from LONDONGRAD

"She held out an Alionka bar. On the wrapper was the familiar picture of a rosy-cheeked little girl in a baby babushka, the tiny headscarf tied under her chin.

I unwrapped it slowly. The same smell of the same chocolate my father had brought home for me every week in his leather briefcase, and now the girls on the bus into Moscow said: taste it.

Breaking off a piece, I ate it, pretended it was a delightful new treat, something I’d never tasted, and the girls all said, eat some more, eat it all, we have enough, come on as if it were a competition, a way to rate me, and I bit into the chocolate again, nodding and smiling for their benefit. I looked out of the window where I saw my father. I pushed my face against the window. Traffic bumper to bumper. Crowds on the street. Neon. Billboards. Shops. A city I hardly knew, and then I saw him just near Lubyanka Square, the KGB headquarters where he had his office.

The huge yellow stone building, where the statue of the founder of the Russian secret police was “hanged” when communism collapsed, hanged, hauled away. I always loved meeting my dad there because the KGB was next to Dysetsky Mir, Kid’s world, the greatest toy shop on earth, it had seemed then. I remembered. Lubyanka, with its terrifying jail, was sometimes joked about in private, called “Adults’ World.”

I saw my dad, walking along, perhaps heading to his office, swinging his good American leather briefcase in which he brought home my chocolates.

Alionka had been my favorite of all the sweets he brought home--cranberries in sugar, a chocolate rabbit for New Years, Stolichnaya with same label as vodka and vodka inside the candies.

Outside, the window the evening sun lighting him up, him dodging traffic, jogging gracefully across the street, carrying the briefcase he had brought home America, which he polished every night at the kitchen table.

"You think it smells of America," my mother always said a little dismissively, but he was proud of it because other officers carried satchels made out of East German leather, or even cardboard. On my father’s fine leather case was a label that read: Mark Cross. Did people look at me? Did they see through the façade, the veneer, the all American, all New York cop? Could they see the Russian, the immigrant, the man whose father was a KGB hero, a KGB creep?

My father when he was with the KGB all those years back, knew how to get information out of people better than anyone I ever met. In the l960 and early 70s, he was a star, enough of a star that they let him travel. He had been to New York.
"Always be quiet," my dad had said. "Always wait." Information came through a sort of easy seduction. Be cool was his message, though he would not have used the word.

The blowhards, the guys quick on the draw with clever retorts, the furious, the overly confident, never learned anything worth knowing. Like my father, I was good at it. Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana had lived—somebody dropped this as soon as I got in the door--was close to the Russian Embassy. Maybe in the next Revolution, the new Russians could set up shop here.

London had always been a good place to operate out of. My mother used to tell me about it late at night when Moscow was asleep. She told me how Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had been in London, Lenin and his wife to a nice place in Kensington, Stalin, who was broke, in a flea pit.  She liked spinning her stories about the so-called Soviet heroes. It made her feel better. It was her form of sedition, these late-night sessions."

from DISURBED EARTH

"I had adored my father. He was handsome and very tall and blue-eyed and he brought home special treats for me.

He liked games, my dad; he taught me chess and he played practical jokes. But, then, games were his business. Games that involved dressing up and uniforms and medals and rituals and marching around. My father laughed and joked with me and he brought me candy and he never really felt like an adult.         

It wasn’t until later that I understood what he did; that his games included secrets and duplicity and death.  When I was fourteen because of my mother who was rebellious and made a fuss about refuseniks and became one herself, the KGB dumped my father and then I understood. I began to hate everything around me, the rote lessons at school, the dreary way people dressed, the obsessive little faces of the Young Pioneers as glazed and zealous as their Nazi counterparts in another era. Still, secretly, part of me believed my father was different, that he had been a hero. It was confusing, but I was a kid and so long as he took me fishing to the river on Sundays, it was OK. I remember thinking, when we went fishing, when we left before light Sundays with our gear, when we sat by the water and he told me stories: this is how it will be when I have sons.

I never had the sons. I was always afraid that if I got married and had a child, I’d lose my escape route. A family would weigh me down and I would drown. All my life I had wanted to escape; now I was a middle-aged adolescent, unmarried, no kids, still frightened. The men I knew seemed grown up, New Age men who attended the births of their children and took turns caring for them. "

from RED MERCURY BLUES

 

“Red Square always frightened me, especially when we marched on May Day or pledged ourselves to the revolution at Lenin’s tomb. I was always sick before; my father always made me go.

The tomb itself was terrifying. The shrunken figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the backlighting, his syphilitic orange glow, my horror that I would be trapped inside.
One year, a kid noticed Lenin’s ear had dropped off. He said so in the loud proud formal manner of the ass-licking top Soviet boy he was. The tomb was shut down suddenly, we were held inside while guards, waving their AKS, grubbed around on the floor, looking for Lenin’s ear.

Artie thought in those days he was some kind of mutant, a traitor, laughing to himself about this great man who invented a wonderful world for boys like himself and now all he does is laugh at the missing ear.

from DISTURBED EARTH

"9/11

Mike kept the picture of the Trade Center in a place of honor in the middle of the mirrored wall over the juggernaut of cereal boxes and a cake-stand with a pile of Danish pastry. It was a photograph of the buildings before they fell. In the margins, one of Mike’s customers had painted angels and over them the names of the friends Mike lost: firemen, cops, people who used to stop by; I looked at it every morning when I ate breakfast. I couldn’t stop looking; 9/11 was like an addiction.

 

September 11. We heard the thunder. We saw the fireballs. Mike’s windows cracked, the dust was every where. Then people came running. The Dust People, they swamped Mike’s place, it was jammed up with people and the dust. We called it dust because we didn’t know what else to call it. Eighteen months ago. People felt embarrassed because they were still dreaming bad stuff; they kept it in now, they didn’t talk about it, but nothing was the same. Everybody felt it down where I still lived on Walker Street. You can’t live in downtown Manhattan and stay the same, especially if, like me, you’re a cop and knew guys who got incinerated. Cops. Firemen. Emergency workers. The ones who lived through it had asbestos in their lungs.  Coughing blood was something you kept to yourself; I was still coughing, but I cancelled the doctors’ appointments and told myself it was the cigarettes I had to stop, and couldn’t.

Downtown that day, I didn’t want to think about it anymore, or about the days afterwards we spent digging. I dreamed about it every night. It changed me. People thought: get over it already; you could see it in their faces, so I tried. I didn’t want to travel, didn’t want to leave my neighborhood, my friends, my apartment. If New York was going to stay standing, I had to put my arms around it."