An Expat Goes Home

by Victor Pogostin

At dawn one day in late November, I was awakened by a call. It was my niece, sobbing: “Uncle Vic... Papa died.”

My elder brother Vladimir had died in the subway on the way to work. A Moscow policeman found his cellphone on him and dialed the first number listed in the contacts. An hour later, an email from the Research Institute, where my brother worked his entire professional life, confirmed his death.

Visiting one’s home country after a long absence (I left in 1993) might seem like a thrill, but be careful what you wish for. Changes can leave you with a sickening nostalgia for lost memories, while making places and events from one’s past, once so dear, seem like nothing but hallucinations.

I found that not only had the street names changed, but the once sullen Soviet display windows now challenge shoppers with the glitter of Chanel, Armani, Gucci, and the like. And the places that I cherished: the curved side alleys, the inner yards where I grew up playing with friends who are no longer there, those are the changes that hurt the most.

And while change may be a popular word in Moscow; alas, some things never change.

To go to Moscow, I had to get a visa. The email from my brother’s place of work produced no effect in the Russian Consulate. “Anyone could have sent this message,” said a consulate official who avoided looking me in the face, trying to hide the odor of alcohol on his morning breath. “A formal telegram is required.”

From time immemorial, only the Central Telegraph Office in Moscow had dispatched formal telegrams of this sort. And for that, a sender had to produce an official death certificate.

The next day was Saturday, and the registry office was not issuing certificates. My brother’s friends’ so called “donation” helped to change circumstances, and the telegram was sent, yet it reached Toronto only after my return from Russia.

Lo and behold, four days later I landed in Moscow. A friend offered to meet me at the Sheremetyevo airport. It had been twelve years since we had seen each other, and it was not the changes in his looks that struck me. He had been a devout communist in the Soviet days, now he crossed himself every time we passed a church.

That November, Moscow was bitterly cold. With the wind blowing tiny icicles at my face, my first nostalgic night-stroll ended quickly in the Okhotny Ryad, a new, upscale underground trade center built beneath Manege Square, which separates Tverskaya Street from the Kremlin. I found a coffee house on the main floor, alongside a cozy fountain and a white grand piano. A shop sign invitingly promised, “What else if not a cup of fragrant espresso or delicate cappuccino to cheer you up!”

True, my espresso came, steaming and aromatic, in a fine china cup. And so, I thought, recalling how ten years before getting a cup of coffee in Moscow was not so easy, that some things had changed for the better. Later, already in bed, I watched one of the many propaganda TV talk shows filled with commercials. One in particular caught my attention. It was about “the superior service and caring staff of the Moscow funeral services.” Well... I thought falling asleep, at least my brother would be laid to rest with dignity.

The following morning was even colder and snowier than the night before. An old Camry borrowed from a friend, straining and grumbling through the drifts, finally broke through the traffic jam-ups to reach the hospital gate. The barrier at the gate was closed. The guard did not even look at me. “No cars allowed... 100 rubles,” he muttered in one breath. Tariff announced, I handed two dollars through the window and the barrier opened.

The hospital morgue was squeezed into a small, one-story, grey brick building with no room, not even a washroom, for the waiting relatives and friends.

Four funeral buses were waiting, engines running. Our bus was third in line. In the bus, the heater worked only in the driver’s cabin, and my Camry was the only refuge from the cold for a dozen friends who had come to say farewell.

The wait stretched to over an hour, and we all needed a restroom. Next to the morgue was a dilapidated, green-planked wooden structure. I peeped through the frost covered window, spotted a human silhouette inside and knocked. A tiny vent window opened, and a young woman looked back at me quizzically.

“Excuse me, is this part of the morgue?” I asked.

“Hell, no. It’s a laboratory.”

“Do you have a washroom?”

“Yes, but only for staff.”

I squeezed two dollars in the narrow opening.

“Okay but make it quick, and your party only.”

I signaled to our small group, and one by one we surreptitiously sneaked in and out.

Soon it was our turn in the morgue. A large, red-faced man, wearing a shabby jacket over a soiled green gown, appeared on the morgue porch holding a coffin lid.

“Who’ll carry the coffin?” he demanded.

“They are looking for ‘a little extra.’” My brother’s friend whispered in my ear.

I didn’t mind paying extra, but my brother’s friends and I thought we should carry it ourselves.

“We will,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders, dropped the lid in the snowdrift alongside the porch and gestured us inside, where we found a small room with concrete walls painted green.

After a nearly 90-minute drive, chilled to the bone, we arrived at the crematorium attached to Nikolo-Arkhangelskoye Cemetery. Opened in 1974, it now did seventy cremations per day. We had missed our designated time and were put at the back of the line. Fast learner that I am, this time I quickly found the ritual administrator and, thanks to a hefty “extra,” the waiting line shortened. However, the time for eulogies had to be cut from the designated fifteen minutes to ten.

Following a colleague from the research institute, where my brother worked, and one of my brother’s closest friends, it was my turn to say a few words. Suddenly, a sad-looking figure of an Orthodox priest clad in a worn-out robe squeezed his way through the thick crowd and placed an icon at my brother’s feet. “Wait,” I said, trying to stop him. “My brother was not only a committed atheist he was also Jewish.”

My comment ignored, the priest hurriedly muttered the psalm, “Blessed is our Lord God, always now and ever,” sprinkled holy water over the coffin, placed a shroud over my brother’s face, and then left, giving me no time to say a word.

Outside, the steel-gray clouds opened up, and a bright winter sun cast a long shadow: the crematorium chimney over the dazzling white snow.

“No worries,” said my brother’s friend, “we’ll have a memorial at the Institute, and you’ll speak there.”

The memorial stretched out to dusk, and I gladly availed myself of Institute Director’s offer to drive me to Donskoy Monastery Cemetery, where a week later the urn with my brother’s ashes would be placed in the columbarium niche alongside our parents.

The monastery was founded in 1591, during the rule of Boris Godunov, and closed in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution. The New Donskoy Cemetery was added to the medieval burial grounds and a crematorium was opened in 1927. It was closed for burials in 1980, and any new burial in the columbarium required special permission from the Moscow City Council. The deceased had to have a certain rating in the unwritten list of bureaucratic ranks to be granted such permission. My father had passed away in 1981. He had been the chief engineer of a large energy trust and a brief obituary in Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow), the official newspaper of the Moscow government, signaled that he should get a family niche.

It was dark when I was dropped off at the cemetery. The narrow door in the pink-hued metal gates was locked. There was no bell, so I pounded on the door hoping to get some attention. Soon I heard squeaky footsteps on snow and a bearded man, his face half hidden by a fur hat, peered out through the narrow opening.

“What?” he demanded.

“Can you let me in?”

“Can’t you read?” He pointed to the hours of operation sign hanging outside the door.

I shoved a twenty-dollar bill through the opening and the heavy door opened. Inside it was dark. Only the bleak, steel-grey moon shed a feeble light on the dusting of snow sprinkled atop the monastery walls, spruce trees, tombstones, and the crematorium tower.

“Have a flashlight?” I asked.

He walked on, gesturing for me to follow him to a small wooden lodge. Once inside, he took off his hat. In the bright light the bearded face looked strangely familiar.

“Hey,” I said. “Do I know you?”

Avoiding looking at me, he reached outside the vent window, grabbed a plastic bag with vodka, filled two not very clean glasses and handed me one.

“Maybe...”

“Jog my memory.”

“First Koptelsky Lane, my father was the yard-keeper.”

It rang a bell. Our family had lived there for over twenty years, and my brother and I were born there. The yard-keeper was a huge Tatar with a bushy, smoky moustache, and a yellowish, worn-out leather apron.

“Holy smoke!” I burst out. “Alex?”

We had never been close friends, but he and his dad had been sort of permanent fixtures in the lives of the inhabitants of the four-building complex where we lived. German architects had designed the building in the 1930’s. Architects and engineers from Germany had been invited by Stalin’s regime to help with the industrialization of the country. Residents of our gated community presented a fascinating mixture of high-ranking technocrats, government officials, educators, as well as military and security officers.

I still remember the clanking of the chains at dawn’s first light when Alex’s dad opened the iron gates to let in the Black Raven (a secret police car used to arrest “enemies of the people” during Stalin’s purges). I was in second grade when the “ravens” stopped coming. Then, on the frosty, sunny, early spring morning of March 5, 1953, I looked out the window to see if my buddies were waiting for me to walk to school and saw two strange looking flags, their rich, red cloth framed by black ribbons.

“Look, Mom...” I called out.

She did and said only one word in reply: “Stalin.”

There were no tears in our family. Yet at our all-boys school classes were cancelled, and all students, from grades one to ten, were lined up in the main hall in front of the huge, full-length portrait of the moustached generalissimo in his high glossy boots. The teachers were crying, some genuinely, others from joy or fear of the unknown times looming.

As for us, first and second graders, we found it hard to stand at attention. We pushed and pinched and giggled. The teachers desperately tried to restrain us. I remember that my elder brother, who was in grade 10 at the time, frowned down at me.

The last time I had seen Alex was many years before. I had run into him on the street. He was only a few weeks out of jail, where he had spent three years for hard currency profiteering.

“Just think! “He gulped his vodka down. “Why are you here?”

“My parents are here, and my brother’s urn will join them next week. You?”

“Business. We are taking it over.”

“We?”

“Trustworthy guys.”

“I see...”

“Like hell you do... Come on, I’ll walk you to your niche.”

Walking through a cemetery at night is no fun, but in this columbarium, there was a sector that always sent the chills up my spine.

In 1930, the city dug up a large pit that was then used as a common grave for some victims of Stalin’s purges. Two more pits were added later. Over 5,000 Muscovites were shot and cremated in Donskoy, their ashes dumped in the pits. In 1989, the Gorbachev Government put up a sign “To the Eternal Memory of the Innocent Victims of Political Repressions.”

While I brushed the snow from the ceramic photos on our family’s niche, Alex waited at a distance, leaving me alone to my memories.

Back in the shed, he handed me another shot.

“Hungry?”

“No. Just cold.”

“Well... I am. Want a steak?”

I looked around. No barbecue. He caught my puzzled look. “I heard you’d left. Where to?”

“Canada.”

“Man, you lucked out there. Come on.”

He kicked a small electric grill “Chinese shit... useless. Check out mine!”

He led me to a large mesh grate made from an old metal bed. The corners of the mesh were attached to electrical wires. He winked at me and plugged it in. In a few minutes, the mesh turned gray and then bright purple. The room warmed up. He took a huge steak from a plastic bag hanging outside the window, threw it on a pan, and started cooking on his DIY grill. The room was filled with the aroma of sizzling meat.

“May your brother rest in peace.” He passed me another glass of vodka.

“You still live in our building?”

“Hell, no. The city took it over for ‘major repairs’ and kicked all the residents out to suburbs. They are tougher than us.”

“I’d like to go there”

“Why? No one’s left.”

“David?”

“In Israel.”

“Eugene?”

“In Germany.”

“Yuri?”

“Killed in Chechnya.”

“Misha?”

“In the States.”

“Sava?”

“Be damned. He was the one who locked me up. Colonel now.”

We had a few more drinks for the road and he offered to drive me.

“Sure?” I asked pointing to the emptied bottle. “What if the police pull you over?”

“You serious?” He chuckled. “Don’t fret. We have them covered.”

My flight to Toronto was the next day, and I thought I’d spend it with my university buddies, but just one was available on such short notice. The one who could meet asked me for a favor. His friend, the Rector of a Moscow Technological University, wanted to talk about a “highly important” project that he planned to develop in Toronto. “Please come,” my friend insisted. “And when it’s over, I’ll drive you to your old place and tomorrow to the airport.”

The meeting started at 9:00 a.m. For nearly three hours, I was bombarded with fantasies of how Canada could benefit if their university opened an affiliate branch in Toronto. My job was simple: to secure the government permissions and licensing documentation. The unequivocal answer to my only question, “Who will teach and in what language?” was, “Us, of course, and in English.”

I tried to politely shift the discussion from Russian to English. The pundits went silent. In a minute or two, the Rector came to their rescue: “Well, we won’t be starting tomorrow... We’ll learn or hire interpreters.”

I didn’t want to be rude, and so when the clock on the wall struck noon, I promised to make some enquiries on my return to Canada and rose to shake hands and leave.

“My friend, why rush?” The Rector would not let go of my hand. “Now we’ll move to the most interesting part.”

I was escorted to a cozy, wood-paneled room in the basement. The table was already laid with Russian snacks and drinks.

After a few toasts, the Rector was completely relaxed. He took a gun from his back pocket and asked his assistant to put it in the safe. “We are among friends here,” he laughed and, reading the question in my eyes, added, “No worries, I have a license. New life. New hot-tempered students form the south, you know.”

After an hour, I was determined to leave and leaving the table for a restroom seemed like a valid excuse. The Rector called one of the charming young girls who served us, and I followed her hip-swaying body to the washroom. It was all white marble with shining brass faucets. The rumors were true, I thought after all, life in Moscow was getting better.

Feeling happier after relieving myself, I pulled the shiny brass handle on the side of the new Italian toilet. Nothing flushed. I tried harder, yet again not a drop of water. Bewildered, I searched the beautiful room for a solution. After a few moments, my charming guide knocked on the door: “Sir,” she called out, “Let me explain.”

“Be so kind.”

“The construction workers forgot to install the water pipes in the wall. You should look for a bucket in the shower stall.”

I opened the shower door and fished out an old, beat-up bucket and a piece of black rubber hose.

“What next?”

“Can you see a small water tap to the right of the toilet? Fill the bucket and flush.”

Having broken free from the Rector’s party — now in full swing — I returned to my friend. “Apologies,” he said. “He insisted and my son is a freshman there.”

Many things have changed in Moscow, with its freshly painted and backlit bridges. In May 2016, a huge brawl took place at the Khovansky Cemetery in Moscow, followed by a shootout. It involved between 200 and 400 “trustworthy guys” from rival groups. Several died. This ended the turf war for the Moscow underground funeral services market, which, according to media sources has an annual turnover of between 12 and 14 billion rubles ($180-210 million).

In addition, starting in the second quarter of 2019, the “GBU Ritual” (government funeral services) intends to demolish all open columbaria walls at Donskoy Cemetery. New walls will be built, where the “Ritual” is going to transfer over 63,000 of the old burial niches. At the end of this venture, a “free reserve” of 3,714 columbar niches should be made available for sale. It is unclear what will happen to the niches of those who do not have relatives living in Moscow: who will ensure the transfer of the urns? Would I have to go back, hoping to run into Alex again?

That is, of course, if he wasn’t one of the unlucky guys shot in the brawl.