39. My Mistake

Eventually, the night I’d been waiting for arrived. Although I had been anticipating it for weeks, I still couldn’t quite believe it was happening. I lay in my bed and listened as someone worried the window in the living room, rattling the pane in its frame. Whoever it was pushed and pulled rhythmically on the wood around the glass, trying to get in. As long as I had been preparing for this very moment, despite all my planning and calculating, now that it was actually happening I was paralyzed. The banging of the window in its sill was steady and persistent, and I knew that eventually, very soon, the latch holding it closed would bend and give way and the window would fly open.

I got out of bed and walked stiffly towards the noise. I had thought so many times about what I would do when this moment arrived, how I would feel. Scared? Relieved? Now that it was here I was blank with terror. I stood in the doorway of the bedroom, hypnotized, staring at the curtain as it trembled from the motion of the window behind it. Waves of a fear so visceral it felt like nausea prickled my skin as they passed from my head to my feet and back again, a sensation that owed nothing to any kind of thought, but was solely corporeal, bodily. It was as if the surge of cortisol and adrenalin that flooded my brain when the noise started had finally overloaded my frayed synapses and had wiped every thought I’d ever had out of my head. I stood there watching, suspended.

Finally, there was a mighty push on the window and it crashed inward on its hinges, wide open, pushing back the curtain on its rod. I screamed and dropped to the floor in a crouch, waiting to spring on whoever climbed through. At the exact, very moment that the window banged open, as if its opening had been some sort of trigger or signal, the phone on the end table directly to my left shrilly rang. A rapid series of confused commands shotgunned through my head. ”Get the intruder!” I thought hysterically, “No, wait, get the phone!”

The ringing of the phone continued, 5 rings, 6 six rings, piercing the 3 am silence. I remained huddled on the floor, waiting for a blue-jeaned leg to hook itself over the sill, but there was nothing. A stiff breeze blew through the screenless window, rifling the notebook pages still scattered across the floor. Not taking my eyes off the window, I shifted slightly and picked up the phone. I held it to my ear, breathing hard, saying nothing.

Finally, after many seconds of silence, a Russian man’s voice spoke up. “Robin?” it said, “Are you there?”

I could not answer. It was physically impossible for me to say anything. My mouth was too dry, my thoughts too scattered.

The man continued. “What are you doing? Where have you been? You are no longer at Guardian. I am worried that something bad is happening to you. I will come get you in taxi. I want to see you.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think. What was happening, here? Why, and more importantly, HOW, was Lyosha calling me at 3 am after a silence of so many months? How did he get my phone number? How did he so correctly guess that at that very moment not only something “bad” but actually the worst thing that had ever happened to me was in the process of happening? Were the two things somehow related? Maybe Lyosha had paid someone to follow me home from the Guardian when I’d still worked there, and now he’d sent that same person to terrify me at an appointed time in the middle of the night so that when Lyosha called I’d be completely broken, completely ready to take him up on his taxi. Or maybe it was the complete opposite – a divine intervention. Lyosha had just happened to call exactly at the same time that Marat and his cohort launched their assault, and the ringing phone had scared them away. Or maybe these events were just coincidence. The wind had blown open the window just as Lyosha decided to call me at 3 in the morning. These were just things that happened, and the only meaning they had was the one I in my fear and exhaustion had decided to assign them.

Whatever its origin, Lyosha’s voice as it asked again if I was there, if I was OK, pierced the fog in my brain like a laser. That old saying “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t”? I’d always scoffed at people who said this, much preferring unique, novel misery to the plodding complaints I’d grown familiar with. But in this instance, the idea of saying no to Lyosha and hanging up the phone on the only human voice I’d heard in 8 days, of closing the window and going back to my bed to face the rest of the silent hours until morning, was inconceivable. I didn’t want Lyosha in my apartment – he’d take one look around at the papers and ashtrays and glasses stained with cayenne pepper and immediately know I’d gone nuts. But I agreed to walk up to the main highway to meet him in his taxi.

Twenty minutes later I was propped in the backseat, staring out the window at the sodium arc streetlights as they whizzed by. “You look terrible,” Lyosha’d said by way of greeting. “I was going to take you to Club 011 so we could dance, but let’s just go find some food.” We drove somewhere, to a hotel café that was somehow still open and had its tables set up in the brightly lit lobby. I sat down in the spindly metal chair and leaned against the lobby window, saying nothing, as Lyosha ordered me a chicken salad sandwich.

“Robin!” he said sharply, shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes. Lyosha was settling back into the chair he’d leaned out of when he’d reached across the table to shake me awake. An empty cup of coffee sat in front of him.

“What? What?” I yelped, “What are we doing?”

“You were sleeping,” said Lyosha crossly, standing up and putting on his jacket. “For an hour.”

I looked around the table, disoriented. There was a greasy smudge on the window where my cheek had been resting. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“You need rest. I’m taking you home.”

“No!” I said. “Wait, wait, no, let’s just stay here for a little bit longer. I promise I’ll stay awake. I don’t want to back to my apartment.”

“I’m not taking you back to your apartment,” he said, grabbing the underside of my arm near the shoulder and pulling, “I’m taking you home.”

*

The apartment looked almost the same as it had the day I left, only cleaner.

There was the table where I’d worried about Yeltsin’s referendum, and written my Sadistic Couplets article. There was the orderly kitchen, the bed in the living room, neatly made. I walked across the room without saying anything and lay down on the couch, my back to the room. At last, I could sleep. Lyosha would be there to watch me and make sure nothing bad happened. Just as I was drifting off, I felt Lyosha sit down on the edge of the couch. “Lyosha,” I mumbled, “Leave me alone. Let me sleep.”

“Be quiet, Robin.” Lyosha scratched my back between my shoulder blades. “I am letting you sleep.”

*

I woke up late in the afternoon of the next day, a few hours before sunset. Lyosha was gone, no doubt at work. I walked in the kitchen and fetched half of the sandwich Lyosha’d ordered the night before and sat down at the living room table, chewing slowly and methodically. I had no doubt that Lyosha expected me to be there when he returned, and probably assumed that I was back for good. But there was no way I could move back in with Lyosha. I’d be jobless, penniless, totally dependent on him. I had worked hard to get myself into a situation where I was jobless, penniless, and dependent on no one, and I wasn’t going to give that up. Plus, I still vividly remembered the fear I’d felt the last week of living with Lyosha, the utter certainty that one of his partners or competitors had a score they’d soon settle. I was completely sure that each of us had a bullet with our name on it waiting for us somewhere out there in the city. Whatever violence awaited me in my future, I thought, I wanted it to be my own personal fate. The last thing I wanted was to be caught up in someone else’s conflagration – this was after all why I made it a point to never leave the house. Coming out here and exposing myself like this had been a mistake, I realized as I pulled on my coat and walked to the door. I needed to get home so that I could maintain my vigilance and keep up my guard, and make sure I was still safe.

The 9 or so days between my perceived mistake – assuming that the one person who could’ve helped me get a grip on myself was a threat to be avoided – and my actual mistake are largely missing for me. I remember that I stopped bothering to lie in bed at night and instead sat on the floor in the kitchen, under the window. This was the same place I sat during the day, and as soon as there was enough light in the kitchen I would once again begin my familiar routine. Drink 3 jelly glasses of vodka with cayenne pepper to mute the anxiety for the day, then read. I remember that although I must have been afraid the fear had transmogrified somehow into something more familiar and benign. I remember that during that period I did not leave the house even one time, and that this was OK with me. I would sit right there and wait, I guess I thought, wait for events to unwind to their inexorable conclusion.

Finally, after about a week and a half, I decided to help them along. For reasons that I still don’t understand, I decided that instead of spending another night sitting alone and awake in my apartment, I would go to Club 011 and dance. I decided this at about 2 in the morning, after sitting in the dark silence for 5 hours, and there was no joy or excitement in this thought, no “Hey! I know what I’ll do!” I simply got up right then and walked out of the apartment and up to the main road to hail a taxi, and 30 minutes later I was standing in the basement club, listening to the Cure’s “Caterpillar Girl” echo off the stone walls.

I danced for two hours, sweating and exhausted, speaking to no one, until the DJ packed up and the Serbs with their machine guns announced that everyone had to go home. It was 4 am and I had no idea what to do. I was so tired from dancing and never sleeping and drinking and never eating that I could barely stand, so tired that I couldn’t figure out how to go about getting myself home. And that was when I made it. My mistake.

“Devushka,” said a very handsome man who looked to be about my age as we all shuffled towards the door, “I can get you anything you want. Ecstasy? Heroin? Cocaine?”

“OK,” I said. When I said ‘OK’ I had not meant ‘OK’ as in ‘yes, I’ll take it.’ I had meant it like ‘OK. I hear that sounds are coming out of your mouth.’

Not surprisingly, the man misinterpreted my response. “Let’s go to my apartment,” he said.

“Ahh,” I thought, “so that’s where I’m going now.”

“OK,” I said.

We got in his car and drove a short distance to, coincidentally, the Stalinist wedding-cake building where Lars (Betsy’s friend who had loaned me the gas gun) lived. We stood in the lobby not talking, me saying and thinking nothing, and waited for the elevator. When the elevator came we got in and the man, whose name was Yuri, pressed the button for the very top floor, #32.

Yuri's apartment building

Strangely, seeing Yuri do this did register with me somehow. “How does this boy live in the penthouse of a Stalin building?” I thought, as the doors slid open and Yuri unlocked a gigantic mahogany door – one of only two on the whole floor – with a filigreed brass key. When this building was finished in 1952, it was reserved for the elite of Stalin’s government. The top floor would have been preserved for the elite of the elite. The person who lived here, therefore, would have had to have been one of Stalin’s most cunning, vicious, prolifically successful monsters. Was it perhaps Beria, the head of the secret police, who was well-known for abducting young girls off the street and whose country mansion, demolished after Beria was murdered by Khrushchev in 1953, was found to harbor 19 skeletal remains in its basement? Or maybe Molotov, Stalin’s protégé and the main architect of the genocide in the Ukraine; maybe he lived here when he was in the city. Whoever once lived here, this apartment harbored some seriously malevolent juju, and I felt it, unfortunately, just as the front door clicked shut behind me. It was then that I understood in a detached, academic sort of way what I had done.

I stood near the door and looked around as Yuri locked it and pocketed the key. The bones of the apartment, the thick paneling on the walls, the ornate windows, the pink marble floor, were gorgeous, even if they were shabby and uncared for, moldering. This made the few items scattered around the huge, combined living room/kitchen space look even more sinister. A cheap, sagging couch and a coffee table sat against one wall, both surfaces littered with newspapers and take-out containers. A straight-backed wooden chair sat in the middle of the large room, looking somehow marooned. The kitchen counters were covered with utensils, mainly pots and pans. In the middle of the kitchen, demarcating this room from the living room, was a large island that had a huge stove set into it. On this stove sat a variety of giant pots and kettles, which were empty but dirty, crusted with a strange greenish-gray film. A very strong chemical odor pervaded the apartment. It
stung my eyes and made me feel woozy. I spied one of the doors to the balcony at the far end of the living room. “I’m going outside,” I said.

Yuri and I stood on the balcony looking at the river many stories below. Even though I knew this was the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life and that the probability that it would end well was very, very slim, I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t really feel anything at all, as a matter of fact. I was tired in a way that exceeded any kind of tiredness I’d ever experienced, or ever would experience again. I did not think about what was going to happen because I could not. My brain had stopped working that way. Only the things that were right in front of me right at any given moment registered with me, and even then only very, very slowly. And so when Yuri grabbed me and bent me backwards over the railing, suddenly inverting the river and the intermittent lights on the ground, all I thought was “Oh. Upside down.”

Yuri had me in some kind of grip that was an odd mixture of ardor and threat. One arm was tight around my waist and the other was wrapped around my arms right below the shoulders, pinning them to my body. My feet were lifted off the ground and the waist-high railing was pressing into the middle of my back, two inches above my waist. I was not exactly dangling over the railing, merely balanced on it in an uneasy pivot. An inch or two either way would decide the outcome.

Yuri was attempting to either murder me or clumsily smooch me, it was unclear which. He was sort of kissing my neck and collarbone as my head lolled back and the wind roaring around the building whipped my hair in disorderly circles. With my head hanging limply like this, the taillights of the few cars on the road at this hour looked like tiny red satellites; planes full of people on their way somewhere else. An unknown amount of time passed like this, blank space that for me had the same amount of drama and gravitas that time spent waiting for an elevator has. After a while, I began to feel cold. “Let’s go inside,” I suggested.

Yuri let go of me and followed close behind me as we went back inside. I walked immediately over to the couch and lay down on top of the newspapers there, curled with my back to the room. Yuri grabbed my left shoulder and pulled, prying me onto my back. He climbed on top of me and pinned my arms down with his knees. He had no particular kind of look on his face. Perhaps he was as tired as I was, and was just going through the motions. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” I told him mildly. “I’m just going to sleep.” And then, that’s what I did. I closed my eyes and went to sleep. After a minute, I felt the pressure lift from my arms and I rolled over into my original position, with my back to the room.

I woke up more than 24 hours later, still on the couch. I know it was 24 hours later because we had left the club at about 4:30, and Yuri’s face as he pinned me to the couch had been painted with the first gray streaks of dawn coming in through the room’s big, curtainless windows. Now bright, early-morning sunlight streamed in through the windows and, as I got off the couch and tiptoed around the empty apartment, I saw that a clock on the kitchen counter said 7:45.

Also, I could tell by the way I felt that I’d had not just 2 hours but a very considerable amount of sleep. For one thing, I was ravenously, unbearably hungry, the first time in two months I’d had any kind of bodily sensation besides fear. For another, I was terrified. But not in an inchoate, amorphous, all-encompassing kind of way. No, this time I was terrified in a very concrete, very lucid, very “holy shit what am I doing locked in a drug dealer’s apartment” kind of way. Because I knew, as I stood in the middle of the room and stared at it; I KNEW that the one door out of the apartment would be locked. The only thing that had saved me two nights before, when I’d come here, had been Yuri’s own fatigue and my complete and total passivity and disconnection from reality.

But soon, my god, very soon, things would be different. I was awake now and it was early in the morning, the start of a brand-new day. I’d have the sense and the energy to put up an entertaining and possibly challenging but ultimately futile fight when Yuri and the other men who worked here – because I was absolutely sure now that this was not a home, but a lab – returned any minute now.

I turned abruptly from the door and walked silently and hurriedly through the rooms of the apartment, hoping to find something, anything, I could use as a weapon. But the rooms were, with one exception, completely and utterly empty. Unused. One of them had a small, unmade cot in it, presumably where whoever was on duty rested in between cooking up batches of “ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, or anything you want.”

Shit, SHIT, I thought, what am I going to do? I paced from room to room, growing increasingly more frantic as the morning grew longer. Finally, I decided that I would go to the front door and rip it out of the wall. I would yank the knob out of the wood and slither through the hole it left. I would undo the screws in the hinges with my fingernails. I would douse the door with the chemical residue in the kettles in the kitchen and it would dissolve into mist. Whatever; I was going to get out of that apartment somehow and right now. Filled with the kind of desperate energy that allows mothers to lift minivans off of their toddlers, I raced to the door, grabbed the handle, and yanked as hard as I could.

The heavy door, which was not locked, swung back with such force that it nearly dislocated my shoulder. I stood in the open doorway, chagrined and amazed. Then I bolted out of the apartment and into the hallway and ran until I found the door to the stairs. I had never been so profoundly grateful to be alive, so incredibly conscious of the second chance I had for some reason been given. I ran down the empty morning streets – it was Sunday, probably around 8:30, and few people were out – and to the metro two stops from Yuri’s building. Paid my fare and ran through the lobby and down the short marble staircase to the train platform. I was ecstatic to see as I descended the stairs an actual light at the faraway end of the tunnel. The train would be here soon, and I would be on it and out of this nightmare.

There was one other person on the platform, a grizzled man of indeterminate age clutching a greasy paper bag. He was making his way towards where I stood, looking directly at me, swaying and staggering but clearly bent on delivering some kind of message to me. I stared back at him as the ground beneath our feet began to rumble with the approach of the oncoming train, and then, still looking me full in the face, the man did a kind of unsteady pirouette on one leg and fell off the platform on to the tracks.

There was no doubt whatsoever about what I would do as I looked down at the man where he lay among the newspapers that were starting to stir as the pressure in the tunnel changed as the train neared, as he rocked back and forth slightly with the effort of trying to get up, looking back at me with no expression. I turned on my heel and ran as fast as I have ever run, up the stairs and out of the station and into the bright, empty morning.

*

Days later, things had changed. I still was not sleeping very much and was anxious most of the time. But I had started eating and stopped drinking, and was hallucinating a little less floridly. I had come home and cleaned up the house, spending a few days sitting on the floor of my living room listening to Thelonious Monk and putting the hundreds of pages I’d torn from my notebook back in order. I had started to write again, hesitantly, writing not essays or ideas but lists of the people I might turn to for help in finding employment. I was even leaving the house every day, walking a short ways through the woods to a store that sold bread, soap, canned black olives, and peacock feathers. I did not want to speak to anyone I didn’t know or do anything beyond the absolute basics, but I could see there was a possibility that I might somehow make it.

Then, one day, there was a man on the path I took through the woods to buy my bread. He was a dead man, actually, wearing a light blue jogging suit and the ruined expression of someone who has been shot at close range in the face. He lay there slightly off the path, partially obscured by leaves, and I passed him twice a day on the way to and from the bread store. Others walked on this path, too, and I hoped and expected that one of these people would do something about this, that one day when I passed by he would be gone. But there he was, day after day, a mafia hit or random robbery victim that had been dumped in our quiet suburb.

Finally on the fifth day I could stand it no longer. This man was probably a bad man. He was probably a criminal. But he probably had good people in his life who cared about him, and who were beside themselves right now with fear and sorrow. I decided to do something about the situation, and called the Russian equivalent of 911. The phone rang and rang, and finally a woman answered. “What,” she said gruffly.

“Hello,” I said, “I need to report a shooting in my neighborhood.”

Click. 911, the number you call when your house is on fire, when you’ve accidentally ingested poison, the one tenuous thread between you and your impending mortality, had hung up on me. I called right back.

“Hello,” I said to a different gruff woman, “Someone has been shot on my street.”

Click. The same response.
I carefully put the receiver back in its cradle, and made my decision.

“Fuck this,” I thought, “I’m going home.”