Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland Read Online Free

brutalized face and plucked eyebrows sat beside me. That decided it: those faces belonged to the criminal underworld. Smiling waitresses were heaping our plates with delectable food, but I had lost my appetite.
    The problem was that, along with the invitation, Elena had given me something: “Zhenya said you were to take this.” Wrapped in newspaper, the brick-sized package contained stacks of rubles fresh from the bank. They were worth $100, a fortune in Russia that year. I refused the package, but Elena could be very obstinate: “I’m not taking it back! If you want to go, you’ve got to take it! Anyway, it’s nothing to him.” In the end I gave in, resolving that when I did meet Zhenya I would return his money, and we would have a laugh about it. I had been carrying it around my waist for weeks. Now I was gripped by anxiety: in Russia, accepting hospitality incurs serious obligations. A Hogarthian image flashed into my mind of Zhenya and his thuggish cronies in my London house, feet on the table.
    The powdered dandy interrupted my thoughts.
    “How do you know Benya then?”
    “What?”
    “Benya—your host!” he repeated, looking surprised. Yes, he did say Benya.
    “Are you all right?” asked the powdered youth.
    Well, no. In Russia the name Benya is not like Tom, Dick, or Harry. It is what the writer Isaac Babel called the Jewish gangland prince in his stories of prerevolutionary Odessa. As Scrooge is to English misers, Benya is to Russian gangsters. Benya, the great extortioner, waltzes through them in multicolored clothes, splashing money around, a rogue with panache. So Elena’s friend was a literary gangster. How very Russian.
    A man with yellow eyes sat down opposite and smiled, or rather leered at me. His face was long and he had a straggling beard. I smiled back politely. Then I remembered the bearded figure in the film Elena showed me. I looked again. This must be Zhenya, or rather Benya. It had to be.
    How to describe what happened next between that man and me? It felt as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff, being pulled toward the edge, though Benya did no more than fix me with a pair of dreadful yellow eyes. I was spellbound, falling. The prospect was terrifying, but I was powerless to resist the pull of those eyes. It was irresistibly sweet. I came to and started to struggle. How long we battled it out I have no idea. I did pull back from the edge, but the effort left me shaken and horrified.
    I got up and hurried back to my cabin. Behind I heard footsteps and a man’s voice saying “Syusan, Syusan.” There was a glimpse of those yellow eyes as I slammed the door. I sat on the bunk, thoroughly frightened, and furious with myself. What was this? I was an experienced traveler. I loved nothing better than traveling on my own. What was I frightened of? So what if the man was a mafia boss? I was in no danger on this boat. But I was not just frightened. There was something here that I could not name, something worse than that.
    I had a lot to learn. The man was just a minor monster, but I came from a world which was properly mapped, where travelers ran across real dangers, not from monsters. I did not yet understand that I had left that world behind.
    I must have dozed off after that. When I woke, the light through the porthole had softened. It was late afternoon, and the cabin walls were thrumming to the syncopated beat of live jazz. I lay there, watching reflections of the water playing on the ceiling, mortified by my overreaction, packing my fears away, yet reluctant to venture out of the cabin for fear of seeing Benya again.
    Finally, the beat of the music lured me out, down a spiral staircase. On the landing below, a wiry suntanned American couple stood admiring the theater designs on the walls. “Great music, isn’t it? We do Dixieland, but we’re nothing compared with this lot,” said the man. A trumpeter, he had been invited to St. Petersburg for a jazz festival. When they arrived,