The Return (2 page)

There was, however, something else I used to do for him.
Most of the
Moscow gangsters’ girls were nightclub hostesses or striptease artists,
actresses or wannabes.
No surprises there; that’s the way it’s always been.
But
Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters,
middle-distance runners, triple jumpers .
.
.
he fell in love with the
occasional javelin thrower, but his real favorites were the high jumpers.
He
said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong.
I was the one
who organized it all.
I went to the training camps and set up dates for him.
Some of the girls were delighted at the prospect of spending a weekend with
Misha Pavlov, poor things, but others, most of them, weren’t.
Still, I always
got him the girls he wanted, even if it meant spending my own money or resorting
to threats.
And so it happened that one afternoon he told me he wanted Natalia
Mijailovna Chuikova, an eighteen-year-old from the Volgograd region, who had
just arrived n Moscow, hoping to get a place on the Olympic team.
I don’t know
what it was exactly, but right from the start I realized that there was
something different in the way Pavlov was talking about this Chuikova girl.
When
he told me to get her, he was with two of his buddies, and they winked at me as
if to say: Make sure you do exactly what he’s telling you, Roger Strada, because
this time Billy the Kid is serious.

Two days later I got to talk to Natalia Chuikova.
It was at the
Spartanovka indoor track, on the Boulevard of Sport, at nine a.m., and I’m
definitely not a morning person, but it was the only time I could meet her
there.
First I saw her in the distance: she was about to start running to the
high jump, and she was concentrating, clenching her fists and looking up, as if
she was praying or watching for an angel.
Then I went over to her and introduced
myself.
Roger Strada?
she said, So you must be Italian.
I didn’t have the
courage to destroy her illusions altogether: I said I was Chilean and that there
were lots of Italians in Chile.
She was five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed
more than 120 pounds.
She had long brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered
all the grace in the world.
Her eyes were almost jet black and she had, I swear,
the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the reason for my visit.
I bought
her a Pepsi, told her I liked her technique and left.
That night I didn’t know
what I was going to say to Pavlov, what lie I was going to invent.
In the end I
decided to keep it simple.
I said we’d have to give Natalia Chuikova a little
time, she wasn’t like his usual kind of girl.
Misha looked at me with that face
of his, somewhere between a seal and a spoiled child, and said OK, I’ll give you
three days.
When Misha gave you three days, you had to fix it in three days, not
one day more.
So I spent a few hours thinking it over, asking myself what my
problem was, what was holding me back, and eventually I decided to settle the
matter as quickly as possible.
Very early the next morning, I saw Natalia again.
I was one of the first to arrive at the track.
I spent a long time watching the
athletes coming and going, all half asleep like me, chatting and arguing, though
all I could hear of their voices was a senseless murmur, or shouts in an
incomprehensible Russian, as if I’d forgotten the language, until Natalia
appeared in the group and started doing warm-up exercises.
Her trainer was
taking notes in a little book.
There were two other high jumpers talking with
her.
Sometimes they laughed.
Sometimes, after jumping, they’d sit down and put
on blue and red tracksuits, which they soon took off again.
Sometimes they drank
water.
After half an hour of happiness I realized I was in love.
It was the
first time it had happened to me.
Before that, I’d loved a couple of whores.
I’d
treated them wrong, or right, it didn’t matter.
Now I was really in love.
I
spoke to her.
I explained the situation with Misha Pavlov, who he was, what he
wanted.
Natalia was shocked, then she thought it was funny.
She agreed to see
him, against my advice.
I made the date for as late as I could.
In the meantime,
I took her to see a Bruce Willis movie—he was one of her favorite actors—and
then to dinner at a good restaurant.
We talked and talked.
Her life, with its
hardships and disappointments, was a model of perseverance and willpower, just
the opposite of mine.
Her tastes were simple; it was happiness she wanted, not
wealth.
Her attitude to sex, which is what I was really hoping to get out of
her, was broad-minded.
That depressed me at first: I thought Natalia would be
easy game for Pavlov, I imagined her sleeping with all his bodyguards, one by
one, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it.
But then I understood that Natalia
was talking about a kind of sexuality that I just didn’t understand (and still
don’t), and it didn’t mean she had to go to bed with all the gang.
I also
understood that in spite of everything, I had to protect her.

A week later Pavlov sent me back to the indoor track with a big bunch
of red and white carnations that must have cost him an arm and a leg.
Natalia
took the flowers and asked me to wait for her.
We spent the whole day together,
downtown for a start (where I bought two novels by Bulgakov, her favorite
writer, from a stall in Staraya Basmannaya Street) and then in the little room
where she lived.
I asked her if she’d had a good time.
Her reply completely
stunned me, I swear.
She said the flowers were self-explanatory.
It was just so
hard, so cold, you know what I mean: she was Russian and I was Chilean, it was
like a chasm was opening in front of me, and I burst into tears right there and
then.
I often think about that afternoon of crying and how it changed my life.
I
don’t know how to explain it; all I know is I felt like a child, and I felt all
the cold of Moscow for the first time, and it seemed unbearable.
That afternoon
we made love.

From then on my life was in Natalia’s hands and her life was in the
hands of Misha Pavlov.
The situation, in itself, seemed simple enough, but
knowing Pavlov I knew that by sleeping with Natalia I was risking my neck.
Also,
as the days went by, the certitude that Natalia was sleeping with Pavlov—and I
knew exactly when she was—progressively embittered and depressed me, and led me
to take a fatalistic view of my life, and of life in general.
I would have liked
to talk it over with a friend and get it off my chest.
But no way could I tell
Pultakov, and Jimmy Fodeba was always really busy; we weren’t seeing each other
as often as before.
All I could do was put up with it and wait.

And so a year went by.

Life with Pavlov was strange.
His life was divided into at least three
parts and I had the honor or the misfortune of being acquainted with all three:
the life of Pavlov the businessman, continually surrounded by his bodyguards,
which gave off a subtle odor of money and blood that unsettled the senses; the
life of Pavlov the serial romantic, or lech, as we used to say in Santiago,
which tormented me in particular and inflamed my imagination; and the life of
Pavlov the private man, with his inquiring mind, a man who spent or wanted to
spend his spare time, his “moments of inner repose” as he said, exploring
literature and the arts, because Pavlov, though it’s hard to believe, was a keen
reader, and, of course, he liked to talk about what he was reading.
That was why
he used to call on the three people who made up what you might call the cultural
or cosmopolitan arm of his gang: Fedor Petrovich Semionov, a novelist; Paulo
Ripellino, a genuine Italian, who was studying Russian on a scholarship from the
Moscow School of Languages; and me, who he always introduced as his friend Roger
Strada, though he sometimes treated me like a dog.
Two Russians and two
Italians, Pavlov would say, with a little smile on his lips.
He did it to slight
me in front of Ripellino, but Ripellino was always respectful to me.
They were
actually fun, those meetings, but sometimes we’d be summoned at midnight; the
phone would ring and we’d have to get ourselves pronto to one of the many
apartments Pavlov owned around Moscow, and endure the boss’s rants, when all we
wanted to do was to go to bed.
Pavlov’s tastes were eclectic—that’s the word,
isn’t it?
The only author I’ve read, to be honest, is Bulgakov, and that was
only because I was in love with Natalia; as for the others, I’ve got no idea,
I’m not much of a reader, that’s pretty obvious.
Semionov, as far as I know,
wrote pornographic novels, and Ripellino had a film script that he wanted Pavlov
to back for him, something about martial arts and the mafia.
The only one who
really knew about literature was our host.
So Pavlov would start talking about
Dostoyevsky, for example, and the rest of us would tag along.
The next day I’d
take myself to the library and look up information about Dostoyevsky, summaries
of his works and his life, so I’d have something to say the next time, but
Pavlov hardly ever repeated himself; one week he’d talk about Dostoyevsky, the
next about Boris Pilniak, the week after that, Chekhov (who he said was a
faggot, I don’t know why), then he’d be onto Gogol or Semionov himself, raving
about his pornographic novels.
Semionov was quite a character.
He must have been
my age, maybe a bit older, and he was one of Pavlov’s protégés.
I once heard
that he’d arranged for his wife to disappear.
I didn’t know what to think about
that rumor.
Semionov seemed capable of anything, except biting the hand that fed
him.
Ripellino was different, a good kid, and the only one who openly confessed
that he hadn’t read a single one of the novelists that our boss used to hold
forth about, although he’d read some poetry (Russian poetry, with proper rhymes,
easy to remember), which he’d sometimes recite by heart, usually when we were
drunk.
And who wrote that?
Semionov would ask in a booming voice.
Pushkin, who
else?
Ripellino would reply.
Then I’d seize the opportunity to say my piece
about Dostoyevsky, and Pavlov and Ripellino would recite Pushkin’s poem in
unison, and Semionov would get out a little book and pretend to be taking notes
for his next novel.
Or we’d talk about the Slavic soul and the Latin soul, and
once we got onto that subject, of course, Ripellino and I were bound to come off
badly.
You can’t imagine how long Pavlov could go on about the Slavic soul, how
profound and sad he could get.
Semionov usually ended up crying, and Ripellino
and I backed down at the first sign of trouble.
It wasn’t always just the four
of us, of course.
Sometimes Pavlov sent out for some whores.
Sometimes there’d
be one or two unfamiliar faces: the editor of a little magazine, an out-of-work
actor, a retired army officer who actually knew the complete works of Alexei
Tolstoy.
Pleasant or unpleasant company, people who were doing deals with Pavlov
or hoping for a favor from him.
Sometimes the night even turned out to be
enjoyable.
But it could go the other way too.
I’ll never understand the Slavic
soul.
One night Pavlov showed his guests some photos of what he called his
“women’s high-jumping team.”
At first I didn’t want to look, but they called me
over and I couldn’t refuse.
There were photos of the four or five high-jumpers
I’d gotten for him.
Natalia Chuikova was one of them.
I felt ill and I think
Pavlov realized; he put his massive arms around me and started singing a
drinking song in my ear, something about death and love, the only two things in
life that are real.
I remember laughing or trying to laugh at Pavlov’s little
joke, like I always did, but the laughter died in my throat.
Later, when the
others were sleeping it off, or had gone, I sat down by the window and looked at
the photos again, taking my time.
Funny how it is: right then, everything seemed
OK, all in order (as my father used to say), I was breathing deeply, calm, free.
It also seemed to me that the Slavic soul was not so different from the Latin
soul, in fact they were the same, and the same as the African soul, which
presumably illuminated the nights of my friend Jimmy Fodeba.
Maybe the Slavic
soul could withstand more alcohol, but that was the only difference.

So time went by.

Natalia was dropped from the Olympic team because she never managed to
jump the required height.
She competed in the national trials and wasn’t highly
ranked.
It was clear that she wouldn’t be breaking any records.
Although she
didn’t want to admit it, her career was over, and sometimes we talked about the
future with a mixture of fear and anticipation.
Her relationship with Pavlov had
its ups and downs; there were days when he seemed to love her more than anyone
in the world and days when he treated her badly.
One night when we met her face
was covered with bruises.
She told me it had happened at training, but I knew it
was Pavlov.
Sometimes we talked late into the night about travel and other
countries.
I told her stuff about Chile, a Chile of my own invention, I guess,
which sounded a lot like Russia to her, so she couldn’t get excited about it,
but she was curious.
Once she travelled to Italy and Spain with Pavlov.
They
didn’t invite me to the send-off, but I was one of the people who went to the
airport to welcome them home.
Natalia returned looking very tanned and pretty.
I
gave her a bunch of white roses (the night before, Pavlov had called from Spain
and told me to buy them).
Thanks, Roger, she said.
You’re welcome, Natalia
Mijailovna, I said, instead of confessing that it was all thanks to a
long-distance phone call from our mutual boss.
Right then he was talking with
some heavies and didn’t notice the tenderness in my eyes (which have often been
compared to the eyes of a rat, even by my mother, God rest her soul).
But the
fact is that Natalia and I were letting our guard down.