By Matt Powell
“…And that is why I will never own a dog again,” one of the toughest men I have ever met confessed to me sitting on the exposed roots of a tree in Chisyakovskaya Grove, in Krasnodar. I had lost track of days and time at the Kadochnikov School, a famous destination for hand-to-hand training by the old KGB in the glory days of the Soviet Union. In a drab, worn out gym, I had been beaten, choked to unconsciousness, revived, and ultimately taught for days on end as I chased what was the most consequential piece of Velcro-backed fabric I would ever work to gain: the School of A. A. Kadochnikov patch.
These days you can find this martial art all over YouTube and I now work for an AI company, but back in 2001 only a few knew of this school and I was the only one invited to come try for a patch. In the 80s this was the place where Spetsnaz operators and KGB operatives alike came to learn the combat art of Alexei Kadochnikov, a man unknown to the West except by strange propaganda videos leaked by their intelligence services. I wasn’t on a thrill-seeker tourism trip, flying back seat in MIG-29s with a half-drunken Russian piloting us—this was a place that when I told Col. Robert K. Brown I had gone, his response was, “damn, that’s a tough place.”
My primary teacher, Victor, school headmaster, attired in standard issue Eastern European blue tracksuit and close-cropped graying hair, was more Sasha from Behind Enemy Lines than a professor of education. But with that degree, Victor developed how to teach the system that grandpa Kadochnikov had created and I was being taught—albeit brutally—to bring it back to America. So, while most college graduates are out partying or in their first jobs, I was there, alone with the Russians in my own Red Dawn.
When not training I stayed evenings in the Hotel Moskva down the road, a place that was so nice that I was told by my school translator, “do not leave your room,” as he handed a small piece of paper with a phone number on it to call “if the police or trouble comes to your door.” I instead spent my nights in the floor cantina struggling to read menus, drinking only Fanta (because it was the only thing sealed), and talking to the only people who would chat with an American—the floor madame, Natasha, and her ladies. Natasha had not hit the Slavic wall … she had been thrown against it repeatedly. The former beauty queen wife of a dead Russian sailor was now an aged young widow running whores out of the dank bar. She spoke English surprisingly well and we traded lies about every topic under the moon, from politics to food. I’d sit at the table showing the ladies my photos from home, smoking Camels and trading the Camel Cash for everything from souvenirs to room cleanings. My entertainment mostly consisted of watching Natasha pull non-paying Johns from their rooms and beat them with a belt in the hallways.
Police raids were common and eventually, when trouble did come knocking during a police raid, I called the number on the slip of paper. A voice came on the line, “Da?”
“It’s the police, they’re slamming against my door,” I gasped in total fear. A week prior I had spent a day in a jail cell in the Sheremetyevo Airport over my papers (a whole other story) and I did not want a repeat.
“Da,” click.
I ran back to the Formica nightstand, barricaded door, pushed against the kicking, screaming police with all my might. Fifteen seconds later, through the door I heard loud voices on their radios. The kicking stopped. Silence. They moved on, the thin walls transmitting the sound of the beating my neighbor was now taking.
Once it all calmed down, I went to the cantina. The madam and her ladies were gone, the hotel emptied out. “Crime raid, Fantaman,” was the explanation from the barkeep.
Great…I was Fantaman.
The watchful grasp of Victor’s invisible hand on me everywhere I went, when I walked around town. I was constantly followed by guys 50 steps away. Fantaman’s daily Cipro ingestion allowed for eating street food and the local Russian version of Pizza Hut wasn’t bad. I was told to never speak English in public and, after being attacked by a toothless man in rags for doing so, I never spoke in English in public again. I dined below photos of Lenin, ate caviar in strangers’ homes, and gave all of my change to a homeless woman outside a store who held a day-old dead baby in her arms.
Places like that create people like Victor—robotic eyes viewing men as math problems. He rarely smiled and only taught. I felt like a childish annoyance as he translated martial art techniques through chalk drawings of physics and diagrams on the walls and floors. Studying at the foot of the master left splinters of unwaxed wooden floors in my hands and my notebooks devolved into chicken scratch. Each break I would slide to the side of the gym, lean against the nearest heater, gnawing on the Russian version of a protein bar while looking at photos from home, most often of my dog, Sunny.
Victor would stroll by, look down at the photo—a slight smile, or perhaps a lip twitch—then kick me to get up and start again.
As travelers often do, I became more mascot than tourist. Endless tours of every square inch of town being regaled with the history of Russia, constantly hoisted atop anything historical and commanded “say chuuuurs” and photographed. Once, after coming down from atop an WW2 Katyusha in an odd military park, I asked Victor if he had any food in the ever-present grocery bag he carried. He opened the bag and in it, a Skorpion SMG underneath a brown bag lunch, fruits, and a book.
A wry smile on his face, he educated me that “you Americans, your fancy holsters—no one searches a grocery bag for a gun.” He pulled the bag away from me and we walked to the gym, more pain, more moments to remember.
Time was winding down; Victor said he would walk me back to the hotel after a training session. Wearing the school uniform and patch I had earned I was ready to go back to America, but I knew my heart would ache for these moments, each a grain of sand in an hourglass affixed to life’s table. I felt a tug on my arm. Victor motioned me into the park we are passing. I followed him to a large tree. He sat, patting the exposed roots next to him. On his hand a tattoo of a Roman legionnaire and I asked him about it. “I fought the Chinese on our border for many years,” he told me in slow English, “our units…we were like Roman legionnaires, soldiers on the border of our empire.”
He paused.
“Your dog photo, may I see?”
“Da.”
He spoke at the photo to me.
“Many years ago, I had a German Shepherd. He was my best friend. He would wake in the morning to greet me, see me off to work. When I get home, he is at the front door to go for a long walk, always to this very place we sit. I tell myself we grow old together, then one morning he didn’t wake up to greet me.”
He whispered in Russian “he always pissed on this tree” as the legionnaire touches the tree trunk we lean against.
His eyes watered, his tattooed hand quivered as he handed back the photo.
“I waited until night. In those days, the police can arrest you for walking in the park after dark, so I sit in my car like this,” he shrugs his shoulders, leaning to the right as he ducks down as if he is ducking behind a car dash, “and I watch them patrol. When they leave, I pick up my boy and bring him here. I dig and dig, deep. God made sure police did not come back. I buried him here, under where we sit.”
He paused.
“I have never cried like that in my life … and that is why I will never own a dog again, because I never want to feel that heartache and pain. I have seen much, seen young men broken in combat, broken by combat, but I have never felt pain like that.”
Silence that we exist within, experiencing that fleeting moment when the student becomes a peer not from skill but from familiarity. He coughed, I stared forcefully at the cars as they passed, that form of ESP men know communicating that I’m giving him space, and the cool October air gave life to his words as they formed in the air in front of him.
“I think it is good we sit here. I think my dog, he would like your dog.”
I nodded.
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like, if you stayed here and taught as a Russian, and I went home in your place as an American? Would the world even notice?”
He stood. That grain of sand fell; the world began spinning again. He handed me his Skorpion-laden grocery bag and hoisted my bags with his now steady hands. We walked to the apartment building where he lived and ate dinner with his family—the photo of his beloved dog, and an old rifle, perched on the fireplace mantle. A mantle a world away, just like my mantle, a world away.
We are not so unlike, all of us, and the world does not notice.
Post script: Russian security and airport X-ray machines were not kind to my disposable cameras, and I left the Kennesaw Georgia Walmart on Busbee Parkway photo center with an envelope of blurred images.
