminal and its environs. The elderly cleaning lady fed them when Patrick promised to find her grandson in America and help him. The woman even brought Lyuba a warm jacket from her house.
Meanwhile there was no way out, and no one was going to come to their rescue. On the third day, Patrick, unshaven, had somehow managed to wash himself in the dirty men's room and then get Lyuba into a seat that someone had vacated, and was wandering around the waiting room, when suddenly he heard a grand English accent. A gray-haired man in an elegant suit was striding in the direction of the deputies' lounge. Through an interpreter he was talking to a companion in a general's uniform. Their entourage surrounded them.
"Just a moment, sir! Stop a moment, please!"
Patrick plowed forward but was surrounded by a dozen guards. Quick as lightning, he sized up the forces ranged against him, and he certainly might well have disposed of at least four of them in half a minute, but this wasn't part of his job. His last hope was slipping away.
"Sir, I'm an American. Can I speak to you?" yelled Patrick, striding after them.
Nobody paid him any attention.
"Hey, this is very important! It's urgent! Wait a minute, damn it! To hell with you and your whole gang!"
The foreigner finally came to a halt, turned, and a faint smile could be seen on his tired face. He turned out to be a diplomat from the British embassy in Moscow. Patrick explained the situation to him in a few words. The diplomat gestured to let the American through, and the guards, not understanding what was going on, drew aside anyway. Patrick described their ordeal as briefly as possible.
"Good Lord!" exclaimed the diplomat. "Yet this sort of thing is happening here more and more. Write me down your names, address, and telephone number. By evening I'll be in Moscow, and in the morning I'll call the American consul."
"But we don't have either an address or a telephone here. Adler airport, that's all. We're sleeping outdoors."
"Better address them in care of the airport chief ," advised the general. He removed his military hat and wiped his damp bald-spot. "I'll explain it to him."
"No doubt you need some money," said the diplomat, suddenly thoughtful. "How much should I give you, and what currency? Pounds, dollars, rubles?"
"If it's not too much trouble, give me three or four hundred bucks and your name," said Patrick. "I'll get it back to you as soon as I can call the Bank of America. The good Lord bless you!"
For their dollars they were admitted to the airport hotel, after about an hour and a half's wait. At long last their honeymoon was on an even keel. But they had to be accommodated separately, Lyuba in a women's dormitory with six beds, Patrick in a four-bed men's dorm. The women's and men's showers and toilets were at the end of the corridor down which, between the many people standing around, the young lovers strolled, giving themselves up to wedded bliss at last. The next day they heard that Delta Airlines had replaced their tickets home from Moscow. But another three days had to pass before Aeroflot sold them new tickets to Moscow, because, they were informed, whoever had stolen them might use the old ones—which was complete rubbish, of course.
In the face of such a lopsided account, the reader might begin to suspect that the author was mining the genre of American Socialist Realism, that maybe he'd start saying soon that everything is bad over there, and here in America everything's just great. Well, when they arrived in Moscow and appeared at the American consulate, the authorities immediately issued Patrick a new passport. But Lyuba, whose student visa had long since expired, was told she'd have to remain for a few months until the relevant American authorities granted her permission to rejoin her American husband. After all, she didn't even have a Russian passport.
Patrick was pretty sure that he was bound to get a long assignment, with no breaks, after his honeymoon. A hatred for the American bureaucracy that he defended so unstintingly flared up in Patrolman Warren's heart. At this point, an author of fiction might do well to give his plot a twist: at this moment, from god-knows-where, a clever KGB recruiter should come onto the scene and, who knows, maybe bring Patrick Warren over to the Communists, or to some other kind of -ists. But, as the reader has guessed already, it's not in my gift to make these things up. In a rage, Patrick just called his sheriff in Sacramento straight from the consulate, the sheriff called the governor of California, the governor called Washington, and from Washington his wrath showed up back in Moscow in the form of a polite request to make an exception to the rule. From the ambassador's office came a likable young official of basketball height with an order to the consul to issue an entry visa to the wife of Inspector Warren. When this gentleman suddenly caught sight of Patrick in the reception-room, he rushed up and grabbed him.
"Genatsvale!" he whispered. "What did you have to kick up all this fuss for, if you and I were in school together in Sacramento—played basketball on the same team?! You should've come straight to me, and we could've settled this whole thing in five minutes."
Of course, "genatsvale" is just a word I stuck in for effect. What he really said was "buddy." But Patrick hadn't had a clue that his pal worked in the embassy. I merely wish to emphasize some negative aspects of American reality. In certain—atypical, to be sure—cases, Americans are just as given to pulling strings as the Russians are.
4.
"The diet there is really great," Patrick now reminisced, sitting in an armchair in my office. "We hardly ate a thing. The upshot is, I've come to the conclusion that I have never had such a rich and fascinating vacation in my whole life. A whole sea of impressions. Looba and I are going to remember our honeymoon for the rest of our lives."
"And how!" I agreed.
"After the trip I did have a few more things to worry about. I sent some money for a new car to Great-uncle Rezo by way of a friend of mine. I sent a check to London for that diplomat. I found the Adler airport cleaning-lady's grandson through police channels. I'll be sending the boy a small sum every month, and I'll try to help him find a job."
"Okay, Patrick," I said, stifling the impulse to moralize on this theme. "But surely you didn't come all the way here to the university just to tell me this story. How can I help you?"
"Slyushay, genatsvale," he said boldly, not even giving me a second to smile before switching over into English. "I want to take courses in the Russian, Georgian, and Abkhazian languages. But in the evening, after work."
"But we don't offer Georgian or Abkhazian..."
He stopped short. "Then just Russian. They say it's still the common language in all their territories."
"You might say. But you'd have to talk to the director of the Russian program, Professor Gallant. In fact, he has office hours right now. But why do you want to learn Georgian and Abkhazian?"
"What do you mean, why?" he said proudly. "I've got roots there. Do you know what the word Abkhazia means? Translated, it means 'Land of the Soul'!"
That conversation took place last summer. This winter, my wife and I were invited to San Francisco for a concert by musicians from Moscow. We were late, there weren't many cars on the highway, and I stepped on the gas, looking attentively on every side, and especially behind, so as not to miss a patrol car. The speedometer arrow was over 90. We didn't have much further to go when I heard a polite voice from the sky:
"Driver of the dark-red Toyota, pull over to the side. I'm asking you, sir, please! Just not under the bridge, but a little further, in that open place there, sir…"
There weren't any other red cars near us, and no place for us to dodge to. We had to pull over to the side and wait. The black helicopter with its white tail came down on the grass nearby.
"Wouldn't it be nice if Patrick Warren was on duty," I said to my wife. "Our man! But it's not very likely—there's a lot of patrols along this road."
And there was Patrick Warren, in his entire immense person, looming at my window, blocking out the light of day.
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know it was you, and I've already entered the license number of your Toyota in the computer. The speed limit on this stretch is 65. You were doing 90, that's …" his lips worked as he figured something out, "… that's 140 kilometers an hour in Russian, but I'll put you down for 75. That'll be a bit cheaper anyway. The treasury here in California is empty, and speeding fines have gone up past 250 bucks a pop."
"That's daylight robbery!"
"I'm embarrassed myself, sir. But what can you do? We all have to feed a bunch of greedy bureaucrats. The new speeding law makes it even harder to appeal your fine in court, damned if I say so myself. But I'm asking you—don't speed. There've already been three crashes on this section today, one of them fatal."
He handed me a ticket.
"Because of you, we're late to a concert, Patrick," I said in annoyance.
Warren understood this in his own way.
"Sorry, but I can't take you to San Francisco. We're not allowed to fly on that side of the bay: it's not our bailiwick."
He shook my hand in his excavator scoop. In the rear window I could see the helicopter roiling the dried grass and shooting up over the highway.
That fall, winter, and spring, I would run into Patrick on campus. He stood out from the crowd of students with his powerful build and the fact that he was still in police uniform. Apparently he never had time to go home and change before class.
"Zdrasveeooytee," he would always yell in his mangled Russian, and then add, somewhat less confidently, a couple of words in the language to the effect that he spikka da Russian real good.
One day he came running into my office, beaming:
"Congratulations!" he said in Russian, and continued: "Looba bore a boy!" Of course he meant something like "congratulate me."
"All right! You guys don't waste any time."
"You know where we made him? Looba and the doctor figured it out exactly: in Adler, on the field by the airstrip, when we couldn't get a flight out. The smell of milkweed was so strong I couldn't hold myself back. Sure, it stank of aviation fuel, too, and the toilet right next to us, but I decided not to pay it any mind. It happened on that mat from the VIP lounge. Just think what people have walked on that thing! Maybe Stalin and Beria. And Kaganovich. And Gorbachev. And that tyrant, Mikoyan!"
"Stalin was the main tyrant," I answered with a chuckle. "Mikoyan was just small fry: he was Peoples' Commissar for the food industry. He made hot dogs."
"Well, sure," Patrick agreed. "They all made hot dogs. 'Now for two kopecks you can't buy a goose,'" he said, in his execrable Russian. I interpreted this as meaning that, in his understanding, Russian history clearly showed signs of progress.
When I returned from Europe at the height of the summer, I came across a fax from Patrolman Patrick Warren. The text was in Russian, and began with the words, "We bring to the attention of all relatives, friends, and acquaintances," and went on to announce solemnly that Lyuba was again pregnant and expecting their second child. I called to congratulate them.
"Have you been watching the news from Russia?" he asked. "There's still a lot of trouble there. The Georgians are fighting the Abkhazians. The Moldavians are quarreling among themselves. The Armenians are in conflict with the Azerbaidzhanis. The Tadzhiks and the Afghans are having it out… It's a nightmare in Chechnya. It has to be stopped!"
"It's got to, " I agreed, eagerly. "But how?"
"Didn't I tell you? I'm going back there again."
"With Lyuba?"
"I'm afraid not, this time. She's expecting another child, after all."
"And what are you going to be doing there?"
"What do you mean?!" exclaimed Warren. "First of all, Looba learned through her aunt in Moscow that Great-grandmother Maniko has come to her senses after her shell-shock. I'm hoping that she remembers where she hid Stalin's pipe. Secondly, I know the faces of everybody who robbed us. I'm going to find them. Thirdly, I have a colossal idea. I've decided to pa-ci-fy them all."
"What are you on about?"
"They've been screwing around long enough! I'd have done it last time, only I wasn't expecting to. I was their as a guest, after all. So, when they attacked me, I couldn't come up with an adequate response, and didn't make any use at all of my considerable physical capabilities. And then I wasn't in uniform, either, and didn't have my gun or my club or my handcuffs with me, or my walkie-talkie. This time it'll be a different story, genatsvale!"
At this Georgian word, pronounced with a California accent, I was so overcome with laughter that I lost the gift of speech. All that's left is for me to sum up the preliminary points: The Warrens were not only raising a Georgian-Abkhazian-Russian-American boy, but, as you've heard, Lyuba was even pregnant again—made known by fax to all of California, in particular President and Nancy Reagan—and, by registered letter, to Great-grandmother Maniko.
But neither Ronald and Nancy, nor Maniko, nor the Georgians, the Abkhazians, the Armenians, the Azerbaidzhanis, the Moldavians, the Tadzhiks, the Chechens, the Russian foreign ministry, the CIA, nor the United Nations as yet know anything about this other plan of his. It hasn't reached the ear of that Russian institution known lovingly to the people until recently as the Federal Agency for Counterintelligence, whose Russian acronym I dare not pronounce in the presence of ladies (the Chekists, however, caught on quickly, and changed their name to something less rude).
So no one as yet knows that genatsvale Patrick Warren, in full uniform, flew out this morning from Sacramento to Moscow, and from there he goes to the Caucasus to establish a durable peace. I should add, "at first" to the Caucasus, and then ...
Meanwhile, don't tell a soul about this.
Translated by Thomas Moore
© Yuri Druzhnikov
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