THE OVERSEER
By the gates of the cemetery, next to the southern wall of Novodevichy, I found a person selling plastic flowers, a drunk, self-appointed guide offering tours “to figure skaters and hockey players,” as well as two Ukrainians with straw-colored hair, who were too stingy to pay twenty rubles for a map.
“Brother, where’s Khrushchev’s grave?” One of them asked me hopefully.
And beyond the gates, there were twenty-seven thousand graves.
I bought a map; the names were printed in a font too small to read even with a magnifying glass. The people I was looking for did not feature among the two hundred graves the map’s publishers deemed to be of interest to the paying public. I positioned myself between the cashier and her source of daylight, and smiled a smile that even I found rev
