She has a father who sails, a mother who works in the finance industry, a sister who lives with her and passes the time playing video games. I’m astounded. My mental categories are in pieces. I’m looking at a Russia that has been totally Westernized. The frontier? No problem for Kristina; on the contrary, she experiences it as a resource, with the same “let the good times roll” spirit of New Orleans in the Prohibition era. She’s got other problems: building speculation, the dominance of the Muscovites, drugs and prostitution, the highest incidence of AIDS in Europe. Kristina is sure that her city, left free to attract investments, would become a Switzerland of the North. She says, “The Muscovites are rich; they come to the seaside here, but they build concrete monsters that nobody will ever live in, eliminate parks and squares; the identity of the place is in danger.”
To get a better understanding, we hop on a tram to the center of town, the first one that comes by. The food market is a people’s place, full of onions and smoked fish, where Kristina, accustomed to the restaurants of Berlin, would never go. An immense market, four times as big as the one in Budapest and much more authentic. In Budapest, you get only Hungary. At the market in Kaliningrad, you get the whole Soviet Union. Apricots from Uzbekistan. Cossack honey, sold by Cossacks. Smoked Baltic fish brought from Saint Petersburg. Crisp, crunchy bread from Azerbaijan. Throngs of peasants with blueberries and currants. Folk cures for tuberculosis and old age, such as bear fat, badger fat, and even dog fat, sealed under glass and lined up on the counter next to the sausage. Here you don’t get the bland blend of the global, but rather the succulent plurality of an empire.
In the pavilions, the pavement is a paste of dust, grease, and sugar that sticks to your shoes. All around, there are strange-looking types checking out everything, more often than not bristly Caucasians with eyes flashing like knives. One of them, attracted by my notebook, comes over to listen to the questions I pose to a meek pensioner who is selling dried fish and complaining about the prices. Nikolai Semyonovich, eighty-two, war vet, one functioning eye, asks how much somebody like him makes in Italy. The intruder listens, acting as if he belongs there. A while ago, he would have been a spy; today he is the guard for the gang that oversees the deals, gets rid of nose pokers, and makes sure there aren’t any thieves hanging around. I suddenly realize that in my entire trip through Russia I have never encountered a police officer.
I’m hungry. My stomach is whining like an untuned violin. There is an Azerbaijani tavern called Osyag that’s emitting irresistible smells of food and deals. I worm my way in. At a nearby table, three more bristly types are eating, answering their cell phones, and ostentatiously counting out wads of hundred-thousand-ruble notes. They’re doing everything possible to be seen, and so we strike up a conversation. I ask them how life is in Kaliningrad, and the most bristly of the three smiles radiantly, puts three fingers of his right hand over his mouth, kisses them with a smack of his lips, and replies, “Awesome.” Then he adds, “Life is easy. It’s a sweet place, and there are lots of deals to be made.”
A loaf of braided bread arrives, kefir with wild herbs, and exquisite dolmas stuffed with meat. Three gelid blond guys also arrive, Putin wannabes, and sit at the table of the Azerbaijanis. The ethnic division of the business couldn’t be clearer. The blond guys are the bosses of the territory, and they’ve come to pick up their percentage. A brief sotto voce chat, a meeting of the minds, and the blue wads of hundred-thousand notes change hands right under my nose. An enormous figure; to eyeball it, something like €300,000. A handshake, as it was done by the Sicilian clans in New York a century ago.
Outside of the Arcimboldian teeming masses, the surprises keep adding up.
Money machines that distribute, besides rubles, dollars in big and small denominations. Black megacylinder limos, ten or twelve yards long, with tinted windows, transporting to the town hall white-dressed brides and men in cream-colored suits. It’s the trendy color on the Baltic, the same color worn by the old couple I’d seen at the train station. The women are almost always stunning. The men are divided into two varieties: businessmen around forty, boxer builds, with horrible-looking bodyguards; or handsome, slender young men with passionate eyes, fired by an ardor unknown in the West. Monika slips into courtyards, snapping pictures in a light that changes by the minute, teetering between sunlight and rain.
Iosip, Georgian taxi driver: “This is my second fatherland. I came here twenty years ago, and it was all gray. Today, it’s upbeat, and above all, there’s no risk of war. Life is good. And tell me, where is it written that the frontier is a downer?”
No-man’s-land, a rarefied space of the imagination, Kaliningrad is a fantastic nonplace like Trieste and Odessa, a city of illusions and intrigues, comparable to postwar Vienna, an ideal setting for Bogart films. Maybe to understand the city—its billionaire smugglers and its pockets of poverty, its military installations and its depressive psychoses—you really do need the philosophy of Kant, the man who, without knowing it, laid the groundwork for modern psychiatry, sanctioning the unknowability of reality with his historic distinction between “das Ding für mich” and “das Ding für sich,” the thing as it appears to me and the thing in itself.
“Who knows what the German thinker would say about the Russified Königsberg of today?” The city’s postmodern intellectual circles amuse themselves with such questions. When the Russians routed Prussia and occupied the Baltic port from 1758 to 1762, Professor K didn’t have a bad time of it. The man by whose afternoon walks the city set its clocks turned out to be an accomplished dispenser of salon witticisms and an excellent pool player, and thanks to the czar of Saint Petersburg, he even had an academic career. The historian Manfred Kühn recalls that Kant greeted with pleasure the new Slavic air that had enlivened the small Prussian world, too methodical and predictable, too dour-faced from Protestant piety and regimented by a dynasty of sergeant-kings.
We have an appointment with Kristina and her girlfriends at the Plaza shopping center, a concrete and glass giant surveilled by more gorillas, not far from the Prussian cathedral rebuilt with German capital. The terrace restaurant is pure America: boom-boom music, giant screens with soccer games, a vacuous horror dripping even from the hyperdecorated walls of the restrooms, vocal communication absolutely impossible without shouting. A friend of Kristina’s explains that the punitive system of the Lithuanian visas discriminates against the poor, who cannot afford to fly. “And if we go from Moscow to Kaliningrad carrying Russian medicines, the Lithuanians seize them because, they say, they’re not in conformity with the regulations. They consider them addiction-inducing narcotics. But it’s just plain old protectionism. In Klaipėda, there was a nice market for Russian medicines; today there’s nothing.”
When I go out onto the terrace to get a breath of fresh air and enjoy the view of the boulevards and the former Palace of the Soviet, now an abandoned ghost, the waiter runs out to get me because staying outside is prohibited. It seems that one day someone was thrown off the terrace to the ground below. I escape again to people-watch. On a tram, I encounter a Mongol woman of breathtaking beauty and a troubled-eyed Slav with a braid as thick as a rope. On a bus, there’s a Georgian gang that ogles my notebook and forces me into an escape in English.
At the zoo, guarded by two matrons at the ticket booth, I’m left bewildered, watching a clearly crazed sea lion swimming in an undersize pool, not far from a melancholy giraffe, immobile under the Northern sky.