Metronome, The (22 page)

Wednesday, June 21

My phone rings early in the morning.

“Allo, this is Konstantin Mershov returning your call.”

“Mr. Mershov, my name is Pavel Rostin. I understand you knew my father.”

“Yes, of course I knew your father. I’ve met you, too, but you might not remember, you were only a child.”

“Mr. Mershov, do you know about my father?”

“Yes, I do. I am sorry.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Pavel, where are you?”

“Here, in St. Petersburg.”

“Staying on Malaya Sadovaya?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we meet tomorrow? I will arrange with my son to pick you up, I no longer drive. We’ll come between ten and eleven.”

I call for voice mails in New York. The usual suspects: Jack, Sarah, Jennifer. Jack wants to meet. Sarah is hoping that I am OK. Jennifer loves me.

I am about to go for a walk in the afternoon when there is a knock on the door. I open without asking, figuring Zorkin must be back. Instead, it’s a slightly hunched old man with a small beat-up suitcase. He has a deeply lined and wrinkled face, a fringe of white hair around his balding scalp. A long pale scar crosses his right cheek. I instantly recognize the man from the picture with my father.

“Hello, Pavel. There were seats on the first flight from Ufa, so I got here quickly.” Andrei’s smile is both disarming and sad.

“Please, come in,” I say. I am not sure what to do or say. Am I supposed to hug him? Shake hands?

He follows me inside, looks around. “Last time I was here in 2002, four years ago. It looks exactly the same; our father did not change a thing.”

It hits me when he says “our father.”

Andrei must sense it because he puts down his suitcase. “I am sorry, it must be awfully strange.”

“It is.”

“Why don’t we go take a walk?”

I nod. And then I realize why he looked familiar in the photo: He was here in 1984, when my mother died.

Andrei walks slowly, with a limp, his breathing is heavy.

“I am sorry,” he says. “I am not in a good shape. Too much smoking; doctors say my lungs are bad. As if I don’t know without them. My right leg was broken in ’69 in the camps, never quite healed right. Father was twelve years older, but he was a young man compared to me. Do you mind if we walk to the Bronze Horseman? That’s my favorite place in the city.”

This would be at least a twenty minute walk for me, probably an hour for him.

“Should we get a taxi?” I ask.

“If you don’t mind, I would prefer to walk. I am not sure when will be the next time that I can walk this city during white nights. I know I am slow, but we have a lot to talk about, and I did not want to do it in the apartment.”

“Why, do you think it’s bugged?”

“Possibly, possibly.”

We resume our walk. “Why did not our parents tell me about you?”

“It’s a long story. You see, I was arrested in 1956 in Budapest. When Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev made that speech about the personality cult, many people thought that things were really changing. These silly Hungarians imagined that they were free to replace the Moscow puppets and put in their own government. So we sent 200,000 troops to show them the extent of their freedom. Marshal Konev himself, the hero of the World War II, led the invasion. He fought the Germans at Moscow, defeated them at Kursk. In 1945, his armies took Berlin. Now, he was fighting Hungarian civilians. It was war, but they had rifles and we had tanks. They were killing us by hundreds, and we were killing them by thousands. There was a fight for one building in the working-class neighborhood of Csepel, where the resistance fighters managed to burn two of our tanks. When they ran out of ammunition and tried to surrender, the officer ordered them shot. I refused. Under Stalin, they would have put a bullet in the back of my head, but instead they court-marshalled me and gave me ten years.”

Andrei leans against the parapet of Kazanskiy Bridge, wipes his brow with a handkerchief, catches his breath.

“My first camp was in the north, near Barents Sea,” he says. “Prisoner number R-3725. Half of the year temperatures below thirty degrees. Never enough food, never enough warm clothing. Trying to stay out of the
hole
, the solitary confinement. Survival of the fittest. I came back from the camps early, in ’63 and was even able to return to St. Petersburg. All thanks to the father and his boss, Ivan Mershov. Usually you did the whole time and they made you stay somewhere near the camps. I never had a chance to thank Mershov; he died before I came back. I got a job at Kirov’s Works heavy industry plant, a bed in their dormitory. You don’t remember, you were little, but I would come over from time to time. But I did not last long. In a sense, I was freer in the camp. When you have nothing to lose, you are free. There were some very smart, well-educated people there. So when I came back, I became involved with the writers, the ones that were rebelling against the totalitarian state. Of course they were not being published so I was helping to copy and distribute prohibited works via
samizdat.
I tried writing myself, but did not have the talent or the patience. In ’66, they arrested me again. It was almost a relief, like pulling a tooth and getting it over with.”

Andrei has to stop and pause again. A young couple bumps into him, the boy swears.

“This time they sent me to a camp in the southeast, not far from Chelyabinsk. It was a much better camp than during my first term. We worked on oil fields, that’s where I learned the business.”

“Why did father write a letter denouncing you?”

“Ah, you found out about that. You understand, I had already destroyed any chances of him rising up in the ranks. You know what they say about the apple not falling far from the tree. My being a political recidivist made my father automatically unreliable. And he was fine with that. It’s you that he wanted to protect.”

“Me?”

“Yes. They did not expect to have you; doctors told mother that she was not likely to get pregnant. I read somewhere that older mothers tend to have smarter children. It was true in your case. Even when you were little, it was clear you were a gifted child. The way you learned arithmetic, the way you learned chess. There were not many schools for talented kids like you. But you had no chance of getting into one with a brother like me. It did not matter to them that I was not a biological son; I grew up with your parents, and that marked them and, by extension, you.”

“My father denounced you so I could go into the school for the gifted?”

“It made no difference for me, I was already in the camps. It made no difference to our parents, as their lives were not going to change. But by writing the letter, father was giving you a chance for something better.”

“Did you see the letter?”

“Yes. The camp commander showed it to me, rubbing it in. But I knew why it was written; father did the right thing. He tried to apologize for it later, but there was nothing to apologize for. That was the only time I saw tears in his eyes, that’s how badly writing this letter hurt him.”

“Why did you not come back to St. Petersburg after the second term?”

“They released me in ’76, but there was no way they would allow me to have the
propiska
in St. Petersburg this time. You remember what it was like, you had to be registered and have a
propiska
in order to live somewhere. We were like modern serfs, able to live only where the government let us. And I have not tried to return. In ’71, they transferred me to another camp, this one near Ufa, to work on an oil pipeline. I ended up settling there. Your parents wanted to tell you about me after my release, then your father wanted to introduce us in ’84, when I came here after the mother died. Both times I asked not to.”

“But why?”

“Pavel, you were young and brilliant, with all that promise ahead of you. Even though I was only forty when they released me the second time, I was an old
zek
. I don’t know if you remember the expression,
zek
for
zaklyutcheniy
, a prisoner. Seventeen years in camps. I thought your parents sacrificed so much to save me during the war, and I wasted it all. I belong to a different era, the period of time that Russia is trying to erase as if it did not happen. Why saddle you with this?”

“Do you want to come back now? Did they not cancel the
propiska
system about ten years ago?”

“They did cancel it. There is still a registration requirement if you want to stay somewhere for more than ninety days, but it’s much easier for people to move now. No, I don’t want to come back. I like Ufa. I don’t know anybody here. People I knew, they are all dead. No reason for me to return to Peter. But I’d like to go to Paris one day.”

“Why Paris?”

“Father told me that’s the only city that can compare to St. Petersburg. I saw pictures, it looks beautiful. Just would like to see the place before I die, to compare for myself.”

“Father’s been to Paris?” I can’t hide my surprise.

“Yes, he went early this year. In January, I think. Have you been to Paris?”

I nod. “It’s true, Paris is the only city that would compare.”

What was my father doing in Paris in January? It was right before my fund came under attack.

We finally make it to the statue and find an empty bench. Peter the Great is astride his horse, pointing to the west. The horse is trampling a serpent of his enemies, riding on top of the enormous Thunder Stone. It took two years to move the stone, twelve to build the monument.
The Bronze Horseman,
 named so by Pushkin, is still riding, protecting his city.

Andrei recites Pushkin’s verses:

To spite our neighbor

Here I shall found a great city

By Nature we’re destined

To cut a window to Europe.

Two young couples are being wed, one placing flowers at the statue and taking pictures, the other waiting its turn.

“When did you last see our father?” I feel strange saying this, referring to my father as also his father.

“Last summer. He came to Ufa to talk about UfaNeft, the local oil and gas company that I worked for since 1971.”

“That was one of the companies on Brockton’s list!” I react involuntarily.

“Yes, he mentioned this name. Also a few others. He brought some pictures for me to look at.”

“Did you recognize anybody?”

“Yes, I did. You see, I am an old
zek
and I could have never become a part of the upper management, but I was there for a long time and close enough to know what’s going on. When the Moscow reformers started privatizing everything, there was a brutal battle to control UfaNeft. One executive was found floating face down in the local river, another was blown up in his car. There were at least three different oligarchs fighting for the spoils until one group won in ‘96.”

“And who were the people that father was asking about?”

“Two brothers, I think the last name was Crossman or something like that. They showed up around ’95 or so, set up kiosks where their people were buying privatization vouchers for vodka. That was also a cut-throat business; some kiosks got burned with people inside. The father wanted to understand how the scheme worked, and I helped to provide some missing pieces. Brockton and Crossmans struck a deal with the UfaNeft insiders. The ownership of the company’s shares was split between the two groups, and Brockton and his helpers were manipulating the prices upwards, while the insiders were cashing in. We re-created our vision of the West, only we took the worst of it. The father was an experienced investigator, but this was completely new to all of us; he was trying to learn how they were rigging the market.”

“What happened when the scheme collapsed?”

“Oh, the insiders just found another way to rig the game. The oligarch in charge set up various finance and service companies that were supposed to make the operations more efficient but in reality were skimming the cash flow. That lasted for a couple of years, until Putin got rid of the old oligarchs and brought in the new ones. They are still skimming, but not quite as bad; at least some money gets reinvested into the business. Of course, I quit five years ago, I am not involved anymore.”

“Why did father take this case?”

Andrei falls silent, then reaches into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and offers me one. I shake my head. He lights up. “You are right, doctors keep telling me I should stop. But here I am, enjoying a cigarette, in Peter, sitting in front of the Bronze Horseman during a white night, talking to my brother…You don’t mind me calling you that? We are not biological brothers, but I loved your parents with all my heart, so perhaps I have earned the right.”

I choke up. “Of course I don’t mind.”

“Why did father take the case?” he repeats. “I think for the same reason that I refused to shoot in Budapest. Did you read his war diary?”