Red Square Read Online Free PDF Page A

Julya said.
        'A car?' Jaak was more respectful.
        'A Volvo.'
        'Naturally. Your bottom should touch nothing but foreign leather.' Jaak implored her, 'Help me. Not for cars or ruby rings, but because I didn't send you home the first time we took you off the street.' He explained to Arkady, 'The first time I saw her she was wearing gumboots and a mattress. She's complaining about Stockholm and she came from somewhere in Siberia where they take anti-freeze to shit.'
        'That reminds me,' Julya said, unfazed, 'for my exit visa I may need a statement from you saying you don't have any claims on me.'
        'We're divorced. We have a relationship of mutual respect. Can I borrow your car?'
        'Visit me in Sweden.' Julya found a page in her magazine that she was willing to deface. She wrote three addresses in curly script, folded the margin and tore it along the crease. 'I'm not doing you a favour. Personally, Kim is the last person I'd want to find. You're sure I can't buy you lunch?'
        Arkady said, 'I'll just treat myself to one more cube before we go.'
        'Be careful,' Julya told Jaak. 'Kim is crazy. 'I'd rather you didn't find him.'
        On the way out, Arkady caught another glimpse of himself in the bar mirror. Grimmer than he thought, not the kind of face that woke up expecting sunshine. What was that old poem by Mayakovsky? 'Regard me, world, and envy: I have a Soviet passport!' Now everyone just wanted a passport to get out, and the government, ignored by all, had collapsed into the sort of spiteful arguments that erupted in a whorehouse where no customers had come to call in twenty years.
     
    What could explain this shop, this country, this life? A fork with three out of four tines, two kopecks. A fishhook, twenty kopecks, used, but fish weren't choosy. A comb as small as a seedy moustache, reduced from four kopecks to two.
        True, this was a discount shop, but in another, more civilized world wasn't this trash? Wouldn't it all be thrown away?
        Some items had no discernible function. A wooden scooter with rough wooden wheels and no pole, no bars to hang on to. A plastic tag embossed with the number '97'. What were the odds someone had ninety-seven rooms, ninety-seven lockers or ninety-seven anything and was only missing the number '97'?
        Perhaps it was the idea of buying. The idea of a market. Because this was a cooperative shop and people wanted to buy . . . something.
        On the third table was a bar of soap, shaved and shaped out of a larger, used bar of soap, twenty kopecks. A rusty butter knife, five kopecks. A blackened light bulb with a broken filament, three rubles. Why, when a new bulb was forty kopecks? Since there were no new light bulbs for sale in the shops, you took this used bulb to your office, replaced the bulb in the lamp on your desk and took the good bulb home so that you wouldn't live in the dark.
        Arkady slipped out of the back door and walked across the dirt towards the second address, a milk shop, cigarette in his left hand, which meant that Kim had not been inside the cooperative. Up the street, Jaak seemed to be reading a newspaper in a car.
        There was no milk, cream or butter in the milk shop, though the chill rooms were stacked with boxes of sugar. The empty counters were staffed by women in white coats and caps who wore the boredom of a rearguard. Arkady lifted a sugar box. Empty.
        'Whipped cream?' Arkady asked an assistant.
         'No.' She seemed startled.
        'Sweet cheese?'
        'Of course not. Are you crazy?'
        'Yes, but what a memory,' Arkady said. He flashed his red ID and walked around the counter and through the swinging door into the rear. A lorry was in the bay and a delivery of milk was being unloaded, directly into another, unmarked lorry. The manager of the shop came out of a chill room; before the door snapped shut, Arkady saw wheels of cheese and tubs of butter.