From Dissident To Owner of a Red Mercedes

Life has a way of turning the tables on you. This is especially true in Russia, where reality seems to change shape several times a day.


When I met Venya in the mid-1980s at an embassy reception, he was a minor Soviet writer and I was a diplomat. Russian intellectuals and the diplomatic corps had a symbiotic relationship in those days -- the embassy got a feel for the cultural life of the country, and the intellectuals derived a small measure of safety from their visibility with the Western establishment.


Of course, contact was mostly limited to official functions. It was work for both sides, after all. So with Venya I was politely inquiring, he was properly ingratiating, and we both forgot the encounter minutes after it happened.


I next ran into him a few years later, when I was teaching Russian at a small New England college where he was lecturing in literature. A lot had happened since then -- glasnost, perestroika, free movement in and out of Russia. And much of America was getting its first good look at real Russians. They were no longer shoe-pounding bogeymen in ill-fitting suits. They were "real people, just like you and me," as many were fond of saying, with a large measure of surprise.


Venya was the darling of the liberal intellectuals -- he was young, handsome, he wore a spiffy sport coat over T-shirts and sported fashionable stubble on his chin. Almost equally important, his writings had the faint whiff of dissidence about them -- most of his work had not been published, and there was a brief period when he was actually in some kind of official trouble.


All of this lent him considerable cachet, of course, and he was not slow to capitalize on it. He zeroed in on me at a college reception -- either because I was the only one there who could speak Russian well enough to understand him, or because there is a big sign on my forehead visible only to Russian men that says "Sap" -- I'll never know. We made small talk and realized we must have met before. By the end of the evening he was introducing me as "my old friend from Moscow."


He was charming and attentive, especially when he found out I had a car. It seemed he had a hankering to see Florida, and thought I could drive him there over the weekend -- no mean feat from New England. I put up a valiant struggle, but eventually I succumbed.


How times have changed. Venya has traded in his Soviet-era rebellion for major Western commercial success. He writes barely comprehensible prose liberally sprinkled with previously unprintable words and graphic scenes of sex and violence, enlivened by a decided tilt towards body functions that are not usually mentioned in polite company. He calls it post-modernism, and with the flare of a born promoter has become popular with a small but select circle in the West, where no one has any idea what he is talking about, but everyone is afraid to say so.


Venya now has his own car -- a brand new, shiny red Mercedes that he bought on impulse in Paris. He saw it in a showroom window and just had to have it. He probably put it on his platinum American Express card. Not that he has returned any favors by taking me to the Black Sea in it. As a matter of fact, the last time I ran into him at a Moscow reception he pretended not to notice me. I guess he doesn't like reporters.


I can't wait for the next round. Somehow I'm sure there will be one.