The Stone Bridge

Shashlyk

SHASHLYK

By the back way, through the painters’ row, where there weren’t so many customers, I carried the banging suitcase to the log cabin near the central stairs. Inside, in the dark, people sold mass-manufactured Dagestan daggers and stored suitcases for five dollars a week. I walked past the self-appointed veterans of the Chechen war (who had replaced the veterans of the Afghan war about five years ago) wailing their songs to keyboard accompaniment, and wound my way along the smoky chain of charcoal grills to the southern fence of the market.

“Shashlyk? Lamb! Pork!”

“No. Thank you.”

“What do you mean, no? You’ve never had such shashlyk!” a red-cheeked guy with a shaved head, in a suit and tie, grabbed me by the shoulder and blocked the way. With a cop’s pushy dexterity, he shoved me to the open door of the café Gorodets. It hurt, this shoving, the guy was good at it, I could feel myself getting bruised, and he wasn’t going to let me get away. He almost knocked the breath out of me, and, scared and sweating, I looked hopelessly at the swarthy cooks manning the grills, who had stopped waving pieces of cardboard above their skewered meat, and at the familiar waitresses wearing white aprons over their knitted cardigans. What could I do? Scream? I stumbled into the café and checked my pockets. I knew it: the bastard had pulled out my passport and the rent receipts.

My sunburnt jerk with the scarf around his throat was sitting in the corner with a plate of food, dipping bits of meat in ketchup, picking up onion rings with his fork. The waitress poured him tea, and he motioned for her to bring another cup. With his mouth full, he blinked in welcome and pointed to the chair opposite.

The cop who had dragged me in sat down on a bench at the neighboring table with the jerk’s driver and turned his attention to tea.

I sank onto the chair with a sigh, placed my elbows on the table and folded my hands under my chin. Then I unfolded my hands and let them drop onto my knees. I reclined back on the chair. I stretched my legs under the table. Then pulled them back. Everything seemed awkward. I ate here twice a week, I knew everything by heart, and yet I couldn’t sit still.

The man finished chewing his piece of meat, wiped his lips with a napkin and put the soldier of the Finnish war on the table.

“I envy you. You’re a free man! You don’t sit in an office. You’ve remained a child. You play for your own amusement, well into a mature age. And you get paid for it! To control your own time — that’s the right goal for a man’s life.” He raised his index finger. “And not to have a boss. What wouldn’t I give for that. To collect old toys and sell them — how wonderful! Do you think that collecting pieces of the past can change anything? By the way, I have my own theory about grown men who play with toy soldiers.”

The waitress, Auntie Masha, brought another cup of tea with lemon and took away the plate with the remains of onion and the shallow puddle of ketchup.

“Would that be all?” she asked.

“Drink your tea,” the man nodded at me, while giving the waitress the money. He took something out from under the table — I didn’t see if he had a bag there — and placed a printed-out photograph on my half of the tabletop, then looked around and whispered, bringing the cup of tea to his lips: “Look at her. She’s dazzling. So many years have gone by, but still, she drives me wild.”

The girl did not look remarkably beautiful. Thick, luxuriant hair framed a wide, adolescently puffy face. She had a dimple on her chin. Her nose, with a barely noticeable bump and a gentle downward tuck in the nostrils, was not Russian. Her upper lip was thrust forward, revealing a defect in the jaw structure, or perhaps indicating a moment of inner movement caught by the photographer — a smile forming, a word dying away.

If you covered the bottom half of the face with your hand and took in the wide, clear forehead, the distinctly traced eyebrows and most importantly the eyes, the girl looked uncommonly charming indeed. Her eyes looked with calm clarity over the right shoulder of the observer — there was living water splashing in them. But then when you took your hand away, all you saw was a healthy young girl, nothing more.

Her hair was of an awkward length — just reaching her shoulders— and curled at the ends. Her hairstyle was organized by a dark ribbon that revealed itself in a bow above her forehead; the bow’s butterfly style dated the photo to at least half a century ago, and put the girl behind the desk of a high-school class. She was dressed in a sober jacket done up to the chin; you could see two large metal buttons with a simple design — grooves in a circle.

“She’s dead,” the man clarified dryly, as if this were of any importance. “She was killed by a bullet to the back of the head on the 3rd of June 1943. This fifteen-year-old femme fatale became an urn at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Nina Umanskaya, have you ever heard of her?”

For a time we kept silent, or rather he kept silent, and I looked out at the gates of the market — the stalls styled to look like fairytale huts and covered with fake tiling made of rubber — and at the newly built pavilion of Nizhny Novgorod folk crafts.

“Here’s the summary of the case,” the man said clearly, irritation creeping into his voice. “It’s 1943, early summer. The Battle of Stalingrad is over, but Kursk is yet to come. The diplomat Konstantin Umansky has an incredibly beautiful daughter, Nina. The girl goes to an elite school along with the children of Kremlin bosses. Incidentally, Stalin’s daughter goes to the same school. Lots of boys fall in love with Nina. One of these is Volodya Shakhurin. The boy is also from an important family — he is the son of the People’s Commissar for Aviation Industries. The children are finishing the seventh grade, and sitting for exams. Konstantin Umansky is appointed Ambassador to Mexico. On the 5th of June he is supposed to fly out with his family to the new post. On the 3rd, Volodya Shakhurin walks his sweetheart home. We can assume he’s asking her, begging — he is 13 or 14 at the time! — don’t go away, I love you very much. The girl probably tells him there isn’t much she can do. Volodya takes a pistol out of his pocket and shoots Nina Umanskaya in the back of the head. Point-blank. And then he points the gun to his temple and fires again. For a while he keeps breathing. For about a day. And then he dies. The incident is reported to Stalin, and he exclaims, These kids are real wolf cubs! The case goes down in Russian history as The Case of the Wolf Cubs.”

He pulled the photograph back, felt it carefully to make sure the sticky table hadn’t smeared or soaked it, and put it away.

“Dull, isn’t it? Schizophrenia, a teenage psychosis of unrequited feelings. It’s all so plain and clear: our homegrown Romeo and Juliet!— that’s all that’s left. But no one,” the man leaned over the table toward me, and everything that he said now seemed extremely important to him, his cheeks burned and his voice softened to a barely audible whisper, “no one, before me, thought of a very simple thing: why is everybody so certain that it was love? Why do we all think it was love that he wanted? The girl was killed. The boy is dead. And no one heard their conversation. So what or who is trying to make this seem so clear to us?” He suddenly smiled drunkenly. “I sense a professional touch. Someone worked very hard to make sure this one version survived for the future. And whoever it was had a reason. And someone is now sure that it all worked out. That everyone has been deceived, and no one will go back to dig around. They’re wrong,” and he finished with a playful, faggoty intonation, like something lifted from a British movie, “My dear chap, I want you to go back there. Everything must be changed.”

He was giving me the chance to nod or at least move, but I concentrated on sitting more comfortably while I pictured myself getting up and leaving.

“I want to know who killed them.”

Satisfied with my silence, the man (didn’t his bodyguard realize that his boss had a screw loose?) started talking more freely, not expecting me to respond with anything that could blow up the rails he was laying down.

“Who killed them. And why. This is a job for a person who likes photography. The gaze of a photographer changes the object of the photo, if the photographer has, so to say, a special relationship with the object,” he paused and gave me a suggestive wink.

“I’ve had a beast of a time trying to decide who to turn to,” he went on. “The problem in Russia is that journeymen never grow up to be masters: everyone wants fast money. No one cares about the work.” He broke off and changed the subject: “Do you visit the website ‘The Last Frontier’? I do — it’s totally wacky… All that New Age stuff, the fifth race… New cults. And there’re so many young people there… They’re into Kali, the Goddess of Death, I suppose.”

He smiled at me in a friendly and sad way, like a hunter smiling at the carcass of an elk that has led him on a chase. Like a hunter with his muddy boot planted on the throat of his dead prey:

“On this website, I saw a transcript of a certain trial posted in considerable detail. But I won’t bore you with the particulars. Basically, there was a young person, practically a child, who joined a cult — a real tragedy. Family abandoned, all possessions given to ‘the teacher’. The young man’s mind completely…” he pinched the fingers of his right hand together and rubbed them together, making a hole in an invisible fabric. “You know the story. Excessive fasting. Meditation. Drugs. There aren’t any legal grounds on which this young person could be forced to return to the family. He — or she — is a free adult, they can choose what to believe in. The parents are in agony: all these years they spent nurturing their child, the apple of their eye, so to speak, and now this child serves some alcoholic with a bunch of criminal convictions like a loyal lap-dog and doesn’t want to come back. Doesn’t even recognize his Mom and Dad. You see what faith can do, eh?

“And what can the parents do, Alexander Vasiliyevich?” My name, how did he know my name?! “They can suffer. And wait. The used-up human material will be returned to them eventually. The problem is no psychiatrists could ever bring such an invalid back into a world where people fry shashlyk, fly to Egypt for seaside holidays, have children, or sell toy soldiers, for example. Instead: dark little rooms, the smell of medicine, mumbled mantras, uncontrollable drooling — forever.

“But the cults mainly target wealthy families. And the wealthy are not prepared to give up their children to the new Branch Davidians of the world. And thus, my dear Alexander Vasiliyevich, a paid service comes into being: forced deprogramming. Kidnapping, or recovery, if you prefer. Treatment. Return to the family. Haven’t you heard about it? No? I believe you; the actions of these de-programmers are not, shall we say, particularly public. The cults certainly keep quiet about losing their cash cows. They wouldn’t want their own corpses to come to light — every business has its waste. They’d keep quiet and have their own security services search for the missing people, the security and the guys who, let’s put it delicately, provide protection for their business. So there you have it: a silent, shadow war with apartment raids, kidnappings, infiltrations, exchange of hostages, even shoot-outs, they say… No? With fatalities.

“Some of this came to light quite by accident. One of the young people who had been rescued threw himself out the window of a safe house apartment in Belyaevo during a therapeutic procedure. And broke his back, as it happened. Sychuzhnikov. Remember him? No? He happened to mention you personally… He was very much afraid that he would be finished off in the hospital. He’s a nice enough guy, appears to be fairly sane. As long as you don’t talk to him too long. But one doesn’t need to talk to him too long to broadcast his story on television: a moving sound bite or two, and that’s enough, next up are elections, corruption among officials, etc. But after Sychuzhnikov’s story made the news, all these groups must have done the same math — and they all brought statements to the police: the Gaudiya Vaishnava, Money Tree, Blessed Virgin, Unification Church, the Mormons, the Scientologists, Children of God and even a handful of the White Brotherhood followers. To this day, it is unclear what kind of psychological techniques the de-programmers relied on. In addition to kidnapping, the statements submitted to the police allege torture, beatings, food and sleep deprivation. Use of psychotropic substances. Forced manual labor. Is some of this lies? Yes, probably. It’s politics, after all. But you and I, my dear, judging it all without sentimentality, may assume that the de-programmers, fighting fire with fire, probably used the same methods that the new cults did on the way there, in an attempt to bring their subjects back here.

“Incidentally, some of the young people who were returned to the world of police forces and market economies testified in court — I know, where’s their gratitude, right? The exact number of kidnappings has not been established. Over sixty? The parents were charged one hundred thousand dollars and more in difficult cases. The children of poor citizens were of no interest to the de-programmers. Although poor people did also come to them — and begged to have their breadwinners returned to the family, fathers or mothers restored to their babies… I read into it — the stories are horrifying. Would move a stone to tears. But not you.

“Based on that testimony, some people got arrested — you must have heard this part, it was such a scandal! — among them retired and active-duty personnel of various security agencies. This triggered internal investigations in the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security, the FSB. Forty-two, in total, were arrested, sixteen were sentenced. The investigation is still going on. Not everyone has been found yet.”

The man looked me in the eye and didn’t blink. And I realized hopelessly that I would have to do it in front of him — to wipe the sweat from my forehead, my eyebrows and upper lip, to wipe my hand after that, and then undo, tear open the buttons of my coat, from the top to the bottom. And lick my burning lips.

“There’s a person wanted by the FSB. The so-called information service of the Church of the End and the Beginning is also looking for him, with the help of the Izmailovo mafia. He didn’t kidnap anyone. He didn’t take part in torture. He only worked on developing the clients. The circle, the connections of the victim… or the rescued person? And so, I thought, this is someone who can help me. This person. And his people.”

He was handsome and well-groomed. One of those people who gets himself rubbed over with cream and has manicures. It was possible that his wet, tar-black curls were the results of someone’s paid efforts. His youth was the one thing he did not buy. It was given to him. A triumphant, strong youth, which was now tossing someone else’s life up and down in his hand, like a sea shell full of holes, collected on the Crimean shore.

“I’ll tell you my train of thought. What does a sect do with a new member first of all?” He immediately answered: “A sect destroys the personal past. The past is not needed, it does not lead to salvation. To control a person, you must erase everything that has been experienced and fill the emptiness with the commands of the teacher. The man I’m talking about, on the contrary, returned the past to the victim, helped him to remember… But if you take into account that people came into his hands with a completely changed consciousness, empty, white paper boxes… They couldn’t remember anything, and the past,” the profiteer smiled with his eyes only, “this man, this agent wrote it over anew. At his discretion. You understand? And one important thing is that he did this for free. The investigation established that he was the only one who did not receive money — I found this particularly simpatico. What is money compared with this occupation? And I said to myself: OK. This is the guy I need.”

“He’s around forty, just over six feet tall. He has dark hair. He’s going grey. A former historian? Although someone testified at the investigation that he saw him at the KGB institute while he was studying there. He’s unlikely to have fled, I thought… He’s in hiding,” he looked at me again. “He’s cut his hair short, wearing an army uniform… The only detail, I don’t even know if it’s true — he collects toy soldiers. All rather childish. But symbolic, you must agree.”

He got up and slapped me on the shoulder with an unpleasant, lordly gesture. As if I were a dog.

I waited, as though I was supposed to be taken away somewhere for further tests, but nothing else happened.

Walking past the army backpacks and camouflage jackets, they — three of them — went towards the gates. They were being waited for by a riot squad officer in a black beret and an automatic pistol over his shoulder. He waved his hand, and a black BMW with a flashing light on it drove up, and a police Landover as an escort. The doors opened. The profiteer was seated in the first car, and the security ran to hop in… That was it. They had moved into the audience and would now watch me running around on my chain.

I took the photograph of the girl Nina out of my pocket.

The girl looked directly into my eyes with sad and questioning calm. Like a living person, as if her lips would open and she would say something to me. I tore her face in half and threw it into the bin for cigarette butts.