Metronome, The (16 page)

Sunday, June 17

I land in Sheremetyevo for the second time in as many weeks. I deliberate whether to call Yakov or Bezginovich first. I decide to go with Bezginovich because it may determine where I go from the airport.

He answers quickly. “Are you in Moscow?”

“Yes, just landed in Sheremetyevo.”

“Where are you planning to stay?”

“I have not made any plans yet.”

“How about the Courtyard Moscow City Center on Voznesenskiy Pereulok? It’s centrally located, reasonably priced, and quiet. And it has a bar we can meet at. Some of my clients stayed there, and I know the owner.”

From his comment “reasonably priced,” I figure that he must have looked into me and my financial situation.

“Did my father stay there?”

Bezginovich hesitates, then allows, “Yes, he did.”

We arrange to meet in the bar at seven.

The taxi takes me on another trip down memory lane. When I was a student, I used to take a bus. The streets are much busier now, filled with European and Russian model cars. The hotel is as advertised - civilized, not over the top, only two stories, and busy with tourists. Bezginovich called ahead with a reservation.

I get to my room, unpack, and call Yakov. I smile when I hear him calling out to Anya: “I told you he’d be back within a week!” Yakov gets upset with me for staying in a hotel and harangues me until I agree to come and stay with them after my “downtown business” is concluded.

“Yakov, I do have a favor to ask.”

“I figured you would.”

“I’d like to check on someone who graduated from Moscow State University. His name was Gregory Voron or something like that. He would have graduated in the 1990s.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can find - when he graduated, what he studied, who he worked with…”

“All right. So we’ll see you soon?”

“Yes, soon.”

I have a bit of time, so I go for a walk to Novyy Arbat. I start at the Arbatskaya metro station, dropped like a red Japanese pagoda into a middle of the square. It’s a tourist trap, filled with shops and kiosks selling magazines, cigarettes, books, films, alcohol, fake handbags,
matryoshkas
, and T-shirts proclaiming that the wearer’s been to Moscow. Kiosks are manned by loud people, trying to lure tourists into buying whatever they are peddling. It reminds me of New York - boisterous, haphazard, impromptu, and exalted.

Stalin glares at me from a poster in one of the kiosks. The great man is staring into the bright future. Took me a second to realize that it was not a tribute to the former dictator but a curiosity, a decoration. I wonder if he is turning in his grave from such insolence.

I go through the underground crossing and find it full of more kiosks and beggars. A group of men is clustered near a building, smoking and gossiping. I walk by a church, then a casino. Everything seems pushy and loud. It’s a cliché, but like many clichés it has truth in it: St. Petersburgers consider Muscovites pushy and loud, while Muscovites think that St. Petersburgers are stuck up on their former glory. Kind of like New York and Boston, especially when the Rangers meet the Bruins in the hockey playoffs.

Peter the Great wanted St. Petersburg to be everything that Moscow was not: precise, orderly, elegant, centered around palaces and the fortress rather than churches. The window to the West. But it was Catherine the Great that completed his vision, creating an imperial city to rival Paris and Rome. Rightfully, St. Petersburg belonged to both of the Greats, except that Catherine was the one that turned away from the Peter’s dream: As the age of Enlightenment was sweeping Europe, she pulled the country back. And so Russia settled between the West and the East, present in both worlds, belonging to neither. In the battle between the two cities, Moscow eventually emerged the winner.

Time to head back. I turn onto Borisoglebskiy Pereulok. I like this quieter, greener street lined with trees. That’s where the beauty of Moscow comes across. It’s not intentional, not laid out with a premeditated artistic vision that was looking centuries ahead but instead an accidental collection of streets and buildings that involuntarily come together. In St. Petersburg, you are a child visiting a strict grandfather that spent his life in the military. In Moscow’s little streets, you call on a chaotic and sometimes confused aunt.

A statue of poetess Marina Tsvetayeava is on the left. Her head leans on her hands, eyes downcast. Yes, poetry was a serious business in Russia. Unlike Mandelstam or Babel, she was not killed. Tsvetayeava came back from exile in June 1939. In August, her daughter had been arrested and sentenced to 15 years. A month later, her husband was taken and shot in the Lubyanka prison. Persecuted, lonely, broken, unable to publish, she took her own life and was buried in an unmarked common grave. She knew how it would end:

As for me, a zone of unrestricted sleep,

Bell sounds and early dawns,

In the graveyard of Vagankovo.

In 1946, on behalf of the party, Andrei Zhdanov condemned verses of Anna Akhmatova, another great poetess, because they were too “autobiographic, intimate, and emotional.” Imagine that, intimate and emotional poetry! Of course, politically correct Juliet would not have asked Romeo to change his name but implored him to double coal production instead. Petrarca’s pining for Laura would have earned him a one-way ticket to the Gulag, but pining for higher steel output meant the Stalin Prize, an apartment in the center, and Kremlin store coupons.

Between the NKVD and suicide, what was the survival rate of the Russian poets in the 20
th
century? Someone should run the numbers; I am sure it was not too high. The blood-sucking spider in the Kremlin sat in judgment over who should be published, who met the criteria of “social realism,” who should be hounded or shot outright. And then Stalin would sue his yes-men –
What did Mandelstam call them? “A rabble of thin-necked leaders, fawning half-men for him to play with”
– to deal with the non-compliant ones. But why did he care about a few lines of rhyming text? Was the power of poetry such that it threatened a mighty state? It was not enough to be careful of what you said, you could be damned by what you did not say, by not heaping enough unquestioning praise and adoration on the leader. You are either with us or you must be destroyed.

The poets collided with the brutal system and lost. They were not revolutionaries, they did not fight the leadership. They just had that desperate courage of people unable to surrender their humanity.

The hotel bar looks like a Marriott in most American cities, a typical middle-of-the-road set up with wooden chairs and wooden tables with no tablecloths. What’s different is a cacophony of languages: Russian, English, German, French, others. I am a few minutes early. I make my way to a not-too-crowded bar, grab a chair, and order Heineken. A mini-skirted blonde no more than twenty squeezes herself in the chair next to mine, leans over and asks in a throaty, heavily-accented English, “Where are you from?”

“New York,” I reply, surprised by the attention.

“Oh, how long are you in Moscow for?”

Before I have a chance to respond, a hand gently grabs my shoulder. “Pavel?”

I turn. Bezginovich does not look much like his sister; he’s short, portly, balding, ears sticking out. But I can see the connection in a small delicate nose and an open smile.

He tells the blonde: “Sorry, dear, we are here for a meeting.”

The blonde grimaces, jumps off the chair, catches her balance on stiletto heels, and saunters away. Bezginovich looks after her and shakes his head, “They are pretty much everywhere now.”

“Who ‘they’?”

“The working girls, who else. Let’s get a table. Thankfully, it’s not too noisy here.”

We position ourselves at a corner table.

“How did you recognize me?” I ask, expecting that he checked me out on the Internet.

“We’ve met before.” Seeing my puzzled expression, he laughs and gestures with his hand, as if shooing away a fly. His laugh is pleasant and young.  “Well, ‘met’ is too strong a word. In my first year at the university, I had to take a mandatory physics course. One day the professor was sick, and you substituted for him. It was impressive, you teaching an auditorium of at least a hundred students while being only a few years older than us. And then a couple of years later your picture was in the news…you and that senator’s daughter…”

“Congressman’s daughter,” I automatically correct him, and chuckle in embarrassment. “Small world.”

Bezginovich looks down. “As I said, I am sorry about your father. I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning? You know, why did you approach him?”

As Bezginovich stares at me, thinking, a waiter appears at our table. Bezginovich purses his lips, “Why don’t we order? It’s going to be a long story.”

Our waiter leaves with the order, and Bezginovich continues, “You left in 1987?”

“1986.”

“Have you been back much?”

“Until this month, only once. Came here with my family seven years ago.”

“So you really did not live through the change, did you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s like a preamble, a context that you have to understand about Natalya and me. Moscow now is a city of the world. We are native Muscovites, so we had front row seats to this show – 1991, the year that Yeltsin stood on that tank and the Communist putsch collapsed, that was the beginning. Moscow, being the center of the empire, even a collapsing one, was the land of opportunity. I just became a lawyer and the concept of law and proper legal process was at least nominally being implemented for the first time in generations.”

“Some people called you an ‘attorney for the mobsters.’”

“Pavel…may I call you Pavel? Please call me Mark…That was the Russian capitalism of the 90s. The free-for-all lasted until the 1998 financial crisis. Yeltsin threw away his chance. Russia, as it had done throughout the centuries, turned to a strongman. Some of the original oligarchs left or got thrown in jail, and new ones rose. We are still a corrupt oligarchy, but some of the worst excesses are behind us.

“This brings me to Natalya. Unlike me, she was blessed with good looks, a sexy voice and a quick mind; she was a natural for the media. But Moscow was flooded with thousands of good looking girls from the provinces, ready to do anything. And a degree in journalism was not worth much. At some point in 1997, she hooked up with John Brockton, having met him at one of the parties. He was a good-looking, successful, American banker and she fell for him. He was the one that helped her get a break at a TV station. That’s all she needed, an opening. When Brockton left for the U.S. in 1998, he asked Natalya to come with him. I know she agonized over it but decided to stay; for the first time she had a real shot at doing something she loved. And she stayed and became the anchor of her own program.”

The waiter interrupts Bezginovich’s monologue with plates of food. Bezginovich does not seem to worry about his weight, he gets a bloody rib eye steak with a large roast potato and a beet salad on the side. I opt for a boring Caesar salad with chicken.

After taking a few bites, I try to direct the conversation a bit. “Did she make enemies with her reporting?”

“Of course. She exposed an oligarch who was siphoning money from a company that he did not own by charging enormous fees for simple transactions. She deposed a minister who was angling to give away a state company to his son-in-law in a phony privatization…”

“Could any of them have taken revenge?”

“Three years later in a faraway country? Possibly, but I doubt it. Her last and biggest case was about the 1999 bombings, and that was the one that I thought may have put the price on her head. Do you remember the details?”

“No, not the details.”

“In September of 1999, there were a series of apartment buildings explosions in Moscow and two other cities. Hundreds had been killed, and many more injured. The explosions had been blamed on the Chechen terrorists, and Russia launched a war against Chechnya. But some people, including people in the Duma, the Russian parliament, were questioning who was really behind the bombings. Attempts at independent investigations had been squashed until the TV station Telenovostiy launched a series of investigative reports led by my sister, focusing on the incident in the city of Ryazan. In Ryazan, a bomb was found on September 22, 1999. This time, the suspects were arrested. Except that they turned out to work for the FSB, the KGB’s successor. The FSB claimed that this was a test designed to check anti-terror preparedness, but not many believed it.”

“What happened after that?”

“The new government put the 1990s’ oligarchs under its thumb. The oligarch that owned the TV station where Natalya worked ended up on the wrong side, was forced to sell the station and leave Russia. Natalya was let go. She tried to continue investigative reporting with one of the newspapers, but she was not popular with the new regime and had trouble getting access. John Brockton was still calling her, and in late 2001 she picked up and moved to California. After that, she came back to Moscow only once, for two weeks in 2003.”