The Unpossessed City by Jon Fasman

There's a Walter Mitty aspect to Jon Fasman's thriller The Unpossessed City. Jim Vilatzer is a going-nowhere, thirty-something who's squandering away his potential working in his family's little strip-mall diner in Rockville, Maryland. When he runs into problems with a loan shark, he decides he needs to get away, very far away. Using language skills picked up from his Russian immigrant father, he takes a job in Moscow with an NGO, The Memory Foundation, attempting to collect the stories of gulag survivors. In trying to collect interviews for this group, Jim unwittingly becomes a "human black box...a person who carries information without knowing it"(95). Entangled by a young Russian woman with whom he falls in love, Jim ends up ferrying coded messages for a group of conspirators looking to smuggle ex-Soviet weapon scientists to the highest bidder. Doing so, he comes to attention of the CIA and Russian intelligence. Eventually, wanted by all, he needs to make a thrilling run for the Ukrainian border with a group of charming but violent Tatar mobsters he befriends in his apartment complex.

The story is far-fetched and hard to follow in all of it's plot machinations. I was never clear on why the conspirators needed to pass along the messages that Jim passes. And, there is not a whole lot of cloak and dagger. A chunk of the book is taken up with Jim tracking down and interviewing supposed Gulag survivors who tell him stories that actually contain coded messages for the conspirators. A general air of menace and threat hangs over Jim at all times, but this is not owing to his being a dupe in a dangerous criminal scheme, but simply too his being a foreigner in corrupt and crime plagued post-Yeltsin Russia.

The book's redeeming feature is its setting, Moscow. Fasman and his main character share an attachment to the city. Local Muscovites are constantly asking Vilatzer why he's in Moscow. Of course, there is the gambling debt. However, as time goes by, Vilatzer finds himself fascinated by his temporary home, "a city that constantly challenged its denizens to survive it unscathed. These challenges superseded mere crime, chaos, culture, or language. What it came down to, really was finding a way to feel human in a city designed to make one feel insignificant"(47). Life in Moscow is raw and given to extremes. As Vilatzer sees it, "American life....tends to flatten out the extreme-one can go years seeing no infraction more serious than running a stop sign, but receiving from strangers nothing friendlier than a professional, tight-lipped grin in a store." In Moscow, on the other hand, "if you occasionally saw a thug send a beggar sprawling, you also had strangers who pulled you out of harm's way"(166).

In the course of unfolding his plot, Fasman brings his keen eye and sharp, literate wit to a virtual tour of the city. We are taken into a trendy night club in the Arbat, Sporting Palace where:

All activities except the brothel took place in different corners of this single huge room with concrete walls and floor, lit by bare high-wattage light bulbs dangling from the ceiling some five stories up and screwed into dangling, obviously improvised electrical outlets. It had all the aesthetic appeal of a displaced-persons camp. The hundred of patrons milling around in various states of debauch could never come close to making the space feel anything but gloomy and underpopulated. The light gave everyone a ghoulish, hungry look, made their shadows shrink and expand as they teetered from one area to the next. Cinder-block partitions separated the various activities from one another, and uniformed security personnel, all holding submachine guns and wearing belts with pistols, Tasers, truncheons, and pepper spray, kept the patrons in line: no mean feat when some of those patrons were half-drunk and test-firing automatic rifles at the long, narrow range at the back of the room (110).

He offers a compelling sketch of a tea kiosk in the metro: "There was something so sweet, so human, so maternal about the process: the kiosk matron, a kind-eyed woman with a hesitant, sorrowful smile just past middle age filled an electric kettle from a ten gallon container of water, plugged it in, and showed him an array of cardboard tea boxes behind her. There was no focus-group chosen music; she was not a moonlighting actress or an undiscovered genius; she wore neither a uniform nor an insincere smile"(123-124).Ok, there is something cranky in a comment like this. Writers celebrating the little folks; always celebrating them while running a mile a minute from them in their real lives.

We visit Izmailovsky's Vernisazh market in an eastern suburb of Moscow which offers "several square miles" of kitsch (127-), a trailer casino where the "machines...[showed] far more signs of life than their users"(142), a hellish army hospital where instruments are 'sterilized' in water brought to a boil on hot pots. We take numerous trips on the Moscow metro that "seems more an ecosystem or a natural phenomenon than a commuter rail network"(165). We go through its stations ruled over by "Armies of stern babushki [who] keep the stations in relative order"(165).

This book details a love affair between the writer and the city where:

the extremes of brutality and warmth...played out on every level, from the sneering clerk and the office manager who made sure you wore comfortable slippers to the savage apartment blocks and the fairy-tale churches; the way the city and its people nurtured their scars; the salutary effects of difference, of being forced to figure out and improvise rather than taking life and its patterns for granted; the lusts unleashed after decades of repression; the honest vibrancy...In truth, though, falling in love with a city is like falling in love with a person: explicable only up to a certain point. After that other people just havve to take your feelings on faith."