In the first year after Yurik graduated from high school, Martha began to pay for his expenses as well, but she felt that what she was doing wasn’t right. She came from a poor Irish family, and though she was Catholic, her views on life were completely Protestant. At the end of the first year of Yurik’s semi-independent existence, she forced herself to tell him that she was not going to provide for him anymore. Yurik thought about getting a job.
An opportunity came his way through Ari, an Israeli friend of his who had been on an extended vacation in the United States after finishing his military service in the Israeli army. Ari had been born in Russia, and his family still spoke Russian at home, so he was happy for the chance to be able to chat with Yurik in their mother tongue.
The main topic of discussion was the army. Yurik, who had left Russia at the insistence of his mother to avoid military service, did not try to conceal this fact of his biography. To Ari’s mind, this was immoral. Yurik considered military service itself to be immoral. He was well aware of the vagaries of Russian politics, and understood that, after Afghanistan, there had been other conflicts—Ossetia-Ingushetia and in Georgia-Abkhazia—not without the involvement of Russia. Now there was turmoil in Chechnya, too. All of this smacked of war, which his mother feared. Yurik didn’t want to kill or to be killed. He wanted to play the guitar. Yurik’s story about the Russian fellow who had hanged himself after serving in Afghanistan didn’t make an impression on Ari. Ari’s experience had been different: he adored the army.
“Before the army, I was just a piece of meat—an idiot with a guitar, and a source of shame for my family. After three years in the army, I became a real professional. I specialized as a radio operator, and I learned Arabic. The army teaches you how to survive, which is also a kind of science. The main thing was that I learned how to learn. I can teach you, too. I’ll teach you how to be a furniture mover. Don’t laugh—it’s kind of like science, too. Not everyone can do it.”
Yurik accepted the offer immediately.
The next day, Ari took him to a small moving company. The person who ran the operation was a Russian Jew with an Israeli passport and a checkered past. Around him revolved a motley assortment of people from all ends of the earth—losers, pariahs, and eccentrics of every stripe. The first crew he worked with was Israeli, and they taught him the tricks of the trade. They worked in a group of four: Ari, two more former Israeli soldiers, and Yurik. It turned out that a pack mule’s endurance was more important than brute strength in this profession, and good mind-body coordination was more necessary than broad shoulders. He worked with this crew for three weeks, until it disintegrated because Ari and his friends went back to Israel. Then Yurik started working with a new crew: two Sherpas and another newbie, a towering African American hulk.
Both Sherpas—Apa and Pema—came up to about Yurik’s chin, but their strength and stamina were the stuff of legend. Though they were unsociable at first, after a few days working together, watching Yurik toiling alongside them and trying to keep up, they grew very friendly and warm toward him. On the first day, the hulk cast disparaging glances at the Sherpas, but after three hours of work, he lay down next to the wall and didn’t budge. Yurik and the Sherpas worked another ten hours before calling it a day, and the black giant never came back to work.
Yurik lived in an abandoned house. Alice, an aging alcoholic with a past in the theater, was the temporary landlady and self-appointed manager. She “enrolled” acceptable candidates and kicked out the ne’er-do-wells. She quelled conflicts, enforced sanitary norms, and negotiated with the municipal authorities, so that they would tolerate the existence of this illegal homeless shelter. She protected Yurik. He had lived under her roof for three years when the municipal authorities cleared the squat. Someone bought the building, and it was scheduled for restoration. Alice was offered a job with the municipality; she became an official.
Yurik also climbed up a notch on the social ladder: he rented an apartment. He and a friend, a thievish guitarist from Peru, split the monthly rent of three hundred dollars for a room in an apartment in which four other seekers after the American experience were living: an Arab girl who had run away from home, two Poles who were working in construction, and a Hindu preacher of some obscure offshoot of the religion. The Arab girl and one of the Poles inhabited the largest room, the Hindu and the other Pole lived in the middle-sized room, and Yurik and the Peruvian were in the smallest room.
Half a year later, the Peruvian underwent a miraculous change. To the bitter disappointment of the Hindu, he converted to Christianity. He stopped stealing, considered himself henceforth to be saved, and believed that in the coming months the Lord would summon everyone who had been saved, including himself, and that they would be ushered into the blessed beyond. He called himself a “born-again,” sang hymns, and wrangled with the Hindu in the kitchen, until he set out for California, to meet even more blessed people.
Now Yurik was the sole inhabitant of the room. The bighearted Martha agreed to sponsor him, forking out the $150 a month that the Peruvian would no longer be contributing. His departure was very timely, because Yurik had found a girlfriend, one Laura Smith, and all his previous casual loves paled in comparison with her. Laura, who was just finishing high school, was the proverbial black sheep of an upstanding American family. They saw each other every day. She liked having a Russian guitarist for a boyfriend, and she went with him to all his gigs, whether in the subway, at clubs, or on street corners—wherever one of the two bands that invited him as a replacement was performing. Laura also had a dream of doing something creative. She wanted to be a belly dancer. She practiced her art constantly: at school, at home, in the subway, and on the street. A small girl, she undulated as she walked, swaying her boyish hips to and fro. She danced and danced …
Yurik’s room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through.
This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other spaces and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to.
Yurik, his injury still fresh in his mind, wrote three songs, which the leader of a well-known band liked so much he added them to the band’s new repertoire. For the first time, Yurik knew what it felt like to be a real songwriter. And he understood that new music arises from new experiences and sensations and troubles. That’s what I was missing, he thought.
Since he had arrived, he had felt like a part of this city. Music, his music, rang out from every corner, from every nook and cranny. When he went to Long Island to visit Martha and Vitya, which he did rather infrequently, he began missing the city while he was still on the commuter train. The Moscow of his childhood was so remote to him that thinking about it was like looking at a picture through the wrong end of the binoculars. Only Nora’s visits reminded him of his pre-American existence.