37. Faith No More

There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realize that their only recourse is to stow away on the tour bus of a moderately famous thrash-rock/hip hop band and see what happens next. For me, that moment came weeks after I’d been let go from the Guardian and was at the leading edge of what would turn out to be one of the darkest periods of my life. Looking back on it now, with a better understanding of the unreliable chemistry that governs my moods and impulses, I realize that the lethargy and creeping hopelessness I was starting to feel are the classic heralds of depression. But back then, I thought that the problem was simply that I was out of a job. I was still writing and intended to keep writing. But to whom? That was the problem.

Our plan to start our own magazine had met with some initial success. It looked like Margot Kidder, who had come to Russia to film an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, would turn out to be our superwoman. Our intern at the Guardian had interviewed her about the movie, and the word on the street was that Kidder was interested in helping us fund a new literary venture. For a while the staff chattered to each other about our new patron and all the things we’d do once we relaunched the magazine, but soon Kidder stopped returning our calls and it was obvious that the idea was going nowhere. I assumed that as a famous person Margot had a lot on her plate and was simply too busy to help, but Jason set me straight. “She went crazy and had to go home,” he said to me one night as we walked around the city. “She came to Russia and it drove her crazy.”

This kind of thing was typical, and did not surprise me at all. It was never a question of whether one would go crazy in Moscow – it was really the only sane response – merely of how long it would take. I was sorry for Ms. Kidder and sad that our magazine would remain just a pipe dream, but I understood. I stopped hoping that someone would swoop in to save us all, but I could not quite face the reality that I’d have to find something else to do.

But then suddenly there I was, standing in some mid-sized arena in the suburbs of the city, waiting with Betsy and Stu for Faith No More to start playing. I’m not sure why I, or any of us, were there. It wasn’t that I disliked Faith No More, exactly; they just weren’t a band I would normally go see. But then, these were not normal times. Now that I was no longer employed, I spent most of my time lying on the couch drinking vodka and reading and re-reading the spiral notebooks I’d filled since coming to Russia, and I recognized that I was becoming unhealthily isolated. Maybe, I decided as I stumbled into the bathroom to splash my face with freezing water and eat some toothpaste, it would do me good to get out and have some fun for an evening. And there was also the fact that it was very unusual for any foreign band to play in Russia in 1993. Regardless of how I felt about the music I knew that this would be a big event in the city, and at this point I was still motivated enough to want to see what would happen.

I slumped in between Stu and Betsy and resumed my running conversation, the only one I was capable of these days. “I don’t know what to do, Betsy,” I snuffled, “I just wanna write.”

Poor Betsy, since the collapse of the Guardian she had spent many, many hours sitting next to me at various bars, listening to me as I cried and drank and cried some more. “Betsy,” I’d slur, sloshing the Bittburger she’d purchased for me all over her and resting my forehead on the bar, “What am I gonna do? I just wanna write!” She put up with all of this with her typically steady patience, but even she was getting fed up with my tormented, drunken artist shtick. Now, as I started up again, Betsy had an idea.

“Robin,” she said, shaking me gently by the shoulder, “Get a grip on yourself. Look, you want to write something? Write about this!”

“About this? Whaddya mean?”

“Write an article about Faith No More playing in Moscow! You could interview some of the fans, ask them about why they’re here. You could even interview the band. You could write about the blossoming of western music in post-Communist Russia! That would be so interesting!”

I squinted at Betsy. “That would be sorta interesting.”

“ I bet you could even get it published in Rolling Stone.”

“You think?” My brain began clicking to life, considering the possibilities. In my fuzzy, disordered state of mind, the gulf between Betsy’s idle suggestion and a monthly “Rock in Russia” column for me at Rolling Stone was easily bridgeable. The more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea. Holy cow, I realized, feeling vaguely energetic for the first time in weeks, Betsy was right! I’d interview Faith No More that very night and they would be so shocked to see me, a fellow American, asking them questions that they’d have no choice but to take me under their wing. They’d call the editors of all the music magazines back home and say “You won’t believe who we met here in Moscow! And best of all, she needs a job!” This was it, I decided, the transition I was looking for that would help dig me out of the hole I was in. The opportunity had taken its time in coming, but now that it was here, I was ready for it.

Strange as it may sound, my sudden, utter conviction that rock and roll would save my life had some basis in reality. Growing up in North Florida, there were few examples of how I might build a reasonably happy life for myself. The basic values that my mother taught me, such as working hard, were good ones, but they never seemed like ends in and of themselves. We were all supposed to work hard so we could …what? Get up every day and sit at a cubicle at the insurance call center? Get our ears pierced at the mall? Sit in silence in our dens and watch Laverne and Shirley? Even as a kid I’d realized that I could do all of these things without working very hard at all.

Most of the people I went to school with were no help, either. Examining them closely for clues about how to navigate teenagerdom, I realized that my obvious choices were pretty much limited to four. I could be a football player or a Christian (these two groups sometimes overlapped), or a Future Farmer of America or a heavy metal fan (these two groups never did). As a pudgy agnostic with no interest in agriculture, by default I found myself hanging out in the Burger King parking lot listening to Motley Crue. ⁵³

Some of the kids in that parking lot were interesting, though. They had older brothers and sisters who had gone somewhere else once and brought some stuff back. Record albums. My friends and I would sneak into their bedrooms and listen. This was not anything like the music we heard on Rock 105, but it was not the music that caught my attention. It was the lyrics. Suddenly here was someone saying out loud "This is not my beautiful house, dammit." Here's somebody saying "Though we keep piling up the building blocks, the structure never seems to get any higher. Because we keep kicking out the foundations and stand useless while our lives fall down." And perhaps most concisely, here’s someone saying “Feel it closing in, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out.”

Whenever I looked around my grungy, ugly town and thought about how I was trapped, how things would never change, how this was it and even if I'd never feel glad about it I'd have to at least learn to accept it somehow -- whenever I thought like this, I'd listen to these people, to this music. There were other people out there who were clearly paying attention. I might never find them, but if I held on maybe I could at least go where they went. Maybe there'd be some kind of different perspective, some different way of living, in London, or New York, or Manchester. I drew a mental map of these places and carried it around with me like a talisman.

Much to my surprise, it seemed as though the gods of the universe noticed my fervent worship at the altar of the LP and decided to reward my devotion. I would attend shows that came to my town and would end up having odd and totally random experiences with various band members. ⁵⁴ My peers noticed that often when I went to see a show I would come to school the next day with some strange story, and began to ask me to accompany them to see bands they liked. My powers reached their apex when one of the most popular girls in school approached me at PE one day and told me she’d pay for me to go see 38 Special if I would go with her.

The experiences I had with the people I admired the most – the writers of the lyrics and music that gave my life color – left me with a sort of Pavlovian sense that the closer I got to music the more interesting and meaningful my life would be. And so it really wasn’t a surprise when I drunkenly stood up in the stadium bleachers and declared, “I’ll do it, Betsy. I’ll go interview Faith No More RIGHT NOW.”

I pushed my way through hundreds of acid-washed-denim-clad Muscovites to the soundboard, which was in the middle of the arena and was surrounded by a 6-foot-tall chain-link fence. Not stopping to wonder what might happen, not wavering one bit from the task that lay before me, I hooked my fingers and the tips of my shoes in the fence and climbed over it, dropping to the ground next to the surprised Russian soundman. “I’m a journalist,” I said in an official-sounding voice, adjusting my sweater, “I’m here to interview Faith No More.”

“Their bus is out back,” said the man, pointing to a door at the back of the large room.

I was momentarily surprised. Wasn’t I supposed to have credentials, or something? Wasn’t I supposed to have my people call their people? But the soundman was not calling security or radioing for help; instead, he was opening the gate in the fence for me and instructing me to “go through that door and down the hall, and there you’ll find their bus.”

I followed his instructions and sure enough, there sat the tour bus, engine idling. Even though I’d met lots of musicians through strange coincidences, I was not a groupie, so I had never been on a tour bus before and was not sure what would happen. I was certain I would need some kind of laminated pass, or that the driver sitting there smoking and reading would want to look for my name on a clipboard. But no. The Russian driver welcomed me onto the bus and motioned for me to sit down, then proceeded to talk at length with me about his family and grandchildren. This was way too easy, I thought. Clearly, this was meant to be. I had gotten this far – onto the bus! – and now all I’d have to do would be to interview the band as we drove to the hotel. I excused myself to the driver and went to the very back of the bus, where I busied myself trying to think of questions to ask.

After several hours, people began to trickle onto the bus. Russian-looking people and American-looking people, music-looking people and business-looking people; all of them saw me sitting back there and either smiled and nodded or ignored me completely as they took their seats. I began to relax. I was in. Finally, a group of very hairy, tired-looking men boarded the bus. Not being a fan of Faith No More, I didn’t recognize them, but as they walked towards me I could see from the other passengers’ reactions that this must be them. They looked friendly enough. Best of all, they were heading right towards me! I clutched the small notebook I always carried with me, ready to go.

“Excuse me,” said one of them politely, “Who are you?”

“I’m Robin!” I said, “I am an American journalist living in Moscow!”

“Well, you’ll have to get off this bus now.”

“No. What? Noooo. Really? I have to get off the bus? But…why?”

“Because we have to leave,” said the man, reasonably.

“Awww, man…really? But, but, wouldn’t you like to be interviewed by an American journalist living in Moscow?” These people didn’t seem to find my presence in this country or on this bus nearly as novel as I did.

“No,” said the man, gesturing to the bus’ door.

“OK, but, don’t you need help getting around Moscow? Finding your hotel? Wouldn’t you like a guide?”

“We have a bus,” said the man, “which you need to get off of right now.”

The entire busload of passengers was turned around watching us, their faces hovering moon-like over the backs of their seats. Still sitting down, I looked up pleadingly at the band as they waited for me to get out of their seats and off their bus. Silent seconds ticked by as I waited for what always happened in movies and what should be happening right now to, in fact, go on and happen. One of them would take pity on me and say, “Oh, for God’s sake, just let her ride to the hotel.” Or one of the passengers would recognize me and stand up and say “Wait! I know her! Really, she’s cool.”

But of course none of this happened. The band stood there, exhausted after their show and annoyed by – face it, there was no one else to blame – ME, and the man who had spoken to me pointed again at the door. Shamefaced, not even bothering to work up some kind of huff, I hung my head and walked towards the door. The actual cool people – the people waiting for me to leave so they could ride with the band to the afterparty at the hotel – those people snickered and tisked as I passed them.

I stood in the back of the now-empty arena and watched the bus puff away into the darkness. When I came to Moscow I’d believed that with enough willpower, personality, and good fortune, I could do anything. I’d believed that the beads that would make up my life were sitting there sparkling in a little satin box, waiting to be strung. Now I was not at all sure what to believe, or how to fill up the dead space that this vanished certainty had left.

NOTES

53. Full disclosure: I also really loved Duran Duran. Continue reading post.
54. To learn about what exactly these experiences were, please read my 4th novel, Avoid the Rat, available just as soon as I finish writing it. Continue reading post.

Damn

Vic Chesnutt.

36. Workers of the Guardian, Unite!

Ever since the visit to the coal-walking workshop I’d had an uneasy feeling that I couldn’t shake. Even though it was now fully spring and the city was exploding with fireworks of lilacs and gladiolus, even though we’d been freed from the terrible yoke of winter, it still seemed to me like a shadow hovered over everything. As the days got progressively warmer and longer and the neighborhood kids played ball outside my window, I couldn’t shed the feeling that something was drawing to a close.

Maybe it was weariness. I was tired of struggling and watching others struggle, tired of standing in lines and bargaining for the basics of life. I was tired of sitting hunched by the open oven door trying to keep warm because the heat had been turned off, and of boiling pots of water to bathe in every few days. I was fed up with the crush and press on the metro, with the men who felt free to touch my hair or yell after me, with only being able to understand half of what was happening around me. The things about life in this city that had once seemed amusingly quirky, that had made me reach for my pen and my notebook, now seemed annoying, inconvenient, or just plain dumb.

I knew my relationship with the city had changed when I was standing in line at a kiosk waiting to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was early evening and the young man in front of me, apparently about to embark on a hot date, was in the process of buying a condom. “That one,” he said, pointing to one of the unwrapped individual condoms pinned to a cardboard display in the kiosk’s window. I watched disinterestedly, expecting the proprietor to pull out a wrapped condom of the brand the man had chosen. Instead, the kiosk worker pulled the tack out of the tip of the condom that was hanging from the cardboard and handed it to the man. The man stuffed it in his pocket with his sunglasses and Cowboy cigarettes, and off he went. And what did I do?

Under normal circumstances, I would have taken off after the man and asked him about the logic of knowingly buying a condom that had a hole in it. I would have gotten into a lengthy discussion with him about dating activities, young Muscovites’ attitudes towards sex, and the process of obtaining birth control now that the USSR had collapsed. I would have arranged to meet this man and his friends later for a more formal interview, and would have turned the whole experience into a feature article. I would have perhaps prevented an unwanted pregnancy. At the very least, I would have found a willing buyer for the big bag of condoms still sitting in my suitcase.

But I didn’t do any of these things. I thought dully about what a shame it was that this stupid boy was going to breed – probably later that night – and asked for a pack of Marlboros. I was tired of living in a place that made absolutely no sense. I had lost my sense of humor.

Most of all, I was tired of other people’s sorrow. Literally every time I went out lately I was accosted by someone, usually a helpless elderly person, who shared with me stories that I, for the first time in my life, didn’t really want to hear. I did not want the lady with the kerchief to cling to me like a child, asking me how she was going to feed herself. I did not want the veteran in the greasy suit coat to clutch my wrist and somehow find the English to sob “America…friend!” when he caught sight of me on the train. I did not want to hear any more about accidents and war and abuse and bad luck. The fact that the daily onslaught of other people’s sad news was largely my fault didn’t change how I felt at all.

This inappropriate sharing – this instant intimacy with people I’d never laid eyes on -- happened to me all the time in America. The cashier at the Piggly Wiggly might answer “fine” when asked by others how she was doing. But for some reason when I’d ask her I’d end up standing there for minutes listening to the story of her third divorce and her troubles with her oldest son and her Aunt Lilly’s gallstone. I’d always assumed it was genetic – the exact same thing happens to my mother – and dispositional. I actually really do want to know what’s happening with people. My interest in their lives is sincere, and I think they can sense this. But the kinds of stories that were shared with me in Moscow were substantively different from the ones Americans told. I did not want to stop caring about people and being curious. I did not want to walk around the city with my eyes cast down and a stony expression on my face. But neither did I want to be the sponge that soaked up the whole city’s tears, which was how it felt lately.

And so thank god for the Guardian. With all the bad omens and hard luck around me I was becoming skittish, approaching the outside world with a superstitious caution that was totally unlike me. The structure and interaction provided by the Guardian was often the only stable thing in my life that I could identify. I hoped that if I just kept on working, just kept on writing, this bad patch would pass and everything would be all right. The alternative – to pack my bags and head home to Florida, to sleep on my college friend’s floor until I saved up enough money to rent a studio apartment, to beg for my job back at the bookstore, to be just like everyone else, as though none of this had ever happened – was no alternative at all. I fixated on my work at the Guardian, the one really positive thing in my life, so completely that I was willing to overlook some serious problems. Like the fact that we hadn’t been paid in 6 weeks.

Jason, the editor, had asked the burly Russian who served as Kommersant’s business manager about the situation after the first missed payday. “Do not worry,” the manager had replied, “I am sending money through Cyprus to avoid Russian tax.” But after several more weeks of no pay and an increasingly worried staff, Jason realized he had to do something managerial, and fast. So he came up with a foolproof plan. This was Russia, right? The workers’ paradise? The proletarian utopia? The closest thing in our country to the communist ideal, at least according to American managers, was the union. And what were unions always doing? Going on strike! Genius! This action would not only get the staff’s need for pay addressed, it would do so in a language that Russians understood. They’d have to be sympathetic to our aims, Jason figured; their history was rife with work stoppages and labor movements. And regardless of how they felt about it, if the bosses wanted the next issue of their magazine to come out, they’d have to pay us.

Jason instructed Brad, who was responsible for layout and who minded our computers, to leave a note for management that we’d all gone on strike, and to secure the files for the upcoming issue with a password. Then we all sat back and waited. We didn’t have to wait long. I’ll let Jason tell you what happened next:

“A couple nights later, I was at Stephanie's when we heard a knock on the door. The head of Kommersant's security, who reportedly was former special forces in Afghanistan, was there with a couple other guys. I once went to a party with some lineman from the University of Texas' football team. These guys were bigger, and swathed in those giant black leather jackets that were tight around the shoulders and upper back but loose on the flanks, so you could hide your gun. Back then, everyone had guns in Moscow. I even had one. It was broken though, so I went with them.

I was taken up to Yakovlev’s (the owner of Kommersant’s) office. In my memory, it was lit perfectly for a late-night confrontation. Low lights casting shadows over his angular face and dark eyes. I knew at that time that he was a black belt in some martial art that he made his Russian employees practice in the basement dojo he had built, but it was only later that I read "Bear Hunting in the Politburo" and found out that he was one of Russia's pioneering swindlers. At this time, Brad was downstairs at a computer, under armed guard as well, unlocking the password and releasing the issue.



He asked me why we were on strike and why I hadn't come to him. I told him that I thought his general manager (the one who was laundering money in Cyprus) was acting on his behalf and that we were ready to get back to work as soon as we were paid. At this point, he asked how much we were owed, and I might have quoted a figure from memory, or I might have had a printed out sheet with names and numbers, certainly nothing more official. He handed me the biggest pile of hundred dollar bills I have ever held in my hand, before or since. I remember it was $100,000, but memory and retelling have probably inflated that sum at least twice over. I thought briefly about getting a cab to the airport and going back to America a relatively rich 22-year-old, but by the next day, I was handing out cash to everyone in the newsroom. As I remember it, I ended up a little short on my end.

Later, David Addis told me that that general manager absconded with a lot of Yakovlev’s money and disappeared in America. I remember being glad when I heard that because it meant that Yakovlev would have him killed.” ⁵⁰

When Jason handed out the money the next day, the staff was jubilant. We’d won! Not only had Jason faced down the thugs that passed for Human Resources, he’d also gotten us paid in dollars. If you ignored the fact that we were all immediately fired, this whole strike thing had worked out swimmingly.

I certainly never blamed Jason for what happened.⁵¹ Though he was our boss and it was his idea to go on strike in the first place, we had all agreed to strike with him. After weeks and weeks of no pay, of being lied to and pacified by upper management, even the most oblivious among us could see the writing on the wall. We were expendable. It was obvious that Yakovlev’s plan was to ignore us until we disappeared.⁵² At least this way we had stuck up for ourselves and had gotten the pay that was owed us. At least we had not gone quietly. And at least, in retrospect, we were not all killed.

But now. Now we were unemployed. What were we – what was I – going to do? It was all right, we decided, with the hubris and ignorance of youth. We were the talent at the magazine, the ones with the moxie and the know-how. We were the writers at the most popular magazine in the city. We’d take our readers and advertisers and we’d start our own magazine. What had happened to us was stupid, and unfair, and surely everything would be fine. Turns out, we were wrong.

NOTES

50. Mr. Yakovlev, if you are reading this, please keep in mind that all of these wild accusations are being made not by me but by Jason Stanford, who lives in Austin, Texas. I am merely the messenger, and everyone knows not to kill the messenger, right? And have I told you how nice you look lately? Your new curly hairdo really suits you. Continue reading post.

51. Nor do I blame him for the other disaster he was closely involved with: George W. Bush becoming president. As the deputy press secretary in charge of opposition research for Ann Richards’ gubernatorial campaign in 1994, just 1 year after the ill-fated Guardian strike, Jason worked diligently and ultimately unsuccessfully to re-elect the popular Democrat to office. Had our strike at the Guardian not failed, who knows? I might be a Pulitzer-prize-winning author right now sucking down mojitos in Ibiza. And had George Bush not beaten Ann Richards in 1994, who knows? Perhaps America would currently have some semblance of moral credibility with the rest of the world and 103,549 Iraqis would still be alive.

Actually, I am just sort of taking the piss out of Jason, here. He is one of my most important friends – he has encouraged me and believed in me and laughed at my jokes when everyone else assumed that my destiny was to be a waitress at a seafood restaurant. And one of the things that I love most about Jason is that he fights for the underdog. He is not afraid to go to battle – even a losing battle – for what he feels is right. Sometimes (but not always) he is beaten by those with more money or connections or snazzier PR firms, but Jason never gives up. He suffers the big humiliations and small victories that accompany working for an ideal with good grace and good humor, and he has taught me a lot. Continue reading post.

52. Interestingly, Yakovlev’s belief that he could will things like his entire staff into or out of existence was the business model upon which his media outlet, Kommersant, was founded. According to the Carnegie Foundation:

One of the first privately owned and truly independent Russian newspapers, Kommersant, which was the brainchild of Vladimir Yakovlev, son of the Moscow News editor Egor Yakovlev, began publication in early 1990 with the express aim of creating a Russian “business middle class” that didn’t yet exist, by writing for it as though it did. The aspiration to live in a “normal country,” often expressed at the time, was so strong in Moscow and the re-named St. Petersburg, that many believed, in a sort of Soviet version of Pascal’s “leap of faith,” that if the country simply pretended that it was “normal,” it would, in fact, become so. In other words, if the outward trappings of a democratic society and middle class were imitated in sufficient detail, the moral and institutional content would magically appear to fill the void left by 70 years of deeply cynical centralized dictates and a planned economy.

Eventually Yakovlev himself would be subjected to the same backroom politics that did the Guardian staff in. In 1999, with his media empire deeply in debt, Yakovlev was “visited” by “people” who were “interested” in buying the company. According to the rumors, the hopeful buyers brought with them a briefcase filled not with cash but with papers linking Yakovlev to “a serious crime.”

Unlike us, Yakovlev landed on his feet, keeping hold of Kommersant and, in 2008, becoming head of the board of directors of another media group, whose flagship magazine is called (and I’m not making this up), SNOB. My source in Berlin (heh heh, I said “My source in Berlin”; how cool is that?), the very knowledgeable and always entertaining Matthew Boun, follows Russian media on his blog, IZO, and has posted links to stories (in Russian) about the “Orwellian environment” at the magazine as well as the various power struggles in the editorial department.

You owe it to yourself to peruse the links below, which discuss SNOB magazine. It will give you not only a very good idea of the kind of place Moscow has become (and what happens to a country when a tiny group of people controls the wealth and the majority has nothing), but also the kind of savvy, slippery, chameleon-like person Yakovlev is and was. And I mean that in the nicest, most respectful way possible.

http://cde.cerosmedia.com/1R4ae6db77c32dc012.cde/page/7 - Puff piece about SNOB and Yakovlev.

http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/snob-magazine-only-russias-super-rich - Angry editorial rant about Snob, with comments worth reading.

http://www.snob.ru/ - The magazine itself.

Continue reading post.

35. Naked Volleyball and Other Life Lessons

Something was always falling on you in Moscow. Snow, rain, soot from trash fires, chunks of masonry, the standard of living: each season featured a new irritant descending on the citizens from above. And now, following the last snowfall and a brief period of flying ash, mid-May had come and the pookh had begun.

For several days at the start of pookh season, I said nothing as I walked the streets of the city blinded by the gossamer puffs of whatever this was that was currently fouling the air. I had never seen anything like this and had no idea whether it was normal, or potentially dangerous. For a while, before getting serious and really examining the stuff up close, I feared that it was some kind of synthetic material, like insulation, or polymer stuffing. Had someone blown up a giant mattress factory somewhere? Shouldn’t we all be alarmed? But the Russians seemed to hardly even notice the storm of fluff that swirled constantly around us, and their stoic behavior made me shy about asking questions. It was possible that I was the only one who was even aware of it.

Eventually, after days of inhaling the stuff and getting it in my eyes and setting it on fire when it landed on the cherry of my cigarette, I scrutinized it carefully and came to the conclusion that it was something like dandelion fluff. But this was unlike any dandelion fluff I had ever seen, that was for sure. We had dandelions in Florida, and occasionally you’d walk across someone’s lawn and kick at one. It would send up a small puff of grayish white, spindly seedpods, a few of which might float on the breeze over a small distance. Here in Moscow, this fluff was actually raining down vertically from the sky as well as floating in horizontally, and the effect was like being in a snow globe that someone was constantly shaking. And the fluff itself was thick and cottony, and colored a bright, sparking white. It piled up in fluffy drifts exactly like the snow had only weeks before, clinging to your boots and swirling in behind you when you entered a building.

At last, annoyed not only by the constant burr and fuzz but also by the fact that I seemed to be the only one annoyed by it, I lost my composure. “What the HELL is this stuff?” I shouted, as we drove through the Serebryany Bor district of Moscow. Serebryany Bor, a forested area on the bank of the Moskva River where many affluent Russians had summer homes, literally meant “silver forest,” and today it was living up to its name. The infernal fluff was everywhere out here, much thicker than in the city. It was piling up so thick and fast as we drove through clouds of it that Stu had to turn on his wipers. “What stuff?” asked Stu.

“This…this…fluff!” I yelled. “This damn fluff that is absolutely everywhere. For god’s sake, what is it?”

“It’s pookh!” said Brad from the backseat. “It’s just pookh.”

“Pookh? Pookh?” Was Brad making this up? “It’s just pookh” in no way answered my question. “What is pookh?”

Brad described the origin of pookh, explaining that it was the seeds of the poplar trees that were everywhere in Moscow and which were now beginning to bloom. Apparently this happened every year, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. The natives were used to it.

I kicked at the pookh as we parked the Kommersant car and walked through the forest to our destination. This pookh had irritated me for days, but now that I thought about it, maybe the pookh would turn out to be a valuable ally. For Brad, Stu, and the rest of the Guardian staff and I were currently on our way to do a story about a nude beach in Moscow. When not discussing the pookh, the main topic of conversation in the car had been “Who is going to take their clothes off?” I didn’t want to come off as a prude, but I was actually a pretty modest person when it came to nudity, and the thought of displaying my naughty bits for my coworkers had my palms sweating. I was sure they were more sophisticated than I was and would probably have no qualms at all about letting it all hang out. Maybe the pookh would allow me to have it both ways. I could take off my clothes and still be shielded by the clods of white cotton blowing everywhere.

It turned out I needn’t have worried. We arrived at the beach to find it empty save for one corpulent Russian man. “Come this way!” he yelled to us as he jiggled down a sandy path through the woods, “The volleyball’s just about to start.”

My friends set down their bags of sunblock and towels and the sheet they’d brought for us to sit on and disappeared down the path after the naked man. Seizing my opportunity, I shucked off my clothes and threw myself in the Moskva River. This was brilliant, I realized. I’d swim around naked for a while and then, right before my friends returned, I’d leap out and wrap myself in a towel. I’d claim to be chilled by the water and ready to get dressed again. “I’ve done the naked thing,” I’d tell them blandly, “Now it’s y’all’s turn.”

I swam in small circles close to the riverbank. In spite of the fact that the water was freezing and was made up mainly of industrial solvents and raw sewage, I was having a great time. I knew that one day in the future, maybe at a boring office party, someone would say something about swimming, rivers, nudity, or pollution, and I’d get to tell the story of my trip to the nudist colony and my dip in the river. How many people could say they’d gone skinny dipping in the Moskva River on purpose? I was glad I’d decided to do this, modesty or no.

After a while, I climbed out of the river and dried off. Instead of putting my clothes back on, I picked up the sheet Brad and Stu had brought with them and wrapped myself up in it. Then I went to find my friends. They were standing at the edge of a sandy volleyball court, wincing as the 12 naked Russians involved in the game dove into the sand trying for a spike, or smacked into each other while attempting a return, or got walloped by the ball in various tender and completely unprotected places. I stood wrapped in the sheet as the pookh swirled around me, aghast at the spectacle. This was my first exposure, so to speak, to what could be called the First Law of Nudist Colonies; that is, the people who are most comfortable taking off their clothes are the very people who should always, always, keep them on.

I know that's unkind. I know that the human body is a gift from god, that it's only my social conditioning that makes me regard nudity as something shameful or squicky, that we're all naked under our clothes, blah blah blah. But I also know that I do not ever again want to see 12 naked 60-year-old men play volleyball. Scaly, sunburned skin pasted with sand and sweat, hair in places I didn't know hair would grow, appendages flopping in ways that had to be both uncomfortable and dangerous -- this display of heaving, leaping, grunting, and reaching liked to have permanently blinded me. My fully dressed colleagues and I stood staring wordlessly at the scene for several minutes and then, as if we'd been given a signal, turned as a group and walked solemnly back to our things. Any levity about taking off our clothes had disappeared, replaced, I imagined, by the silent understanding that this was what awaited us all. Not naked volleyball, necessarily, but flesh that hung like dough and belied the vigorous spirits we'd still no doubt posses. That maybe getting old might free you from self-consciousness, but that very few people would appreciate what you finally felt brave enough to reveal.

I was thinking about all of this, the indignities of aging and what kind of person I'd turn out to be, as two hours later I walked from Kommersant's offices up to my metro stop to find some bread. I made my way through the crowd towards a store when an old lady blocked my path. "Why am I not joyful?" she demanded by way of greeting.
I looked around, unsure weather or not this was a rhetorical question. "Why am I not joyful?" she wailed again, sobbing openly now. "I had a granddaughter! She was just your age! Yes, only 20. She was hit by a car just yesterday, and killed. My only granddaughter! She looked just like you! Just like you!" The old lady pulled at the shawl around her shoulders, miserable. "Devushka, devushka, what can I do?"

"Oh, grandmother," I said, leaning forward and hugging her wearily. "Here," I fished in my pocket and withdrew 250 rubles. "Please buy her some flowers for me."

"Oh, god bless you, granddaughter. God bless you!" the old woman staggered off with the rubles in her fist as I went in the store. When I came out 45 minutes later, her voice carried across the square. "He looked just like you" she wailed at a man who looked to be in his early 30s. "Just like you!"

I walked home with my bread through the piles of shining tree fluff, kicking at drifts to make them float ethereally on the air in front of me. Soon the short Moscow spring would be over, I knew, and with it the pookh that had irritated me so. I swatted at the silver cloud stirred up by my boots, making a game of how many pods I could catch, and resolved to enjoy spring while it lasted.

*****

The picture in this entry illustrates the piling up of the pookh, and was snagged from an interesting blog called 20 East. At this blog you can read more about pookh and other noteworthy topics. Many thanks to the blog owner for sharing the picture with me.

34. My First Million

I certainly never told anyone at the Guardian this, but I would have worked at the magazine for free. Little did my bosses know that the things I was now doing for pay – asking random strangers nosy questions, seeking out off-beat places to visit, trying to find out why things happened and what people thought when they did – were exactly the things I had previously done on a volunteer basis, just for entertainment. The idea that I had convinced someone to pay me for something I would’ve gladly done pro bono was, to me, the ultimate racket. What a scam, I gloated, as I prepared to accompany Stu, Stephanie, and Julia to the story we’d cover that day. My work at the Guardian was so much fun that I almost felt guilty for taking their $400 each month.

And so I was probably the person who was least upset when, at the first weekly staff meeting in May, Jason let us know that we’d no longer be paid in dollars. Now obviously, this was not good news. We all knew the power of hard currency in Moscow. It was the one thing that shielded us from the desperation around us; the one protection we had (assuming we planned to stay in Russia) against a life made gray and hollow by poverty. It wasn’t any consolation that we’d be receiving the equivalent of our dollar salaries in rubles. One dollar might now equal 8,500 rubles (instead of the 630 it got you only 3 months before), but there was no comparison whatsoever between the two. Nearly every place in Russia that we’d grown to rely on for food, care, and beer only accepted dollars. It didn’t matter how many rubles you had – without dollars you’d never shop in a hard-currency grocery store, drink in a hard-currency bar, bribe your way out of jail, persuade someone not to shoot you, or convince a doctor to treat you. As a ruble-toting foreigner, in fact, you’d actually be worse off than the average Russian. The people at the food markets would hear your funny accent and know that you were someone who was supposed to have hard currency. After all, dollars were your birthright. What the hell kind of loser American gets paid in rubles? IF they agreed to do business with you after learning you had no dollars, the vendors, the waiters, the taxi drivers – everyone – would jack up the ruble price to at least double what they’d charge a normal Russian. We lacked the ability – the language skills, the networks of connections – to live like real Russians even if we now got paid like them. When Kommersant started paying us in rubles, a crucial lifeline was cut, and I knew it. But I tried to look on the bright side.

At least, for example, I was not surprised by this development. When the stores you shop at start giving you change in gum, when every day a new denomination of ruble is issued to accommodate the 5000% inflation (5000, no lie), when 1000 rubles will no longer buy you a quart of milk, you can pretty much stop waiting around for the other shoe to drop and instead get busy knitting a pair of warm socks. I was pretty certain that I’d cultivated a good enough relationship with my landlady that she’d let me pay her in rubles, and I hoped that the Russian friends I had would help me shop for food so I could pay the “normal” Russian price. And also, I reminded myself, there was the fact that at the tender age of 22, I had made my first million. My first 3.4 million, to be exact. If you ignored the pesky truth and forgot that the 3.4 million was in a totally useless currency and was actually only worth $400, it was possible to see this as some kind of inspiring Horatio Alger-type story. I could picture the headlines back in America (“local girl makes good”); could imagine the leverage I’d have over my future spawn (“by the time I was your age, I was worth 3.4 million!”). I’d show up on payday with a large canvas army rucksack, journey to the basement vault, and shovel in the notes. I’d go home and dump out the sack and roll in the money, send naked pictures of myself posed atop the pile of cash to all my ex-boyfriends. I’d make the most of the situation and not spend time fretting about something I couldn’t control.

Plus, I reminded myself, I would’ve done the work for free. The day before, I’d gone with my Guardian friends to visit a man who specialized in apitherapy, the use of bees in healing. Today, as an amateur beekeeper and obsessive bee enthusiast, I am totally down with the idea that bees and the tiny miracles they produce are good for you, but back then the notion that someone would volunteer to be stung by bees was even more ridiculous than walking around with garlic in your nose. Nonetheless, I kept an open mind as I sat in the man’s apartment and watched him open a mahogany wardrobe that was stuffed with comb. He opened both doors of the heavy piece of furniture and bent with a pair of tweezers to a small drawer in the bottom of the plexiglass that covered the hive, and plucked out a single bee. He applied the bee’s bottom to the spine of the elderly man who sat on the table in front of us, and the bee dutifully stung the patient. I watched, poleaxed, as the doctor did this 39 more times. The old man, who had shuffled into the room bent with rheumatoid arthritis, stood up from the table and stretched up his arms, his naked back tracked with double rows of stings down either side of his spine.

Amazed almost to the point of anger, certain that this was some kind of parlor trick put on for our benefit, I grabbed the old man, who was now doing calisthenics, and shook him back and forth by the shoulders. "What happened?" I demanded. "Why would you let yourself be stung by 40 bees?"

With Julia translating, the man patiently explained that he visited the bee doctor twice a week for his 40 stings, and that before finding this treatment he'd been essentially unable to walk. As he hopped up and down, bending at the waist from side-to-side, the doctor explained that the bee stings provoked an antihistamine response that decreased inflammation. Bee stings, he averred, were good for any kind of auto-immune problem (such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or MS) -- even better than the modern therapies that were no longer available in Russia. The old man agreed, asserting that by the time he came in for his second treatment of the week, the effects of the first had worn off and he was virtually crippled again. "But now look at me!" he said cheerfully, twisting around and waving his arms, "I'd get stung by bees every day if I could!"

And today promised to be even more interesting than yesterday. As Stu, Stephanie, Julia and I drove to the outskirts of the city, Julia did her best to explain where we were going and what would happen when we got there. Someone – to this day I’m not sure who, how, or why – had found a man in Moscow who offered workshops to people wishing to walk on hot coals. We were off to attend one of these workshops, and to watch Stu walk on fire. After driving for 45 minutes or so, we pulled into a small parking area in front of an old, imposing building that looked like a public library, or a Methodist church. This building sat by itself in the middle of nowhere – to get there we’d turned off a small paved road and onto a muddy track. We drove down this tiny, potholed path through brown marsh grass and sickly birch trees for several miles before rounding a bend and coming into the parking area, an uneven and cracked concrete pad. Ours was the only car on the lot, and we climbed out of it and stood close together, looking at the peeling gray building.

Although it was barely noon, the light that fell on the building looked burnished and indistinct. Out here on the outskirts of town, we were much closer to the fires that burned all night and day in Moscow during the spring, and the smoke from these fires cloaked the landscape in a perpetual sunset, a hazy twilight. I’d asked Julia about these fires days ago, wondering why the air in the city was suddenly so thick and acrid. You could always smell and sometimes see the smoke that hovered over Moscow, and for days now a dust of ash had coated the snow in the city, turning it a sour yellow. Julia had explained that as the snow melted and revealed the trash underneath it, the citizens sprang into a kind of spring cleaning frenzy, picking up all the previous fall’s flotsam and burning it in large metal dumpsters. I stood in the parking lot and pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, hoping to filter out some of the air that was making my eyes water.

We followed Stu across the lot and up the crumbling stairs to the building’s front entry, two large wooden doors. As Stu pounded on the locked doors, I looked around for some sign of where we were or what purpose the building served. The only information was a small, tarnished brass plaque next to the door, which read “Profilaktika #4.”

“Julia,” I whispered, unnerved, “What is this building?”

“This is a rest home for retired truck drivers,” she whispered back.

I looked around again, trying to ascertain what Julia was seeing that I wasn’t. A logo? An inscription? But there was only that sign. Profilaktika #4. “How do you know?” I whispered.

She leaned her head towards me again to whisper her response. “I don’t know,” she said.

After several minutes of pounding on the door, a pale young woman in a nurse’s cap and dress poked her head out. Through Julia, she instructed us to walk down the stairs and in the opposite direction of the parking area, down a narrow drive we hadn’t noticed. We’d come to a gate, she said, and we should go through the gate and across the road to the smaller building. There we would find the coal walkers.

We set out obediently down the path and after a moment came to the gate, which was part of a tall iron fence, and was locked. We looked at the 8-foot-tall fence with its black spikes at the top, knowing that it was too tall to climb. We could see the dirt road we were supposed to cross on the other side of the fence, but after that, only forest. There was not another soul in sight.

“Let’s go this way,” said Julia, pointing to the right of the gate at a stand of spindly trees. “We’ll walk along the fence and see if there’s a place to get through.”

We walked for a very long time through the scrub that ran alongside the iron fence, looking for a place to cross. It was early May in Moscow, and our boots as we walked cracked through the thin layer of snow that crusted the ground and sank in the mud beneath. I watched my feet as I walked behind Julia, concentrating, and noticed that the water that seeped into the footprints in front of me was rainbowed with a skin of greenish yellow oil. This place, like most areas on the edge of Moscow, was polluted, poisoned, and the trees we walked through showed it. They were twisted and slight, with weeping black patches in their bark.

Finally the iron fence we’d been following tapered off into a much flimsier wire fence, and we decided to climb over it. We slogged through a small field of waving brown grass and eventually came upon the road we were supposed to cross to get to the workshop. Standing on this road with their backs to us, looking at something, were four women in nurse’s uniforms. They turned to us as we clambered up the side of a ditch, as surprised to see us as we were them. As they turned, I saw what it was they were looking at.

As a typical American kid, I had seen lots and lots of dead people. Taxi Driver, the Zapruder film, those poor hapless kids in Nightmare on Elm Street; it’s estimated that by the time she’s 18, the average American has seen 16,000 murders depicted on television. But this was the very first time I had ever seen a dead person up close and in real life, and it was nothing at all like TV. Devoid of artful lighting and portentious music, robbed of any context or tidy ending, the man lying on the muddy road at my feet was a problem with no solution, a cipher. There was no obvious indication of what had happened to him, no sign of injury or violence. He lay there in the road in his dirty street clothes, a homeless man who had frozen to death. An alcoholic who had died from the tainted vodka currently blinding hundreds in the city. Or perhaps he was a retired truck driver who’d come for a rest and suffered a
heart attack while out walking. It was impossible to say. We could all see one thing, though, and that was that this man had been there for a very long time.

I stared at his swollen face and stiffened hands, at skin the color of the water in Julia’s footsteps, and all I could think, strangely, was about this man as a baby. I thought about this man’s mother; like all of us he had once surely had one, and how she had probably taken his small hand in hers and put her lips to its palm, blowing into it to make him laugh. Then I realized that this line of thought was not at all helpful, and for the very first time wondered fleetingly if I was cut out for life in Russia. (Sadly, it would take me another decade to accept that my inability to impassively look at suffering, to stop myself from empathizing and thus from being sad, was not a sign of weakness but an indicator of basic mental health.)

Julia finally broke the silence. “We are supposed to walk on hot coals,” she told the nurses. They instructed us to walk a bit further down the path to a small outbuilding, and we said our goodbyes to the man and his charges.

*

Hours later I was walking home from Kommersant’s offices, trying to figure out what to write about the coal-walking workshop. The day had been interesting in a way I’d not been prepared for, and the event we’d been sent to cover had barely even registered with me. I walked along a sidewalk next to a small street, and then, with the peculiar symmetry that life sometimes hands you, I came upon a small group of people. Like the nurses earlier in the day, this group of 6 or so Russians was huddled together, looking intently at something on the ground. I told myself to keep going, that looking at anything other than what was immediately in front of me was a recipe for anguish, but when I got even with them I couldn’t resist. I stopped and stood on my toes, peeking over their shoulders.

“Isn’t it pretty?” said one of the Russians, grinning up at the rest of us. “So beautiful,” agreed a person on the other side of the small circle. These Russians had stopped on their way to the store or to work, interrupting their busy day, to stare avidly at a small bush upon which fluttered a tiny green leaf.

I looked at the single leaf and the smiling, softened faces of the people admiring it, and burst into tears. Oddly, the Russians standing around me did not seem at all surprised by my reaction. Perhaps, given the winter we’d all just endured, it was completely sensible to be overwhelmed by the notion of spring. Perhaps it was normal to cry when presented with evidence that even in this brutal city, things would continue. Life would go on.

I turned from the group, wiping my dripping nose on my coat sleeve, and walked the rest of the way home. When I got there I made a cup of tea and sat down at my table with my spiral notebook, resolved to puzzle out the events of the day and their meaning. As I stared at the blank page, my nose began running again. I put the side of my hand up to my nose, sniffing, and when I lowered my hand back to the table it was bright red with blood. I’d assumed that my nose was leaking from crying, but I’d been wrong. I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, my cheek and my chin a crimson smear from wiping my nose on my coat sleeve on the way home. I went back in the living room and laid down on the couch, waiting for the bleeding to stop.

33. I Love the Nightlife

The GAU, Moscow’s answer to the traffic police, knocked on the window with his stick as Stu turned and whispered to his 5 passengers. “Remember,” he hissed, rolling down the window, “Don’t speak Russian.”

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” asked the cop in Russian.

“Butterfly!” said Stu in English, grinning at the GAU like a fool.

“What? Where is your license?”

“Motorboat!” yelled Stu. I leaned forward in the passenger’s seat to get a glimpse of the cop. “Seashell!” I contributed. This was fun!

“Step out of the car,” said the GAU, in a tone that meant he was out of patience.

“OK, we will!” waved Stu as he rolled up his window and sped away, leaving the GAU standing in the middle of the empty boulevard.

In some countries, having a company car is a perk. In Moscow, it was hard to decide. The cars available to Moscow Guardian staffers were bright blue Okas painted with Kommersant’s (the company we worked for’s) eye-catching rainbow logo. When I say “painted with,” I mean that 5 separate, 5-inch-wide stripes of color ran alongside the body of the car, up across the doors, over the roof, and down the other side. This was the highly visible, well-known-around-town “Kommersant Rainbow Car.”

It was extremely difficult to be taken seriously as a hard-hitting journalist when emerging from a car that might just have been jacked from Sparklebutt the Clown, and when a group of us took one of them out for the night and unfolded ourselves from the tiny auto, the other patrons of the casino or nightclub would point and hoot. I tried to tell myself “well, at least we have a car,” but in this case, no. Walking was definitely more dignified.

A sign that hung in the Guardian’s office expressed this ambivalence. “If you value your safety,” the sign warned, “do not take out car #56. Or any other car.”

And truly, driving in Moscow in any kind of car was unwise. One of the most popular shows on television in the ‘90s revealed just how dangerous the roads in the city could be. The show, Dorozhni Patrol, was two guys driving around the streets of Moscow filming the remains of mind-boggling car accidents. “Wow, that was a bad one,” said one of the men as the camera honed in on a charred army truck sitting atop a crushed Lada, an Opel protruding from its windshield. The accidents you would pass on a daily basis as a Russian motorist – and which would sit there in plain sight until covered by snow or eroded by time – often seemed to defy the laws of physics. “How did that taxi get inside that phone booth?” you’d wonder as you passed another twisted pile of metal.

A visit to the gas station provided some answers. New, western-style gas stations had begun to spring up on the outskirts of the city as more and more foolhardy Russians acquired cars and took to the highway. These gas stations – at least the ones I visited -- sold two things and two things only: gas and vodka. That’s right, you could not buy wiper blades, floor mats, or those little tree-shaped air fresheners at the gas station (for these things you’d presumably have to visit a liquor store), but you could walk out with trunkloads, literally, of alcohol that you could drink right there on the spot. How convenient!

And finally, having a car in Moscow – especially one painted like a 5-year-old’s lunchbox -- meant dealing with the infernal, corrupt GAU several times a night. You’d be driving down the road in your rainbow-colored car, minding your own business, drinking your gallon of vodka, and suddenly a man in a light blue trench coat would motion from the side of the road for you to pull over. Mysteriously, you’d always comply.⁴⁹ Depending on how much of a hurry you were in, you might taunt the GAU as Stu was doing with his “butterfly” routine. Usually, though, you’d simply roll down the window and ask “How much?”

“Fifty,” the GAU might reply, and you’d hand him the money and be on your way until the next GAU flagged you down for a bribe.

So having a car was not quite the convenience it was in other places. But there were some positives. For instance, occasionally these cars would catch on fire for seemingly no reason. It always cheered me to see these little toy cars, ridiculous with their roller-rink paint jobs, burning merrily away on the side of the highway. It was fairly common to see abandoned Kommersant cars all over Moscow, leaning forlornly on their busted axles, wishing they could be involved in real wrecks like the other, grown-up cars. These little broken-down cars were reminders of where I had been the week or even the night before, nostalgic landmarks on my map of Moscow by night.

I had only recently started leaving the house again after finally running into Lyosha. I was hiding in the back of the empty Irish House Bar in the middle of the day, eating a ham and cheese sandwich and reading the paper, when I looked up and there he was, sitting at the bar beside a beautiful blonde Russian girl wearing an emerald-green silk business suit. I watched over the top of the paper as they laughed and chatted. Obviously, I thought with a peculiar mix of emotions, Lyosha is totally devastated by my departure. Poor man; what a brave face he is putting on.

Just then, Lyosha looked in my direction. He said something to his date, then walked towards me with a blank look on his face. As he approached he put his hand in his coat pocket, withdrawing something. He reached my table and placed a square of paper in front of me. “This is last phone bill,” he said. “Can you please pay your half?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, grabbing the paper and looking at the calls recorded there. “How…how are you?”

“Am fine,” he said. “How are you?”

“Also fine. Thanks.”

“When are you going to come back?” he asked in such a way that I couldn’t tell which answer he was hoping for.

“I am not going to come back,” I said carefully.

“I think you will.” Lyosha said this in a friendly tone, the way you might compliment an acquaintance on their outfit, then leaned in to kiss my cheek. “Well, see you.” He calmly walked back to the bar and sat next to his date, resuming the conversation. I finished my newspaper and, on the way out of the bar, put the phone bill and $45 down next to Lyosha.

“Thanks!” he hollered at my back, and that was that.


Now I felt free to ride around the streets of the city with my new friends, the people who worked with me at the Guardian. We spent our nights stuffed 6 deep in the Oka, me lying on the knees of the people in the backseat as we drove across town to Jacko’s Bar, or Sexton FOZD, or Club 011. These were my favorite places in Moscow, places where you could get away from the Ace of Bass’ omnipresent “All that She Wants,” for an evening and sing Frank Sinatra tunes with people who worked for the mafia, the UN, and/or the BBC. They were places where you could go see spunky, noisy bands like Korol I Shyt and Motorhead, or where the owners, heavily armed Serbs fleeing the war in Yugoslavia, dealt with aggressively drunk customers in a way American bouncers could only fantasize about.

As with every activity in Moscow, it was impossible to forget even for a second that you lived in a dangerous, unstable place where the waiters were packing heat, the elderly were traumatized by memories of war and famine, the infrastructure was collapsing, and no one wore seatbelts. But at last, after a lifetime of not fitting in and feeling strangely isolated from most folks around me, I had lucked into a group of people who understood where I was coming from. The staff at the Guardian accepted me, and looked at the world the way I did; we shared similar senses of humor and the same overwhelming curiosity about the world around us and the people in it. With my friends acting as a buffer against the stress and mayhem of life in Moscow I was able to laugh at things that might otherwise have scared me, and go places that, had I been alone, might have overwhelmed me. I was intensely grateful for their presence and for the opportunity I was having to make something meaningful out of myself, and thought often of what I would've been doing had I not taken a chance in Russia, had I stayed at home in Gainesville.

One night we were leaving Sexton FOZD when a guy my age accosted me. “Are you Robin?” he asked me. I told him I was and he rifled in the bag he was carrying, pulling out the issue of the Guardian that had my superstition article in it, the one I’d had to get drunk with the folklorists in order to write. “Did you write this article?”

When I answered affirmatively he looked at me seriously, intensely, then shook my hand. “I loved that article,” he said, pumping my hand up and down. “Thank you for writing it.”

“Thank you for reading it,” I stammered, astounded.

“Robin, c’mon!” hollered Jason as he held open the door of the Kommersant car. I said goodbye to the man and crammed myself in the Oka with my friends, ready to face the GAU, the accidents waiting to happen, and the dark and brilliant Moscow night.

NOTE

49. I never understood this. Not once did I see a GAU with a car, or even a radio. What was he going to do if you sped right by him? Chase you? Hurl rocks at you? Yet everyone always stopped. Continue reading post.

32. Excursions

I’d glimpsed it just once, fleetingly, in 1991. The sightseeing bus my schoolmates and I were riding on pulled away from the stoplight before I could note the location, or even really register what I’d seen. Under normal circumstances I’d have told myself I was imagining things, surely, but in Moscow? It was entirely possible that the sign I’d seen as the bus merged into traffic really did say what I thought it had said. “Musee Khleba.” Museum of Bread.

Believe me, I understood the urge to see something whimsical, or out of the ordinary. I understood that hand-made, highly localized entertainments could often be way more interesting than glitzy, prepackaged diversions like Disney World. My own obsession with esoterica had driven me to search out and visit unusual places in my home country, places like the World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well, and the Lightning Portrait of Henry Wells.⁴⁵ And I had voluntarily attended both the cat circus and the mouse theater, after all. I knew as well as anyone out there that weird usually equals fun and interesting.

But…bread? A whole museum devoted to bread? This was before the Virgin-Mary-on-grilled-cheese-sandwich incident, when all of us realized how interesting bread could actually be. Back in 1991, I tried hard to imagine what exactly would be on display in the Museum of Bread, and failed.

Now I had another chance. It was 1993, and I was lucky enough to have a job that mandated finding and visiting strange places like the bread museum. So I did everything I could to find it. I haunted bakeries all over the city, spoke with curators of other museums and chefs in restaurants, called the Ministry of Culture and Carbohydrates. But it was no use. The Museum of Bread was destined to remain just a yeasty rumor, a starchy El Dorado. In my searching, though, I came across a reasonable substitute. The Museum of Popular Nutrition (though probably not as compelling as the Museum of Unpopular Nutrition) would have to do.

So I called them, and was informed by the uncharacteristically friendly man on the other end of the phone that I could “come and visit any time, though we are only open on Wednesdays.” The following Wednesday, I took them up on their offer and made my way to the respectable stone building that housed the museum. I was greeted in the lobby by a man who appeared to be very elderly – well into his ‘80s, if not beyond. I was somewhat taken aback by this, as war, alcoholism, and poverty had conspired to make old men in Russia a relative rarity (in 1994, for example, life expectancy for men was a nasty and brutish 57 years). This old man was most definitely alive, though, and with his natty wool jacket, alert blue eyes, and compact stature he looked like a friendly gnome. He got right down to business, asking me politely, “What do you want?”

“I would like to see the museum,” I politely responded, gesturing to the heavy wooden staircase that I supposed led to the displays.

“Why?” he responded.

Good question. Why does one come to the Museum of Popular Nutrition? Because one is unable to locate the Museum of Bread? Caught off guard, I stammered, “I…just…thought it might be interesting.”

The old man considered my reply. “Hmmm,” he said. And then, “Are you with an excursion?”

“An excursion? No. No, I really just wanted to see the museum. I called and you said it would be OK.”

“I see,” he mused. “And you’re not with an excursion?”

“No,” I said, realizing that I was going to have to tell this man the truth. “Actually, I work for a magazine. My job is to find interesting places in Moscow and write about them so that our readers will have someplace to visit.”

“As an excursion?” the old man raised his white eyebrows, suddenly hopeful.

“Well…maybe. Yes, probably, yes. A big excursion.”

“Ahh,” he sighed, “I’ll go speak to someone. While I’m gone, read the rules of the museum.” The man took my elbow in a surprisingly firm grip and led me over to a wall where a 16 x 20’ poster hung. “RULES,” it said at the top of the poster, but that was all I could decipher. I stared at the 60 or so items on the list, wondering just how much trouble it was possible to get into at the Museum of Popular Nutrition, anyway, until eventually a woman in her 50s appeared.

“Were you with this morning’s excursion?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes I was. And it was so interesting that I decided to come back. Is that OK?”

“Oh YES!” she beamed, rushing around behind the counter.

As she was selling me my ticket, the old man I’d first spoken with returned with a much younger man, who seemed to be in charge. “This is Ivan,” said the younger man, pointing.⁴⁶ “He will give you a tour.”

I followed Ivan up the stairs and into a hallway with four large doors. We opened one and entered a vast room that was lit only by the big windows that made up one wall. Glass display cases of knives and forks ringed the room and ran down its middle. Ivan turned to me. “Do you understand Russian?” he asked me kindly.

“I will if you speak slowly,” I replied, then realized what I had done. Oh. My God.

“This…is…a…fork,” said Ivan, watching my face for comprehension as he pointed at the first item in the case. “In…the…old…days…forks…were…very…heavy…as…you…can….see…

I peered around the room as Ivan moved on to the second item in the case (another fork), and did some frantic calculating. There were, conservatively, perhaps 1000 knives and forks on display in this room, and at 5 minutes a story per each utensil times 4 rooms total…I realized it was going to take me approximately 13 days to get through this entire museum. I would starve. At the Museum of Popular Nutrition. Ha!

Fortunately, at that very moment the younger man threw open the door. “Don’t give her the full tour!” the man yelled crossly at Ivan. “She’s not an excursion!”

Ivan, his presentation interrupted, seemed bereft. We stood there in silence for a few moments and then I asked him how many excursions visited the museum. “We had five,” he replied, not specifying if he meant that day, that month, or since the museum’s opening.

“Ah. I see. And where did you get all these…(I gestured helplessly at the display cases, the words for knife and fork having deserted me as soon as I opened my mouth)…plates?”

“Plates? You would like to see plates?” Ivan shepherded me into room number 2, which was filled with (you guessed it) plates. But wait! What’s this? Ivan described a few of the plates to me but then, perhaps fearful of being yelled at again, pulled me over to a separate, lighted case that was obviously the room’s star attraction. Inside the small glass case stood a figure of a chef made entirely of lobster claws. “Langusta!” declared Ivan with pride.

“Indeed!” I replied. We smiled at each other, pleased to be sharing this experience together.

Finally, Ivan led me into room number 3, the last of the rooms I would visit. And suddenly, everything changed.

This room was much smaller than the previous two, and lacked any windows. The close quarters and the yellow light thrown by the fixture hanging from the ceiling gave it an intimate, cozy feel. The wall across from the door was entirely covered in faded pink squares of paper that were divided by grids into smaller squares, like bingo cards. “What are these?” I asked, stepping away from Ivan’s side for the first time and peering at them.

“Those are ration cards,” replied Ivan, “from the siege of Leningrad.”

“The siege of Leningrad?” I became immediately, inappropriately excited. I had read all about the 900-day siege of Leningrad, the deadliest siege in the history of the entire world, where 1.3 million civilians perished.⁴⁷ It stands to this day as one of the worst things I’ve ever learned about.⁴⁸ I am not trying to minimize other groups’ suffering here, at all; I understand that suffering is something that cannot be measured or quantified. But in the catalogue of terrors and atrocities that make up the uniquely barbarous 20th century, the siege of Leningrad ranks right up there near the top of the list. To actually be standing in a room that was filled with everyday items from this experience, things that the people held in their hands and stored in their cupboards, was overwhelming. The fact that the items on display related directly to food made the whole thing even more emotional. City records show that at the start of the siege, in September of 1941, the city had this much food available:

*grain and flour: 35 days
*groats and pasta: 31 days
*meat and livestock: 33 days
*fats: 45 days
*sugar: 60 days

The siege would last for nearly 3 years. They rationed the food they had, eventually giving civilians – who spent all their waking moments digging defensive trenches in the frozen mud – a daily allotment of 250 grams (5 slices) of bread made from sawdust and straw. The residents ate anything they could – pets, rats, briefcases, wallpaper glue, dirt, their neighbors – but still it was not enough to keep people like Tanya Savicheva and her family alive. Everything, all the scholarly work, all the military analysis, all the oral histories describing the siege could be tossed on a bonfire and we’d still know everything we needed to know about it because we have the brief diary of 12-year-old Tanya. Reading the last nine sentences in her journal; blunt, declarative statements that simply report what was happening, is like looking into a black vacuum in our collective soul, a place where nothing recognizably human – not evil, not sorrow, not anything – exists. It terrified me when I read it sitting at home on the couch in Florida, and it nearly undid me here in this tiny room, standing among the empty bowls and plates of the victims.





Standing frozen, staring at the reproduction of Tanya’s diary and the chipped porcelain child’s cup that accompanied it, I realized that I was on the verge of some kind of silent hysteria, and abruptly turned and crossed the room. The pictures I was now looking at were from around the same time, I could tell, but the subject matter was much happier. Young men and women stood in rows, posing for the camera. They looked the way all Russians do when posing for formal photographs, serious and stern, but they also looked well fed, alive, and not terrified. Nearly all of them sported jackets emblazoned with medals. “What’s this?” I asked Ivan, startled by the harsh sound of my voice in the airless space.

“Those are chefs and restaurant workers who participated in the war effort,” replied Ivan.

I looked more closely at the photos and, remarkably, saw someone I knew. There, much shorter than everyone in his row, stood 30-year-old Ivan, with his natty wool jacket and alert, pale eyes. “Hey!” I shouted, suddenly overjoyed, “That’s you!”

“Yes,” replied Ivan. He looked off modestly to the side as he said this, but I still caught his small, gratified smile.

“Ivan…Ivan.” I crossed the room to where he stood and put my hand on his arm, “You don’t understand! That’s you!”

“Yes, dear, I know. It’s me. It’s me.” Ivan patted me kindly as I wiped at my eyes and looked around the room, trying to figure out what to do with this news.

“You like history?” Ivan asked me as he escorted me to the lobby door a few minutes later. “You should come join us for our monthly buffet dinner. The last Wednesday of every month. It’s a reunion. It’s all you can eat.”

“I didn’t know they had those kinds of things in Russia,” I said, stuffing a tissue back in my coat pocket and getting ready to rejoin the world outside. Truly, I didn’t. I thought all-you-can-eat buffets were an American innovation. And anyway, where were they getting the food? There wasn’t exactly a surplus in present-day Moscow. But then: “Stupid,” I chastised myself, “These are people who survived 900 days of famine by eating mattress stuffing and the pages of books. Post-Soviet Russia probably seems like a picnic, literally, to them.”

“Yes, yes, it’s all you can eat” confirmed Ivan, “and we would love for you to come. But Robin,” he warned, growing serious, “we ask that you don’t bring a bag.”

“A bag?” I repeated, not understanding.

“Yes, it’s one of our rules,” Ivan pointed at the giant poster I’d seen when I came in. “We want there to be enough food for everyone.”

“Me too, Ivan.” I thought about Ivan and his friends at the museum, and Tanya, and hungry cities then and now. “Me too.”


NOTES

45. I am now going to have to learn to play an instrument and form a band and record an album just so I can name it the Lightning Portrait of Henry Wells. Dammit. Continue reading post.

46. I’m sorry that all the old men in my story are named Ivan. If I were making this up I would have chosen more interesting, less stereotypically Russian names. Continue reading post.

47. Facts about the siege come from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_the_Siege_of_Leningrad_on_the_city Continue reading post.

48. And when what you study is Russian history, that’s really saying something. Continue reading post.