Read Moscow but Dreaming for Free Online Page B

complained at length, speaking hastily, as if trying to prevent me from talking back. I waited. I did not really expect him to talk about things we did not talk about—why he left or why he never told his wife where I was working. In turn, I made sympathetic noises and never mentioned how angry I was that his emigration back in the ’70s fucked me over. What was the point? I did not blame him for his mother’s death, and he didn’t blame me for anything. He just complained that his grandkids don’t understand Russian. I don’t even remember what they, or their parents, my own grandchildren, look like.
    When he was done talking, I went to bed and even slept until the voices of children outside woke me in the early afternoon. They always carried so far in this weather, those first warm days of not-quite summer, and I lay awake on my back listening to the high-pitched squealing outside, too warm in my long underwear. And if your life is like mine—if it’s as long as mine, that is—then you find yourself thinking about a lot of shit. You start remembering the terrible sludge of life at the bottom of your memory, and if you stir it by too much thinking, too much listening to the shouts and bicycle bells outside, then woe is you, and the ghosts of teenage girls will keep you up all night and all day.
    The cars NKVD drove were called black ravens, named for both color and the ominous nature of their arrival in one’s neighborhood. Narodniy Komissariat Vnutrennih Del—it’s a habit, to sound out the entire name in my head. Abbreviations just don’t terrify me. The modern yellow canaries of the police seemed harmless in comparison, quaint even. But those black ravens . . . I remembered the sinister yellow beams of the headlights like I remembered the squeaking of leather against leather, uniform against the seats, like I remembered the roundness of the hard wheel under my gloved hands.
    Being a chauffeur was never a prestigious job, but driving him—driving Beria—filled one with quiet dread. I remember the blue dusk and the snowdrifts of late February, the bright pinpricks of the streetlamps as they lit up ahead of my car, one by one, as if running from us—from him, I think. I have never done anything wrong, but my neck prickles with freshly cut hairs, and my head sweats under my leather cap. I can feel his gaze on me, like a touch of greasy fingers. Funny, that: one can live ninety years, such a long life, and still shiver in the warm May afternoon just thinking about that one February night.
    It started to snow soon after the streetlights all flickered on, lining along the facades of the houses—all old mansions, being in the center of the city and all, painted pale blues and yellows and greens. The flight of the lights reminded me of a poem I read some years ago; only I could not remember it but tried nonetheless—anything to avoid the sensation of the sticky unclean stare on the back of my head, at the base of my skull, and I felt cold, as if a gun barrel rested there.
    “Slow down,” he tells me in a soft voice. There’s no one but him in the car, and I am grateful for small mercies, I am grateful that except for directions he does not talk to me.
    I slow down. The wind is kicking up the snow and it writhes, serpentine, close to the ground, barely reaching up high enough to get snagged in the lights of the car beams.
    “Turn off the lights.”
    I do, and then I see her—bundled up in an old, moth-eaten fur coat, her head swaddled in a thick kerchief. I recognize her— Ninochka, a neighbor who is rumored to be a bit addled in the head, but she always says hello to me and she is always friendly. The coat and kerchief disfigure and bloat her as she trundles through the snow, her walk waddling in her thick felt boots that look like they used to belong to her grandfather. I hope that this misshapen, ugly disguise would be enough to save her.
    I pick up the speed slightly, to save her, to drive past her and