Chapter 42 – Saying Goodbye

11 June 2000

Irina Chornenkaya, one of my best trainees, invited me to her dacha Saturday for a goodbye event. It was a very nice place, about 40 minutes past the last metro, about 15 minutes from the airport but not noisy. On the way, we stopped at a wayside market where the villagers were selling their wares to city slickers streaking by in their cars. On two card tables sat pigs’ heads. The full head. No pig. Just the head with eyes staring straight ahead. Put me further off meat than I already was.

The dacha area was carved out of farmland about four years earlier. Irina bought when it was new, and they built their own house. It is roughhewn with a kitchen and living room on the bottom floor and two bedrooms upstairs. The living room is completely occupied by a ping pong table, a mountain bike, and plant seedlings. No comfortable chairs exist. The TV sits atop the refrigerator in the kitchen and you can watch from two hard straight-back chairs. They do not have hot water or electricity but do have an outdoor privy. The lawn is very large, and she has been busy planting trees, bushes, vines, a few vegetables and flowers. Most of the dacha’s were large, two-story affairs and some of them were gigantic with manicured lawns, paved streets, and little girls pushing doll buggies around, like any American suburb.

The wind blew wickedly all day, and it was cold. I neglected to bring a jacket and had to borrow one of hers to go walking. First me and her husband played ping pong for an hour. He asked me three times, “Are you tired?” Each time I said no. The third time I said, “No, are you tired?” He said, “Of course not” and we played on. Finally he caved and said let’s rest.

Her husband was not the most attractive and had really bad teeth, but he seems very nice. Her mother had bleached her jet-black hair and is now blonde and looks like my sister Janet. The husband works as a computer specialist/trouble shooter in an Indian company along with her sister. The mother works at a refrigeration company. Irina works at a sexual assault organization and makes $25 a month plus what I pay her when she trains, that probably averages $100 a month. I don’t know what her husband makes but they are able to afford a dacha and a car plus a decent apartment in the city and two cats. They are considered “middle class.”

After lunch we went for a walk and then the mother, who is six months younger than me, took a nap. Irina asked if I wanted one and I didn’t but said I’d like to play more ping pong. Her husband refused which is very unusual because Russians will usually do anything for a guest. I don’t think he liked being beat. So we just talked until her husband barbecued and we ate again.

12 June 2000

My Sunday adventure for my last weekend was to meet a group and go out to the Moscow River for a picnic and swim. We met at Violetta’s apartment. She said it was the nicest apartment she had ever lived in including with her parents – her father was KGB so I would have thought he had a nice one. Her apartment was on the 5^th floor of an apartment building with a pitch-black entrance and an elevator that descends only from ever other floor. The apartment has fake wood paneling and floors.

Upon entering, the kitchen is to the left, straight down the hallway are the toilet and shower, to the right is the living room, then the daughter’s room and on the left the mothers with a balcony. She has a nice view of a forest from her living room and a nice view of trees from the balcony. Furniture is minimal and decoration nil – like my house. In the kitchen she has a refrigerator that has not worked for eight months, a gas stove, clothes washer, sink and three cupboards whose doors won’t shut correctly. The paper is peeling from the ceiling and the wood around the door frames is split and falling away. The daughter’s bed is a chair that makes into a bed. The mother’s bed is like mine was for years – a mattress on the floor. They have a white pet rat that runs around the house, and she assures me that he is very smart.

She told me that her father had warned her one time not to go to a certain trial in which she was defending someone. She didn’t go. I was aghast and said but you had a duty to represent, and you can’t just not show up. She said he had other counsel and obviously it was all right with the client as he never called her afterward. Nor would I.

It turned out to only be the three of us – Violetta, Batima and I. We went in Violetta’s car to the river. She is just learning to drive and has no business driving on a public street. There is a sign in the front and back windows that indicates she is a learner, and a sign on the back saying she is a woman.

I asked why that was there?

She said that men drivers are so disrespectful of women that the sign says – respect me, I’m a woman. I doubted it would help because of the way she drove!

I made the mistake of getting in the front seat and found the seat belt didn’t work. First, she ran through a stop sign. Then sat through a green light. She didn’t know how to shift properly and instead of gradually slowing down, waited until she was right up to the car in front and then slammed on the brakes. We were almost hit on the right side by one car, and then she pulled out in front of another car on the left. Cars are quite new to Russians so nobody can really drive very well. During communism only the party elite had cars driven by chauffeurs. No traffic problems! Finally we got out into the country and the road curved to the right, but she went straight down a side road. It was a road to a graveyard and Batima joked, “It’s too early to take that road yet.”

The woods and river were beautiful, like a mirror, only a few people fishing. But the place was totally trashed. Litter and junk everywhere. Batima didn’t bring a suit, and Violetta was afraid to go in because it was cold. So I went in and then they followed. It was cold but doable when you got in. When we got out, Batima was up on the bank already dressed, and I asked her to give me a hand to help me up the steep, muddy bank. Since I had 100 pounds on her, rather than her helping me out, I pulled her in. I ended up climbing up the bank on my hands and knees and she had to change into something dry.

On the way back, we were stopped by the cops. Violetta was gone for a long time during which Batima told me that two years previously, they were in Yalta on vacation and decided to go to the Crimea just to look around. Both places are Russia, and they were all Russians. They were arrested and put in jail for two hours because they didn’t have any registration saying they could be in the Crimea. Finally, one of the people knew a local Mafioso who called the police and got them out. Both parts of the story are an indictment and sounds more like the U.S. every day.

I was worried about Violetta’s long absence because I don’t think she had proper papers for the car. After thirty minutes, she returned saying that the police said she did not have proper authorization to drive the car because the power of attorney was not from the owner and if not from the owner, it had to be notarized and hers wasn’t.

She showed them her attorney card and began arguing, show me the law, show me the law, she shouted. They retorted that the prosecutor said and all these other attorneys said and they are more clever than you.

She kept arguing. Finally the officer said, “Oh we have such stupid attorneys.”

She threatened to sue them, and they let her go. As soon as we got to her apartment, she grabbed her law books and looked it up. The officer was right.

Chapter 43 – One Last Training

14 June 2000

This is my second trip to Samara, a business hub south of Moscow. The training was on child abuse with six heads of juvenile divisions, eleven inspectors, ten prosecutors, and a professor. No one had a computer, only typewriters. They understood violence in the home was the cause of most juvenile delinquency.

At the restaurant I first ordered chicken and vegetables until the waitress pointed out it took two hours. I asked how can it take two hours to prepare chicken and vegetables? Do you have to chase the chicken first?

They had preparation times next to each item – salad 10 minutes, julienne mushrooms 10 minutes, and chicken patties 35 minutes. We all ordered food that had preparation time of 35 minutes or less. Seventy minutes later, the food arrived. Apparently, the preparation times were aspirational.

We walked on the embankment that was much like any beach in CA. American music was blaring, kids raced around on roller blades, everyone drank beer, flirted, and talked stupid. The flight home took us 80 minutes and the drive from the airport 90 minutes.