We are the eggman, documents please

A fat policeman.

One of the joys of Moscow is that every car can be a taxi. If you need to get somewhere, simply  stand by the road and put your hand out, someone will stop, you say where, agree a price and go.

A year or two back a Toyota pulled up in response to my wave and in the driver’s seat was a fat bald man. I too am a fat bald man, but this guy was fatter and balder than me by some distance, kind of like a pink boiled egg with limbs. We agreed the price and I sat down expecting to have a quiet ten minutes to watch the world go by, but he wanted to talk, which is unusual with the Russians: Tajiks, Uzbeks and Caucasan guys always want to talk to a foreigner, but fewer Russians are interested.

We did there “where are you from?” routines, and then I asked him what his job was, even though I had worked it out already from the piggish demeanor and beady eyes: a cop.

   Moscow specializes in fat cops. There are thin ones too, younger guys, but at 40 or so they all put on about 50 kilo and go bald overnight. I’m guessing there’s some sort of machine at the cop headquarters that does it to them, but nobody really knows. Whatever the truth, it’s hard to like these guys: I have not met anyone who has managed it in all my years here, though surely there are mothers or sons and daughters who can pull it off. And, yet, somehow this egg man in a Toyota won me over. He did it with absolute frankness. I asked how it was being a cop in Moscow and he took a deep breath and started telling me the entire story.

He set off straight away addressing corruption, saying he took money when he needed money, and with two college age daughters and a wife and her mother, he often needs money. And he said it was wrong, and everyone knows it is wrong and that the bulk of what he takes gets passed upstairs though the department. He may have been simply confirming the stereotype for the benefit of a western “guest”, but it didn’t feel to be that. He made no claims to be suffering moral agonies inside a system that stopped him from doing good. It was the old pragmatic “what to do?” attitude in all its familiar, shabby glory.

He was skeptical about the change in name from militia to police and said the public mistrust was too deep for a re-branding exercise to fix it. He didn’t call it a “re branding exercise” but that’s how he saw it.

The traffic was bad, so 20 minutes became nearly an hour, but neither of us was rushing anywhere and football and politics and women came up, and England and Russia, and the West’s approach to said Motherland etc…the usual conversation.

And the odd thing, which is also the most expectable thing in the world, is that he was just a guy: just an ordinary man making do, and talking honestly, and funnily about life. The worst thing you can ever discover about policemen is that they are really just like us.