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Machine Guns in the Afternoon

08.17.09 | 11:37 AM ET

The bus took its final lurch towards my stop, quieting to an idling rumble at a corner of Balkanskaya Square. I squeezed myself through the foggy-windowed doors, exhaling the beer- and sweat-drenched air, and started down the dirt path home. It was the end of the second week of my summer-abroad program in Russia.

Before I left the States, I was slated to stay with Olga Semyonova and her grand piano at the center of St. Petersburg, just off the Neva River. Her home was 20 minutes from the university and seemed a safe and culturally rich location for a young woman with mediocre language skills on her first trip abroad. But her roof fell in and I ended up in Kupchino, an hour and a half bus ride from the city center, with the only host mom left: Svetlana Stepanovna.

Svetlana lived in a high rise, a dirty grey tower with cracked, spidery windows weaving cobwebs of clotheslines out onto tilting balconies. The foyer of my new home smelled like urine, still water and cement. Since its erection in the 1960s, this Communist monument to “equality through ugliness” had been self-destructing, unhindered by rehab or renovation. Svetlana, however, had grown strong and saucy with the years. She was a 62-year-old former sociology professor who loved ballet and trashy French novels. Through impromptu games of multi-lingual charades and evenings watching “Sex and the City” dubbed into Russian, we became fast friends.

That particular afternoon, I decided to skip my ritual after-school walk down Nevsky Prospect, to return home early. Everything seemed routine as I walked the familiar path, but when I unlocked the two security doors of our sixth floor apartment, I realized something was different: Svetlana wasn’t home. With extra lectures and cultural excursions, I usually wasn’t home before 8 p.m. I’d never realized it, but Svetlana’s presence was a constant in the apartment. The silence felt eerie. I calmed myself with the notion that Svetlana was a social pensioner whose life did not revolve around being home to make me kasha and chicken kutleti. I locked both doors and settled down with my homework.

I had barely begun curling the Cyrillic cursive of my name when the phone rang. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never been alone with the phone. Svetlana didn’t have an answering machine, and I figured it could be my mother or boyfriend calling, so I answered it.

“Allo?” I said.

“Svetlana doma? Is Svetlana home?” a gruff voice asked.

“Nyet. Can I say who called?”

“Ne nada.” The caller hung up.

Although I was proud of my newly discovered Russian secretarial abilities, a drop of apprehension made its way down my spine. Someone now knew that I, a young foreigner, was alone in the apartment. The stories I’d heard about Kupchino’s gang problems resurfaced in my mind. I could only imagine the tricks Russian criminals had for looting apartments and kidnapping foreigners. Something must have prompted the tenants to barricade their apartments with double security doors.

I buried my head in a Pushkin poem and tried to shake off the nervous energy pooling in my stomach. The phone rang again.

“Allo?”

“Svetlana, doma?” asked a different voice, more abrasive and searching than the first.

“Nyet, can I ...”

“Ne nada.” Click.

My mind now leapt into the realm of imagination usually inhabited by writers of B-horror films and National Enquirer articles. I conjured a pair of criminals who were either superiorly dense, or just liked to be thorough when staking out a hit. Perhaps a gang of delinquents had gotten hold of the university’s list of students. Foreigners have cash, iPods, digital cameras and, most importantly, American passports. Who wouldn’t want to rob them? The convicts were now making house calls with Kalashnikovs.

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