After perhaps fifteen minutes of waiting nervously, trying to look calm and collected, the secretary approached my chair in long graceful strides and asked if I would follow her to Mr. P’s office. We ascended another staircase, but this time we swept upwards, instead of climbing, to the third floor over plush, red embroidered carpets pinned to white marble steps with brass bars at the base of each step up. The house was appointed inside like a miniature palace with no details spared to replicate the grandeur of what it once was. To my right over the railing now at eye level hung a crystal chandelier which cast faint, dispersed prisms on the yellow wall on my left as I followed the Cossack beauty up the staircase to the third floor. How did she walk on this thick rug in those heels without even wobbling? She must have gone to finishing school to learn that trick! My mind seemed to be on anything but the interview that was about to start. I had to push out all the distractions of the environment and focus. I stopped watching the skirt and legs in front of me to get my thoughts together and watched my own dusty shoes shuffle over the shallow upward steps. I felt at once very underdressed seeing the frayed hem of my blue jeans although they were clean, sort of. At least I was wearing a jacket with a clean shirt under it. What else was a poor student supposed to wear? We had arrived.
As I entered the palatial office on the third floor Mr. P. rose from behind his large dark wooden desk and walked toward me with his stocky gate with his right hand extended to greet me in a very professional and warm way. As we shook hands he clasped his left hand on to my left shoulder, welcomed me to his home and invited me to sit down on a firm leather couch, one that might be found in the den of a British country gentleman. It was very comfortable. I set my book bag down, leaned up against the end of the couch. Notes would be taken later. His secretary who had been waiting at the door offered to serve drinks.
The floor in this office space was the same intricate, polished inlaid wood as downstairs and undoubtedly was the same in each room. The study was in the same classical style but the walls a dark gray with white highlights. A decorative column flanked both sides of the entrance to his open office. The window behind his desk looked south into the garden and the handsome grove of birch trees that grew there. A garden house could be seen but no garden furniture had yet been set out on account of the weather just having turned warm enough to do so.
Mr. P. was dressed in suit pants and shirt but was not wearing a necktie. With his bright white collar open against his shaven bald head he was the epitome of sterile. His shoes, obviously not Russian gleamed in the lamp light of the office. He sat opposite me on a matching couch with a glass-top coffee table between us whereon my water and his coffee sat slowing steaming.
“So, you are Mr. Peter Turner. We have met before, right?” he started. My heart stopped remembering the night in his restaurant on Valentine’s Day. I knew I couldn’t just not answer him.
“Yes, we have. A few weeks ago, at the Monastery during the student event,” I reminded him.
“Ah yes, Marina’s American friend, but you did not stay too late, no?” he said chiding me.
“I can only apologize for my colleague who misbehaved and was asked to leave,” I said trying to defuse the memory.
“He was drunk?” he asked in an accusatory tone.
“Who wasn’t that night?” I replied with no guilt on my conscience.
“Yes, so was I, so was I!” he admitted.
“It was a great party and we had a fun time. Thanks for that,” I said telling a huge white lie.
“It was nothing. It gives me pleasure to give students some fun,” Mr. P. said with fake humility.
“Well, I believe you succeeded,” I said ironically.
“We have not met before in the Monastery?” he asked again looking sideways at me.
“We had not been introduced before that night. Believe me, I would have remembered!” I said with a friendly smile, but inside I was ready to run for the door.
“So, you came to Russia to study the Russian language?” Mr. P. asked politely as he relaxed.
“Yes, in part, but also history and politics,” I confirmed.
“In Russia, our history is politics. Who knows what the official political history is today? You must be careful about which history you read and write this year. Today maybe its okay, but next year you might be deported to America again if they don’t like your history and politics,” he warned me sitting up on the edge of his sofa.
“Well, that is why I choose to mostly study the most recent history since 1992. When history is too new it is difficult to change it. When nobody remembers it any longer, or all who lived through it are dead, then it becomes easy to make it political,” I parried his short lecture with a counter move.
“You speak very good Russian, Mr. Turner. Where do your people come from?” he asked.
“I have no Russian blood if that is what you are asking,” I replied vaguely.
“I thought maybe your parents were Jews from Russia twenty, thirty years ago when they left in the 1970s, maybe from Ukraine. You have a Ukrainian accent,” he said looking sideways at me.
“I spent some time there before I came to Nizhniy. I am told I have a Nizhniy accent as well when I speak to people from Moscow,” I tried to push the discussion away from me.
“Da nyet, you sound like an American with a Ukrainian accent. Very unusual,” he said and looked away.
“And where do your people come from?” I returned the interest in his genealogy.
“My grandparents are from the Volga village of Plyos. They were farmers on a kolkhoz. So I am more Russian than Mikhail Gorbachev & Boris Yeltsin combined. Real Russians come from the Volga,” he said haughtily.
“As Dean Karamzin maybe explained to you, I am writing an academic paper about the current changes in the economic system and about the policy challenges to help the development of private business,” I changed the subject.
“Yes, he explained this to me,” he said somewhat disinterested in the intellectual.
“Will it be a problem if I ask you many, many questions about how you started your business activities, how you have grown them to what they are today, and what plans you have for the future?” I asked like a doctor examining a wounded pedestrian.
“Yes of course,” he said with an arrogant manner as if relishing being asked questions about himself.
“OK, thank you, but if there is anything I ask about that you cannot answer because it’s confidential, I understand, so just tell me honestly if you cannot or do not want to answer a question. That will be no problem. I am just trying to gather as much data as possible, not trying to be intrusive,” I said hoping to convince him as I knew full well what I was up to.
“It won’t be a problem. C’mon let’s get started,” ,Mr. P settled into his couch as if he was about to watch his favorite movie on the television. It looked like he was going to enjoy this.
“Can you describe your first entrepreneurial activities and do you remember in which year these already started?” I asked him.
“It was 1986 when I started selling replacement and repair parts for the Volga sedans that are built here in Nizhniy Novgorod. Do you know those cars?” He asked me as he answered.