Читать книгу The Perestroika Effect - Cecilia Tanner - Страница 7

“Hello,” Sergey called to Maria, his neighbor two doors over, who was sweeping her little porch. Maria Bratnikova was a plump older graying woman with a pleasant face marred by a pulpy goiter at her throat. The goiter, from a lack of iodine, rested across the right side of her neck. Initially, it was startling but soon one stopped noticing. The day he had moved in, she had come over with a still warm babka, the Easter bread, to welcome him to the neighbourhood. Why not have such a wonderful treat all year round? she explained.

Hers was a weathered wood house like the one Sergey was renting, with the pipes above ground wrapped in insulation, and the outhouse and shed at the back of the yard. Only the doors and window sashes were painted, Sergey’s blue and Maria’s green.

Her little Yakutsian cow was in the fenced yard rooting in the thin layer of snow for the grass underneath. It was a black beast with a white dorsal stripe along the back and stored fat under its skin in the summer to survive the poor conditions of winter. The little cows produced milk high in fat content, meat with natural marbling, and were often used as draft animals as well.

Maria’s children had grown up in Zhigansk but as soon as they had the freedom to leave the Siberian town, they left their parents to eek out their own lives in a more hospitable climate. When her husband got on at the ceramics factory, they left Zhigansk and moved up to Seytchan. After the factory closed and his job vanished, he retired, and they lived on the pension the government provided. Now, however, pensions had been cut, and Bratnik took on the tasks of running the town garbage truck, the bulldozer, and the snowplow grader.

The husband, a stocky unsmiling man, was stacking wood to the side of the house without gloves covering his beefy hands. He was missing two fingers on his right hand, probably frost bite. Not such a rare occurrence in those who had lived in such conditions for years. The man looked up briefly but didn’t speak. Sergey realized this was the incredibly slow grader operator that had taken forever in his ancient snowplow to clear the snow from the parking lot at the plant. Sergey now noticed his painstaking effort at stacking the wood, evening out each pile and straightening each piece of wood on the pile, then going back and realigning any piece not exactly to his liking, over and over. Sergey realized he was staring at the man, and turned his attention back to Maria.

Maria had understood on their first meeting that Sergey was not a man who welcomed uninvited company, and Sergey was grateful that they took to looking after him without ever pressing in on him. Seeing that he was alone, however, Maria took to regularly dropping off what she called her "extra". She would leave a double stacking glazed iron pot with a wire loop handle against his door. Its compartments were crammed with delicious food; dumplings and sauerkraut with pork, or borsht and fresh bread, or deer stew. It was always very good and there was always more than he could eat at two sittings.

“Hello,” she called back as he got closer. “Are you finding what you need?” she asked.

“Just walking down to the shop for some cigarettes, thanks.”

She stopped sweeping. “This is my husband, Standa, Colonel.” Standa took another quick look at Sergey, barely nodded and turned back to the pile. “If you need anything just ask,” she smiled, moving the broom again.

The village, receiving few strangers, had taken note of the arrival of Sergey, the newly appointed Director of Security, who effected to be a man used to power but disgruntled with his apparent exile. The locals looked at newcomers, but made allowances for differences because this was a country that was often a harbor for misfits, the paranoid, the obsessive, the bipolar, minds that were locked into dark places looking for threats every minute of every hour. Many were trying to hide, hoping to find some peace of mind away from the demanding and disapproving conformity of their families and friends in the urban centers.

Looking at Yuri they saw a tall curly haired good-looking man with a moustache, who looked to be a dependable family man carrying out his gate guard duties conscientiously but did not have the skills or ambition to go higher. He was thought to be a bit of a clown. Didn’t he show some of the kids how he could juggle Indian clubs? Obviously, he was skilled manually and liked fun, interested in his home life, motorcycles, and hunting. Yuri's wife, Magda was seen to be a well-dressed Russian city woman. She was seen walking down the rocky side of the road in high heels, making them smirk. But Magda’s interests seemed, nevertheless, centered on her family; cooking, sewing, and socializing as any Russian wife would.

Often, in these remote regions people made up stories about themselves. They left whoever they were behind in whatever world had not been good to them, and sought out the places where they could be someone they wanted to be or at least stop being someone they didn’t want to be.

One man Sergey met in Zhigansk had simply stopped being a mechanic in Petrograd and had become a handyman in Zhigansk “I love it, not working for the man, choosing who I want to work for and choosing what work I want to do.” Sergey thought this may have been the reason he wanted people to hear, but suspected that the man was probably deserting a woman he didn’t love or a family that destroyed his self worth for some reason or debts he couldn’t pay. Not many of the troublesome would want to bother looking for them this far north.

In truth, Sergey was a skilled and clever intelligence agent who thrived on his work whether it was in a metropolitan centre or a village. Yuri, also, was a versatile, agile, intelligence agent and a clever strategist. Magda had been a specialist in analysis in the former KGB for ten years. They had all achieved considerable rewards for their service, but the medals were kept private as was the tradition of the secret service.

The people of the village thought the newcomers would remain only until something better came along; which they thought may not be likely in such days of uncertainty.

He passed some kids playing with a stick and a puck on a patch of street they had pushed clean, taking turns on the slap shots, “ peh, zheh, kah, cheh, yu, myakee,..” they counted.

Sometimes Sergey marveled at where he found himself these days, the conditions he suffered, the demands he accepted since the former KGB was dismantled in 1991. General Samocherny had survived and had placed himself in a higher post in its temporary successor, the FSB. The best officers and agents of the former KGB were handpicked for the new secret service where Sergey ended up 2 ranks from the top. The rest scattered, some, unfortunately, to form the first new Russian Mafia.

He kicked the buildup of snow under his boots, bucking the toe sharply against the post of a fence at the side of the road to shake the clumps off. The two young boys stopped slapping the beatup hockey puck back and forth to watch the stranger. Sergey waved at them and they went back to their game. They were the first kids he had seen.

General Dmitri Samocherny was Sergey’s immediate supervisor, and as soon as he heard about the death of Tarasov, he sent Sergey and Yuri out from Moscow. The death of Tarasov was certainly suspicious, and there was an obvious need to remove the temptation for any ambitious party to overtake the plant. Without people knowing about the real activities in the plant, and as far as they knew, very few knew about the plant, it was best to curtail any possible private development that could imperil Russian sovereignty.

Also, Sergey knew that there was escalating confrontation between President Boris Yeltsin and his adversaries in the legislature. Sergey assumed the General was dispersing his most trusted and able troops when unavoidable situations with unpredictable results threatened his domain.

Though Sergey had hundreds of people under him in Moscow, he now had one agent and his wife. That did not matter. Sergey did not indulge in that Russian quest for the “biggest”, as in the Mir mine, the biggest mining hole in the world, or the biggest damn, or the biggest plant, the universal macho need to achieve the most and the biggest even when it destroys more than it achieves. Sergey took every assignment, big or small, as a personal challenge, and a merciful respite from nostalgia and regret. To him, this assignment was just as important as the political events unfolding in Moscow.

Sergey and Yuri had left within hours of receiving General Samocherny's orders. A 20 hour trip, planes, trains and automobiles, had taken them from Moscow to Yakutsk, ending with a smaller flight to Zhigansk from where Yuri, Magda, and Helena took the once-a-week bus that was still running from Zhigansk to Seytchan arriving a day before Sergey who was delayed getting the CD player installed in the Toyota at Zhigansk before driving up to Seytchan.