Departure: Ksenia at the Craneworks
Andrei’s letter arrived the same day as the Americans:
Ksenia, trusted friend, hello!
We meet next Monday with the interested parties who may make our project possible. Please come back to Galich before university and review the presentation. You have always been good with words, and I trust you to help us express our plan in the most effective terms possible….
Andrei told me in his letter the general scope of his plan. It was a natural step, it seemed, for him and the rest of his young samizdatchiki. They’d spoken up in their underground newsletters for glasnost and perestroika, for free speech and free markets. They’d raced down the new paths Gorbachev seemed to be creating for expression and energy and teenage rebellion. Now Gorbachev and the Union are gone, and the rebels want to rush into that vacuum and turn word into economic deed. Poets of the revolution need to become pioneers of capitalist industry, Andrei wrote. We need to make money.
But I’m not sure Andrei is fully ready to make that transition, to talk like a businessman. I want very much for him to succeed—that’s why I fell in writing with them last fall—and so I wanted very much to get home and help him on this first real adventure into what he believes—what we believe, I guess—is the proper rebuilding of our country.
This is all secret, of course. We still operate like dissident publishers, choosing our words carefully in letters the Kremlin might read, not implicating anyone outside our circle in our efforts to tear down the regime, even though the regime has tottered off the stage under its own drunken inertia and no one should really mind if we take the reins in building a new regime that everyone ought to agree Russia needs. We all have our own inertia, I guess, our habits, paths we follow without really thinking.
I didn’t tell the Americans, not even Rudy, why it was so important that I get back to Galich. Rudy simply saw that it was important to me, accepted the idea of my seeing Mama and Papa and the lake as important enough that he should help. I didn’t ask him to help. I didn’t expect any American tourist to fix our buses or make time stop or… whatever. But there he went, and here he came. He wasn’t held back by expectations or rules. He just did what needed to be done, for the good of others.
Maybe I shouldn’t paint him with that halo. Rudy brought me to Galich as much for himself as for me. He wanted to see the road. Future historians explaining the rise of New Russia and the reign of Tsarina Ksenia the First will say it all sprang from the motoring wanderlust of one wistful American. Ha!
But Rudy did bring me back, and I am grateful that he did. I am immensely grateful that he came with me to the falls, the lake, the mountaintop. I have never seen a prettier moonrise or a gentler midnight, and I hope he remembers our Saturday, all of it, from breakfast and Pushkin to bottles and notes, as fondly as I will. I hope the grief he must feel, flying home alone, will not make him forget.
I am grateful, shaken now, scared at the thought, really, but immensely, undyingly grateful that one unlikely choice meant he was here and safe with me and not on that bus.
I am grateful that Rudy was so kind to Mama, so helpful to Papa. I am immensely grateful that he made possible these extra days with them, here, at home.
And I am grateful that Rudy brought me home so I could keep Andrei from making an ass of himself.
Andrei intended for me to proofread his presentation and revise style and form. He did not ask for a critique of the business plan itself. But when I read it, the errors were obvious. Andrei and his partners fancied themselves capitalists, but they were speaking half in old Party-speak and half in boyish cribbing of Western movie lines. Their actual data, what little they had, wouldn’t have persuaded me to give them cab fare to the bank, let alone a million-dollar loan, hard currency, to acquire decommissioned government factories. I read the plan top to bottom, crossing out errors as I went, and told Andrei straightaway what a mess he had and how to fix it. A better pitch seemed obvious, even to me, and I’ve never built a business. I reeled off three main points around which he could structure an effective plan for expanding the plant’s operations to Moscow and St. Petersburg, or at least for convincing men with money that he stood a reasonable chance of achieving such goals.
“Brilliant,” Andrei said. “Can you say it to our investors the way you just said it to me?”
My first thought was, who am I to make business pitches to men I don’t know about machines I won’t build in factories I haven’t seen? But then I thought, who was I to get on a motorcycle with a man I hardly knew (part of me kicks back, says, no, I knew Rudy, I know Rudy, somehow he is not the stranger that a mere counting of days would say he is)? Who was Andrei to cook up this plan that really grew from not much more than trying to save his father the master welder’s job? Who were any of us, doing anything we could think of to gather up the pieces of Lenin’s shattered fantasy and bolt and wire and patch together some scheme, some economy, some empire that would put food on tables and make buses run on time?
Again I hear the future historians—Ksenia, swept up in a mad weekend… but no. The times are mad, this time, our time, together on the road and in Galich, was sane. Rudy, sane and capable, did a sane and brave and practical thing, to help me. I am sane and capable, and I can help Andrei. I’ve never built a factory, but likely neither have these investors, whoever they are, not the way things must be built now, and I can tell them how.
So I made Andrei’s pitch. I went to his meeting, wearing shoes borrowed from Mama and pants from Papa (none of my old school dresses would have convinced the money men that I lived up to the credentials that Andrei inflated for me in his introduction, not even my plaid dress, and I wore that Sunday, for Rudy). In the cafeteria of the crane factory, idle for August vacations and the delay in steel supply, I handed out papers and sketched graphs on the rolling chalkboard that usually gives the day’s menu. To my surprise, and more to the surprise of Andrei’s partners, who were getting the outline of my revisions to their plan at the same time as their investors, the investors, men in suits from Kostroma, Vologda, Yaroslavl, men with cash and connections it seemed better not to ask about, said, Go ahead, use our money, do this thing.
There will be more meetings, more pitches, more investors to recruit. Andrei wants me to be part of his organization, to handle “communications”. I said I will help but I will not skip university. I will go to Moscow. I will get my degree. University comes first, no matter what. Andrei said that’s fine; there are more investors in Moscow, more money flowing there from the provinces and overseas, more players to get on his side and approve whatever comes next. When things get going—and this initial investment means things actually can get going—Andrei expects he’ll move his base of operations to the capital, anyway. The Galich factory will continue to operate; Andrei’s father can weld cranes, and Papa design, and Mama keep books, for years and years and someday retire comfortably. But the focus will be expansion, diversification, and development of exports, and the place for that work is Moscow. Having me there, Andrei says, will make his work easier and more successful. And university study will only make me better at whatever it was I pulled off today.
The only thing that bothers me is that Andrei says I must keep this work secret. I cannot talk about the men we met, the money they put up, or the purposes for which it will be used. I cannot put this work on my CV. I can’t even tell Mama and Papa, beyond “proofreading”… though Papa wonders why I needed his pants just to mark up some papers.
Secrets—that’s just business, I suppose. Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, all the Soviets kept secrets. We kept secrets when we published our bulletins. Now we will keep secrets while we make money… for the greater good, I tell myself, for the workers in Galich, the workers new factories will hire, the grocers who will sell the workers bread at prices that someday will stay the same from week to week.
But I want to be able to tell people, This is the way! Come with us! Do this, and this, and Russia will be strong and stable and sane again! (I hear Dostoevsky question that last item—have we ever been sane?)
But one step at a time. We make ourselves strong and stable first. Andrei handed me two weeks’ wages for two days’ work. In Moscow, in two weeks, that money may buy only a quarter of what it can now, so I shall go to the market tomorrow and buy small, useful things that I can carry to university.
I shall buy paper so I can write to Yulia and to Rudy. Surely I can tell Rudy of my secret business adventure. He will be far away in New Jersey, building his own business, building houses. He’ll have no interest in capitalizing on secret information about factory financing in Russia. He’ll never be the competition that Andrei worries about. He’ll just be happy for me and happy to know he helped set me on this fortunate course.
No, Andrei will say, not even your American friend. Complete secrecy, he said. I will respect that—after all, Andrei is paying me, so I guess he’s my boss now.
I will write to Rudy, not of this business, but of everything else. I will tell him how sorry I am for what happened to his friends, our friends. I will tell him we can share our grief and still seek happiness. I will tell him how happy my parents are to have me home, how happy I am to be home in Galich. (This he knows, he saw, but I will tell him again, so he does not forget.) I will go to the lake again and write Rudy from the mountaintop so he may see it again, through my words, in sunshine. And I will tell him that he must write back, must assure me that he has made it home safe and sound and can find sunshine of his own in his Trenton, New Jersey.