MOSCOW, September 18, 2005 -- Katrina has come to Moscow – well, not exactly; but Sergei has been doing an awfully good imitation lately.
Since announcing that he was going to live here with me and Zhorik and not go back to Stavrapol or Svetlograd for at least the next two years, he’s been increasingly argumentative, hostile, and generally unpleasant. He finds fault or argues with virtually anything I say. He gets angry about everything, won’t leave the house, plays computer games all night and sleeps all day.
Tuesday night, we were all – he, Zhorik, and I – sitting in the kitchen when he announced he wanted to move to America.
“No chance, honey. You could never get a visa.”
“How ’bout Germany?”
“Germany’s got lots of economic problems right now. I don’t think they’d let you immigrate.”
“France?”
“Ditto.”
“Maybe Australia. If we could all three move to Australia, would you do it?”
“Yes, I would. But the first thing you’d have to do is contact the embassy and find out what their policy is now. I think they require that an immigrant have $ 100,000 or something like that before they let him in.”
He sagged a little further.
“I don’t want to live here,” he continued. “The police are all bandits. The mafia are bandits. Everybody’s a bandit.”
This from the guy who has lately taken to declaring that he’s going to rob a casino and get rich?
“Well, you’re right about that,” I agreed.
“There’s no reason to stay here any more.”
And then he finally got around to the problem: “Andrei’s getting married, and …..
I really didn’t hear any more.
Andrei getting married!!!??? My lifelong partner who has promised repeatedly that he will never get married – that he and I will live together and take care of each other as long as I live? What about my dream of setting up my West Virginia survival farmette in Stavropol-Svetlograd?
But it would explain Sergei’s cyclonic behavior. It had pulled the world out from under him. One of the few unchangeables in his life has been his and twin Andrei’s unremitting commitment to each other. It’s actually quite touching: I’ve never seen two people who weren’t married or dorking each other who were so inseparably entwined.
The sudden realization that someone was permanently coming between them was for Sergei an irreconcilable psychological blow.
His fury has been surfacing in his interaction with me and in increased talk of suicide. His main reason for living has just been taken from him.
Andrei and his “fiancee” have known each other since they were children, Sergei said. They’re now living together and she’s also helping him in his work.
When Sergei finally got around to coming to bed about 5:00 the next morning, I asked, “how long have you known Andrei was planning to get married?”
Another hurricane blast: “Why are you asking me that now? What difference does it make? Why didn’t you ask me that last night? I want to sleep. What’s wrong with you?”
Coincidentally, the following day Andrei sent an SMS: “Hello, Dane, I love and miss you. I’m now in the hospital. My heart hurts. I may have to have an operation.”
I immediately called the number from which he had sent it. When he announced that “I have very little money on my phone.” I handed it to Sergei so they could talk. After a few seconds, Sergei shouted, “fuck you,” and hung up.
A few minutes came another SMS -- to Sergei: “Why did you hang up on me? I really don’t have any money. Let’s talk by SMS.”
Then another: “Don’t be offended. You can’t imagine how hard it is for me. Is it okay if I visit you?” Then: “I guarantee you 100% I will visit you this week.” And finally: “Sergei, I want you to live next to us and we will live and work together. I will come visit you and our souls will be reunited. Okay? I love you and miss you and Zhorik.”
Suddenly Sergei was a new man. He was dancing on air – the old Sergei. He immediately began planning to return to Stavropol with Andrei and they will get rooms in the same apartment or whatever, and they will be “the inseparable twins again”
But unfortunately, it didn’t diminish his hurricane velocity. Or maybe it was just the eye of the hurricane.
With my increasingly demanding schedule – nearly 80 hours a week of teaching or traveling – I have to have six to seven hours of sleep. So Sergei and Zhorik have been turning off TV by 1 a.m. and playing – silent – computer games instead.
But Sergei has a new game, “Warcraft,” which utters guttural commands at crucial points in whatever battles they’re waging. The repetitive grunts drive me up a wall.
“Sergei, can you turn that down?” I asked about 12:30 a.m. He turned it down. “I can still hear it.” He turned it down a little more. “Honey, I can still hear it. Why do you need the noise?”
He slammed the computer with both hands, turned up the volume full force, started shouting and stormed out of the room.
I followed him into the kitchen. “Why are you angry?” I asked.
“I’m not angry.”
“Sergei, that kind of behavior is not acceptable. You know my schedule. I have to have my sleep. You’re going back to Stavropol with Andrei, right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Because when you’re like this I don’t want to live with you.”
Later he announced with the same level of intensity, “I’m not going back with Andrei.”
“Are you planning to live here?”
“I don’t know.”
Oi vay!
Andrei arrived on Thursday while I was having a lesson at Misha’s law firm. When I got home about 7:00, we hugged and kissed and chatted, and then, with Sergei and Zhorik in the kitchen, I casually mentioned, “Sergei says you’re planning to get married.”
“No, no, Dane,” he replied with a quizzical look on his face. Why do you think that?
“Sergei said you were.”
“I said they were living together and I thought they were going to get married,” Sergei said defensively.
“Honey, you said they were getting married.”
“No, Dane. I’m just living with her and fucking her. We don’t plan to get married. I don’t ever plan to get married. How could I get married? I don’t have the money, I don’t have a home. I couldn’t get married.”
“So our dream of living together in Stavropol is still alive?”
“Yes, of course. By the way, when are you planning to move there?”
“Well, here in Moscow, I have many friends and a good job. If I moved there, and if Sergei started acting like he’s acting, and if you’re going to be living with a girlfriend, where would that leave me? Besides, Zhorik wants to go to school here in Moscow, and he needs a place to live.”
Andrei then suggested Zhorik should consider going to school in Stavropol. But I could tell by Zhorik’s reaction that he doesn’t want to do that.
In any case, we’ve still got lots of time to figure it out.
Zhorik has announced that he has to go to St. Pete next week for Oleg’s trial in connection with the drunken pocketing of some kid’s watch (Chapt. 108). His trip will cost at least a couple hundred bucksi.
Fortunately, we should have that much. In addition to Institute of Diplomacy classes starting Wednesday night, I have two new students – Ilya, a nice but not very cute college student pal of former student Andrei who will meet twice a week; and Andrey, a very handsome, straight, 32-year-old business pal of Kreutz’s who wants lessons three or four times a week at 9 p.m.!
So the money is coming in pretty steadily now. I’ll finish paying off Rod and Nadya this week, but I’ll probably have to pay the twins’ bus fare to Stavropol in addition to Zhorik’s pilgrimate to Peter.
Zhorik and I continue to have a very loving – but frustratingly non-sexual -- relationship. Last night as he was lying on the bed in his shorts, I lay down beside him and gently massaged his stomach, chest, nipples and navel. He seemed quite receptive. He pointed to his naked legs. He had cut the hair off them with scissors the night before.
After feeling the stiff bristles on his legs, I let my hand fall on his flaccid dick. He immediately removed it.
And then we went for some canned cocktails and a “bench session,” in which he said Andrei had assured him that Sergei will be going back to Stavropol with him.
“And then we can have a normal life again?”
“Yes, we’ll have a normal life,” he smiled. “Thank god.”
Since – thanks to the $ 5,000 “loan” to Andrei – I had no summer vacation, I’ve been thinking of taking one during the International Baccalaureate School #69 break the first 10 days of November. And since Zhorik can’t get an international visa, we’ve been thinking of going to Yalta in Ukraine, which I think doesn’t require a visa for Russian citizens.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said as we sat on the bench, “maybe in November we should go to visit Andrei and Sergei in Stavropol instead of going to Yalta.”
“No, I think it would be better to go to Yalta.”
But we have to find a tourist agency and start finding out about costs, visas, etc. We promised each other we’ll do that next week.
Khodorkovsky has announced he’s running for the Russian Duma, which immediately set the Kremlin in motion. Under the constitution, a convicted person can run for elective office as long as his appeals are still active.
So the molasses-in-January court system has announced it is stepping up the hearing on Khodorkovsky’s appeal in an obvious attempt to nip the process in the bud before the Dec. 4 by-election.
But that isn’t stopping his supporters. They have announced that if the Kremlin tries to block his candidacy, “we will hold people’s elections anyway.
“We want to follow the law,” they told a press conference. “But as soon as the authorities stop following the law, this process will be conducted outside the system.” He said this would involve asking voters to write in Khodorkovsky’s name on the ballots or to simply hand the unfilled ballots to Khodorkovsky’s staff at the balloting point.
According to the Moscow Times, such a move “could torpedo the…election” by invalidating it and allowing Khodorkovsky’s team to count his votes, which could prove a huge PR embarrassment to the Kremlin.
The region the convicted former Yukos oil magnate is running in is the very liberal district that is home to Moscow State University, where it is expected Khodorkovsky could count on widespread support.
Ironically, it’s also the voting precinct of Pres. Putin.
To get around the impassable barrier of getting his election ads on state-owned or controlled TV, campaign officials plan to blanket the precinct with ad screens at metro stations and plasma ads on vans circulating throughout the area – a tactic that was widely and “very effectively” used in toppling Ukraine’s dictatorial regime in the “Orange Revolution,” according to Ivan Starikov, of the liberal Union of Right Forces.
“Huge numbers of people gathered to watch the ads shown on these screens.”
One of Khodoorkovsky’s major assets in the campaign is Sergei Dorenko, a former popular TV anchor who, before splitting with Putin, helped get him elected in 2000. As a highly regarded political tactician, he was considered an effective force in the success of the Orange Revolution.
So Khodorkovsky’s threatened candidacy seems to be fulfilling predictions that by sentencing him to nine years for the crime of publicly opposing him, Putin has managed to make him “the focal point for real – meaning outside the Kremlin system – opposition in Russia” (Chapt. 133) who is galvanizing left- and rightwing politicians and further stoking Putin’s paranoia about the thing he fears the most: an orange revolution in his own back yard.
The Russians have a saying: Be careful when you dig a hole for somebody else – you might fall in it yourself.
Chapt. 165 – 2068 words
Columns :: Hurricane Sergei; Andrei dismisses marriage rumors
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