Luda’s elbow drilled into my ribs. “With such a flight it is a miracle that you survived! Maybe you want to take off your coat and boots?”
“Coat okay, boots not.”
“I do not understand.”
“I might have broken my foot. If I take off the boot I’ll never get it back on. That will be a lot of turbulence to explain to…”
“I understand.” Luda cut me off, then in Russian, “My friends would love some tea, Grandmother. Thank you.”
Sighing and waving her gnarled hands, the old woman lamented having so little food to share. She tried speaking to Anna, and then to me in Russian, Ukrainian and even a bit of French. We pretended not to understand, smiled and spoke to her in English. Luda had actually managed to keep what she did to make ends meet, over and above teaching, from her baba.
Granny’s apartment might have been somebody’s dining room, a long, long time ago. Since then, hastily erected walls had divided it into two rooms. The building itself had been liberated from the bourgeois by the Bolsheviks, who then carved it into a multitude of ill-conceived rabbit hutches for the proletariat. An opening from one of Baba’s two tiny, high ceiling and impossible to heat rooms led to a communal toilet, basin, and kitchen shared by several other apartments of similar size and layout. One of the two rooms had, much later on, been provided with a sort-of kitchen: a counter, sink, and hotplate; but the single toilet and bathtub were still communal. I wondered if the later additions to the sitting room had been Luda’s. The other room contained their beds, a desk, TV, wardrobe and Luda’s enormous Great Pyrenees, their own personal bodyguard, asleep in a nest of moth-eaten blankets after curiously greeting and approving of us.
Luda had taken it upon herself to make some changes to our appearances. Following my desperate rooftop phone call, she’d run out for boxes of cheap hair dye and cosmetics. With Baba in the other room and down for the night, Luda went to work on us, me first. The wound on my scalp from Sergei’s pistol-whipping burned like crazy. What the hell? The ammonia, peroxide and other reagents in the super-cheap hair color not only turned my hair black, but disinfected and cauterized the wound.
“Hey, jet-black is better than gangrene.” I’d joked, getting punchy. My humor went unappreciated.
Anna’s light brown 1980’s perm was sacrificed for a short, bleached-blonde punk cut. It looked like something had gone terribly wrong at the salon, but without question, it changed her appearance. I, on the other hand, might as well have stuck my head in a bucket of printer’s ink. We found it uproarious, more so after being scolded by Luda for our bad behavior in Baba’s flat. Chastened, Anna was the first to give in to exhaustion. With what was left of her hair still damp, she stretched out on the kitchen floor, pulled up a ratty dog’s blanket, and was out like a light.
Luda motioned me to the far corner. “Early in the morning you must go,” I caught the slight tremor in her voice. “If it was only me you could stay, but you bring great danger to Grandmother. She is too old to know anything about this terrible business and her life has already been hard enough. Please understand, I can not get her involved.” Luda wished me goodnight and disappeared into her, and her grandmother’s, bedroom.
Through the closed door, I heard a whine from the huge dog then Luda’s harshly whispered command to “lie down — sleep.” I kept my left boot on and buckled tight as I could stand it. It provided the sprained — possibly broken — ankle some compression and support. I was fading fast. Every muscle in my body cried out for sleep and multiple sources of bodily pain were losing the battle to keep me conscious. I lay down on my own holey dog blanket, covered myself with my parka, and felt the room spinning.
Anna was barely visible a few feet away. “Goodnight, young voyager.” I whispered, reaching out for her.
Anna’s reply was a long sigh. She was beyond REM and into deep sleep.
“I dare say, turbulence be damned, you’re in for the ride of your life.”
The dog snorted from the other room followed by a loud, “Shhhhh.”
Drifting off, my last thought was, how in hell was I going to get us out of this one.
“Time to go.” Luda stage whispered, shaking me awake.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m up.”
She poked at the mound under Anna’s blanket.
Anna groaned.
“Anna, time to get up. I do not want to explain to Baba why you must go.”
The rickety elevator hadn’t survived the night. Someone noted its demise with a scrap of paper, “Not working,” impaled on a loose screw. I glanced at my watch, just shy of seven.
Seeing as leaving together wouldn’t be the smartest play in the book, Anna headed out first. From the lobby, I watched her disappear up a deserted, snow dusted side street. Her instructions were to catch a bus to the Arsenalnaya subway station and wait for me — inconspicuously. The station wasn’t on our usual route and far enough away from the apartment — the scene of the previous night’s shootout — to just maybe, not be watched. With Anna out of sight, I left Luda’s building and waited across the street for a taxi.
At Arsenalnaya, I limped down stairs decorated with dollops of frozen spit. Anna paced back and forth just outside the super-heavy steel and glass doors of the metro station. Great way to get attention. I signaled her to stay where she was and elbowed my way toward a bank of payphones. In a gravelly voice the Canadian Vice Consul told me to meet him at the embassy ASAP.
On the way, we emerged from the subway at Khreshchatyk. Right downtown in the glittering heart of a city that always seems to be in darkness. “Is the sun ever up around here?” I growled under my breath.
An automatic teller machine in Mandarin Plaza cranked out twelve hundred American dollars without complaint. I stuffed the cash into my pocket, then with Anna’s support, hobbled back through the empty mall. I desperately needed coffee and to get off my feet — the left one, in particular. We rode one of the glass elevators to the fourth floor where a bar and restaurant were both closed. High-end dining doesn’t rise and shine with the junior executives of new Kiev, but I could see them outside, through the glass curtain-wall, alighting from their limousines and taxis. “Dear god, let there be coffee at the embassy.” I hit the call button for the elevator. “And maybe some good news for a change. We could really use some good news.”
The sky, an oppressive slate gray, had lightened somewhat above the traffic choked streets. Streetlights were randomly going dark when I hailed a taxi and we made our way to the Canadian Embassy. Of course, there was coffee, tea, and even muffins. With Anna reasonably content, enjoying her breakfast in the embassy’s homey common area, I joined the Vice Consul, coffee in hand.
“Look, you need to get out of Kiev.” The Vice Consul looked out at Anna and gently closed his door. “I made a couple of calls on your behalf. The girl’s mother, one Yana Keitel, known apparently as The Skater, seems to be quite the interesting character. There are those who would be very pleased to avail themselves of her cooperation if you could get it. The daughter is another matter, though. Under the circumstances, she would be welcomed in Canada as a refugee and potentially useful witness, but she would have to make her way there herself — she’s not valuable enough to qualify for government help. If you can find that missing passport, you can probably get her to Turkey or Egypt where it would be safer. Then you could travel to Canada from there.”
“Sure, getting the passport makes sense, but she tells me her mother took it to force her back to Russia. I’m thinking there’s no way she’s just going to give it back. Can’t someone here help with that?”