“The nineties are gone, Milena. There’s no more vor v zakone crime boss running a fiefdom in Khimki. Now everything flows — from the very top.”
The dancer stopped to hit the pineapple waterpipe; Milena noticed a small tattoo under her garter belt that simply read ‘CHOMP.’
“Even this place, darling. Everyone knows what happens upstairs in the VIP rooms, and we are a few blocks from a police station and the Duma, but we don’t get raided. You know why? A few years ago, this chubby muzhik, goat milk drinking villager type, big fat hands, face one large red blemish, rolled up into the club, piss drunk, and started indiscriminately grabbing the girls. Alexei beat his face in a little, so what. The next day, he comes back with some balaclava types, big guns. They pack up all our bouncers and drive them off. Then the red faced muzhik, Versace suit wearing gorilla, says he is now the official proprietor of Dolls Gentlemen’s Club. You see those husky types around that table — Spetznaz. And the table over there — Internal Ministry. That’s why they don’t shut us down. They own us. So, this thing you want to buy, you won’t be able to buy here, too risky. But thanks for the purse, darling. You always have the best deals.”
Milena left a tip, got up from the lounge chair and made for the exit, staying in the sections of the pole room where the neon was dimmest. She knew all the girls here, but didn’t have time to chat.
Outside, walking along Clear Ponds, she heard ducks splashing their webbed feet in the water and could see the lights of the Teatr Modern building. There’s a good oyster restaurant nearby, she remembered. Somewhere in the distance, teenagers played Tsoi on guitar.
The city is infested with facial recognition technology. Traffic, security, even apartment lobby cameras — scanning faces, storing them in databases. Even now, when the warm summer air forced sweat off her brow, a thick grey cotton hoodie covered her hair, and a black surgical mask hid her face.
Extra precautions: the software only properly worked if it could match a person’s facial landmark with a template already on file, yet, a single splash of sodium hydroxide on her soft, innocent skin had altered the contours of Mila’s face. As far as recognition technology was concerned — she was a phantom.
Without looking at herself, she felt the scars along her cheek. For the most part, the acid had only left second-degree burns on her face, except of a small sliver which managed to eat away at the dermis and reach the buccinator muscle near her jawline — the skin graft on her lower cheek left scar tissue; coarse, it pulled the left side of her face slightly out, distorting it a pinch; a porcelain doll with chipped paint.
Third-degree burns left the dorsal outer area of her hand, feeling stiff. After four surgeries, and months of rehabilitation, the circulation improved. She could move her wrists more easily now.
She dreamt of the attack. Human shapes flowing down the escalators onto the platform of Mayakovskaya Station — itself just one node of the Moscow Metropolitan, with its three concentric circles running outward from the city’s heart, veins crisscrossing and interlacing underneath the capital.
Rush hour, discordant steps pulsating in her ear. A hooded, masked figure with a strange canister made his path through the crowd straight at her.
Instinctively, she covered her face.
In the first few seconds, the sounds of the platform dissipated from her ears — brain assessing a sudden distress signal beaming from her organs. Slowly she started to feel the acid soak up her skin and sink deeper to her bones. Eyes closed, she heard the cacophony of her panicked screams for water. There’s a distinct corrosive chemical smell.
In the midst of August heat, a cyclist douses her face with his water bottle. An older woman takes saline solution out her purse and applies it to her cheek and hands.
At some point, she passes out from the pain.
Movement helped shake bad memories, the shaitan, out of her mind, so she wandered the streets at night.
Reaching Chinatown, Milena passed the gothic Lutheran church, a synagogue and the Ivanovsky Convent. Walking down the narrow cobblestone street, she turned into an alley and went up the stairs to Vorona Books where Niki worked. Since 2022, the bookstore, known for its nationalist sentiment, had both been firebombed by radicals for supporting the front, and raided by the authorities for supporting the front too enthusiastically. The government had a distrust of patriotic groups not directly financed by the state.
As the joke goes: In Russia, it’s easier to be a liberal than to love your country.
Niki hugged Mila tight and brought out two cups of Earl Grey.
“My dear, regarding what you asked about over the phone. Listen, I’m going with the lads to Donetsk in three weeks’ time with a humanitarian shipment. There I can arrange for something. But here in Moscow, it’s too risky. But about the other thing,” he passed her an envelope. “All there. Like you asked.”
“Niki, you don’t understand how much this means to me, all my investments are tied up in my next shipment. Thank…”
Niki excused himself to greet some customers walking into the bookstore.
Milena touched his shoulder to signify she’s leaving; before exiting, she quickly glanced back at Niki. Under his baseball cap of the Holy Mandylion flag, she could somewhat see the scars covering his entire scalp. Mila remembered when back in Sklifosovsky, he shared his university graduation photo; his blond hair slicked back like a Hells Angel. Junior Sergeant Kirill Schwarz voluntarily joined the front. His tank was hit with a drone and by the time he crawled out, his hair follicles burned off.
When they were hospital roommates, Milena teased him for resembling Niki Lauda, joking he should have been better at driving that tank.
The name stuck, as did their friendship wrought by circumstance.
***
When she first woke up at the Sklifosovsky Research Institute Burn Unit, Mila saw her mother’s eyes wrapped in a PPE Protective Suit, an opaque white silhouette on the background of lime green walls in the operating room. The patient monitor performed a staccato rhythm in ¾ tempo; the sound of the hospital waltz quickly pulled her back into an opioid slumber.
Milena’s wounds were washed with saline, then a scalpel was applied to the damaged areas of her hands and face to remove the eschar, dead tissue formed when blood ceased to flow into the burns. She remembered drifting into consciousness in between surgeries, to see the top layer of skin crisped, toast melted with butter, scraped away with a simple table knife. Skin grafts from her inner thigh were placed on her hands and to a small section of her cheek.
The parts of the damaged skin that only sustained second degree burns, through epithelialization, would recover on their own, as new cells migrate from the edges of healthy skin, and from the still viable dermis and surviving hair follicles in the damaged areas.
Doctors told her she was lucky she put her hands up in time.
When nurses wheeled her around on the hospital bed, her body took on a certain lightness; she floated in a vacuum, absent of time and space, into an endless sequence of sterile examination rooms.
Mila remembered the touch of latex on her cheek. Feeling exposed as doctors brought in medical students to examine her, a ventriloquist’s toy — she promised to herself she would never become a medical case study analyzed and researched, with photos shown in classes for future physicians to mutter “poor girl” as they jotted down notes.
Most of the doctors she met were useless and only seemed to exacerbate her worries about proper recovery. The physician assigned to her by insurance just told her to apply the prescribed topical creams: an antibacterial to prevent infections, ointment to keep the wounds moist, gel to heal the scars, corticosteroid to reduce inflammation. She got a bill for her visit because the treatment was cosmetic and thus not covered.
Milena’s mother said to trust her instinct and never settle for a subpar doctor. It took nine visits to various private clinics until Mila walked into the Imperial Dermatological Center.
Their website looked like it was from 1998, with Greek meander lines on top and banner ads on the sides but their staff had recognized experts in burn injuries. One of these physicians, Doctor Kozlova took her into a private room, performed a full examination, then sat Mila down and explained what could be done using pictures of past patients:
“What we focus on is using the Fractional CO₂ Laser to stimulate collagen remodeling. Slowly your epidermis will improve, and the hyperpigmentation will mellow out, so skin will look more even. There are other cosmological procedures we can perform. We have the best equipment from Germany and South Korea. But you must understand, this will be pricey.”
Milena walked out into the lobby to see a girl her age wearing a Tiffany’s cocktail watch encrusted with diamonds. A charming rose face with a brown pixie, she had visible lip fillers and had come in to receive plasma injections but was planning to book a Botox session or maybe some Hyaluronic acid.
A woman in her late seventies — with a face resembling a wax mask — was holding a brass-colored Coach Rouge handbag. Her meek hand, resting on the handle, was wrapped with a gold wristband Cartier Tank. Outside, Mila saw a Range Rover and a Bentley Bentayga.
Sanctions changed little in Russia, just raised prices — 50% or so, depending on available substitutes — and shifted around some bank accounts.
The paupers buy Chinese knockoffs. The ultra-wealthy can afford to fly to Milan. What about the rest of the population? The junior Vice Presidents, hair salon owners, programmers with bossy wives.
Russians don’t save their funds. There’s no guarantee your Bond will be redeemed. The English with their Perpetuals issued in the early 1900s could never understand. Russia is too volatile for fixed income and salaried pay. The currency can collapse again, or crude oil prices could hit $140. There could be a coup or the most corrupt could suddenly be replaced. Stochastic undulations of fate.
Everyone in the country knows stories of fools saving their Rubles before the 1997 crash, or 2008, 2014, then 2022. Russians buy property, cars, durables — or go on vacations, invest in fond memories. Even now, it’s not hard to get a tourist visa to Italy or Spain.
Demand for luxury is inelastic. Whatever Moscovites bought before February 2022, they still buy now thanks to parallel imports.
The big money is in industrial machinery, but you have to form dummy corporations, and the person in charge of procuring the merchandise in the US and EU risks arrest.
Luxury consumer goods are simpler, while still illegal for export into Russia, no one cares what life trajectory a Hermès bag takes, and it’s almost impossible to track. All you need is a buyer, preferably a woman with fashion expertise.
Milena reached out to girls from her modeling days — from photoshoots, runways, business conferences for oil conglomerates and banks — who had moved to LA, Paris or Barcelona for work, boyfriends or husbands. Most needed extra cash.
For exclusive items, the girls would sign up on waitlists, but most items were easily bought straight from the boutiques. At first Mila, for a small fee, asked acquaintances coming back to Moscow to carry the purses or watches. But both EU and Russian Federation border control asked too many questions, so she adapted.
Her solution was Timur, who ran a series of LLCs registered in Kyrgyzstan; a nation with Eurasian Economic Union free trade agreements with Russia, and no sanctions imposed on by the west. Customer money to buy western luxury was wired from unsanctioned banks in Russia to Cyprus. Any transaction flagged as suspicious could easily be diverted to accounts registered in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, UAE, Turkey, or run through fully digital banks, crypto, cross-currency accounts in Armenia, Union Pay from mid-tier Chinese banks — everyone was ready to do business.
Mila tried selling to working models, but most already had contacts, so she turned to an industry quite often derived from fashion — exotic dancers and escorts, girls who didn’t have the patience for an ETF on the MOEX or the high yielding OFZ government bonds, but nonetheless, had a lot of untaxed and undeclared cash.
First thing these girls did with their money was fix their teeth with braces or augment their breasts (usually upwards, but sometimes downwards) — their idea of investing into the future.
Then they bought a house and a Geländewagen.
But then, a bifurcation occurs in the community: smarter ones invest into small businesses — cigarette kiosks, hair salons, places easily run remotely.
The others develop a mild addiction to their new job (their other option is back to a monthly 30,000 Ruble cashier salary) and they really like the attention given in the form of tips. To calm the quivering of their spirit, they consume, but not Chinese, not from AliExpress.ru — they want Louboutins, Louis Vuitton and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Mila procures the real thing, from Evropa.
***
Crossing the bridge from Chinatown to Tagansky district, Milena stopped to look at the Stalinist Art Deco apartment complex resting along the embankment — one of the Seven Sisters. When looking at Moscow from a distance, these Communist era skyscrapers — spread out across the metropolis —shot up like massive spears, towering over all nearby buildings.
Milena could see the granite covering the bottom floors and the massive beige limestone forming the walls of the building. From the center tower, two wings of apartments, with gradually descending roofs, spread out in twain to form a serpentine maze. The gilded accent lighting along the walls and jade green spires, stood out like a lighthouse, against the backdrop of pitch-black sky, sporadically colored in with brush strokes of thick dark-purple acrylics.
Inside the Stalinka she took an elevator up to the café and saw Timur, with his reddish blond hair, smoking nargile while answering messages from two smartphones.
Aside from Russian and English, Timur spoke his native Tatar and Farsi, the latter picked up while studying Diplomacy at the prestigious MGIMO. When his wife Sabina, whom Mila knew from her modeling days, gave birth to their second child, Timur realized they could no longer live on a bureaucrat’s salary and went into export. Knowing Tatar, he quickly picked up Uzbek and Kyrgyz and adjusted his Farsi to the more anachronistic Tajik.
Mila started buying space inside his crates to ship purses and jewelry from Europe and Timur even helped her register an LLC in Bishkek and set up the necessary currency business accounts.
“Mila, I reached out to all my contacts. Do you remember Elnur, the lard faced Azeri who worked as a dentist and now lauders money. Can you believe he’s buying his fourth house in Adler! Fourth, and I’m trying to run a clean enterprise! Anyways, he said there’s this guy, Zaza, a Mountain Jew. He’s at that Latin bar, Jambu. Go there now.”
Mila knew the area well, as a child her parents took her to the Old Believers settlement nearby; Russian men with raggedy blond beards in linen Vishivanki and Kosovorotki — traditional shirts — served little Mila a fish soup called Ukha for lent.
She was greeted by a bald provincial type security guard who let her into the club. A live band played Merengue and Salsa. The floor was packed with Bolivians, Venezuelans and a few Indians who were pretending to be Latino to pick up naïve Russian girls (it never worked, the moustaches gave it away). Most of them were students at The Peoples Friendship University, a college that in the USSR attracted the children of high-ranking civil servants but now was used to attract any third worlder not afraid of the cold. Mila asked around and found Zaza smoking a shisha, but he brushed her aside — she didn’t fit the profile of a typical customer.
Milena stalked the Evrei for over an hour until he headed to the bathroom, and snuck in behind him, closing the door herself.
“Sir, I need to buy what I asked about earlier.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No, I’m a lifelong teetotaler, haven’t had a sip since I threw up from Massandra in Yalta when I was 16 and my mom slapped me around. Anyways, what’s market? About 800 USD, yes? Here’s 1500 USD.”
Walking out of the bathroom, she noticed an old black Cuban, eyes cloudy white, staring at her as his fingers rolled fresh cigars. Mila bought one and smoked it on the walk home.
It was 4:30 am when she came back into her apartment.
The summer sun’s rays already permeated through the living room, and she could clearly see the dark curls hanging off the side of the couch; a silver Orthodox cross rested on the pillows.
Kostik is still sleeping.
She ran her fingers through his hair, and saw his eyelids flicker open.
“Milena. Are you awake already? Listen, I’m sorry about last night, I was just emotional…”
“I have something I want to give you.”
Konstantin — Kosta or Kostik how she called him — was dancer at RAMT, on his way to the Bolshoi or Marinsky, but danseurs seldom made enough to live on, and he would at times model in photoshoots, using his sinewy gymnast figure to make extra cash, and met Milena.
Three years younger and shorter than Mila — she was 6’2” — he hovered around during the shoot, eventually asking for her social media; they chatted online a bit, then Kostya abruptly stopped replying.
Months later Milena was attacked and forgot all about him.
Until six months ago when Kostya messaged her.
Being a romantic — of the type common amongst artist and aristocratic military officers — he was involved with a patriotic organization and got locked up for two years for ‘extremist materials’ found on his phone during a raid.
After getting out, he lived in a decrepit Khrushevka apartment on the little money his parents helped him with. At night, the cockroaches, tip toeing on the linoleum, didn’t let him sleep, so he wandered the city, watching the married couples with their puffy cheeked, fair-haired children. He didn’t care for politics anymore; wine drunk, stumbling upon the bronze, granite and marble statues all over the city, he would talk to them as if to Roman gods and pleaded “in this city with 7 million of them, I just need one.”
He finally messaged her, joking he was at a corporate retreat outside Moscow for a few years and she told him of how she had been attacked and left modeling and didn’t want to see him, or anyone else:
“In the Middle Ages they burned women like me.”
Finally, Milena agreed to meet at a seedy hookah lounge, where the dim lights and hammam dense smoke would hide her from him. She walked in late, after standing outside contemplating her next actions when an April flash rain pushed her indoors.
Konstantin kept his eyes on Mila as she made her way to his table; aside from the scars on her left cheek — the drenched blond hair whisked out, camouflaging her irregularities —she was the same creature from five years ago: tiny waist, oval face with pistachio eyes and plump lips.
He saw the woman for whom he obsessively flipped his phone over to check for new messages, like Pavlov’s Dog — first thing in the morning, last thing at night.
So long he dreamed of meeting, of making love to her, but in most of his reveries, he simply held Mila’s hand and kissed it, smelled her hair, and laid beside her.
Milena slowly grew accustomed to his scent. Sometimes Kostya would stay over and gently nibble on her ear to make her laugh while their naked flesh mended together from the still warm sweat off their bodies.
Last night Kostya came late into Milena’s apartment. He told Mila he saw one of his old prison guards.
“I followed him home. But I didn’t have my knife, I had taken the metro earlier and left it at home. But I now know where he lives Milachka,” tears ran down his ivory pale face
“Do you know how they treated us in there? I never told you. I’m going back tomorrow to his home.”
From shock and stress, Kostantin fell into a slumber.
Mila sat alone in the kitchen, drank a cup of black coffee then called the two people she trusted most, Niki and Timur, put on a hoodie and walked out of her flat, spending the night in constant movement until now.
Kostya sat up on the couch: “Listen Mila, I shouldn’t have told you my plans.”
“Kostya, you know how sometimes I joke that I’m your Kikimora, your Slavic house spirit that if treated poorly will haunt you, but if shown tenderness, will show love back.
Well listen — you can’t use a knife, he’s a cop, he carries a gun, and what if he’s not alone? And Kostya, I know you well enough to know I can’t stop you but…”
Her eyes grew as wet as her hair that night in the cafe, and she pulled out a Makarov along with a cartridge box with 9x18mm.
“Kostik, I can’t lose you. Look at me, who else will love me like you?”
She couldn’t say anything else.
Konstantin look with awe at the gun, then saw Milenas’s eyes and pulled her closer, Mila’s head now resting on his naked chest:
“My dear, sometimes you are the most foolish girl in the world.”
— California native, Roman Kislitsyn has spent the last few years living in Russia and Brazil and traveling across Eurasia.