Harvest, Part I

Wild Mushrooms- Shpilenok

This is the time of year when I miss Russia- when the fog creeps into the yards, and the cold and damp creep into my bones.  I start to miss vodka, evaporating on the tongue like hope; cigarettes seem worth the cancer, though I've never smoked.  Fall was beautiful and agonizing, and every glimpse of beauty or possibility was something to be cherished and savored during the months ahead.  This is Part One of a long piece I wrote when Ivan and I lived in the thrice-tenth tsardom.  The week after I sent it, in 1999, we heard from absolutely everyone we knew.

Natalya Dobrovolskaya's son is lying in the intensive care ward of a Moscow hospital.  I can picture him in the sunlit children's ward, lying on the faded print of cotton sheets from home, the long golden fingers of autumn evening stroking his face until 9 o'clock twilight.  In the children's department, the walls will be sponge-painted with flowers and homesick jungle vines will stretch tendrils to the windows above his head.  Bleach and anaesthetic assault his mother's nostrils- she won't clean her apartment for months without crying.  The sound of children and doctors struggling to breathe will compete with metal stretchers rattling down tile and concrete hallways, the shuffle of denim overshoes, the rasp of doctors' overcoats bleached until they are stiff and disintegrating.  In the background you can hear the dust settle, the paint flake, and the hum and keen of hope.

Natasha is 25 years old, and a secretary cheerfully capable of taking care of all of the incompetent foreigners her job sends her.  Her last name means "well-fated" or "volunteer".  She is a linguist by training who slips an education in Russian idiomatic expressions on her unsuspecting supervisors.  She is also the adoring mother of a five year-old boy.  Pictures of him paper her desk drawers, and she tells stories of him over tea and cakes and winter salads  that she brings to work and feeds her colleagues.  She is married, but I've never heard her mention the boy's father.  Her private life is a satellite around her son.

When she didn't show up for work the second day in a row, her boss called her home, and was told she was at the hospital with her boy.  Rick grabbed a staff member and and a bouquet of flowers on the way to the bolnitsa.  The doctor, weary with the effort of sustaining life and living on 500 rubles a month, informs Rick that the boy's kidneys have failed, he's bleeding internally, he's sustained liver damage, and after several agonizing hours he's slipped away from the pain and into a coma.  He isn't expected to recover consciousness, although he does, several times, emerging from oblivion gasping and crying before submerging once more.

Nobody is sure of the cause.  There is a possibility that he ate some corn from a field contaminated with pesticides near his grandparents' dacha.  It is also the season for mushrooms, both edible and poisonous and sickeningly similar.  The end result is the same; a grey-lipped boy and a mother numb with fear and echoing with grief.

On the other side of town, in the SouthWest quadrant, there are two gaping holes that have left shrapnel and debris throughout the country.  Chechen terrorists reacting to Russia's newest war in Dagestan have successfully blown up two of Moscow's 30,000 residential apartment buildings, 8-story monstrosities that were homes for over 200 people.

The receptionist of the American Chamber of Commerce lived in an eighth-floor apartment of the building that exploded at 5 am that Monday morning.  There were no survivors, and the school adjacent to the apartment block was closed so that investigators could collect the remains from the roof and the playground.  At the Chamber, every phone that rang, every call that wasn't transferred by Vika was accompanied by a sense of a malevolent and stalking fate.

In Russia, this act had the emotional impact that Oklahoma's bombing had on US citizens. Terrorism from external forces is unheard of in Russia's capital.  The KGB held the state monopoly on fear for so long that imported terror has caught the population blind-sided.  The FSB, the KGB's more limited offspring, has had ample opportunity to remind the population of this, as they scour the first and second floor apartments of every major city.  Today, my secretary said with a very carefully polite voice edged with grit and sand- "Marya, we have two guests who would like to meet you.  Could you come to reception, please?"  Two smirking men in leather jackets were waiting for me, showed me their documents, and said they would like to see our storage room.

They commented on what a nice job we'd done with the place, looked at the windows, and said they'd made a mistake, they needed to inspect another office-sorry to bother us. And they left.

What scared the hell out of me wasn't a visit from the FSB- I actually have kind of a soft spot for the gentlemen who allow me internet access from my apartment (the better to see you with, my dear), listen to my conversations with my mother (the better to hear you, my dear), follow me to Novosibirsk, provide me with rides to work, ensure the local grocery store had a good supply of olive oil and Diet Pepsi (after an operative followed us 10 miles through the city, on foot, in freezing weather, as Ivan and I searched for some), and ensure that Ivan and I don't get mugged in our stairwell (a quiet nod of gratitude to the burning tip of a cigarette in the shadows of a doorway next door).

What scared the hell out of me was that they hadn't asked for MY documents, they'd only shown me their ID, not the required warrant and witness from the building administration, they didn't look in any cabinets, and they'd paid very close attention to our windows and electrical systems.  I was very sure they were imposters casing the joint.

After considering the blood, sweat and tears I'd spent collecting our equipment for the office, our company's self-insurance policy, and my boss's refusal to install an alarm, I had a long cosy conversation with the head of security for Rosstep, the sugar company across the hall.  They have a 24-hour guard and security cameras all over the place, and I let them know my concerns.  They were very considerate, and reassured me, not to worry, they'd call if they saw or heard anything strange, they have a direct line to the police since, for some reason, they serve as the munitions depot for the local militsia.  This was not exactly soothing-but questions regarding how a sugar company ends up storing the national guns, grenades, and ammo are better left unasked.  I'm just glad that the guards at Rosstep like us.

Meanwhile, Ludmila called the FSB and asked if they'd sent the agents over- she even had the presence of mind to remember their names.  The FSB said yes, there was a planned raid of our building: there was a planned raid of all the buildings downtown today.  Thanks for calling, have a nice day.  On the way home, the streets were crawling with cheerful police and stopped cars and documents.  I was awfully glad for once that Ivan hadn't left the apartment.  Sometimes looking like a Southern bandit is helpful, sometimes it isn't.

There was a sinking dread to one particular observation- all of the citizens looked GLAD to be stopped and searched.  This is what they expected the government to do, this was normal, this was safe.  For me this was throat closure and elevated blood pressure and cold sweats.

8:16:58 AM