by Yuri Troitsky
translated by Alexandra Berlina
The English translations of the excerpts were made possible thanks to the support of the WE EXIST! Foundation
26. London, 2010s
[…]
Whenever I change SIM cards, I always stubbornly keep my old Moscow number on one of the messaging apps: if anyone needs to get hold of me, here I am, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So when Titov and his people wanted to find me, they did. They put me on their list, one of the sixteen. I heard they took it to Putin himself for approval. It didn’t seem like a set-up, a carrot to lure me out. But I had my doubts. I pondered it. I never fully believed them, and there was absolutely no one to ask for advice. Nobody I knew was still inside the system, in the mainstream. I kept trying to get in touch with Roman, but, of course, to no avail; I’m used goods to him. The only person I could talk to was myself. And when you want to convince yourself of something, sooner or later you will. And so I’d almost agreed, I wrote what I thought was a carefully crafted text stating that I was ready to consider the proposal. Then I put it aside. Who would give me guarantees, who’d take responsibility? I reworked the draft once more, trying to anticipate everything, to cover all the bases from a legal perspective.
A legal perspective is all well and good, though, but apart from a legal education, I also have an intuition the size of a seasoned alco’s liver. So there I sat, hovering the cursor over the ‘send’ button, for quite a while, and eventually moved the email to the drafts folder. Why not wait a little longer.
A week later, after refreshing the news page, I saw that my guts hadn’t let me down. One of the other invitees had let them talk himself into flying to Moscow. Right at the airport, he was presented with charges, detained, and a day later the court, with obvious relish, pronounced him guilty. Business as usual. Titov’s cowardly comment was: ‘No one automatically guaranteed an acquittal to the participants, this matter falls within the court’s jurisdiction.’ Everything was crystal clear now, thank you very much. My hopes of returning to Russia were over. It was time to cut the umbilical cord.
A ball rolled passed me and into the woods. Soon some poor bastard will come running to look for it, but it’s gone. A brand-new premium ball, too. Well then, I could use a couple of pounds. Besides the pleasure of watching the game, I suddenly also had a practical use for it. That certainly beat collecting bottles! I’ll wash, dry, and sort the balls I find at the edge of the pitch, then sell it to their former owners for half the price. They’ll be buying the same ball twice, the losers!
This thought unexpectedly cheered me up; I even winked at a passerby.
A notification popped up in my messenger. I grabbed my cheap supermarket glasses, haven’t been able to read without them for ages. An unknown number, country code +38. Where on earth was that? Latvia, maybe, but no, Latvia, I seemed to remember, was +37. Definitely spam. But right now even an advert would be better than nobody writing at all. I opened the messenger. My phone may be old, but it got face ID, though it does play up when you haven’t shaved for a while, and with these glasses on top. It didn’t recognise me, wouldn’t let me in, the sod. I typed in the password, read and reread the message: ‘Hi! It’s Vitya Popov. Not sure this is still your number but if yes, give me a call when you get a chance. Hugs.’
I shoved the phone deeper into my pocket, fastened the button, even. A prickly sphere was growing inside me, making it hard to breathe. I wiped my face with my crumpled baseball cap and headed home.
27. London, 2010s
I badly want to call Vitya. I don’t know how many times I’ve reread his message. Sure, I had sometimes, not very often, wondered where he was, how he was. I’d left him alone in Riga, I’d just run off. And there he is, sending me hugs. Yep, I’d betrayed my only friend – cause that’s what he is, my only real friend, as it turns out – like the worst kind of bastard. What can I say to him? Vitya, I’m a total write-off, forgive me, bro. But to do that, you need courage, and I’ve lost mine somewhere on the way, turned into a fucking pussy. A loud clap will send me running.
***
‘Hey, Vitya, is that you? You wrote so I thought I’d call.’
‘Great, mate! Wow, so you’ve actually turned up. I knew you would! Yak tvoї spravi?’
‘What?’
‘How are you? I’ve been in Ukraine for ages now, moved here as soon as I got out. I’ve got tons of stuff to tell you! But, come on, how are you? Must be an oligarch by now!’
‘Almost…’
‘I’m so fricking glad! Shall we videochat?’
‘No, Vitya, sorry, video doesn’t work well for me right now. So tell me your story, how did you end up with the dill-eaters?’
‘Listen, so much has happened! In a nutshell, I met this guy in the Riga detention centre. He’d ended up there for some hot snails.’
‘Hang on, is that Ukrainian again? Or prison speak? Like, is snails drugs, or weapons, or what?’
‘Snails are snails. Escargot, people in Europe eat nine hundred thousand tonnes of them a year. And they aren’t exactly cheap, either. So this guy was absolutely obsessed with these snails. Cause the climate in Ukraine turns out to be perfect for them, plus the cheap labour. The only problem’s the bloody customs clearance in the EU. So he was smuggling them into Latvia, declared as a mollusc exhibition. And then reselling them as EU-grown. They nabbed him at exhibition twenty-five.’
‘Fu-uck…’
‘But then the EU and Ukraine signed something, so now it’s legal to farm them and ship them directly to Europe. That’s when I got out, and he offered me to join his farm. Now we’re running this whole kolkhoz together, thirty tonnes a year, and that’s just the start.’
‘That’s great, Vitya! It really is, I’m happy that things have worked out for you. For one of us at least…’
‘Hang on, hang on, I don’t get it (half-switching into sympathetic-sounding Ukrainian again), why this pitiful tone?’
‘Vitya, forgive me, brother, I let you down back then, ran off like a piece of shit, like a fucking rat. Someone up there sees everything, you know. I’m so fucked-up, Vitya, totally fucked-up. Penniless, no home, no money, no family… A lonely hobo, that’s what – ’
‘Right, stop, shut up right now. First off, you didn’t let anyone down; if you’d stayed, they’d have locked us both up, and you get more time for a gang. And anyway, if it wasn’t for Talivaldis, everything would have been fine. It was him, the bastard, who got us all fucked. I hold no grudge against you, none whatsoever. Got it? I’ve got no reason to. If it weren’t for you, the worms would have gobbled me up ages ago in some Moscow suburb. So, if you don’t mind getting your hands slimy, get a move on and come over – we’ve got enough snails to last a lifetime.’
‘Thank you, Vitya.’
I hung up. I couldn’t speak any longer. The prickly sphere had been pressing at my insides, and finally, the wall ruptured, the contents spilling out in a burst of suffering and relief.
28. London, 2010s–2020s
I’ve got an interview in one of the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf today. I get there via the Jubilee Line, changing at Victoria. This stretch of the grey – no, silver! – line is new to the London underground. The stations are bright, spacious, Moscow style, with plenty of room to spare. The trains are comfy, too, with high ceilings and fresh blue panelling. The escalator carries me up into a sparkling concourse. Sunlight floods the polished space through the vast glass dome. Worth going back down just to come up again! A shame I’ve arrived at the last minute…
The district that has sprung up above the Dog Island docks was conceived as a new City. Perhaps it will renew my life, too. Ah, there we are. I slip past the security guard, hoping that fashion has come full circle and my jacket, tailored to the latest trends five years ago, looks more or less the part. No worries, guys, soon I’ll be walking past you with my chin held high, nodding like I own the place: ‘How’s it going, John? Why don’t you wear a shorter skirt, Jean!’ You’ll be spotting me in the crowd of visitors, greeting me warmly, asking how I’m getting on. For now, it’s good enough that my ID made it on the applicants’ list. I’ve been asked to wait. All the better, I’ve got time to freshen up in the men’s room – brush the dust off my lapels, comb my hair, polish my boots. It’s a hell of a loo, too! Theatre begins with the coat rack, they say; well, an office begins with the urinals. I’ll be making at least a hundred grand a year, that’s for sure. And I’ll bring in Vitya, too. He’s got no business wallowing in snail muck. My appetite for life had returned after his call.
And soon after, something else had happened for which I’d been waiting all these years. My son got in touch. He told me he’s got a state-funded spot at Moscow State (a Bachelor’s, he wrote), and wants to do his diploma (his Master’s, as he put it!) in the UK. I rang him straight away, of course. Vanya said he’d been scared to contact me before because Mum had been really pissed. At first, after returning from that holiday in Turkey, she would literally shake at the mere mention of my name. When he tried to find out what had actually happened, she’d give the standard ‘you’ll get it when you grow up’ line and withdraw into herself for days. But little by little she thawed up. One evening, she asked him to look for something on her ancient laptop, and, rather surprisingly, it came to life. Amongst all the clutter on the hard drive, there was a bunch of our family photos. As Vanya began flicking through them, she first pretended she wasn’t interested but couldn’t help glancing over, giving a surreptitious smile every now and then. Vanya saw that it was safe to talk about the past – and they recalled how happy we’d been during my visits from Riga. And thus, the unspoken rule forbidding the mention of my name was cancelled.
In my excitement I invited him over straight away, suggesting he’d stay with me for some university open days. It was only after I’d hung up that it began to dawn on me. Stay in my grubby Croydon bedsit? No way! The lad should be proud of his father, happy to look him in the eye. And then, perhaps, Ira might join as well.
So all at once I needed work – proper, well-paid work, not some Uber job. And sure, on the one hand, I’m an emigrant with a useless Russian degree and barely adequate English. But on the other, I know how to make money where no Exec MBA would spot a penny. They don’t teach you that sort of thing. I’m needed where people are valued not for their certs and quals and LinkedIn profiles but for their ability to think for oneself and to sink others on the fly. And that’s where I excel! But to show that, I’ll need an employer capable of embracing my ideas. Ideas that the locals won’t comprehend (and if, God forbid, they do, they’ll call the cops straight away).
So, I googled companies with Russian roots. There turned out to be over a hundred of them in London – from Milhouse to Revolut, from nouveau-riche attire to hoodies. This filled me with optimism, but when I dug a bit deeper, I realised that fintech firms are run by the children of oil-and-gas fathers. If Big Daddy doesn’t take me on, his son or mistress won’t, either. So I decided to stick to the main players, the grown-ups. Besides, it was getting a bit hard for me to keep up with all these crypto-startups, to be honest. I’m an old-timer after all, though still in good shape. I put together a smart CV, stuck on a ten-year-old pic. I haven’t changed that much, though these days, my neighbour cuts my hair, not a trendy hairdresser.
So here I am, giving my shoes a final polish with a piece of toilet paper. Shining like a tomcat’s bollocks, they are! And now, out onto the stage. Just in time, too – I’m immediately invited upstairs and enter the lift, accompanied by a knuckle-dragging hulk. Where on earth do they find people like that? Part of the infrastructure or something. As we step out, the cyborg finally hands me over to a human. A man in a good shape and a pricy Italian jacket, probably about ten years older than me, though he looks ten years younger.
‘Good day, please do come in! My name is Ivan Kuzmich.’
He smiles warmly and holds out his hand.
‘Yes, sir!’ I blurt out for some reason and barely keep myself from saluting.
‘Well now, welcome in my office. What would you like – tea, coffee? Let’s have some tea, shall we? That’s the Russian way! I’ll ask Susanna Yuryevna to make us some of her special blend. She takes this bland local stuff and mixes it with proper willowherb, Ivan chai, you know? No idea where she gets it from… Do sit down, make yourself at home!’
While I settle into a deep leather armchair, he takes a thick folder bearing the company logo out of the safe, sits down at his desk, and starts leafing through it. Oho! That’s not just any old ring binder; the reports and extracts are stitched through with heavy-duty thread, just the way the Soviet authorities did it. Judging by the thickness, a whole team of filers has been working on my file. I try not to crane my neck toward the papers, surveying the office instead. Expensive furniture, a stunning view from the window… On one wall, a photo of a drilling rig amidst Siberian snows. On the other, a racing catamaran is rearing up on an ocean wave. The crew are pulling ropes in unison, furiously cranking handles. May good Siberian gas fill your sails, lads!
‘Ah, I see you’re interested in yachting,’ he says, suddenly looking up from his reading.
‘No, not really, never got into it somehow. What I love is golf. Haven’t been playing much lately, though.’
‘Golf, now that’s fine! What’s your handicap?’
‘Used to be fifteen. You play, too?’
‘Hardly at all these days. But back when I was spending a lot of time in South-East Asia, we used to have quite the tournaments, yes. As for our boss, he’s keen on sailing. There he is, at the helm, see? The Louis Vuitton Cup. Bermuda. Our pride and joy. If you’re good at your work, you’re good at everything, you know.’
The secretary brings in tea on a silver tray. By its side, there’s milk, lemon, and a plate heaped with sweets beloved by Soviet children, fairytale maidens, little bears and squirrels on the wrappers.
‘There you are, enjoy!’
Susanna Patronymicyevna gives her boss a tender look and pours the tea – first for him, then for me, nudges the plate of sweets towards us and backs out.
‘Well then. I won’t torment you with questions, my people have collected all the necessary info for me here,’ he said, lifting the folder with the logo. ‘Your experience is impressive.’
‘Thank you. I’m a lawyer by training. I’ve worked in financial management, banking, the sports business – ’
‘Yes, yes, all very impressive indeed. There are some dark chapters, too, to be sure. Criminal ones. But that might even be a plus.’
Ivan Kuzmich looks up and studies me intently, without a smile. I feel a shiver down my spine, as if I’d suddenly found myself in the Siberian snows. My shirt grows treacherously damp on my back and under my arms. That’s why I’d greeted him so strangely. That was experience, intuition. He’s one of them, and they never really leave their profession.
‘I’m not sure if I understand’, I mumble, ‘that is, if you understand, I mean, if we understand each other… But, you know, I’m afraid I can’t be of any use to you. I’m not allowed to leave the Island. I’m on Interpol’s files.’
‘No worries, you won’t need to go anywhere; there’s plenty of work here, too. As you know, Great Britain often behaves dishonourably towards our Motherland. For example, by welcoming and rewarding traitors. In exchange for state secrets, it gives them a comfortable life here. It is our direct task to neutralise such people. To find them and finish them off. To rub them out in the outhouse,’ he quotes. For a split second, his face hardens and his eyes flash. But perhaps I only imagine it… ‘And, as you are no doubt aware, that’s what we do with a great deal of success.’ By this time, his fatherly smile is back. ‘I have carefully reviewed the files of your personal case, which was handled by operative Mescheryakov. He was skilled at recruiting informants, quite a decent officer overall. Got quite a few awards, too. But at the end, he wasn’t good enough; at some stage, he lost his nerve or simply made a mistake. I don’t know if you heard – he fell out of a window about a month after your escape from Moscow. While he was being questioned, he asked to go to the toilet and fell out of a window. Things happen …’ Ivan Kuzmich sighs. ‘But let’s get back to the matter at hand. I see great potential in you. I’m sure that with your background, your experience, and under our guidance, you’ll be not only useful but, without a doubt, successful. But you haven’t tried a sweet yet! Has the tea gone cold? Drink up, drink up, and have some sweets!’
I obediently pop an alyonka into my mouth. Then a mishka. A belochka. Without feeling the taste.
Ivan Kuzmich glances at his watch.
‘Take some home, too! I insist! I’ll give Susanna Yuryevna a word right now, she’ll pack some for you. I can see you, too, like our good Russian sweets. You’ll probably need a bit of time to digest them. But don’t drag your feet. And don’t go chasing after other Russian investors. It’s a dead end.’
I stepped out onto the street. The countdown had started.
