The Mulberry Bush (13 page)

There were no servants. Diego did the cooking, Luz the housekeeping. She knew the house, knew the routine, knew where everything was. On the morning of the final day, he went back to Buenos Aires and his practice. Luz and I stayed behind.

“Stay the week,” he said. “I'll come back on Friday, I have an operation in San Antonio Oeste, and we'll fly home late Sunday.”

We accepted. There was no reason not to. Fortuitously, Luz had taken the whole week off, and I could take whatever operational time was needed.

Diego said, “One small thing. A friend of mine will be stopping by sometime this week, I'm not sure which day, if you don't mind giving him dinner and putting him up overnight. He's a Russian. You'll enjoy him.”

Ah, a Russian.

Arkady Barburin, as he called himself, turned up at about five the following afternoon, bearing two chilled bottles of Cristal Champagne and a flat can of Beluga caviar. I wondered if he knew that Roederer had created this wine for Tsar Alexander II. Probably he did. He was a lover of minutiae, one of the new Russians, or maybe a re-creation of the old type we knew from nineteenth-century novels. He was interested in everything, a man of the world—well barbered, well dressed, smiling, a good talker, mannerly. A sort of Slavic Diego, you might say, including the inner twin that listened but never spoke. His
porteño
Spanish was flawless. He was in the import-export business, the South American representative of a Russian conglomerate whose Roman alphabet acronym he pronounced slowly in case Luz and I might have heard of it. I hadn't. This was far more sophisticated cover than the Soviet intelligence services could ever have provided. Caviar, Arkady said, was his favorite import. He hoped we liked it. We did. Luz made the usual accompaniments, and we ate it all with one bottle of the Cristal and drank the other with the sea bass she cooked.

Even before we drank the second bottle of Roederer, Arkady was entirely open to questions. That was his shtick. He was good at it. I asked him how he happened to know Diego.

“He saved my life—bypass surgery,” Arkady said. “I was feeling a bit dizzy, shortness of breath, inexplicable pain in my left thigh. Diego was
recommended by my doctor as the best surgeon in Buenos Aires. He saw me on fifteen minutes' notice, listened to my heart, put me on a treadmill, and two hours later put me on the operating table. I said, ‘Can't this wait?' He said, ‘If you want to die in the elevator, yes.' Quadruple bypass surgery. I've felt like a billion rubles ever since.”

As usual, Diego had been right. We enjoyed Arkady. He could talk about anything and give every impression that he knew what he was talking about. His sentences moved on an undercurrent of humor.

How had he become Diego's friend instead of just another ex-patient? How did anyone become a friend? They just hit it off, they were a lot alike despite having grown up in entirely different cultures half a world apart. In far different circumstances, too, Diego being an aristocrat, Arkady the descendant of serfs and peasants and workers. Arkady recited his autobiography, a fundamental giveaway: Only spies and others with something to hide act as if they want you to know everything about them on first meeting. In their case, the legend usually is pure fiction.

His grandfather, he said, was on Old Bolshevik who had actually known Lenin even before he came to power. After Lenin died, the old man made a joke about Stalin while drunk and was exiled to Siberia. He never came back. When this happened Arkady's father was already in university and a candidate for Party membership. He thought his life was over, but Stalin died in timely fashion, so he was allowed back in the fold. Arkady was born into the fold. He went to good schools and was accepted at a good university, which of course he named—Lomonosov, in Moscow.

“I studied economics but I was a capitalist by nature and instinct, also religious though I got over that, God knows where all that came from,” Arkady told us, “so when Gorbachev came and the Soviet Union fell into pieces there was a market for my ambitions, and here I am.”

Did he have a wife? Luz asked.

“Alas, no. There was a woman I loved when I was young, gorgeous and good, but at heart a Komsomol who never grew up, a Stalinist Peter Pan. She longed for a Communist world, wanted to work for an ideal instead of profit, so it was impossible.”

“What happened to her?”

“What usually happens. One day we were together never to part, and then we had an extra drink and a quarrel and the next day she disappeared. I kept looking for her and sometimes like Dr. Zhivago on his trolley car I saw a girl on the street and thought it was her and hurried to catch up. But it was always the wrong girl. It took me twenty years to have the heart attack.”

Arkady left the following afternoon. Before he got into his Mercedes he hugged Luz and warmly shook my hand.

“This was fun,” he said in English. “Let's stay in touch. I'm having a little anniversary party Saturday after next for my open-heart surgery. Diego will be the guest of honor. Please come—eight o'clock, dinner, tango, casual dress.”

He handed each of us a calling card. “No gifts,” he said, touching his chest. “Diego has taken care of that.”

Arkady was following the script.

At Arkady's party, a handful of aunts and uncles mingled with a new-rich crowd of several nationalities, including a knot of expatriate Russians wearing ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches and displaying lissome young wives in couturier dresses that probably cost about the same. As usual, the aunts and uncles embraced Luz as if she had just gotten home from her sophomore year abroad and greeted me with perfunctory smiles before whisking her away and leaving me standing all by myself.

My isolation didn't last long. Arkady appeared in a matter of minutes with a fellow Russian in tow.

He said, in English, “Say hello to Boris Gusarov. He works in our embassy, one of the higher-ups, so you two should have a lot in common.” I said, “I wonder about that. I'm pretty lowly.”

Boris, watching my eyes to see if I understood, said something to me in Russian: “I, too, am lowly. But I think you are modest and are not so lowly.” In Russian I said, “I am just as capable of being lowly as you are, Dmitri.”

“My name is Boris.”

“I know. I was joking.”

“Joking?” Boris said. “Explain to me what is funny.”

I said, “Have you ever seen the movie
Dr. Strangelove
?”

“No.”

“In it, Peter Sellers, the actor playing a prissy American president, tells the drunken Soviet prime minister over the hotline just before the Russian blows up the world with his Doomsday Machine, ‘I am capable of being just as sorry as you are, Dmitri.'”

Boris laughed—two barks. “Very amusing. The American president is sober?”

“In every way. He's a liberal.”

“You speak our language very well,” Boris said. “Let's talk Russian, do you mind?”

“No, but why?”

“I've been speaking Spanish all day. I'm tired of it. Speaking Russian doesn't seem to be much of an effort for you. Did you have a Russian mother? Wife? Girlfriend? Friend of the same sex?”

Was he trying to be offensive? When I didn't answer these rude questions immediately, Boris beckoned words from my mouth with a crooked forefinger. Obviously it was Boris's habit to let people know from the first moment who the alpha male in this conversation was going to be.

Diego arrived. Arkady exclaimed, “Ah, the guest of honor!”

He hurried across the room, smiling happily, arms outspread in welcome.

Boris said, “Doctors are always late. It is required by the Hippocratic oath.”

Maybe he was just trying to be funny. I didn't answer. Boris, his face close to mine, asked me ten rapid personal questions, all the while searching my face, as if like a living polygraph he could tell whether I was answering with the truth.

On the eleventh question I said, “Good to meet you, Boris.”

And walked away.

Boris gasped, recoiling from this insult.

On the fringe of the party I found a plainly dressed Argentinean couple standing alone in silence. We chatted. They were polite but puzzled. Who was I? They had never seen me before. I looked like a Yanqui but didn't sound like one.

Finally I introduced myself.

“Ah, Luz's friend from the north,” the husband said. “We've heard about you. Diego speaks highly of you.”

Really?

I said, “You and Diego are friends?”

“Since childhood. He and Violeta, here, are medical colleagues.”

Violeta, he said, was a surgical nurse. She assisted at some of Diego's operations, especially the ones he performed on weekends for the poor.

“Diego has saved many, many lives. In his airplane he will go anywhere at a moment's notice to save the life of a worker,” Violeta said, eyes ashine. “He always says that if you save one life, you save many—a wife or a husband, children, a mother, even children of the children that the saved person has not yet conceived and their children.”

Of course the opposite was true when you exploded a bomb in a crowded room—but why mention that?

I said, “Then you must have known Luz's father.”

Silence, then a reluctant nod from the husband, as if he was afraid he might utter an unmanly sob if he gave me his answer out loud. Violeta squeezed his hand, smiled up at him.

She said, “For many years Firmin's mother was his family's cook. My own father also worked for the Ordoñezes. Diego was like a cousin. The children were a commune in our neighborhood. You are lucky to know Diego, to have his good opinion. He doesn't make new friends easily.”

I wanted this conversation to go on, but before I could think of something to say in return, Violeta nodded brusquely, having said all she
wanted to say, and then took her husband by the hand and led him away. I watched them greet Diego and embrace him—the woman kissed him three times on the cheeks. Diego put an arm around the man's shoulders.

While all this was happening Arkady, a tall man, was gazing at me over the heads of the crowd. Boris was standing where I had left him, glaring at me. Arkady lifted his eyebrows:
What was going on?

Abruptly, Boris departed without saying good night. I didn't think I had seen the last of him. Rejection is a motivator for the Borises of this world. He would find a way to have his way. He would come at me from a different direction and balance my insult with a worse insult of his own. I was content to wait for him to make the next move.

A week or so later, out of the blue, Arkady invited me to lunch at Chan Chan, a so-called closed-door restaurant near Palacio Barolo. The chef specialized in creative fish dishes—no meat on the menu.

“It's a nice change from steak, steak, steak and chimichurri, chimichurri, chimichurri,” said Arkady.

So it was. During the appetizer, lobster salad, and the entrée, grilled sea bass, we talked about football—soccer in American English—in Russian. Arkady played in the park on Sundays with a team composed of expat Russians. It was called Gospoda—”the Lords,” or “the Gentlemen.” Under Stalin, this counterrevolutionary name would have been more than enough to land the whole team in the gulag.

Did I play football? I told him I had played in school. Was I any good? Within my limits, I said, I had been adequate. I had a knack for scoring but was no great shakes at anything else. As a fifteen-year-old, by sheer luck, I had, in practice, got the ball past a friend of my school's coach, a world-class goalkeeper who had played in the Olympics for, I think, Cameroon.

“What luck!” Arkady said, impressed. “We desperately need a striker. Ours was transferred by his company to Paris, the lucky dog. With your Russian, you could impersonate someone from Omsk or Tomsk and no
one would be the wiser except Boris, amazing fellow, who figures absolutely everything out. And he'd never tell.”

Arkady studied my reaction when he mentioned Boris's name.

I said, “What position does Boris play?”

“Goalkeeper, what else?” Arkady said. “I'm serious. Will you try out for us?”

“I don't think that would be good for my career, but thanks.”

Arkady mimed deep disappointment.

The waiter brought flan for me. Arkady skipped dessert. While I ate mine, he revealed the purpose of this luncheon.

“Speaking of Boris,” he said, “he's puzzled by what happened at the party. A little hurt, too.”

“‘Hurt'? What does he think happened?”

“You left him on the dance floor.”

Arkady's tone was light, but the look on his face was dead serious. “He wonders what he did to offend you. What
did
happen?”

“He put his hand on my ass.”

“Boris? You're joking.”

“Of course I am. But he comes on strong.”

“In what way?”

“Being interrogated as if I had just been arrested on suspicion of counterrevolutionary thought is not my idea of conversation.”

Arkady said, “Oh, that. I should have warned you. That's because Boris is shy, so he rattles off questions so he won't have to answer questions. It's just the old ‘the best defense is a good offense.' After the first fifteen minutes, he relaxes and becomes good company. He's a good guy, really.”

I worked on my flan and made no reply.

Arkady broke the silence.

“I knew Boris in university days,” he said. “Football again. My weekend team sometimes played his team. We'd drink together, both teams, afterward. Boris may look like a gorilla, but he's got a deep and open
mind. Smart. Trustworthy, loyal, friendly. Photographic memory. Good chess player. I never won a game he didn't let me win. Do you play chess?”

“Maybe not at Boris's level.”

Arkady said, “Look—really, no kidding, Boris is OK. Do yourself and me a favor. Give him a second chance.”

I said, “You're the buddy broker?”

He flushed:
And I thought
Boris
was rude?

The waiter brought coffee. Arkady sipped his and recovered.

With a smile, he said, “I just think you and Boris would get along just fine once the bad moment was behind you. I'd ask you and Luz to have dinner with me with Boris as the extra man, but somehow I don't think that would work out.”

I didn't contradict him on that point. I didn't want to kill all possibility of seeing Boris when I was in control, so I said, “I understand, Arkady. He's your friend. He has hidden qualities. But what's the point?”

“I think the two of you would get along if you gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

I tried to look skeptical.

After a moment of thought, as if he had not invited me to Chan Chan in order to make the exact suggestion he was about to make, Arkady said, “How about this? We meet at the soccer ground in the park—seemingly by chance if that's the way you want to do it—and you kick a few while Boris keeps goal. He's good at it. He won't let you get one by him if he can help it, I promise.”

I expelled a heavy OK-I-give-up breath and said, “All right, Arkady. Saturday?”

“Perfect,” Arkady said. “Before it gets hot? Seven o'clock?”

“Fine.”

At this, Arkady smiled as if it had just stopped snowing in Moscow.

Keeping my date with Boris cost me a hundred dollars for soccer cleats. I wore my running clothes and to warm up, ran the mile to the park in
running shoes with the cleats hanging around my neck and bouncing on my chest.

When I arrived on the stroke of seven, having taken a detour to kill time, Arkady and Boris were already at the football pitch. Boris, who wore his Gospoda goalkeeper's uniform, stood in the goal. Arkady was kicking the ball to him. The Russians saw me immediately but went on with their drill while I took a drink of water.

Arkady had a strong leg but was a wild kicker. This made Boris's job somewhat more challenging, but he was remarkably nimble for a man who looked more like a weight lifter than a whippet.

I studied him. He moved to his left less quickly than he moved to his right. He had a tendency to twitch right, wasting a fraction of a second before plunging left.

Finally, Arkady launched his final kick and in Russian shouted, “Fifty!”

Boris made a nice save.

Arkady, smiling, walked toward me with hand outstretched; Boris stayed where he was.

“You made it,” Arkady said, squeezing my hand. He was as sweaty as I was. “Welcome,” he said. “We were getting ready for the masked striker. You remember Boris.”

I nodded to Boris, who nodded back. He made an attempt to invest the gesture with cordiality, but his true intention was written all over him: His plan was to beat me, badly, and reestablish chimpanzee rank. I thought the first part was possible. I hadn't kicked a soccer ball into a net for twenty years. I mentioned this. Boris stared at me unsmiling, as if he would soon get the truth out of me.

I hoped so. Boris had a weakness in his play, and I thought I knew what that weakness was and how to take advantage of it. I knew, too, that it was possible to get lucky, because every goal I had ever scored owed more to good luck than to skill. Because of the daily runs my legs were strong enough. Also, I supposed my body would awaken its own memory of
how to play the game. It all depended on my brain. If it would consent to stop giving my muscles orders for a while and let my muscles do the thinking, I might have a chance.

Arkady said, “Do you want to warm up or are you loose enough already?”

“I'm good.”

Boris, still wordless—not trusting himself to talk without firing questions, maybe—trotted back to the cage, doing some sort of calisthenics as he went.

Arkady said, “OK. Ten practice kicks, then fifty kicks that count. Agreed?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Just like in a match, you only need one goal to win.”

I said, “How many penalty kicks?”

“Five at the end, if you need them. Is that agreeable?”

“Generous. Are you going to pass me the ball?”

“With pleasure.”

I said, “Let's skip the practice kicks.”

“Really?”

“Don't want to wear myself out.”

Arkady made a gesture. Boris flung the ball into play. At first, because of my long layoff from the game, I didn't quite know where I was or what I was trying to do. After the first few kicks, however, I began to enjoy myself. I had never taken soccer very seriously, but it had its moments: I did like to score. The rest of it I could take or leave alone, and as a bored kid in a suburb I mostly just counted the minutes until the clock ran out.

Arkady was far and away the best passer I had ever played with. He was quick, instinctive, agile. It didn't take the two of us long to find a rhythm. I made some bad shots—a few of them deliberate—and some good shots, the latter mostly to Boris's strong side. He gobbled them up. I'm left-footed by nature, so naturally he began to concentrate on his
right side. I flubbed a shot, then gave him a couple of saves to his right, then flubbed one over the goal. You might have thought all these mistakes would have aroused Boris's suspicions that I was up to no good, but maybe because I was an American (so what could I know about soccer?), this didn't seem to be the case.