Free Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland by Susan Richards Page B

became of their great love? When they were freed they ran off in opposite directions and never clapped eyes on one another again.” He paused. “That’s what Marx is doing to Natasha and me.”
    TURNING RUSSIA AROUND
    It was early evening in Marx. The breeze off the fields smelled sweet and the sky over the steppes was vast. Under the poplars of Lenin Alley groups of young men in nylon track suits, trousers hitched tight to display their manhood, were flirting with the miniskirted, bubblegum-popping girls. It was a welcome sight: their youth carried its own sort of promise.
    Natasha and I were invited to supper with Misha and his wife, Tatiana. We walked past broken benches, hacked-down trees, abandoned building sites, and row on row of jerry-built, battered residential blocks. The crippled, gifted art teacher I had just met walked this way to work every day: “I read all the way there and back without lifting my eyes from the book,” he confided. “It’s the only way I can survive the ugliness.” Marx was affecting me like that, too.
    In one of the battered blocks, we found Tatiana scrubbing crayfish in a red and white polka-dot kitchen. There were crayfish everywhere: in a bucket on the floor, crawling along the sideboard; boiling on the stove, steaming in a pink pile on the table. Tatiana was young, with large gray eyes, full lips, and wavy, ash-blonde hair. “I hope you like crayfish,” she said shyly, standing on one leg, wrapped in an apron, unconscious of her beauty. “There’s nothing much else to eat. Some boys were selling them by the roadside and Misha bought a sackful.”
    She and Misha had come to Marx to serve out their obligatory provincial stint after graduating as engineers from Moscow’s elite Baumann Institute. Marx’s secret electronics factory used to employ five hundred engineers to work on the electronics for Saratov’s arms factories. It was deemed a prestigious placement. So hush-hush was its operation that even its workers did not know the factory’s real name. They turned out toy cars, too, to give the factory an alibi. Now the bright young engineers like Misha and Tatiana had left, and toys were all the factory was making. Those who remained earned a token amount, when they were paid at all. Tatiana was happy that Misha was earning enough for her to be able to stay at home and look after their daughter, Polina.
    Presently, Misha walked in, pink and dripping, straight off the soccer field. Star of the factory’s team, he was putting on weight now. He was fair, like his wife, with blue eyes and a gentle face which lit up when he smiled. Natasha had described him to me as “the only honest businessman in Marx.” When I told him he laughed. “Honest? Not me! Well, it depends what you mean. I don’t stick to the law—no one could. But in the sense of being decent, I try.”
    What Natasha meant by saying that Misha and his partners were honest was that they had not set up their business by stealing from the state. Those who could did so by paying some factory manager to “borrow” his employees’ wages for a month or two. The workers went unpaid, but another business was born. Misha kick-started his business by driving to southern Russia, where Tatiana’s mother worked in a sugar factory, filling the car with sugar, and selling it in Saratov. Now they traded in soft drinks and chewing gum. Though the family lived modestly enough, unlike most people they could eat fresh food every day, and treat their friends.
    Misha was shy with me. But as the liqueur bottle grew emptier, he relaxed: “I know you think we’re just traders in cheap goods, but you wait! I’m going to knock out my rivals. I’m going to be a power in this province. We may have started by lying and stealing from the government—there was no other way. But we’ll soon be beyond that. Even now things are sorting themselves out. And there’ll be no stopping the people who come through these years. We’re going to