Marilyn Monroe’s Russian Resurrection
Ivan Rebrov worked in the team of arrogant and impudent guy, Stepan, who was just born to do this murky timber business. Everybody, who had any power on these long roads to the port, was well bribed by him, and his trucks with lumber roared to the sea almost every night. But he was always late paying his hardworking men, and that day their pay was badly delayed, too. His men, used to vodka from almost childhood, and now weeks from their last drinks, could only stealthily curse their boss: they wouldn’t get a job anywhere else here. Probably, their boss delayed money deliberately: less vodka, more timber to the port.
Ivan Rebrov, as young as he was, also couldn’t live and work in the frozen woods without vodka. Even in the boarding-school he frequently got drunk not only with his gang, but also with their “educators”. Those were local village guys that couldn’t get any other job before army enlistment. Sometimes they even drank together, or loaned money for a bottle when their pupils were out of money they usually got for cranberries or mushrooms sold to a girl at mobile shop.
In February once, late in the dark, Rebrov and the driver returned with a load of lumber from remote allotment; a severe frost in the woods, in their stomachs nothing but hunger, and both in great need of a drink. Their truck struggled forward over the narrow bumpy log-path in the snows, its headlights pushing aside crowded at the road black timber. Suddenly, behind the turn down the hill, where they worked all last week, two rubies of tail lights flared up under truck’s headlights. It was plain whose jeep stood there in this midst of dense forest: Stepan, the boss, arrived to inspect with master’s eye the stacks of his ready to howl timber.
“Stop here!” suddenly and unexpectedly for himself Rebrov said to the driver. The heavy truck groaned and stopped. In the dark Rebrov went by tractor trail to the timber stacks, and the anger as a cat with its claws tore on him. He was going just to get some money his boss owed them, because he badly needed a drink, and he was bored to death with potatoes’ meals of their team cook. But when he saw Stepan with a flashlight between the stacks he pulled out his knife. Rebrov thought that he would simply show this knife to Stepan, and the boss would understand: his hard workers are desperate, just on the edge without money. But boss, Stepan, had heard the roar of the truck, and now stood there looking cautiously at someone coming to him in the dark. In the forest a man senses a danger clearly, and Stepan sensed it immediately. When Rebrov was closer and he could make out in the dark his stony face, Stepan picked up two-yard long piece of timber and got ready. Closer, when they saw the eyes of each other, both men understood it was too late to talk. Stepan began to raise his timber, but Rebrov suddenly threw his fur-hat up and forward. Stepan glanced upwards, uncovering his bare neck under thick collar of sheepskin jacket, and immediately the knife entered his bare flesh under Adam’s apple.
Stepan still wheezed and spattered the snow with bloody foam out of his ripped throat, but Rebrov already threw open his jacket and fumbled through his pockets. From the wallet he threw everything out on the snow and picked up the money. There wasn’t much – who would go with money to the forest.
When they moved on, the driver asked, “Talked to him?”
“No.”
They drove in silence to the settlement, but nearing the store Rebrov said, “Stop here.”
With moans and groans heavy log transporter stopped. In the store Rebrov bought two bottles of vodka and a pair of pork stew cans, and he was out of money again. In the truck’s cab he handed one bottle and a can to the driver. Driver looked cautiously into Rebrov’s eyes and didn’t move to take it at first. But then took it all right, and shoved it under his seat.
“Utter a word that we stopped there, and I’ll saw your head off,” simply and softly said Rebrov.
The driver, huge middle-aged man, just looked into this youngster’s eyes, nodded and said nothing.
The jeep was soon found, and police came. They walked and looked over freshly and heavily snowbound allotment with high timber stacks and left it until spring. They found Stepan only at the end of April, when the snow melted in the clearings, and this snowdrop, as police call them, showed up.
“The lousy gambler!” Rebrov thought of the banker Levko, looking through the window. “It is my bank, mine. I beat all the money from the debtors ten years ago – they wouldn’t return you a cent!”
That was true. Indeed, after the default of a ninety-eighth, when even the state itself refused to repay its debts, the winged phrase emerged among shady businessmen, “Only cowards repay their debts”. Bankrupted Levko gave his new acquaintance a list with a dozen of names and multiple-digit sums against each one and said to bandit Rebrov, “Of the money you knock out of these gents half is yours. And then we’ll launch a new bank together.” Bandit Rebrov knocked the debts from almost all of these gentlemen. The only one who did not respond to his arguments was dead the next day. With this money they opened a new bank, which Levro proposed to name "Straight Credit". It sounded respectable, honest, but a banker and gambler Levko meant something different: a winning hand in a poker, Straight Flush.
Outside the window, down in the village, dogs barked, late roosters cried, and these simple homely sounds soothed Rebrov. Years ago this time in the mornings his mother returned home from the barn with a steaming bucket of milk. She kindled fire in the stove, and with the crackling of wood their dark morning hut turned bright and joyful.
When Rebrov by sheer chance came to Moscow, he could not really believe that one can permanently live in this city and stay normal and happy. When he pocketed his first millions, he immediately moved out of city. However, when the realtor took him to see a newly built house in the “elite” cottage settlement that sprang then around Moscow with mostly corrupt or criminal money, and when he saw these stone mansions with turrets, saw faces of this “elite”, that would become his neighbors, he didn't even bother to look what’s inside, and just turned and walked back to his car.
He told his realtor to find him better some land in a simple village, where he could build a house of his dream. Realtor found in a week this beautiful but crumbling village with four neighboring families dreaming to get out of here and become city dwellers. Rebrov bought them for a million greenbacks four apartments in the capital, burned all their huts, sheds, and started new construction. He built his house of the northern fir-trees, almost a yard thick. He hewed house frame himself beaming with pleasure, and the hired carpenters just smiled with amazement and clicked their tongues.
All of his land Rebrov planted with apple-trees. But then he made a mistake that he didn’t know so far how to set right. He fenced his land with a wall of pressed tin sheets. That was quite widespread way for newly rich to hide away from the peering eyes. Outside, such a brightly painted fence looked good. But inside, one’s look was obstructed everywhere by close and monotonous wall that immediately evoked a disturbing feeling of being confined to some penitentiary. Rebrov never had been in a jail being convicted, with God’s mercy. But he spent three months in Butyrka preliminary prison, waiting for a court, on charges of plunder. Nothing was proved, but Rebrov learned there to appreciate his freedom.
Rebrov was in love just once when he was eighteen, and as it turned out the last time too. She lived in the neighboring village, on other side of the lake. That village was much bigger, and there was even a food store and elementary school with two classes. Adolescent Ivan Rebrov went to his school on a horseback: every day six miles around the lake, and six back. Only in January, with wolf weddings in full play, when they ran baring their teeth even into the villages, his father harnessed his horse in a sledge, threw inside an old rusty shotgun and drove his son to the school. But that happened only if his father could be livened up in the morning, because in the evenings he was mostly dead drunk.
From May till late autumn, if there was no high winds, young Rebrov sailed to that village by boat. The boat was made of two thick aspens, hollowed out and fastened by steel bolt. They didn’t build boats any other way here. On the banks of numerous forest lakes one could always find such a boat, roiki, all of them for everyone’s use. Very stable and lifting, they did not require any maintenance: overturned in late autumn, with aspens bottoms up, they were left thus until spring. They were frequently used to transport cattle to far pastures, and less frequently, coffins, for the last trips by lake to the cemetery.
The cemetery was even further behind that village, on a hill by another lake. There were buried all Rebrov’s grandfathers and grandmothers, there also rested in peace his beloved mother. Near the cemetery once stood a beautiful church, that was seen miles away, but in the thirties atheist bolsheviks dismantled it to use the quality old bricks and its bells for scrap. They left only high bell-tower, obviously, for some military reasons. Now this tower, declined and decayed, with thin birches growing on the crumbling bricks high over the ground, stood as if looking with sorrow at surrounding forests, lakes, the depopulated villages, recalling better life there: proper, godly and sober.
Ivan and Masha went to school together for only two years. From the third year he was sent to boarding school, and Masha was taken to her relatives living in the district center, having there a good high school. They saw each other and played together every summer, but real love came to Ivan Rebrov only at eighteen.
He worked then again in the woods, but with another team. He worked hard, sawing the timber and hauling it by the trucks. They paid better there and more regularly after that grim incident. Rebrov did not drink much and saved all the money: he wanted to repair his house and add one more room, good enough to bring his wife into. They both were waiting for spring to marry, when Masha will be eighteen, too.
Rebrov worked all that winter on distant allotments. Almost every week someone of their team went back home for a short stay to one of the neighboring villages, and Rebrov exchanged with his Masha gentle and loving letters. Rebrov never went home himself and didn’t see her several months: he wanted to test their love, because he had to go to the Army soon. He tested their love all right, though it didn’t endure their winter parting. By the end of the winter fewer letters reached the snowbound woods, and they became kind of formal and dry, and by the early spring they stopped coming. In April one fellow that came from the neighboring village frankly revealed to it to Rebrov, “She’s having a good time, your Masha.”
Rebrov went home only on First of May holidays. That was both official and folk festivities stretching often well up to Ninth of May, the Victory day. He sailed to her village by roiki with his little brother, but he didn’t go to her house but stayed by the store with a bunch of his old half-drunk friends. He drank half a glass of vodka, then some more, but his soul was trembling. Then he suddenly saw her. She walked down the village main street, closely arm in arm with some guy. Rebrov’s friends, who knew about his love, stopped talking at once, and the dead silence fell on store’s porch. She saw Rebrov, too. As if trying to hide her boy from Rebrov she fussily turned, but then stepped forward, with a back to her boy, breasts to Rebrov, with worried and scared eyes, as a bird protecting her nestling.
Rebrov stepped forward. He just wanted to say “Hi!” to congratulate her with a May’s Day, and maybe to have some talk. But she warily backed from him, bumping at her boy. Rebrov, taken aback, stopped. Something flashed in his affected by vodka mind. And getting his knife out of pocket, he walked to them. Deeply insulted, with everybody around watching, Rebrov felt he should kill this guy now, because nothing else could lift his months-old pain, whatever happens with him afterwards.
Unexpectedly she flung herself at him, threw her arms around his neck, kissing his face and pushing him back. Rebrov couldn’t even to move away his knife in time and it stuck between them with its blade between their stomachs. She was kissing his face all over, pushing back, step by step, away from her boy. Rebrov felt his knife cuts her, but she did not stop kissing, silently pushing him further back from her boy. Finally, he threw out his hand with the knife sideways and cast a quick look at it. The blade was glittering red. With his other hand Rebrov gently pushed her back, just to take a look at her. Down her waist over her festive dress ran a bloody stain.
Something that was painfully strained for months suddenly snapped and broke in him. He reached out his hand down to her bloody stain, but she at once threw herself back from his hand, and Rebrov saw closely her eyes. There was nothing in it but unconcealed stony fear. Rebrov let down the knife from his hand and it fell on the ground. Then he closed his face with both hands, turned and slowly walked away. Feet brought him down to the lake and he got into his boat. Something hard and tight suddenly squeezed his neck and a lump rose in his throat. He clamped both his hands to the eyes and his body violently shook all over. Soon his little brother came running after him. Rebrov leaned overboard, drew a handful of cold water and splashed it on his face.
At home Rebrov packed his sporting bag, tried to wake up his drunken father, but then hugged his brother and went in the light spring night to the railway station some fifteen miles away. Passenger train stopped there once a day. On even days of a month the train went to Sankt-Petersburg, and on the odd days to Moscow. If it would have had happened to be an even day the train would have taken Rebrov to Petersburg, where his uncle lived, a non-drinking cheery fellow. Every time he came for vacation, to see his sister when she was alive, he always lured Rebrov to come and work with him at metal works. However, early morning of that day in May happened to be odd. Rebrov went to Moscow, became there firstly a burglar, and then a professional killer. He never came back to his village.
4. Lunch with a Banker
Levko has chosen Chinese cuisine for lunch with his partner. First dish was to be a swallow's nest, that’s a soup cooked of small fishes caught and brought by swallows to build their nests, glued together with something tasty. Second dish was simpler, the duck a la Peking with bamboo shoots. Levko hired his first private cook in the nineties when he founded his first bank. It was vitally sensible: in those wild years the less the banker showed up in crowded places, the longer he was expected to live. He named his first bank as a born gambler and reckless card player: Bid Credit. This bank, with the doors from a dirty backyard, did not deal in loans, but mostly had laundered criminal money. If Levko ever gave any loans then, that was to the traders who brought to the country second-hand clothes or long overdue sausages and canned food bought cheaply from Europe’s shops. That was quick and profitable turnover for his bank. But the main business of his bank was laundering criminal rubles and moving it abroad turned into hard foreign currency, minus, of course, a fat percent for his bank’s risk and trouble. Also, his bank transferred rubles from its accounts into paper cash keeping no record and trail, if the owners needed it for some shady and murky deals. That was even more illegal. Though, the problems were only with the suitcases to carry to and fro billions of those inflated and weak rubles, called then "wooden".
Levko also stuffed his pockets with easy money when privatization was undertaken by current government. Issued privatization vouchers, a silly idea in the falling apart country, meant to justly divide all of the state’s riches among two hundred million people. But currently those pieces of paper had meant or cost almost nothing in those hungry years and were sold by most people just for dinner. Thus almost all riches of the great country were seized and divided between a hundred fat corrupt cats; two hundred million people got nothing. Levko’s bank very actively bought and sold those notes of country’s potential wealth, getting huge and quite legal profits.
Confused by privatization and shock therapy applied by vigorous but entirely ignorant government, millions of Russians took their scarce “wooden” rubles, fast depreciating with inflation, to newly sprung unknown banks such as Levko’s Bid Credit. Advertizing in the newspapers, Levko boldly promised everyone a hundred percent gain, but by the end of year the ruble lost thousand percent of its value, leaving him profits he could never dream of.
Those were golden years for such operators as Levko, and no wonder it so foolishly ended in ninety eighth with a crash. Country finance could no long endure economy “a la Levko” and had burst as a bubble; vigorous but ignorant “vouchers-managers” drove the country to default. Bid Credit went bankrupt in concert with his country’s government. Levko then reasoned that if even his State does not pay its debts, he won’t do that even more so. His own money was transferred in advance to off-shores, because he felt long before that something wrong was going on: the state government, as a loser gambler in tatters, was borrowing money by growing every week three-digit percentages.
Bid Credit vanished. They simply removed the sign and locked all the doors. But still there were dozens of those who owed money to the bank, and a lot of money. To lose it seemed to Levko ridiculous. Though the debtors were shrewd enough and also hid their money wherever they could, though to sue them in a civilized way and get then just pennies was stupid: those pennies would immediately be claimed by bank’s creditors. So it was the best to go bankrupt and approach the bandits. That’s when the banker Levko met the killer Rebrov.
Levko always lunched at his spacious office, because he did not like being away from his computers even for an hour. Everywhere one could throw a glance, on the tables and on the walls, flickered and silently stirred charts and tables on computer monitors. The world stock exchanges directly reported to Levko the current results of his risky financial speculations. He was an innate gambler. As a youngster he had begun playing cards for living on golden beaches of Sochi. At nights, in stuffy and smoke-filled hotel rooms Levko beat and baffled rich Caucasian food markets traders, winning all they had on them. But never Levko entered numerous casinos, that were opening everywhere with perestroika. He played only those games where chances and luck were on his side, but not obviously on someone else's. Levko was a very clever gambler.
Five minutes to one Levko tore his eyes from the monitors and went to the farther corner of his office where the lunch table was laid by the window, and attentively inspected it. The table was served in Chinese style with the blue elegant porcelain. Levko was an aesthete in everything. At lunch he liked listening to classical music, particularly opera arias, which he adored. Therefore, he swiftly went through the disk collection on the shelf, looking for something Asian, and chose Cio-Cio-San.
Levko was an avid concertgoer and frequenter of opera theatres, at home and abroad. He had many friends behind the stage, and almost all ladies, whom he invited to his two-storey apartment, were of those arty circles. Those nights he sent away his servants, so they wouldn’t babble, because Levko was married. His wife and son lived mostly in London, coming back just for short visits, and that suited Levko fine. The reason was his son’s bad case of mischief. His son, a sixteen-year-old goof, studied at school there, but a year ago he got involved in a bad incident of group rape. All the boys involved were from good rich families, though the girl was from a respectable family too. To hush up this case Levko had to disburse, with pain in his soul, several hundred thousand of British pounds. The case was "amicably" hushed up, but after that incident his wife rented apartment near his son’s school and lived there, keeping an eye on her son
Levko seated his guest facing the window and took place at the opposite side, to watch two large plasma monitors on a wall.
“Well, I don't offer you a ‘martini’, but I will drink one for the appetite,” said Levko fingering a napkin. “Or will you?”
Rebrov shook his head and pursed up his lips; he didn’t drink for several months. Young waitress, with a happy smiling face, brought a bowl and poured soup into cups with porcelain spoons. When she closed the door behind her, Levko said, “Vladimir arrives next Friday.”
Rebrov tore off his eyes from the window where he watched the crows sitting on a poplar tree and looked at Levko. "That's it,” he thought, “So it’s real."
“Are you ready?” Levko asked, and Rebrov just nodded. “Did you warn your men?”
“Not yet, too early.”
Both fell silent taken up by their soup. Rebrov tasted some, and then just stirred the soup with the spoon, driving swallow’s little fishes around the cup. Levko ate with healthy appetite, considering his next important and touchy question.
“What on earth happened to that poet Sergey?” He asked very lightly.
“Suicide, they say. Hung.” Rebrov shrugged his shoulder.
“Why? Such a capable twin!”
Levko contemplated Rebrov's face with sharp eyes of a gambler: any muscle of his face could give him out. Levko had met that Sergey just once, and he went to see him out of curiosity, as a freak of nature, and was amazed by his resemblance to the great poet. Levko didn’t care at all about that strange out-of-date twin, and whether he already met with his great prototype. What he worried about now was a possible double game being played behind his back. Didn’t Rebrov himself put Sergey’s head into the noose?
Rebrov didn’t answer the question considering it rhetorical. He caught with his spoon a little fish and asked, “How do the swallows catch them, as they can’t swim?
“They are Chinese,” Levko said, engaged with his soup. Listening to quiet aria of unhappy Cio-Cio-San he continued to think of nuisances. He never trusted anybody in his affairs, and the leftist politician Fomin, he recently met, could be trusted even less. One could expect anything from such a determined Communist. Their great purposes, as it well known, justify any means. That’s what he told Levko, though what means were appropriate for him any current minute one could only guess. More so, because of their ideology the banker Levko should have been their worst enemy.
Levko had fed already millions of dollars to this leftist party, but they asked more and more, and he with no debate donated more off his thin, almost ruined bank balance. But it shouldn’t have to go this way much longer. His investments should return soon with a thousand-fold gain, just in one week, at longest one and a half. Although, there was no hanged poet in their scenario! Why is this mess?
Suddenly the charts on TV screens on the opposite wall sharply stirred, and Levko jerked his head up and fixed his cold eyes on them. In the morning Levko entered into a pair of not very big deals in the currency markets; first one, with an expectation of the growth of the dollar against the euro in London Stock Exchange, and the second, of the fall of the dollar against the Russian ruble in Moscow Exchange. All the morning before lunch current prices for both deals looked like curved saws on the charts, though both were heading to the monitor corners where Levko wanted them to go. Thus, a steep hill was formed on a London chart, and an abrupt slope on Moscow one. But suddenly latest teeth of both chart saws crumpled and abruptly jumped: London, up, and Moscow, down.
“Excuse me,” said Levko and almost leaped to his computer. All was ready there for his final touch; he just twice clicked with the mouse button, and both his deals were closed, and very successfully closed. With his two fingers he earned these morning twenty thousand dollars, just a trifling in his situation, but very pleasant and encouraging, and it will warm him from inside till the end of a day. Levko returned to the lunch table in a very high spirits.