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

XXXI

KOSTYA’S MOM, NADYA, took offense when she was called an alcoholic. It was true that she had drunk up the pension she received after the death of her husband in the Second Chechen War, sometimes going off on binges lasting several days, but she didn’t consider herself to be a social undesirable—she kept her home in order, it looked fine outside too—she really wasn’t a bum, she had an income, a job working every third day as a nurse in the local Tver Region New Jerusalem Hospital that allowed her to feed herself and Kostya, who should have started school this year, but didn’t end up going. That time she had been drinking for eight days or so—and when the vodka went dry, and the money ran out she called out: “Kostya, kiddo!”—but Kostya wasn’t there. She went out into the courtyard—no, no one had seen him. The neighbors’ kids were playing in the yard, she asked them if they had seen him, but no, they hadn’t. She went to the police.

How was she to know that Kostya, when he went out to walk, had walked out along the train tracks and walked and walked and walked until he was exhausted? He sat down at a bus stop, fell asleep, and woke up in a room with a big window, and a police officer—a nice guy, by all appearances, was telling somebody everything about him, Kostya—said that the boy would have frozen to death if the police officer had not been coming back to work that day at exactly that time from his dacha. Kostya started to cry, the police officer and some lady there in plain clothes (it turned out that she was also a police officer) started to ask Kostya where his mom was, and he answered honestly that she was on a drinking binge, and they laughed and gave Kostya a sandwich, he ate it and fell asleep again. If he had been told that he was in Moscow, he would have been amazed, but it really was Moscow: the Levoberezhny district branch of the Department of Internal Affairs, to be precise.

It was a holiday—February 23—with a three-day weekend, and the inspector for juvenile affairs came back to work only on the Monday after they had already come from Yaroslavl to pick up Kostya—I promised that this story would have many unfortunate coincidences, and here’s another for you: in Yaroslavl, a boy from the orphanage also named Kostya went missing (actually, he drowned, but that doesn’t matter, the point was that he couldn’t be found), and the headmistress of the orphanage, when the police called her, decided that this Kostya who had been found in Moscow must be hers. She sent the steward of the orphanage for Kostya, and he brought him back, but it turned out it wasn’t the same boy; they couldn’t take him back, though, and so she kept him.

Big systems always have logistical problems.