29/10/93

The Spy Who Came In From the Cole Slaw

They were two hungry immigrants working for opposite breasts of Mother Russia, bringing Zionism to the bosom of Moscow.

    Boris and Pavel met by the frozen chickens at the all-night supermarket. Their shopping carts were empty, even though they had been shopping all evening. This was what they never tired of doing: chugging up and down the supermarket aisles, gawking and gaping and gasping at the nine different brands of tunafish, the rows and rows of American chocolate bars, the incomprehensible choice of laundry powders, the meat with meat on the bone, and even -- what would old Yevgeny say! -- the caviar. Right there, on the shelf, all you have to do is take it, and you own it, it's yours. No protektzia, no KGB agents watching you, no frostbite waiting in a queue. You want, Boris? You take, Boris. Is all yours. The only catch is, you have to have money to pay for it, and who has money if you're a Russian immigrant with bupkes?
    Boris Pavelovitch was counting the pieces in a package of chicken wings, and Pavel Borisovitch was still trying to guess what was in that bag marked "kurkevanim" when their eyes met.
    "Boris!"
    "Pavel!"
    And then they hugged like they hadn't seen each other in 20 years, which they hadn't.
    "Pavel, you old running dog, I didn't even know you're Jewish!" What he meant was that Pavel had been to university.
    "I wouldn't even tell my mother that I'm Jewish. And you, Boris, you foolish herring, what brings you to this part of Tomsk? I always thought you were a nephew of Brezhnev, the way you carried on in the Communist Youth!"
    They hugged again, loudly, and from all over the supermarket Russian immigrants came running with their empty carts to see who was making such a shameless scene.
    Boris and Pavel recalled that summer in Leningrad, and wondered what became of Katarina, who had one blue eye and one brown and two very long white legs. A beauty like that didn't work in the spoon factory, that's for sure. And Mikhail, the boy most likely to be on the locomotive assembly line, did he make it to the job of our dreams? No, Pavel, said sorrily, he was once overheard quoting Solzhenitsyn to his wife in bed and he's been in Siberia ever since. Poor Mikhail, they agreed.
    Pavel popped the question that any Russian-immigrant conversation must work up to. "So what are you doing now in Israel, you old mosquito in a glass of vodka?" Boris grinned. "I am making a careful study of the bureaucracy. And you?"
    "I am studying to be a kibbutznik."
    The two childhood chums looked hard at each other, the giddiness gone from their voices. Like any normal, paranoid Russian spoonfed distrust from birth, their couched terms revealed coded truths only they could fully comprehend.  
    They moved a couple of aisles down, to the health-food corner, which is where all the Russians went for a private powwow.
    "Pavel, my Chernobyl-affected friend, you cannot possibly be on a kibbutz. You were a lousy Communist even back in Moscow. You used to paint banners in looping red strokes instead of the compulsory straight red strokes. You were a daring little rebel. And now you choose to be a Communist?"
    Pavel looked this way and that, peeked over both shoulders simultaneously, and licked his dry lips. "Boris, you sterile sturgeon, you tin screwdriver, tell me exactly what you're studying and for whom, and I will reveal the complete truth about the sunflower crop-yields at Kibbutz Na'an."
    An old lady pushing a half-full cart came within earshot, so Pavel picked up a jar of pickled mung beans, pretending to study the ingredients, while Boris contemplated the tofu marmalade. But she was looking for the Marshmallow Fluff, and they directed her to the other end of the store.
    Boris Pavelovitch stared at his twitching comrade. "Borisovitch, you are spying!" 
    Pavel Borisovitch caught his breath. "And don't tell me, Pavelovitch, you Kamchitka tour guide, that you are spying too!"
    The two spies raced off to the toilet-paper shelf, where their voices would be muffled. One may speak freely in this country, yes it is true, but not if you were working for Mother Russia without a business card.
    Pavel threw caution to the two-ply economy-pack Molett and told Boris about his mission. "The radical-conservatives of the Communist Party want to rebuild with a new credo, to once again hoist the red flag over the people's nation. Only they don't have much to go by. It's a problem to organize a popular putsch when the last remaining godless god is Castro, and he's telling his people to eat grass so they shoudln't starve. For heaven's sake, Boris, even Albania is looking to make a buck."
    "So?"
    "So they hear I'm getting an exit visa for Israel, and they knock on my door, not in the middle of the night this time, mind you, and they say, 'Pavel Borisovitch, we've come to wish you well. Keep in touch.' I tell them I'll send a postcard from Tel Aviv, and they say 'Pavel, keep in touch. You can call us any time, collect.' And then they shake a few rubles at my yearning capitalist soul. They remind me that the Russians here are hungry, jobless, miserable, untanned, but I can always come home to the new fully-equipped dacha they're going to buy me if all I do is report back how those Israelis do it. I say, do what?, and they tell me, how they've managed to perfect communism, because not even Marx imagined it could be so utopian. Boris, my imperialist comrade of the Zionist persuasion, they want to model Russia after Rosh Hanikra!"
    "But Pavel, you're selling state secrets! What have you revealed?"
    "I infiltrated the innermost sanctums of kibbutz society. I even saw the work schedule for next month!"
    "Sputnik-brain, why should you risk your life to tell the glorious successors to Marx, Lenin and Chernenko that Dudu is watering tomatoes at noon on Sunday?"
    "Ach, you are such a coffee-grind. The point is that people work. They live by the assumption that next Sunday at noon they have a task to do and it will get done, not for pay, but for the greater good. This is pure, perfect, textbook Communism in action. This is how Russia will be, once we figure how to get people to surrender their children to the authorities, like on kibbutz."
    "They do this? Willingly?"
    "Oh, yes, but they are then rewarded. They get a private telephone."
    Boris was impressed. "Well, I'll be an orbiting-monkey's uncle," he said.
    "I have observed a lot just by watching," Pavel continued. "They have some pretty radical ideas we could use to kick-start our wretched, failed kolkhozy. Like the sexy slave laborers they import from Scandinavia to stimulate the men's appetite for work. I tell you, Boriska, there was one hot morning I was out in the fields with one of them, picking cucumbers, and I almost blew my cover."
    "Unbelievable!"
    "You want to hear unbelievable? I've learned that there are some kibbutzim where God is openly acknowledged. Think of it, Boris, religious-Zionist Communism! They pray, then they work, then they pray, then they eat, then they pray, then they watch television. Insane, no?"
    At that moment, a young couple stopped by the toilet-paper display and got into a lover's quarrel over which brand to buy. Pavel volunteered his opinion to the couple that the Lily was good enough but for sensitive skin maybe the Scotties was worth the extra money. The pretty young woman thanked them, and Boris and Pavel shuffled off to the yogurts.
    Pavel wagged a finger at Boris. "You son-of-a-babushka, you got me to confess. Now you."
    Boris Pavelovitch knew his friend was not going to believe this. "I must admit, I'm working for the other side."
    "Boris! Not the Americans!"
    "Don't be silly. For Yeltsin. Yeah, him. Can you imagine, I, who worshiped Yuri Andropov, who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan, who placed flowers on Khrushchev's grave every year, now I'm working for democracy."
    "But you were Communist of the Year in the third grade! What happened?"
    "They discovered I was a Jew. The rest you can figure. Now I'm getting my revenge, suckling the reborn Russia on Jewish milk."
    "What have you fed them?"
    "They want to know how to go about ingathering their exiles. You remember how it was, a good Russian went off to live in Latvia, and he was just a Soviet. Now he's called an 'ethnic minority,' a Russian in a foreign land. Well, now they want to know from us how we got them to let our people go."
    "No!"
    "Yes. And most important, what to do with them once we get them back. The Kremlin doesn't have a lot of experience in dealing with immigration. So that's where I come in. I sit in the Ministry of Absorption and fill out forms. I buy things with rights. I go to customs, the port, the Interior Ministry, the Jewish Agency, absorption centers, the works, and I report back everything Israel does to make an immigrant feel at home."
    Pavel paled. "Boris, you puppet of perestroika, you glasnost stooge, what are we doing? We are working for opposite breasts of Mother Russian, but for a common cause: to bring Zionism to the bosom of Moscow! Boriska, my old comrade, it's as clear as the purple splotch on Gorbachev's head."
    "Do you think this is good for the Jews?"
    "Do you think this is good for the Russians?"
    A Russian-Jewish lady steered her empty shopping cart right to where Boris and Pavel were making as if they couldn't decide which yogurt to buy. The lady gawked and gaped and gasped at the selection. Boris suggested the lady try Danuba, and the two men slipped away. Pavel looked fearfully over his shoulder at the large, dowdy woman utterly mesmerized by yogurt. "KGB?" Pavel suggested. Boris gulped. "Looks like Shin Bet," he said, as they made a dash for the vodka department.