Saturday Night I
by Joel Deutsch
Eight P.M., and the main room of the Nevsky Prospekt Banquet Hall and Restaurant was at full capacity, a sonic melee of high-decibel dinner conversation, the clank and clatter of tableware, and the 4/4 thump and throb of discoish Russian-language pop music blasting from bass-heavy speakers. Black-jacketed waiters, trays held aloft, patrolled the aisles and dodged around the long, linen-draped family-style tables, rows of them, every square centimeter of their considerable surface area covered by so many things that it seemed impossible the waiters could find space for even one more serving dish, but still the items kept coming. Platters of smoked fish. Blini with red caviar, blini with meat. Boiled potatoes with mushrooms, Fried potatoes with garlic and dill. Three kinds of salad. Fresh vegetables, steamed vegetables, marinated vegetables. Seared tuna. Sliced veal tongue. Baskets of white bread, baskets of black bread.
And those were just the appetizers, Irina knew, because she had sat here at Nevsky Prospekt with family and friends, herself, how many times over the years she couldn’t even count, celebrating birthdays, weddings, new jobs and all the other life events that mark our time. Only last June, it was her own Sasha’s high school graduation they had gathered here to honor.
But tonight she was present in a different capacity, seated near the swinging kitchen doors at the only two-person table in the house, a rowboat tied up at the edge of a marina lined with ocean-going yachts, her two cameras at the ready beside her complimentary glass of Gerolsteiner sparkling spring water, waiting for the first course service to be completed so she could approach the diners and offer to provide them with documentary commemoration of their good times.
“I will create such beautiful portraits of the customers that they’ll feel as special as President Bush or a movie star,” she had promised Grisha, the dapper, balding owner of the photo company, at her interview a week after Sasha’s party. It had taken her a year since Dima’s departure, but she had finally realized she had to find some kind of work outside the home. Not out of need to supplement Dima’s monthly spousal and child support remittances , which were decent enough, besides which the hourly pay of $8.50 an hour wouldn’t have been much help if she’d really needed it. Money wasn’t the issue. she simply had had to get hold of herself again, regain a sense of being something more and better than merely abandoned.
The business operated out of a storefront office suite in a rundown Fairfax Avenue mini mall it shared with a Cuban restaurant, a Salvadoran flower shop, the clinic of an Israeli podiatrist, and a Korean dry cleaners. Friday through Sunday nights, during the appetizer course, when the people were settled in and maybe a bit lubricated, a crew of five or six photographers, all female and nearly always under 30, if not 25, descended on the restaurants to whose owners Grisha had paid an access fee. They snapped pictures of the patrons who wanted their celebratory moments documented—newlywed couples posed in various combinations with family and friends were a staple—and then returned to home base to get the best shots on their digital cameras’ memory cards printed.
The two high speed laser machines at the office were run by a skinny, sad-eyed technician in his fifties from Moldova named Vadim, who always kept perched on top of them open cans of Coca Cola Classic from which he drank while they were cranking out the 8 1/2 x 11-inch photos.
“Vadik! You idiot! You saboteur!” Grisha would admonish. “Remove the damn Coke! You’re going to drown my hewlett Packards with that crap one of these days!” Grisha, with a shudder, imagined the electromechanical viscera of the printers gummed up beyond the hope of repair by a soggy mess of high fructose corn syrup sweetener and food coloring, but Vadim kept placing the cans on the printers and, miraculously, nothing ever spilled. “Would you prefer me to drink vodka, maybe?” was his usual unsmiling and senseless rejoinder. And the Coke Classic cans remained, sitting sometimes atop one of the printers, sometimes the other, sometimes on both, unmolested.
After inserting the pictures into cheap white paper frames at a work table, The young women would stow them in large red canvas satchels emblazoned on their sides in gold with the company name, TROPICANA PHOTO. Then they would jump into their Civic hatchbacks, Rabbit convertibles and second-hand Saturns and race back to the restaurants. The prints sold for $15 each, all of which went to Grisha; to have anything meaningful to show for her time beyond the pitiful hourly wage Grisha paid, a photographer depended on tips.
Irina was grateful that Nevsky Prospekt and the others had only one seating. If they had operated like American restaurants, with diners coming and going all night, she thought, you could never know how many more potential customers you might be missing while you were out getting your shots printed. She was also glad that Grisha, instead of making her work two, or even three restaurants as some of the others did, had given her a permanent assignment at Nevsky Prospekt, along with another photographer, a rail-thin, model-pretty girl named Kira. The two of them would divide the room between them, each cruising only her own half of the restaurant for customers.
Nevsky Prospekt was big enough for that. It was the largest of the Russian banquet halls outside of Glendale, where an Armenian family ran a cavernous, airplane hanger of a place called Gorky Park , complete with dining balconies that overlooked the main floor of the hall and a theatrical-sized stage on which they presented not only live bands for dancing, as did Nevsky Prospekt, but full scale revues, too. One week it would be choreographed Cossacks, the next week a tango show, the week after that maybe a 30-minute Greatest Hits version of The Sound of Music, with “My Favorite Things” and “Climb Every Mountain” sung in Russian by a lederhosen-clad troupe.
Irina had been to Gorky Park just once, on a date with a man her neighbor Tanya had introduced her to. A businessman, Tanya had said. Something to do with computers. Of course. Wasn’t it always computers? Igor, his name was. He had picked her up in a Mercedes, and he had reserved a balcony table on which, as they sat down, he’d laid out his telecommunications paraphernalia—a Blackberry, two sleek, identical cell phones, two pagers– in a display of his connectedness. She hadn’t liked his cologne, an overapplication of something expensive and cloying that she placed as the scent that threatened to suffocate her when she walked into the first-level entrance of the Bloomingdale’s at Beverly Center. He had ordered too much food, which she had politely picked at, plied her insistently with vodka, which she had sipped demurely. His conversation revolved around the growth of his company, some kind of consulting enterprise, from what she could make out, and the cost of the things in his life. The lease payments on the Mercedes, the after-rebate prices of the Blackberry and the phones, the deal he’d gotten on the late-model laptop he’d brought right into the restaurant in a black leather shoulder bag and stowed at his feet. He would periodically digress from this sort of consumerist braggadocio into a dissertation about the philosophy to which he credited his success, a garble of precepts that sounded to Irina like a late night self-improvement infomercial featuring Russian Orthodox mysticism.
At one point in the conversation, he broke off to ask Irina about herself, but when she took the bait and began telling him about her photography, he veered off into another lecture, this one on the proper roles of men and women that struck her as so retrogressively sexist it was all she could do not to get up and leave, the restraint owing more to being carless a long way from home than anything else. So she was more than a little grateful when the house lights went down and a troupe of dancers appeared, dressed in stylized Spanish Gypsy garb, and made their way through a Disneyland-like performance they announced as A Night in Andalusia, their Russian singing accompanied by an electronic keyboardist and an electric guitarist playing something approximately like flamenco. It wasn’t much, but it was better than having to talk to Igor for those 15 or 20 minutes.
To be continued…