Vignette: When The Iron Curtain Turns to Rust

By Ewan Hodson.

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Oksana awoke to the sound of waves crashing against the shoreline, her constant companion over the previous year. Every morning, she had woken up, alone in her bed, to the sound of the Baltic Sea, slowly, fizzily encroaching along the beach front near to the house. It was very different from her home, St Petersburg. There the water was fairly placid, befitting its past as a swamp; it bubbled and gurgled along, sometimes it would lap against the sides of the shore at best compared to the Baltic Sea which foamed and crashed and fizzed as it hit the shore. The Sea made her feel small. It was older than her and would live far beyond her. In a few centuries, where she lay would be gone, swallowed by the waves.

It was comforting in its enormity. It made her feel less alone.

Not that she would be alone much longer, as the long-awaited day had arrived, the day in which Malik would finally be coming to her. Her husband, her lover, her soulmate, he would finally be arriving. After a year of longing, yearning, and despairing over him, today he would be wandering off a plane from Tallinn, likely with his same boyish grin and keen gait that she had always found charming. He had managed to keep it despite everything, despite the efforts of those pig eyed, red faced, ghoulish men who had tried to make Oksana and Malik’s life hell. Through the pain and misery, he had kept his smile and she for that Oksana had been very thankful.

Her wandering thoughts were interrupted by the sound of creaking stairs, and she realised that Tatiana was coming up to greet her.

Once, her bedroom had been the attic of a lovely holiday dacha for a dull little bureaucrat who despite it all had liked to skinny dip in the Baltic Sea. The primarily wooden building had been left to moulder after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the sudden urge for a Dacha by the Baltic Sea had depreciated in the wake of food shortages and declining living standards. Despite this, it would be renewed again when Oksana’s and Malik’s friends, Tatiana and Yuri Andrienko, had been forced to leave St Petersburg themselves a few years back. Seeing the opportunity that it presented and wanting to have a quiet beachfront property after the chaos of St Petersburg, they bought the land and the building using the remains of their savings.

It had been a risky investment but it had paid off: the Andrienko’s had flourished, their daughter, Yelena, having recently gone to Bonn to study on a scholarship. Oksana remembered bidding Yelena goodbye. The party had been beautiful, held in the cultivated and a happy garden by the Dacha, on a cool and sunny Baltic day, plum brandy had been drunk, and much crying had occurred.

Now it was winter, and the garden had died back, apart from a few of those hardy winter plants and some vegetable roots that Yuri enjoyed cultivating now that it was a hobby and not a necessity.

The door creaked open slightly and Tatiana was peeking in, with a soft smile on her face. Oksana and Tatiana had been friends for a long time, having met as students at what was once the Leningrad State University. Oksana, awkward, pudgy, with dark eyes and an unflattering black bob cut, had seemed on the surface an unlikely friend to Tatiana, who was confident and had a curvy body, long flowing chestnut hair and hazel eyes, but they had clicked immediately, and Tatiana had helped Oksana realise herself in many ways. Oksana secretly had a vein of confidence and writing ability, which, watered by Tatiana's affection and support, would in time allow her to experience triumph and tragedy in equal degrees.

Tatiana looked older now, her hair was shorter, with flecks of grey and a pudgier body due to a combination of childbirth and encroaching middle age, but she was as beautiful as she had always been.

“Did I wake you?” she asked as she leant against the door frame.

“No, I had just woken up,” Oksana said as she slowly shuffled out of bed. “What’s the time?” she asked as she looked outside. The sky was a usual wintery grey, matching the dull blue-grey which she saw trying to climb up the beach down below. It was an indeterminant sky, it could have been half-seven in the morning or four in the afternoon for all that Oksana knew.

“It’s about eight…Yuri’s still asleep,” Tatiana smirked.

“I’m not surprised, let me guess…he was painting again?” Oksana smiled as before turning back to the sea. Yuri had a habit of staying up until the early hours of the morning doing his varying hobbies and sleeping until ten in the morning, with a loud droning snore that Oksana always found amusing but was thankful she didn’t have to share a bed with.

“Yes, he’s been doing a painting of Kaliningrad at night, you know with all the winking lights and neon signage and all that,” Tatiana said softly as she came up to Oksana and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’s for his mother.“

“How is she?” Oksana asked.

“Well, she’s alive. She doesn’t understand why her son can’t come back…you’d think she’d understand given all she’s lived through. It’s…been hard for her.” Tatiana sighed, and Oksana felt her grip tightened.

It was something that Oksana knew all too well. She remembered in the early days of her exile, letters from her mother and father, confused by her statements that she couldn’t return. Surely this all a misunderstanding, her mother would quietly say over the phone, in the background she could hear her father blaming it on Malik. He’d never trusted Malik, never liked him, always said Malik with a sneer. Of course whatever had led to their beloved Oksana having to travel across the Baltic Sea to the safe haven of Kaliningrad was the fault of that Malik, despite Oksana's pleas to the contrary.

“I should head into the city soon, have to get ready to greet Malik… and pay my final payment with Sergei,” Oksana groaned, taking in the sight of the wild untamed sea for one last time, in an attempt to gain some strength.

“I’ll just mention that me and Yuri have an invite tonight. Alexey’s putting on an exhibition of his photographs, thought it would be good to say hello to an old acquaintance,” Tatiana said as slowly started to wander towards the door.

“So I guess that means me and Malik get a few hours to ourselves?” Oksana smiled as Tatiana leaned against the door and looked back at her.

“What you do with your time, is your prerogative.” Tatiana cheekily winked causing Oksana to laugh. She loved these moments together during her exile, it had allowed her to feel like she still had her life, despite others trying to get it.

~ ~ ~​

Kaliningrad itself seemed just like any other Soviet city that had been built in the aftermath of World War II. Oksana would always spy the candy coloured Khrushchevkas as far as the eye could see as she came in on the bus, before her eye was drawn towards the unfinished site of the House of the Soviets as they reached near the centre. The House had been awkwardly built on top of the destroyed remains of the Königsberg Castle in an attempt to destroy the last remnants of Prussian Aggression forever.

The castle would have its revenge though. The House of the Soviets would remain unfinished due to a combination of a lack of interest by the authorities and the unsafe nature of the ground it lay on. The locals had dubbed it the 'buried robot' and its main attraction was the collections of graffiti it had managed to gather in its empty halls. The State Duma had recently agreed to destroy it and turn the area into a park as part of the city’s regeneration project, but for now this awkward remnant of the Soviet past remained standing, attracting the eye in the same way that a car wrapped around a lamp post would.

She turned away from the House of the Soviets and continued towards the commercial district of the city. This area had similarly ugly buildings, but mainly of those glass-and-steel wide frontage types popular in Western Europe that were beginning to infect their way out East. The large windows of the shops were optimistically advertising goods from companies like Dior or Gucci, but after a while these luxury shops were replaced by the kind that Oksana was more used to, ones that sold goods, often shipped in from Germany via Poland: tape machines, Adidas clothes, poorly printed books in Russian and VHS movies of varying lurid quality.

Despite this, Kaliningrad was fairly well off (as well off as a nation of five years could be) by all accounts. Oksana could see that on the breakfast table of the Andrienkos. Alongside a consistent amount of the simple porridge, cheese, sausage, bread and tea that most Russians could barely afford these days, there was also exceptionally rare apple juice and coffee that had come from Germany, the perks of being a Free Economic Zone. Oksana remembered reading about the effect of the recent Financial Crisis that had consumed Russia, of savings being wiped out overnight yet again as the government flailed in response. It had been hard for her parents, their pensions were once again worthless and Oksana had tried to send over what she could to them; trousers, tape machines and powdered milk had been part of the various care packages she had sent.

She felt tremendous guilt for being able to afford even basic foodstuffs, despite being on a relatively meagre budget as a secretary and translator which was compounded by her savings going towards getting Malik out of Russia, which something that many of her fellow former countrymen couldn’t do. They had to go to Red Square or the Duma and scream, cry, and clamour for any support from their apathetic government. As pensioners cried for food, President Sobchak grumbled about art and Russia as a nation on the world stage.

I wish there was more that I could do, she thought as she wandered past the various shops and the sparse amount of people who had the ability to meander around the commercial district on a work day. Pensioners doddering along without much care, kiosk owners puffing on imported cigarettes and grumbling to themselves, and occasionally militsiya men laughing around as they lazily viewed the legally murky kiosks. Oksana kept her head down as she crept along, her body automatically heading in the direction she needed to go, ignoring the people around her.

“Excuse me, madam?” a reedy voice, which snapped Oksana out of her thoughts. The voice, it turned out, belonged to a man wearing a leather coat, with his voice hoarse from the cold.

“Are you going to be voting for Yuri Matochkin for President?” the man said, holding a poster- pamphlet in his hand, which had a black and white picture of the candidate in question. Headlines ran ‘Greet The Millennium In The Right Way, Vote Yuri Matochkin Again!’ and ‘Kaliningrad in Europe, Vote Yuri Matochkin’ below the photo of the seemingly illustrious President.

“I guess…” Oksana muttered as she looked at the man, who had bags under his eyes and looked worn out “...I will” she finished, spiked with guilt, causing the man to smile slightly.

“Excellent, well…here, this will help you inform on his promises,” he said passing over the poster pamphlet, which Oksana took with a sigh. She wandered forward slightly further along before opening it up.

“As the MILLENNIUM comes ever closer, we need a strong and thoughtful leader for our new nation. YURI MATOCHKIN has guided our beautiful, virgin nation since its independence nearly five years ago and has shown that Kaliningrad has a future with EURO-” 

Oksana crumpled it up and threw it in a bin, her time consumed by more pressing matters than the sparklingly future that was to behold Kaliningrad.

~ ~ ~​

“Well, today’s the big day!” Sergei exclaimed merrily as Oksana opened the door to his office, in which he was sitting by his desk, casually smoking a Marlboro.

Sergei was a Russian who had never actually set foot in his supposed homeland. Instead, he’d been born in Estonia and had grown up a stranger in his own home, not quite Russian but definitely not Estonian. As a result, Sergei had found himself an outsider, something which had drawn himself to dodgy deals and criminal behaviour. He had in time made a business in the movement of people, helping Russians in Estonia go back to their perceived motherland, helping those trapped in said motherland, ranging from corrupt figures and dissidents to refugees who had the misfortune of being stuck in Russia flee to places elsewhere. A messy brush with the authorities in Estonia had forced him to move to Kaliningrad, whose belief in the freedom of trade and commerce appealed to the grubby businessman.

“It’s certainly a big day Sergei, certainly,” Oksana said as she slowly came over to the shiny new leather chair facing his desk.

“Indeed! Well, it’s been an arduous process, but my Tallin contact just called me about ten minutes ago to tell me they are heading over to the airport,” Sergei exclaimed happily before taking a puff on a cigarette. “Soon, you will be reunited with your beloved and I will have made another thousand. American,” he finished, facing eliciting a brief flash of seriousness before he returned to a grin as he stubbed out his cigarette.

He remained Oksana of those old Komosol functionaries, with his pudgy face, dark brown hair done in a well-groomed short pompadour and a well-trimmed beard, alongside his portly body which he managed to squeeze into a blue striped shirt with a red and yellow dotted tie, which made him look at least a decade behind the times. Despite his seemingly out of time appearance and his dismal office’s appearance with its yellowing flock wallpaper and the wonky Venetian blinds that didn’t close properly, Sergei was quite successful, which you could make out by the fact that he had a solid gold signet ring on his hand and a silver tie band. It was always the ones that hid their wealth that were the most successful, unlike those ‘poisonous flowers’ that paraded around the streets of places like St Petersburg with their shiny pastel suits and their extensions of manhood pistols around their belts.

Oksana quietly took out a check-book, wrote the requisite amount and ripped it out with a grimace, staring at Sergei as she passed over the check. Sergei stared at her for a moment before he got a Marlboro carton out and tapped one up and offered it to her.

“Would you like one?” he asked as she stared at him. “You did pay for it,” he smirked as Oksana sighed and took a Marlboro out, while he lightly took the cheque out her hand and placed it in a drawer. Oksana fumbled with her lighter for a moment before Sergei offered his own, Oksana awkwardly leaning into the flame.

“Oh!” Sergei clicked his fingers before he opened the draw again. “Your husband…Malik?” he asked, spinning his fingers as he tried to remember Oksana's husband’s name.

“Yes?”

“He's the fella that did the newspaper articles on corruption in St Petersburg, right?”

“Yes, he is. He was a journalist,” Oksana muttered as she looked as Sergei took a newspaper out of his drawer.

“Yeah, well, I remember he did a couple of articles on Sobchak's Chief of Staff and well…”

He placed the newspaper down in front of Oksana. It was a front page of the paper, with an image of a burning car with the headline screaming ‘President’s Chief of Staff Dead In Car Bomb!’ with the tagline of the photo stating ‘Vladimir Putin (47), Chief of Staff to President Sobchak, was killed this morning in a car bombing’ in a matter of fact tone.

“Oh…well,” Oksana muttered. He deserves it, after everything his goons did to Malik, she thought in the moment.

“Yeah, you know they said the Chechen Mob did it,” Sergei mentioned absent-mindedly before he caught a frozen stare from Oksana. “It’s a good thing that your husband’s gotten out when he did,” he finished in a sudden neutral tone, as he began to sheepishly bring the newspaper back to his side of the desk.

“Thank you, Sergei. I hope I don’t have to meet you ever again,” Oksana said as she stubbed out the cigarette and walked out of the office, as Sergei watched on, with a sheepish smirk on his face as he watched her go.

~ ~ ~​

Khrabrovo Kaliningrad Airport was the closest airport but still half an hour bus away, at best, as it would trundle towards the small village of Khrabrovo. Much of Oksana’s time as she travelled from the city centre to the airport was consumed by the waiting void, as she felt a queasy unease with the rattling of the bus. Even once she reached the airport, she still felt the dark emptiness she felt from waiting around for the 14:05 from Tallin to get into the airport. Compounding this fact was the matter of Khrabrovo Airport being a dull place, with crumbling grey concrete exterior and a beige plastic interior, with two doors for departures and two for arrivals and very little else. In terms of things to do there was a kiosk to get tea and there was a kiosk to get cheap thrillers and romance novels, and that was it.

It had the air of a provincial airport, which in a sense it was. The only thing different about it was a line of red faced disgruntled customs officers smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, meaty border guards toting Kalashnikovs and a dull steely glare about them, and the flag of Kaliningrad hanging from every wall alongside posters welcoming all travellers to this new nation and to take care along the way.

Without warning, one of the border guards, looking like a slab of beef that had been given legs and a uniform, marched towards her, rifle gently rattling against his side. Oksana was gripped with anxiety that at the last second, at the last moment of her journey, she would be taken away by a militsiya officer to be kept forever separate from Malik.

“Excuse me, madam?” the guard said in a surprisingly soft voice for a man whose face looked like butcher's sausage. “Are you called Masha by any chance?”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.” Oksana sighed in relief, visions of being a detention cell alleviated for the time being.

“Oh. My apologies, madam,” the guard sulked as he wandered away to leave Oksana back into the waiting void.

Time passed at a glacial pace as Oksana felt herself stuck back in a pit of anxiety and tension. Aside from the clock in the arrivals lounge, there was very little indication that time passed. Everyone stood around like statues and stayed in their positions even as the clock hands moved closer to Malik’s arrival. At one point, another woman with black hair came to the arrival lounge and the guard tottered over and asked the same question if she was the Masha he was keeping an eye out for as before, but she looked at him blankly and shook her head. The guard tutted and headed back over to his colleague and made out the guard grumbling; “ ‘e told me that she had black hair and was in her thirties…” before they turned away and their conversion became muffled and conspiratorial.

Suddenly, a murmuring began rippling through the custom officers as they hastily began shuffling towards various desks and heading through to the other side of doors, leaving only the guards to remain on the outside. Occasionally the guards tried to look through the windows in the doors but given that they were thin slits in which only light came through, after a while they shrugged and went back to talking to each other. Not long after, a shuffling crowd of people came through the doors, some chittering in conversation, others silently looking towards the exits, some saw loved ones and began happily sprinting over, as Oksana kept her eyes open for Malik and then—

He was looking healthier than the last time she had seen him, smothered in bandages and shuffling with a crutch around the house. He now had a limp and held a cane, but he gained back some of the weight he’d lost whilst recovering from his numerous beatings nearly two years ago. His cheeks looked plumper, and he’d shaved the scraggly beard that had emerged in hospital and his period of confinement to their apartment. His skin was back to his tanned, swarthy complexion that he usually had compared to his pasty pallid skin that she had seen as he had recovered, his hair was short and groomed, and when he turned to Oksana and smiled, which seemed to beam with an iridescent glow in her eyes, she felt finally, for the first time in years even, that she was seeing Malik once again.

“Oh…” was all she uttered before running towards Malik as fast as she could, galloping over with an awkward gait, nearly falling into his outstretched arms. They embraced each other for what felt like an eternity, time slowed and all they could feel was their bodies.

Tears crawled down their cheeks.

Warm breath crept across their necks.

They began to laugh, joy rippling through themselves as they held each other.

“Oh my love,” Malik said softly as he moved his face to look down at Oksana’s eyes, which she buried back into his chest as soon as possible.

“You’re home… we’re home,” Oksana muttered as she buried herself into his body, and never wanted to let go as long as she could.

~ ~ ~​

The Baltic night was inky black and cold. A frigid wind tried to scratch its way through the Dacha windows, trying to creep in through any possible nook or cranny that would invite it, but the Andrienko's house was warm and cosy, which was intensified as Oksana threw another log into the log burner, which caused another bout of woozy heated air to waft through the lounge.

Malik hadn’t moved much since he’d come in, he’d given his thanks and pleasantries to the Andrienko’s and even had a half-hearted conversation with Yuri until Tatiana had shooed him out of the door, seeing Malik’s exhausted look despite his cheeriness. Now he lay on the main sofa in the lounge, buried under a knitted quilt which cheerily depicted a scene from a fairy-tale that Oksana couldn’t remember, and he watched her with intrigued half-open eyes.

She slowly crept up and shuffled in beside him on the sofa, curling her legs up and laying her head against his legs, staring off at the fire raging within the log burner, a contained heat. He slowly untucked a hand from the quilt and began to softly and slowly stroke Oksana’s black hair.

“Remember doing this at university?” Malik asked softly.

“Yeah,” Oksana said softly. “We were very different people.”

“The world was different, Brezhnev was still in charge,” Malik mentioned absentmindedly.

“Was he? Was he ever in charge?” Oksana asked quietly, causing a chortle from Malik.

They went back to silence, as Malik continued to softly stroke Oksana, and let the time pass away. Oksana had been dreaming of this moment through fitful nights of sleep, of just being with Malik. They had spent so much time apart that, despite Tatiana's joking insinuation, it wasn’t sex she needed; just a cosy touch and a warm connection with Malik after so long.

“Humans don’t know how to experience history,” Malik mentioned abruptly, waking Oksana out of her stupor. “Within our lifetimes, we’ve seen the end of everything we knew, to be replaced by something that feels both familiar yet alien to us. Soon we’ll see the beginning of a new century.”

“Here’s hoping it’s better than the last,” Oksana said.

She hoped as much this would be the case; too much had happened to them both the last decade. Poverty, hunger, and beatings had been as much of a part of their life as changes in the weather.

Time passed once again, woozily ticking along as the heat from the log burner continued to engulf the pair of them. Neither moved away, instead finding every way to compress themselves into every nook and cranny of each other. Oksana heard the tell-tale noise of Malik gently snoring, something he did when he was in light sleep, a noise she hadn’t heard in a long time.

It made her body feel at ease, that finally, she was home.

Because home was with Malik, even if St Petersburg had been where she’d grown up or had met Malik or had lived most of her adult life in. Whilst a part of her yearned to walk by the Moyka again, she dissipated it from her mind. She didn't need that increasingly cold and alien place. Malik was here, and here was Kaliningrad and now this strange, new nation that was awkwardly spasming into the new century would be her home.

And with even that thought dissipating from her mind, Oksana closed her eyes and went to sleep.

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Ewan Hodson is the author of "A Day at the Castle" for Pride and Points of Divergence.