“If some mudak tries to hurt you because of your religion, or laughs at how fat you are, come to us and we will break his head open,” Caesar said.
We toasted one last time with the flask, “To our friendship!,” and then I zigzagged my way down the street toward my waiting car. A light wind picked me up and guided me forward, cleaning the dust off my neck and wiping a spot of blood from my lower chin. The day was shifting from unbearable humidity to elusive summer pleasure, much as the violence against me had given way to pity and understanding. All I ask is the occasional reprieve.
“Did you talk to the Americans?” Mamudov asked.
“No,” I said, massaging the bruised flab around my kidneys. “But I spoke to some Russians, and they made me feel good again. There are wonderful countrymen around us, don’t you think so, Mamudov?” My Chechen driver said nothing. “Let’s go to the Mountain Eagle,” I said. “Maybe Alyosha-Bob and his friends are still there. I want to drink some more!”
Alyosha-Bob and Ruslan the Enforcer had just quit the premises, but the artist Valentin was still dawdling, hungrily finishing up everyone’s sour cabbage and cramming several slices of leftover Georgian cheese bread into his broken-down satchel.
“How are you doing, little brother?” I said. “Enjoying the beautiful day?”
“I’m going to see my friends at the Alabama Father strip club,” Valentin said sheepishly.
I presumed he meant the mother-daughter whore team. “Hey, why don’t I take you and Naomi and Ruth out to dinner!” I said. “We’ll go to the Noble’s Nest.”
The monarchist, although presumably well fed on Alyosha-Bob’s ruble, clapped his hands together. “Dinner!” he cried. “How very Christian of you, sir!”
The Alabama Father strip club was all but empty at this time of day, only four drunk members of the Dutch consulate passed out in the back by the empty roulette table and the imported rum-and-Coke machine. Despite the lack of an audience, Valentin’s special friends, Elizaveta Ivanovna and her daughter, Lyudmila Petrovna, were up on the makeshift stage grinding against two poles to the sound of the American super-band Pearl Jam.
The age difference between the artist’s friends was not as obvious as I had imagined; in fact, mother and daughter resembled two sisters, one perhaps ten years older than the other, her naked breasts pointing downward, a single crease separating them from the little tummy below. The mother was imparting upon Lyudmila her theory that the pole was like a wild animal that one had to grasp with one’s thighs lest it escape. The daughter, like all daughters, was shrugging her off, saying, “Mamochka, I know what I’m doing. I watch special movies when you’re asleep—”
“You’re a dunderhead,” the mother said, thrusting to the sound of the ravenous American rock-and-roll band. “Why did I ever give birth to you?”
“Ladies!” Valentin cried out to them. “My dear ones…good evening to you!”
“Hi, there, little guy,” mother and daughter sang in unison. They each put a hand down their tiny lower garments and writhed with special vigor for the artist’s benefit.
“Ladies,” Valentin said, “I would like to introduce you to Mikhail Borisovich Vainberg. A very good man. Earlier in the evening we drank to America’s downfall. He drives around in a Land Rover.”
The ladies appraised my expensive shoes and stopped writhing. They hopped down from their poles and pressed themselves against me. Quickly the air around me was filled with the smell of nail polish and light exertion. “Good evening,” I said, brushing my curly mane, for I tend to get a little shy around prostitutes. It was, I confess, nice to feel their warm flesh against me.
“Please come home with us!” cried the daughter, massaging the posterior crease of my pants with one curious finger. “Fifty dollars per hour for both. You can do what you like, front and back, but please no bruises.”
“Better yet, we’ll go home with you!” the mother said. “I imagine you have a beautiful home on the embankment of the River Moika…or one of those gorgeous Stalin buildings on Moskovsky Prospekt.”
“Misha is the son of Boris Vainberg, a famous and recently deceased businessman,” Valentin announced. “He has offered to take us to a restaurant called the Noble’s Nest.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said the mother, “but it sounds just grand.”
“It’s in the teahouse of the Yusupov Mansion,” I said with a pedantic air, knowing that the mansion where the loony monk Rasputin was poisoned would not make much of an impression on the ladies. Valentin managed a slight, historic smile and tried to nuzzle up to the daughter, who favored him with a chaste kiss on the forehead.
The Noble’s Nest is really quite a place. They normally don’t allow whores or low-earning people like Valentin, but because of my fine reputation, the management was quick to relent.
Now, it is no secret that St. Petersburg is a backwater, lost in the shadow of our craven capital, Moscow, which itself is but a third-world megalopolis teetering on the edge of some spectacular extinction. And yet the Noble’s Nest has one of the most divine restaurants I have ever seen—dripping with more gold plating than the dome of St. Isaac’s, yes; covered with floor-to-ceiling paintings of dead nobles, to be sure. And yet, somehow, against the odds, the place carries off the excesses of the past with the dignified luster of the Winter Palace.
I knew that a fellow like Valentin would rejoice. For people like him, this restaurant is one of the two Russias they can understand. For people like Valentin, it’s either the marble and malachite of the Hermitage or a crumbling communal flat in the Kolomna district.
Valentin’s tarts wept when they saw the menu. They couldn’t even name the dishes, such was their excitement and money lust. They had to refer to them by their prices: “Let’s split the sixteen dollars for an appetizer and then I’ll have the twenty-eight dollars and you can split the thirty-two…Is that all right, Mikhail Borisovich?”
“For God’s sake, have what you wish!” I said. “Four dishes, ten dishes, what is money when you’re among your brothers and sisters?” And to set the mood for the evening, I ordered a bottle of Rothschild for US$1,150.
“So let’s talk some more about your art, little brother,” I said to Valentin. I was having some kind of Dostoyevsky moment. I wanted to redeem everyone in sight. They could all be Misha’s Children, every last harlot and intellectual with flaxen goatee.
“You see…you see…” said Valentin to his women friends. “We’re talking about art now. Isn’t it nice, ladies, to sit in a pretty space and talk like gentlemen about the greater subjects?” A whole slew of emotions, ranging from an innate distrust of kindness to some latent homosexuality, was playing itself out on the artist’s red face. He pressed his palm down on my hand and left it there for a good time.
“Valya is doing some nice sketches for us,” the mama said to me, “and he’s helping us design our Web page. We’re going to have a Web page for our services, don’t you know?”
“Oh, look, Mama, I believe the two sixteen dollars are here!” Elizaveta Ivanovna cried as the two appetizers of pelmeni stuffed with deer and crab arrived, both dishes covered by immense silver domes. The waiters, two gorgeous young kids, a boy and a girl, looked at one another, mouthed one, two, three, and then, in tandem, pulled off the lids to reveal the horrid appetizers beneath.
“We’re talking about art like gentlemen,” Valentin said.
The evening progressed as expected. We drove to my apartment beneath a confusing cross section of the summer sky—the deep blue of the North Sea at the top, followed by the indeterminate gray of the Neva River, and, at the very bottom, a brilliant ribbon of modern orange that hung like a fluorescent mist over the dueling spires of the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress.