Red Ticket: #Notalldejournayas
“Hello,” she said, “I am the landlady. I am here about the scandal.”
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, Lyosha gets arrested, and Robin gets evicted. If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, and 15.
Chapter 16: #Notalldejournayas
by Robin Whetstone
Stalin was a butcher. He murdered 50 million of his own people, yet I found that hardly a day went by in Moscow without marches in his honor. Russians whose parents starved in gulags carried his picture and chanted anti-corruption slogans, their numbers growing larger by the week.
Russians were used to dictators. “Strong hands,” they called them. Autocrats like Stalin and Lenin murdered people, but they did it in the service of a big idea: the creation of a Communist paradise. The 50 million murdered by Stalin in camps and in basements were enemies of the people, saboteurs.
But now a different bunch of people were doing the murdering, and the norms had changed. There was no big idea any more. There was only money, and power. Now just anybody could be robbed and murdered, and was. Days before, there’d been another shooting on a main street of Moscow, in the middle of the day. Another guy in a suit, dead in a Volga. The police bumbled around, measuring hubcaps and pretending to investigate while the corpse sat there, avoided. There’d been as many as eight shootings a week lately as the oligarchs fought over their turf. The papers blared about the 46 generals in the Russian defense forces, court-marshaled for providing military-grade weapons to Russian crime groups. Corruption was everywhere, and Russian culture had become as coarse and brutal as the crime on its streets. Russian women sold themselves for pizza. Russian men wore aquamarine tracksuits. The shops were full of dildos and Toblerone. This was not normal.
Russians could tolerate dictators because dictators kept order. Dictators won world wars.
“But this, this is infuriating. Things are out of control. No sense of propriety. People are being attacked in their homes.” This is probably what the old lady was thinking as Lyosha raised his arm to hit her.
The lobby of our building was the old lady’s home. She was a dejournaya; a door watcher. There was a dejournaya in almost every lobby of the vast former empire. She lived there, her cot tucked into a small nook. Her job was to watch the lobby and report what went on to the Soviet State. She had been a powerful person before the collapse two years earlier; a tyrant in a housecoat. But now there was no State to report anything to.
The dejournayas could not tolerate the idea that now they were just old ladies living in lobbies. They experienced a nasty extinction burst, their bad behavior flaring up for one last, desperate taste of power. They marched in pro-Stalin rallies. They shouted at you about your nightmare hunting boots and your slutty long hair. They refused to unlock the door if you came home later than they thought was appropriate, or with someone they didn’t approve of. There were battles in lobbies everywhere as the balance of power between dejournaya and resident recalibrated.
“But this, this is infuriating. Things are out of control. No sense of propriety. People are being attacked in their homes.” This is probably what the old lady was thinking as Lyosha raised his arm to hit her.
“Who is this whippersnapper, waking me up to let in his frizzy-haired American floozy?” I’m sure that’s what our dejournaya was thinking when she heard Lyosha’s knock. It was 4:30 a.m., and we’d been out dancing. Now it was snowing hard, and many degrees below zero, and Lyosha had to leave for work in two hours.
“No!” she shouted at us from behind the glass, a shawl wrapped around her, “Enough with you! Go!”
“It’s freezing out here,” pleaded Lyosha. “Please, grandmother, let us in!”
The old woman glared at us, shaking her head. Then she turned and shuffled back toward the cubby where her cot was. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Should we go over to Serge’s?”
Lyosha looked back at me in silence for a couple of seconds and then a strange wail tore up out of him and he spun and punched his fist through the window. Glass exploded everywhere and Lyosha’s arm was inside, scrabbling for the door handle. The dejournaya rushed back to the door, clawing at his hand and yowling. Lyosha wrenched the door open and took off after the old woman, chasing her into her cubby. “I’ve had it with you, you bitch,” he yelled, “I’ll kill you!”
I ran after them. Lyosha had a knee on the cot and his arm raised over the old woman, who lay on the bed sobbing, her hands raised to deflect the blow. I grabbed his arm, hung off his shoulder. “Don’t,” I said, “Just come on. We’re in, we’re in.” I dragged Lyosha out of the cubby toward the stairs, and the dejournaya immediately rallied.
“You’ll pay for this,” she screamed, chasing us into the lobby. “You’ll be sorry!”
We ran up the stairs to the sixth floor and locked our apartment door behind us. We shucked off our coats and our outer clothes, not speaking, freaked out. I got under the covers on the couch bed and waited for Lyosha to bandage his hand. I was scared. We had crossed the dejournaya, big time. What would happen? Would we be evicted? Cursed? Lyosha got in bed beside me. “Lyosha,” I said, “Can I stay with you?”
“I think you must,” he said.
The door to the apartment crashed open and five men in plain street clothes ran in, guns drawn. They yanked Lyosha from the bed and threw him on the floor. They kicked him with their black boots and hit him on his back, right on the scar, with the pistols they were holding. I sat up, pulling the covers around me. “What are you doing?” I screamed.
The men stopped beating Lyosha and looked at me, sitting there in my long underwear, screaming at them in English. They let go of him and straightened up, turning my way.
“Don’t hurt her!” Lyosha struggled to his feet, clutching his side. “She’s my wife.”
The men paused and Lyosha, standing now, began talking to them hurriedly. He slid a few steps sideways as he talked, reaching down and stepping into his pants. The men stood around him in a tight circle. Lyosha pulled on his coat. He opened a cabinet in the living room hutch and pulled out a carton of Marlboros, which he tucked under his coat. “OK,” he said.
Two of the men grabbed him under his arms and dragged him toward the door.
“Lyosha,” I yelled at his back, “What’s happening?”
“They are taking me to jail,” he said. “Stay here.”
The door slammed shut and everything was quiet. I got out of bed and stood in the foyer, staring at the door Lyosha had just disappeared through. I didn’t feel scared. I felt numb. This was unexpected. On the linoleum by my foot was a single drop of blood, no bigger than a pencil eraser. It looked black and glossy in the dim light, and I stared at it for a long time. “I should call someone,” I thought. A knock on the door I was standing right in front of startled me. I opened it and a woman I’d never seen before stood there, a sympathetic smile on her face.
“Hello,” she said, “I am the landlady. I am here about the scandal.”
“The scandal?” I said.
“The broken window,” she said, still looking friendly. “I am afraid you are going to have to leave.”
“Oh,” I said. This news didn’t surprise me. “OK. At the end of the month we’ll move.”
“Oh no,” she said. “You must leave now. If you are not out in 30 minutes, the police will come. I am sorry.”
She left and I stood in the foyer, trying to process this news. “If the police come you’ll get deported, or worse,” I thought. “Leave your stuff; just get dressed and go.” But where? It was 6:30 on a Tuesday morning in February. The options were limited. I walked into the kitchen and reached under the sink for the rags and washing powder I kept there. I came back into the foyer and got down on my hands and knees, scrubbing at the mud from the men’s boots, and at the single drop of blood.
Read the next chapter here.
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