Chapter 6
How It Happened with My Friendship
In February there came gossips that the Hungarian shop has been won by a small limited liability company from the country. One day we saw it open and, when we went there with Joe, we found there people trying to set it into order. They were headed by a small woman in her thirties, her Christian name was Judith. We introduced ourselves, informed her who we were and offered our help in case she needed. We told her we had always been in a very good contact with the shop-keeper on a mutual advantage base. She promised to visit us up in our office later.
With this encounter I acquired my second friend in my life after Z., and at the same time I think my best friend ever.
She was the representative of the company, which had got authority on the shop and manager of the shop itself. She has had two employees, one of them the Russian wife of a Hungarian company representative in Moscow – the same person who had received me at the airport on my trip 6 years before – who had a good private relationship with the owner of the company, the other one the son of his colleague, chief of the repair workshop for my car. It is clear from the previous sentence that in Moscow that time, as well as in Hungary, there were enough cross connections to confuse a divorce attorney.
The shop was doomed to failure because of this system of connections.
She came up to visit us and we gave her access to people of business importance. Also we tried to illuminate certain connections on the agency that were to be taken into account to survive at least some months in this place. Some of our acquaintances later proved dangerous for her because of attempts from home to displace her, but for a time she prospered by them.
At the beginning our friendship has not been extensive. When I had got the aquarium from the family of Maria I found the flee market of the city, where there were pets on sale during Saturdays and Sundays, and bought a pair of fish for breeding. One day towards the end of April, still snow everywhere and freezing, I went to her shop to buy some food, mainly spices, for my household.
I found her in her office, a corner in the inner room of the shop serving as high store. She asked me, if I knew the pet market. I told her how to find it. She insisted that I was to show it to her and, as on the coming Sunday I was not to have any obligations, I promised her. The market has been near to my home.
She was living on the eastern outskirts in a block of apartments. As a meeting point, we agreed in a METRO station at the junction both from me and her to the market. She was extremely unwell with a cold, but she said she would not cheat me by staying in bed.
We walked around the stands, forcing ourselves through dense crowd and around noon we parted on the same place, where we have met.
Our next encounter around June was to be thanked to my hobby of going to theatre. Some months earlier, when Veronica was there to arrange my takeover, she went to the hotel built for the 1980 Olympic Games. It was the newest one of the city, named Mezhdunarodnaya, meaning International. She had had a habit of swimming and going to sauna during her term. Her acquaintance was still there and let her in, a big deed as it was only for hotel guests. She introduced me to him and I asked him how to get into contact with somebody from the Service Bureau to get theatre tickets. He promised me to call back later.
I have already lost my hope he would, when he did at last. He said, the lady had left the hotel for the municipal ticket office and it took time for him to find her traces. I called the lady, Olga, on the given number and she said, she would call us, when she got something. She did it and offered tickets for all of us, I mean, the family of Joe and me. It was an uninteresting opera performance, an extremely long one. It has been Prokofyev’s "Engagement in the Monastery”, on the play of a 19th-century English playwright. Anyway, from that time on, every month at least twice I had the possibility to see good performances.
In the spring of that year an English-language weekly sprang to life about topics of the city involving foreigners. There was a piece of news in one of the volumes that CNN could be received by an ordinary UHF antenna. I tried it and could program it into my set.
In May Olga offered us tickets for the Bolshoi and we took them. However, the wife of Joe would not come and we offered the possibility to the shop-keeper lady, Judy. She was very happy of the thought, only had concerns. Her shop was to be open to 7 p.m., and performances started at the same time. She had to leave the shop on her employees that day.
Her problem has been solved and we met at the theatre. We went there with Joe’s car, mine has been on repair. In February, on a snowy day, I wanted to turn right from the Boulevard to the Kalinin Avenue, when a taxi bumped into my right front corner, pushing the hood up to the windscreen. For lack of spare parts and paint the repair has been made temporarily by freeing the windscreen washer jets and final repair was programmed on that week.
We met J. in front of the theatre. After performance Joe did not let her go home by METRO, he carried her home. I was there, too. She told us she had bought a TV-set through the agency’s black-market channel – Boris, one of the purchasers –, but with its programming she had some difficulties. She asked us to come in and check, if all was well. We established that an antenna was needed to have better reception, as her room was shaded from the TV-tower by the house itself. I promised her to lend her my spare one.
About two weeks passed, when a Sunday morning she called me to give some instructions for the antenna. She confessed, she had not tried it so far, but then she decided to do so. I told her what to do, but she said it did not take in CNN. I made her check, on which standard her TV was operating, both SECAM and PAL or only SECAM. Of course, she had been trying the impossible, CNN was broadcast on PAL and her TV-set was a SECAM one only.
Suddenly it surfaced between us, that having a fine day, although a little clouded, we could go for a walk. We agreed to meet on the same spot as a month ago and we went to the Botanical Garden in the north of the town, a former estate of the Counts Sheremetyev.
Goal of our walk has been suggested by her. She knew Moscow fairly well. Before she accepted the offer of the private company for this term, she had been working with the largest, earlier even the only, tourist agency of our country. She had been travelling all over the world and had a good talent for organizing events.
She was properly prepared for the walk as a guide, with prospectuses, even when we had to catch a tram she had tickets with her to punch. First we walked through the Botanical Garden. I have always liked woods, and it was rather a forest or a park than a garden. At the limit of the park there was a lake separating it from VDNH (exhibition) premises that had belonged to the same estate before the Great Revolution. There she revealed her large fondness of waterfowl, especially ducks. During the walk we disclosed almost everything about ourselves. She told me the story of her divorce, a very sad one and a clear proof of her toughness. She had a son of 16 still in school, who has been helped by his grandmother, her mother.
After her marriage she worked with the tourist agency and undertook a lot of extra jobs, sometimes very low-level ones as cleaning, to save up for a flat. She succeeded at last in buying a site and house not far from that of her mother. I concluded from her narrative that she appreciated her mother much more than her father. The Moscow term she accepted to get some extra funds for the reconstruction of her new property. She was constantly in a state of splitting her mind – like me – between necessity of earning money and being with her family.
From the park we went over to see the palace of the former estate, still closed, alas, only its direct surroundings and one big room could be surveyed. She taught me some details about the building, structure and function. I have always been a great fan of cultural tourism. In towns visited I have left out only in Rome – as I told it in its place – the visit of museums, galleries or other sights worth its fee. With her I have got a private guide who knew a lot of those details unknown generally even for locals.
Some weeks before I decided to have a look on the Central Asian Republics of the S.U., being always out of reach for me earlier. I went to see Samarqand and Bokhara. Around May 1 there was a break of 3 days because of May-Day holiday. I bought a ticket to Samarqand, another from there to Bokhara and a third one to the return trip from there to Moscow. I wanted to have two days in Bokhara and one in Samarqand, but the time-table of flights between the Uzbekistani towns turned it the opposite. Through DiplService I could arrange all.
On route to the airport in Samarqand there was a great bazaar and I walked through it with a feeling I had been there already. I realized, I felt the similarity of it with Mercato in Addis Ababa.
I took neither buses nor taxis to see the town. Although it was tiring, I went by foot to all places. Weather has not been hot, rain fell sometimes, but my interest has been limitless. Samarkand is very similar to Addis Ababa both in its location and architecture. People are white, but suntanned, with a look to be mistaken for a Hungarian peasant from the Great Plain. Their hospitality is enormous, they speak to the stranger as if he were from their own family. It was interesting to see the great sofas of tea-houses made of sheer wood, the size of 7 by 7 feet. Their height is about 3 feet and they have a wooden railing around. People, usually old Uzbeks in their national caps called tubeteyka, are sitting on it in lotus style, drinking tea. Tea-houses are called chaikhanas.
I walked through all the time I spent there. The small plane of AN-24 took me to Bokhara, where I found a guide on the airport in the person of a taxi driver. The driver took me around the town in a short time, so, when I became free, I went myself by foot once more. It was worth much more. I had only a primitive map, but could find my way. One of the funny things: when I wanted to go by a route shown on the map as Communism Street, I found that somebody built a fence across it. Imagine the road to communism is a dead end in Bokhara!
If Samarkand was similar to Addis Ababa, Bokhara was even more similar to Assab, the Red Sea harbour town. All streets in the old town were dirt roads, some of them so deep that ground floor of the houses were level with my shoulder. There were amazing buildings. Most of them within the complex around the former mosque turned tourist hotel turned retail centre of small shops. The complex formed a square with booths, refreshment stands and a tea-house. In a souvenir shop I bought a funny thing looking like a cap, but it actually was a heat preserving equipment. It had to be put over a tea-pot full of tea and it remained hot for four hours. At the same place I bought a silver bracelet of typical Uzbek make for my wife, with a large turquoise in its middle. Later I realized it has been actually made of small pieces and polished to look one.
At that time, although the Soviet Union still existed, rouble began to erode away. Its first step has been around March, when the transferable rouble, that had been always mysteriously confused by cashiers with Soviet roubles, became distinct from it: 1 US dollar was equal to 0.60 transferable rouble – just as before –, but to 6 Soviet roubles. In a short time that previous phenomenon vanished, only Soviet rouble remained, with always decreasing rate. When I visited Bokhara, one dollar was equal to 13 roubles. It would soon change to 27, then 40. After my holiday, in September, the daily rate would be determined by the Central Bank.
There were other numerical modifications. From the beginning of the year 1991 in shops there appeared "agreed prices”. Agreed between the retailer and the manufacturer above the heads of customers, who did not get "agreed salaries”. It was the time of about 1,000 percent decrease in living conditions of Soviet people. There were news in papers that you did not understand with clear mind, e.g. the county of Tula – to the south from Moscow – decided to stop "export of goods to the capital”. What? Export to the capital? Well, in plain language they wanted to keep some of their own production in their home town. I was living in a world where backward children had been right with their slogan (“you imbecile normal”).
Well, to come back to my trip to Central Asia, Uzbekistan has caught me so much that I would come back together with my family.
I had to visit another part of Russia by plane around that time. My set of hard contact lenses began to wear away for dry air and small crystals of quartz in it. I could not bear them all day. I decided to react to an ad in the local paper about soft lenses of English make from Leningrad. I called the firm and we agreed in a Saturday before-noon date. I bought the air ticket and flew there. These lenses were very good at the beginning, but one of them would become soon figured like a mosquito net. The other would crack in two at the middle. I would return to hard ones during my holiday.
When I got that mission and it became clear that my wife would remain home, I included cooking equipment, even a cook-book, into my chests. In the first some weeks it was not necessary to prepare food at home, I bought butter, sausage, bread and had only a supper at home, as for lunch we went to the agency to eat.
The restaurant in the agency went over to dollar from January 1. I did not have my dollars. In the past my dollars have been sent to my account in Budapest and in the new system I would get my salary for January only on the last day of the month. That one month of transitional period was enough to change my habit. That far we left the office closed at two o’clock, hurried to get there up to the deadline of two fifteen, and, as there was always something to arrange, we could not get back before four o’clock. That luxury of a two-hour lunch-break vanished with the new system. I ate my sandwich for lunch, I was there all the time and had a good dinner at home, prepared during week-end and stored in the freezer or refrigerator.
In the following days after my walk with J. on the Sheremetyev estate, I was very busy with my trucks, although they became less frequent because of that "lack of hygiene” of the meat. Joe has been occupied in a business with a Hungarian partner of his, whose trucks were coming every week and whom he made a lot of favour. Now he wanted another. He was coming to Moscow with his wife for recreation. Joe was in a trouble with their accommodation as neither he nor they wanted to pay for it. At last he agreed with them and his wife that they would live with them for the week they would stay.
Early morning on Sunday before their arrival there was a phone call from the parking that a driver of one of our frigos were taken to hospital because of an accident. On my questions they told me that the man was falling off the top of the cabin, when he took a can of beer from the small compartment of the cooler set for the drivers’ use. He fell very unfortunately with his head on the concrete ground. I asked them which hospital he was taken in and drove there at once.
It was too early – about 7 a.m. –, there were no doctors, I had to wait. But the man was conscious after a long period of unconsciousness. He came against me on the corridor. As I have not met him yet, I asked the man if it was he. Yes, it was. He was very slow in every sense. It might have been from some medicine, but also from the fall. We agreed to wait until he would get some strength and also to speak with his doctor.
In about an hour the doctor arrived. He checked his patient and then told me, he would have to wait some days, before he would let him go. I asked him about documents and cloths of the driver and he said, they were in the store until his departure.
I went to the parking place and talked with drivers who had been present at the accident. I told them I hoped there would be no complication. In the afternoon I visited the man again and then he was completely normal in behaviour. His stunned manner has passed. He complained about food – I have never been in a Russian hospital, but I know that in a hospital food is worse than usual in the country – and wanted to go home as soon as possible. On his head there was a bandage, but he had no open wound. I consulted with the doctor and he was of the opinion not to let him drive and not to transport him in the cabin of a truck, either.
I told the driver to wait, until I could speak to our doctor at home. The next morning my first action – taking into account the two-hour difference between Moscow and Budapest – has been to call our health centre and speak to the chief medical officer. He said he would come for the man by plane.
"Well, I suppose you speak Russian well”, I said.
"Not a word.”
"Then let me propose something else. You organize his reception in Budapest from the airport to the hospital and I would do my duty here and accompany him on the plane.”
He agreed, he promised to inform our executive in charge for passports and tickets. I had only a night at home.
The man came back a year later and said he did not feel heat or cold since his accident.
Even that one night has been good for making me sure everything was in order. My wife boasted with her results in the installation of gas and showed me the new gas-stove in the kitchen. She did a good work at managing all without me.
Joe came to fetch me at the airport. He had a confused look and it took the dime a minute to fall down. I realized his concern. He put his guests into my apartment. I could do nothing but smile like a politician. Well, my smile became less hearty, when I saw that they took my bedroom, even my bed. I was more polite than to ask them to move to the other room and I myself lay down on the big sofa.
To remember how I got my washing machine I have to go back in time again. My first all-night service on the agency – it was to be given by company representatives for Saturdays and Sundays – coincided with my encounter with the institution’s managing director, who said me he was leaving for good at the end of the year 1990. We were somewhere in November. I asked him to sell me his things he would not take home. He promised me his washing machine, his microwave oven and a complete China set. I led his name into my agenda not to forget to give him a truck for his moving.
Let us come back to June 1991. The guests of Joe, Robert and Elizabeth, wanted to go to the best restaurant of the city and they invited us with Joe. He took his family with him and it was he who selected the restaurant of the hotel "Peking”. It had two halls, we went to that of Chinese food.
I had been there once with Joe and his family on Valentine day as it was the name of the boy. That time we all behaved, what could not be expected from R. and E. I wanted to eat little as I do not like Chinese tastes. But my menue became even shorter when these two tasted all with their forks and spoons.
Sunday morning for the favour of R. and E. we visited Zagorsk, the Orthodox Vatican. It was a fine experience, I did not resent to have visited it. But I would have chosen other companions, if it had been possible. When Sunday evening I said good-bye to them I hoped we would meet never again. Their uninvited presence in my home has been a nightmare. Both smoked, even two weeks after their departure, when I have cleaned the rooms, I could smell their cigarettes. R. took always my white cotton gown into use. I spotted that he had another one, a precise copy of mine, but he took mine by mistake. After their departure I did not find mine, E. must have packed it up, too. Well it was enough of them.
Shortly after that his guests left, Joe was making preparations for his holiday. Soon I would remain alone in the office. I began to feel that it was a little long, that year. Before their departure Olga put us some tickets aside and now J. has been within the group. There was even a case, when only we were there in two, but it has not been a success. The dancers and singers of Bolshoi went abroad to do their tours and the Paris opera sent its people to Moscow.
It was a performance of ballet on Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. I decided then that I would take tickets only for classical Russian performances in the future. The dancers did a fine job, but music has not been for my taste and our places, it was a special case. I did not notice on the tickets that they have been valid not "in” a row of so-and-so, but "to” that. It meant a foldable stool without back. Well, my back was almost missing, too, when the performance ended.
Joe went on holiday at the beginning of July, my turn has been one month later. During his holiday I was alone in the office. The more so, as J. had business of her own and we hardly saw each other. She and her two colleagues from home were not satisfied with their manager-owner. Such mistakes have been committed as sending 6,000 kgs of coffee instead of the ordered 600 kgs and, besides, it has all been over guarantee time. She had to sell all of it on a very low price to get back any money. Also no beer has been sent to the shop and she was forced to buy it in the town at various places.
The three of them were preparing a plot to spring out of the company and begin their own activities independently.
I also had other things on my mind. One of my partners from the Soviet Republics, a Hungarian man, the representative of Ikarus in Tbilisi, Georgia, had long tried to convince me to visit him in his place. I have never been afraid of visiting a place so I had organized it. It was a proper time, as for his move home for good he needed a truck and, as I had none in that region, I sent it from Moscow. The young driver seemed a good partner for the job.
Frank received me at the airport in Tbilisi. He was nervous, as the driver had not reported yet, but I told him, he would be there the next day. My host has showed me his reign to be lost, as he would not have any successors. His company got into troubles for narrowing markets in the Soviet Union and their management has not been prepared to rule it out of that situation. He took me for a walk in the town, a fine mixture of historic and Soviet buildings. The previous caught my eyes, but the latter only for a crystal glass bowl that I bought for my wife. My son would have no excuse for any resentment, either, as for him I bought a kindjaal, a Georgian dagger with a fine sheath.
Frank took us up to the edge of the Caucasian to show us some popular tourist sights and to look down on the town. It was worth coming up there. This trip of mine has been short, but a fine experience. I would be sorry forever not visiting also Yerevan during that last time of the Soviet Union, when still there was some safety.
After the departure of her colleagues J. had some time before her leave for holiday. Sundays we had programs together. Before she left she helped me get gifts for my wife.
Months before, when the "agreed prices” came into fashion, gold again appeared in the shops. First only gossips came about sightings – similarly as sightings of Nessie would come –, but soon I myself saw items of gold in jewelleries. The prices have been prohibitive for locals, thus I could buy a pair of earrings for my wife with three small brilliants each.
Joe arrived back at the end of July and I made the last preparations for my leave. With my wife I discussed our financial situation. It was necessary to check it sometimes, as the absent-minded girls in our payroll department had made me a surprise back in December. I found in the bank during my non-permitted leave that no incoming sums have been booked on my account. It meant the company had not paid me at all. For this reason the bank sent a letter informing me that my account was in red and it had to be closed until I would manage to shift it to a positive balance. Well, clerks of the bank had also been big fools: they debited my account without credit transfers.
I arranged it from Moscow as it could not be clear I had been home. In a month I could tell the bank to open my account again, but they made me fax a letter with this request. Actually that was the first letter I faxed from our new set, as it has been sent to me not long before the end of the year and its installation could be organized only in January.
Soon after that my wife called me and said there were very little transfers from my company. I gave her the phone number of the payroll clerk girl and told her to arrange it. When she called me again she said either I had enemies there in the payroll department or I have to answer her about my business.
”When I called her on the phone number you gave me, she said you are liable for child support.” It was a great blow. Even my colleague in the Machine Tool Works, who said to my wife I was on holiday, when I actually was in the country on business, could not cause such a destruction. I told her to go there in person and make them show my payroll to her.
At the same time I rang up our payroll department head and told her to find the guilty girl and restore my honesty, otherwise I would do it myself by physical punishment.
Well, now, before my first holiday, fortunately there was no problem at home. My first back-to-back man Theodore P. has come two days before my departure. As he would not be able to do anything for his lack of Russian, it was all the same, if he was there or was not. All the tasks would fall on Joe to solve. T.’s main concerns have been to have a shoehorn and where to buy batteries for his crumb vacuum cleaner. He would use my service car. Well, I would have some malicious joy at home hearing from the radio about the 3-day coup against Gorbachev. T. has been caught in the car at the hottest spot, in the tunnel under Kalinin Avenue. He would never come again to the Soviet Union at any price.
Joe took me to the airport and my son and wife have been waiting for me in Budapest. My son had put his old Polish FIAT 125 into order. He had purchased it second-hand two years before and until my mission I had been keeping it in a good shape. In my absence he had crashed twice with it, but he always did the necessary repair. He was very proud of his job, he had even got the "environment-friendly” card for it.
I sensed something in my wife that made me anxious. Someone, who might have returned from Moscow, and might have met her, might have told her something about my life there. As my one-time colleague would have said: "Either it is not true, or it is a lie.” But I could not make her be frank and I decided not to show her I had something on my mind.
I did not make it a secret that in Moscow we, Joe and me, had a friend, who was a girl, but nothing else. I told her, she was an intelligent woman and a clever, honest one. She might have combined things together and might have come to a false reasoning. Anyway, my holiday has not been all easy and pleasant.
I had not given up my doctorate at that time yet. I wanted to finish re-writing it in time and give it in the university. Deadline had been October 1992. I went to institutions to gather data – new data to convince my opponents –, but I found that nobody dealt with this topic beside me. I could not find anything useful.
Before my return to my place in Moscow I participated in an annual conference organized by our company about truck safety questions. There I met the management of the company, the last time I was not selected for destruction by any one of them.
I also had to get information about a case of mild poisoning by dangerous load. About two months before my holiday I accepted an order from a customer to carry chemicals from Riga, Latvia to Belgium. I have not been informed that the load was dangerous, otherwise I would have asked for instructions from our dangerous load department.
On the loading place some of the plastic drums were leaking and in the rain the crystalline stuff caused mild poisoning at some of the drivers. The load has not been taken to the consignee, it has been put into a proper store in Hungary. I had to make it clear that I had no responsibility, as I had not known about the danger. I do not know it up to this day, if my responsibility has been established or has not. That was the ordinary way of dealing with personnel in that company.
Not long before my return to my place I called Joe to inform him about my arrival. We agreed that he would give my car to J. and she would fetch me at the airport. I called her, too. She was feeling alone and urged me to start back at last. I told her the date of my flight and she asked me to let her go into my flat for a week, until her colleagues would leave for home. I agreed. Alas, when I called Joe again from a public phone, my wife heard me say that Joe was to give the key of my flat to her. She might have combined again something. It began to be an irreversible process, when my image in her mind would become more and more shadowed by my imaginary guilt.
To tell the truth I was already looking for my return. Not only for what would wait me in Moscow, but also, because the air has not been pleasant here. When the time came, I felt not to have left anything behind.
It has not been my best time. At arrival in Moscow nobody waited me, at least it looked that way. The airport information has cheated J. who waited me on one side, while I came out on the other. We met when I took my things and went over to that side.
It was autumn in Budapest, when I resumed my work in the Moscow office, in Moscow it was even more so. The big heaps of water-melons from the southern republics was in hard contrast with the near-freezing temperature. The economy of the country began to change to capitalism, there were joint ventures for food and automobiles. As a result the newest wonders appeared on the roads and traffic became deadly.
We both damaged our cars in a short time. First Joe met a Georgian truck driver who made a U-turn from the second left lane over continuous line. Joe was on his left and the truck damaged his car almost completely. However, it has been repaired. Then a bus pushed me to the left in a divided road and the central lane was too high for the front suspension. For two weeks I used my trucks to get lifts when I had to go somewhere far from METRO-lines, as the office was without any car.
The number of trucks began to grow again. Meat changed to beef, and beside meat there were other kinds of food as cheese. Near to our office a restaurant of the network Pizza Hut opened and we went there sometimes to take lunch. Work was so much that to stay two h