Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

XXXIV

THERE REALLY WEREN’T enough nurses at Soyuz, and when the recommendation from the New Jerusalem Department of Public Health concerning “Chernenko—Nadezhda Vitalievna—b. 1978,” the director didn’t even finish reading it; he gave it to his secretary, who passed it along and by the following day, when the Moscow-bound bus stopped at the designated kilometer marker, Nadya stepped up to the security gate with two regularly-sized bags—various socks and underwear, work shoes, a book by Darya Dontsovaya, shampoo, and other stuff like that—a minute later her passport had been scanned by the security guard with the battered knuckles, and ten minutes after that Nadya’s career at Soyuz ended as quickly as it had begun. It wasn’t her fault, Svetlana Sergeevna had explained to her in great detail everything that she knew about the strictness of the regime there; but who could have known that at that very moment the children would be walking along to breakfast in pairs and that one of the children, actually not a child, of course, but a grown man, would suddenly push off of the woman next to him, break away from the formation, and run up to Nadya, crying out, “Mom!”

Of course it seemed to her that she had lost her mind. Up to her was running, well, yeah, Edik, Svetlana Sergeevna was not mistaken, but Edik for some reason was shouting out “Mom” but not “Nadya.”

“Mom!” he shouted, and Nadya did not notice the fact that for an ordinary, though specialized, assisted living facility, there sure were a lot of security guards—young men in identical black suits and ties sprang out from every corner of the premises and ran toward her and to the one who was shouting at her. Two of the men apprehended the man, two got Nadya, and she saw no one else but these two security guards. They led her to the security gate, sat her next to their colleague who had scanned her passport, and told her to wait.

Nadya cried. She did not understand and could not understand what had happened, but the director immediately understood when the on-duty officer in charge of security appeared in his office without knocking and reported: some woman had arrived with a nurse’s ID, but then it turned out, judging from all appearances, that she was the mother of one of the students. The director cursed—he had suspected from the very beginning that something like this could happen, but had not come to any conclusions about what to do about it. He asked where the woman was being held and stepped into the waiting room. After a second he returned, poured himself a whiskey, then pulled a piece of gum out of his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and again walked out of the office.