Potemkin

NYC #2: Damndest thing I ever seen

2010-02-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

You'd think meeting Wyatt would've been excitement enough for one night, right? Oh no.

I said my goodbyes to the extremely friendly Jon Stewart people and walked 9 or so blocks through the remains of the recent blizzard up to Julliard. So now, what are we doing at Julliard, again?

For readers who don't know, I am married to this guy named Jim White. He is a critically acclaimed musician whom I've been a fan of since his first album came out in 1997, though I didn't actually meet him (at a show at the Echo Lounge) until 2003. Jim is sort of a renaissance fellow; when he's not working on albums he's involved with a variety of interesting side projects. One of these side projects was scoring the senior student production at the Julliard Theater School.

Everybody knows that "Julliard" = "wow" when it comes to music. But I didn't know until Jim got involved with this crew that the 15-18 students accepted into the theater school each year (out of 2000 annual applicants) are some of the most talented actors in America. What I DID know was that for the past 8 months Jim and these Julliard people had been working their butts off to create something extraordinary.

The show was an adaptation of Sam Shepard's "Paris Texas" and the "Motel Chronicles" interspersed with stories the young students had written about their families. In between the stories, the students would sing songs arranged by Jim and Dan Nettles, his very talented colleague. Some of the songs had lyrics written by Stephanie, the dramaturg; some were re-arrangements of songs Jim wrote in the past.

For those of you not familiar with Jim's work, the above sentence probably carries no emotional weight one way or the other. People who DO know his music, though, are probably struggling as much as I did to reconcile these two wildly disparate ideas. For "musical theater" is never, ever the first thing that pops into one's head when thinking about Jim's music. Maybe an old falling-down MOVIE theater on some forsaken corner in the abandoned downtown of a Mississippi hamlet that has seen better days but is now known mainly for its startlingly high rates of birth defects due to the huge number of basement meth labs that began springing up once the local lumber mill shut down; yeah, I could see Jim's music overlaying a scene like this (and you can, too).

But a THEATER production? Jim? It'd be like hearing that Tom Waits had been chosen to play the lead in the upcoming Ethel Merman biopic. Does. Not. Compute. Nonetheless, I reserved judgment. Jim is a talented person working with other talented people. Perhaps they'd take these incongruous ingredients and whip up something tasty after all.

And wouldn't you know, we settled into the back row of the sold-out theater on the show's opening night, and it was amazing. 18 students singing "Combing My Hair in A Brand-New Style," and "Ghost Town of My Brain" while performing a choppy, angular, rhythmic dance that completely suited the off-kilter lyrics -- I'm telling you, if the show had stopped right then I would have said it was one of the damndest things I'd ever seen.

But it didn't stop right then. It kept going for 2 more hours. These people, these kids, were WORKING. They were in constant motion; when they weren't talking or singing or dancing they were running around setting up, disassembling, or toting around the sets and the multimedia that held the whole show together. This production was fairly experimental; there was no clear plot or narrative per se. It was more like a mood that was created that built on itself as the show went on, and the sparse set and dramatic lighting were instrumental in creating this mood.

The lighting, in fact, was such a critical part of the show that it was almost another cast member or character. The show used something I'd never before seen and used it to great affect: a long series of milky glass panels that lit up in different ways according to a complex series of cues. Each individual panel was about 5 feet long and 3 feet wide, and there must have been about 10 of them attached to each other. This 50-foot long rectangle of glass was attached to the ceiling by cables, and the whole thing could be raised or lowered depending on the mood the director wanted. The glass face could point down, so it was shining on the actors like overhead florescent lighting, or it could face out, so that the audience of parents and grandparents (this was the class' thesis show, after all, and the opening night) and theater people could see the sequence of colors and flashes.

It was really something to see, and really added to the production. And so, when at the beginning of act 4, the cables holding the fixture aloft suddenly snapped and the whole 2000-pound, 50-foot-long, dangerous glass contraption crashed to the stage below and exploded like a fishbowl knocked off of an end table, everyone was absolutely, completely aghast.

Act three had just ended, and the 18 (EIGHTEEN, do you understand how many people that is) actors distributed themselves around the stage and froze, waiting for the next act to start. A slide was projected onto the back wall, interstitial music was playing, and the big rectangle of lighted panels was being raised to the very top of the ceiling 20 feet above. It had almost made it when the cables snapped and the lights crashed to the floor. It made a sound that was unbelievably loud and also oddly satisfying -- like the sound a crystal chandelier would make if someone threw it out of a helicopter. It echoed in the absolutely silent theater as we all prepared ourselves to see which of the students we'd been watching for the past 2 & 1/2 hours had been killed, and which had been spared.

Remarkably, unbelievably (and I still have no explanation for this) not a single person on the stage was hit or even hurt very badly. One person had to be walked off by two other students when she was hit by flying glass. But there was not a single other injury. It was, without a doubt, the damdest thing I've ever seen. I still have not completely processed it.

And what a tragedy! Obviously, it would have been way more tragic if someone had been hurt or killed, but still. All that work, all that labor. Those poor kids. Poor Brian, the director. Damn.

We all sat there in total silence for a very, very long time, until finally Brian sort of stumbled on stage, spread his arms out forlornly, and said "We can't continue after this. Everyone go home." We all leapt up and began clapping frantically, trying to communicate all our shock and relief and gratitude and amazement. Then, we all went home.

Tune in tomorrow for NYC #3. Boy, this was a busy 2 days. No wonder I'm sick.

NYC #1: My story is better than your story

2010-02-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

I went to NYC this past Thursday to see the Julliard play my Southern Gothic Husband^TM wrote the music for (more on this in NYC #2).

We stayed in a very swanky-do Philip Stark joint called the Hudson, right over by Lincoln Center. All I can say about the hotel is:

1. It's very dark. I have never been in a darker hotel, as a matter of fact.
2. The housekeeping staff is possibly the friendliest I have ever encountered.
3. While looking for a place to pee one night at 3am when we were locked out of our room, I staggered into the supply room (which should have been locked) and drunkenly stole about $600 worth of shampoo samples. I am not sorry.

The first evening I was there, Jim had to go over to Julliard to finish up the final preparations for that night's show, which was the opening night.

I had about an hour to kill before I had to show up for the performance so I went down to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine. The bar was fairly crowded; most all the one- and two-seat "conversation areas" were filled. So I sat with my wine in a wing-tip leather chair that was part of a larger group of seating: a big leather couch, a couple more chairs, etc., etc. I wasn't planning on being there long, just long enough to drink one glass of wine. I took out my notebook and started revising Potemkin.

I'd been there for about 10 minutes when a group of about 9 young people (mid-late twenties) walked over to me. They were headed by a woman who worked at the bar, and they all looked me over sort of beseechingly, but without saying anything. It was clear this was the only place for this big group to sit, yet because I was perched there it made the whole area sort of off limits; my territory.

"Here, here," I said, standing up and pointing to my nearly empty glass of wine, "I'm fixin' to leave. Y'all can sit here."

"No! No!" shouted the group of people, "We can't do that! Stay! Stay! You MUST join us!"

The last thing I ever want to do is make small-talk with a big group of strangers, and so I started standing up and saying "no really, I'll move." One of the guys in the group, though, looked at me really sincerely and said "Please. We're sick of each other. We want you to entertain us! Tell us ALL about yourself!"

Hmmm, well. It just so happened that I DID actually have something interesting to tell that night, so I relented and sat back down. The person directly to my left was a very nice-looking man wearing a sharp suit and tie. He was way more dressed up than the others he was with, and I found this curious. He looked at me very seriously and said, "So, Robin, tell us about yourself. What are you doing here?"

"Well, I'm going to Julliard."

"Oh! Your parents must be very proud!"

I laughed and explained to him that my husband Jim was writing the music for this play that the Julliard folks were putting on, and (in response to the man's further questions) that he was an alt-country musician whom I'd met at a show in Atlanta, and had a movie out, and how we'd once sung a song together on Flannery O'Connor's front porch. I felt very happy and excited that I had a good and worthwhile story to tell these folks. Though I wasn't really thinking of it as a competition, it's still nice to think, ha, I'm giving these people something to talk about. I'm always grateful when someone does this for me.

So then I asked the man, whose name was Wyatt, "What are you doing here?"

"We're filming a segment for TV," he said.

This did not impress me. People film TV stuff all the time, even in Athens, GA. They could be making an infomercial for the Ronco Pocket Nose Picker, or a commercial for Strong-Arm Vinnie's Accident and Injury Practice and Deli. We talked for a second about the logistics of filming for TV, and then I asked him, "What TV show are you filming for?"

"The Jon Stewart show," he said. "We're doing a segment on evil bankers and credit-card companies, and we're interviewing a whistle-blower for Bank of America in this hotel's bistro."

"Hang on just a second." I leaned over and began rifling through my large bag, searching for the flip charts, PowerPoint slides, and bell-curve graphs I carry around with me everywhere in order to be able to, at a moment's notice, deliver a concise yet exhaustive presentation about why our entire economy is just about to completely collapse.

We ended up having a lengthy conversation about, well, how our entire economy is just about to completely collapse. I encourage everyone to watch this segment; it's going to be on Monday, Feb 22. As usual, Jon Stewart is one of the only, ahem, journalists, who sees and says what's going on. The fact that his staff had every reason to be all snooty and "yeah, we're on the Jon Stewart show" but instead was as friendly and outgoing as Mary Kay recruiters at the Kroger's just confirms my suspicions that Stewart is a worthy hero.

If only I'd met Wyatt AFTER the first Julliard show, I'd have had a MUCH more interesting story to tell him. I'll have to settle for telling it to you, tomorrow.

Inadvertent Criminals

2010-02-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

Do any of you know any people who set out to do something enterprising, with the best of intentions, and ended up breaking the law? For instance, 5-year-olds who want to have a lemonade stand but end up falling afoul of zoning regulations?

If you do, could you email me at robintraining at yahoo dot com? Thanks much.

Demon Sheep in Loafers

2010-02-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in a while. It’s an ad by Carly Fiorina (you may remember her as the CEO of HP; that’s right, the one who nearly ran the company into the ground), who is planning to run for Republican gov of California. It’s an ad attacking another Republican contender, Tom Campbell.

There are so many things wrong with this video that I can’t even begin to enumerate them. OK, I can.*

1. Is she calling fiscal conservatives sheep?
2. What other way to fall besides down is there?
3. Why is that sheep wearing loafers?
4. Does she not realize that FCINO is perilously close to Fiorina? (this kind of subtlety matters in advertising, I’m told)
5. Is the narrator, with his over-the-top “Hi, I’m a narrator” voice, really serious? Or is he just poking fun at the project he somehow got sucked into in a desperate attempt to appear snarky and ironic and thus salvage his credibility?

All of these questions just add to the mystery. What is known is that Republican “insiders” are calling this video a “meltdown” for Fiorina, and that Campbell, her opponent, is sending the video out as part of his campaign materials to demonstrate once and for all that Fiorina is on the Express Train to Crazy Town.

I’m looking for a seminar or retreat or something where they help you tell the difference between satire and reality, because it’s getting harder and harder to tell.

*I'm not the only one who has these very same questions. They're very obvious if you watch the video -- so much so that even the commenters on YouTube (usually a haven for slack-jawed, hairy-backed mouth-breathers) are asking them. My beloved Metafilter also has a funny comment thread on this video, where you can learn more about Fiorina's tenure at Hewlett-Packard, the fallout from this video, and California politics in general.

Farmer Jason Likes My Chicken Tractor

2010-02-02T09:26:00.000-08:00

In another sign from the universe that I am indisputably blessed and am exactly where I'm supposed to be, Farmer Jason showed up at my house yesterday.

Those of you who don't have young kids may still know Farmer Jason if you're lucky enough to know who Jason and the Scorchers are; namely, the shreddingist motherlovin' what-would-happen-if-you-put-Hank-Williams-and-Iggy-Pop-in-a-blender-with-a-half-cup-of-nitroglycerine-and-a-heapin'-spoonful-a-kick-ass band EVER. Well, one of them. I saw them in 1985 or 6 at UNF in Jax and my ears are STILL RINGING. Whoo!

And what a treat to realize that Jason Ringenberg is as nice as he is talented. After my 3-year-old stopped staring at him in stunned, star-struck silence, he sang her not one but two songs AND complimented her on her monkey blanket! Thank you for giving my kid one of the most awesome experiences of her young life, Farmer Jason. You are the best.

FARMER JASON SINGS TO SADIE

FARMER JASON IS COMING TO YOUR TOWN

http://www.farmerjason.com/dates.htm

JASON AND THE SCORCHERS ARE GOING TO MESS YOU UP, BUDDY

"Wind-Up" Winds Up

2010-01-29T06:40:00.000-08:00

Congrats to my friend Stephen Earnhart on the debut of his theater adaptation of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Stephen is one of the funniest people I know; unassuming-looking with sticky-up strawberry-blonde hair, just some guy from Indiana. But he creates amazingly creative things, and his dogged pursuit of his ideas and persistence in seeing them realized has always inspired me. Here's to you, Stephen. I'm so glad you finished the play and that the opening was a sold-out success.

Review.

Also, happy birthday, Chekhov. And RIP JD.

Contest + Resources

2010-01-27T05:06:00.000-08:00

As part of my daily efforts to make something of myself, I've entered a contest to have my work reviewed by a Real Live Agent.

You can learn about the contest here:www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog

But please, don't enter it yourself unless English is your second language and/or your memoir is about that time you made tapioca pudding. Thanks!

I Excel

2010-01-26T04:55:00.000-08:00

So, my story about Russia has ended, but my story about my story about Russia is just starting.

I've got my Excel spreadsheet of memoir agents all laid out and the first two paragraphs of my query letter written. I've revised and polished Potemkin so it'll be ready to mail off should someone want to see it.

If anyone out there has any advice, or any input, or any names of any people who might help me on my quest for publication, I would be delighted to hear it. You can comment here or email me at robintraining at yahoo dot com. Here's hoping this journey will go a bit more smoothly than the one I just finished writing about.

I am going to try to post here frequently about projects I'm working on, because this blog has been a good way to motivate myself to keep writing. I am most grateful to all the people who visit.

Tune in soon to read the first chapter of the novel I'm working on now, if you're so inclined.

Best,

Robin

40. Too Tough to Die

2010-01-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

Airports are excellent places for reflection and self-analysis. They are liminal places, places where people are literally in between. People in airports have shrugged off their day-to-day identities but haven’t yet donned who they’ll be when they reach their destinations. There are only very broad categories of people in airports: businesspeople, tourists, terrorists; the details of their specific stories are unknown, their next chapters waiting to be written when the plane touches down.

If this were a movie⁵⁵ , 82 minutes that required a neat summation of what my experience in Moscow meant, the airport would be an excellent place to stage this scene. I could sit in a chair and watch the people pass by and meditate on the transient nature of life and experience. Better still, I could stand in the airport bathroom and stare solemnly at my reflection in the mirror. My voice would play over the static tableau, detailing my many epiphanies.

“My story, which began as a tale of societal collapse, was really about my own personal disintegration,” my voice would say. “And that’s when I realized. The two – the individual and her community – are inseparable. The only way to insure your own sanity is to help create a sane community. Far from being a story about collapse, mine was a story about learning to build something meaningful.”

Or maybe:

“My story, which ended with me trying and failing to cope with life in Russia, was not really about my own strengths and weaknesses. And that’s when I realized. Part of growing up, part of surviving, is having the wisdom and sanity to recognize when the environment around you – despite your best efforts – is wrong for you. Far from being a story about giving up, mine was a story about learning when to fight.”

Or even:

“My story, which was ostensibly about living in Moscow, was not about living in Moscow at all. And that’s when I realized. Until my internal landscape became somewhere I could comfortably dwell, it wouldn’t matter what city I lived in. I’d never find home. Far from being a story about living in Moscow, mine was a story about learning to live in the world.”

But this story is not yet a movie, and back then I was way too young and way too tired and way too freaked out to derive any coherent meaning from the city I was waiting to fly out of. The only thing I knew back then was that I was nowhere near as tough as I’d thought. Moscow had chewed me up and spat me out. All I thought about was getting home to Florida. I didn’t want to go home, and considered doing so a terrible defeat. I had no idea what I’d do there. But the events with Yuri had shaken me so deeply that I no longer trusted my judgment. Sure, I was trying to put my life back in order and was having some tiny successes. But my experience with madness was too recent and unsettling to easily forget, my grip on sanity too tenuous. I feared that anything or nothing at all could shove me back into that dark room, and I doubted I’d have the energy to get myself out of it a second time.

These were the very last things I wanted to think about as I sat at the dingy gate in Sheremetyevo Airport waiting for my plane to come in, however. So instead, I thought about my mother. She did not know that I was on my way home, and though there was almost nothing good about the circumstances under which I was leaving, showing up unexpectedly on my mother’s doorstep would be good. I would be like the prodigal daughter, back from years of wandering the wastelands. She would be so glad to see me, I knew, and I her. We would sit down together and I would ask her the question that, according to her, was the first question I’d ever asked: “what’s gonna happen next, mom?” I’d been asking her that question incessantly since I could remember, and although I rarely took her up on her suggestions, she was the very best person I knew to help me find an answer. She knew me better than anyone and had provided me with a kind of internal compass that, though sometimes prone to serious magnetic disturbances, had not failed me yet. And right now that compass was pointing straight to home, straight to her.

My plane landed 11 hours later in Miami, Florida. When I’d bought my one-way ticket at the airport, Miami was the closest I could get to my final destination of Jacksonville. Of course I knew that Miami is in fact 400 miles away from Jacksonville, but, relatively speaking, that’s still pretty close. I had no plan for what I would do when I got to Miami, but I also totally didn’t care. I’d walk if I had to. I’d been through worse.

Finally, I decided to take a bus from Miami to Jacksonville. The recording when I’d called the downtown station told me I’d have a long wait; the next bus to Jax left 5 hours from then, at 6am. I resolved to settle down at the airport and wait out the night, but after an hour of sitting propped up against a wall I changed my plans. I was exhausted from jet lag and months of very little rest, and I was afraid that if I stopped moving I’d fall asleep and sleep forever. I’d miss my bus, my luggage would be stolen, I’d be arrested for vagrancy – anything could happen. So I dragged my heavy suitcase out of the airport and into the humid Miami night, and hailed a cab downtown.

One day many years from then I’d move to Miami and thus would understand the lunacy of deciding to walk around downtown by myself at 1am, and while dragging a suitcase, no less. But in the state I was in then, the homeless people and derelicts eying me from their doorways as I walked down Highway 1 were merely friendly fellow Floridians. There was no way they could hurt me! Didn’t they know what all I’d just been through, where I’d just come from?

There is a phrase to describe the kind of carelessness that overtakes people who are coming to the ends of their journeys. It’s called “barn shy,” and it’s your certainty that you are this close, almost there, that causes you to let your guard down and makes you vulnerable. That night in Miami, gawking at the abandoned Freedom Tower and the glittering black bay, I was definitely barn shy. “Listen,” I’d tell anyone who tried to mess with me, “You and your little ‘give me your wallet’ routine are pretty weak sauce after what I’ve just experienced. What is this, amateur night?”

I was not tough enough for Moscow, that was for sure, but on that night I was feeling tough enough for downtown Miami. I had made it back to America, my feet were on my home soil, and damn right I was tough. Too tough to die.

After a few hours of ambling unmolested around downtown, I was worn out and sweating profusely in the thick summer air. I hauled my suitcase back to the deserted bus station, sat down on it (my suitcase, not the bus station), and lit a cigarette. I had two hours to wait. Finally, the sky began to lighten and people began to trickle up to the station. Like most Greyhound bus passengers, we were a motley assortment. Black people, white people, Latinos; drunk people, sort of drunk people, extremely drunk people; people wearing embroidered trucker hats, people wearing airbrushed ones – the only quality we shared was that we all looked rode hard and put up wet. As I walked down the aisle of the mostly empty bus, I spied the one exception, a very neat-looking black man dressed sharply in a crisp Navy uniform. He nodded at me politely as I sat down next to him. As the bus rumbled onto Highway 1 for its 12-hour trip to Jacksonville, I made my move.

“Excuse me, please,” I said to the man, having to concentrate hard to say this in English, “Where are you going?”

“Waycross,” he said, “to visit my mother.”

“Well. I wonder if I might ask you, if it is not too much trouble. I have got to go to sleep. Right now. If I go lie down back there (I pointed over my shoulder towards the bus’ empty back), will you make sure nobody jumps me? And would you wake me up when we get to Jacksonville? I am sorry to ask you this, but I have got to go to sleep. Right now.”

The man looked surprised. “OK,” he said finally, “sure.”

Twelve hours later, I felt a gentle poke on my shoulder. It was the Navy guy, keeping his promise. I walked out of the bus station and into the empty downtown. I squinted up at the windows of the office buildings, reflecting red in the late-afternoon sun. The carless street sat quietly in the buildings’ shadow, the rows of traffic lights spanning it ignored, unnecessary. The smell of frying grease from the Krystal’s next door, the only shop open on the whole street, pervaded everything. I sighed. I was home.

*

An hour later I stood on top of the airconditioning unit, hot air blowing up my pants cuff, trying to pry open the garage window. Far from showing up at the house and being absorbed into the bosom of my family, I’d arrived to find the house dark and locked up tight, the car missing from the garage. “Well, hell,” I thought as I walked through the stuffy, vacant house, “This is anti-climactic.”

For the first two days, I did almost nothing but sleep. I’d sleep all night, wake up in the late morning and find some food, and then go immediately back to bed and sleep for most of the rest of the day. In the evening, I’d sit in the lush backyard for an hour or so, smoking and watching the sun set behind the live oaks. Then I’d go back into the quiet house I’d grown up in and sleep for the rest of the night. I wondered from time to time where my parents had gone and when they’d come back, but only very vaguely. It didn’t really matter if they were there or not, I realized. All I ever planned to do again was sleep.

But on the third day, I woke up in the morning and began to think seriously about the situation. I was alone in the house. I was disoriented and confused by the disappearance of my family. I drifted through the darkened rooms like a shade, saying and thinking nothing. There was very little food in the house since my parents, wherever they were, had eaten everything up before they left on what was apparently a long trip. I ate a half a box of Wheat Thins, most of a jar of olives, a slice of American cheese. Soon, if I didn’t leave the house to get more, I would run out of food. The isolation, the empty house, the odd, aimless hours, the confusion, the scant supplies -- this was sort of like Moscow, I realized, only with cable.

My most urgent problem, though, was that I had run out of cigarettes. And, as I thought about how to solve this problem, I realized that here in Jacksonville in my present circumstances I was way less capable of acquiring the basics than I’d been in Moscow. I had no car, and in my suburban area you had to have a car to get anywhere. Though I had walked for miles each day in Moscow, sometimes through howling blizzards, the idea of walking anywhere in this American city seemed ridiculous. Walk? Where would I walk to? It simply wasn’t done.

Nonetheless, I needed cigarettes, so I ate a few spoonfuls of extra crunchy peanut butter and set off through my residential neighborhood. It was probably two miles to the convenience store on the highway that ran past our neighborhood, no distance at all. But there were no sidewalks, no other pedestrians. This town was not configured for walking. I trudged along the side of the busy, deadly highway, stepping over the trash people had thrown from their car windows and the carcasses of unlucky possums and raccoons. I could see the 7-11 shimmering in the distance, through a miasma of car fumes and July heat and road-kill stink. Finally, I made it. I bought my pack and walked back to the house.

Three days later, I had again run out of cigarettes. This time, I called the one person I knew who I thought might still be in town in spite of the fact that he was now grown up and free to go anywhere. My friend Mark Hilpert was both a fantastic photographer and a devout Pentecostal. He spent all of his time thinking about f-stops and the Rapture, and thus rarely made concrete future plans. He was one of my closest friends; I had no doubt he would help me. After a few rings, his slow, sleepy voice said, “Hello?”

“Mark!” I shouted into the phone, “It’s me! Robin! I’ve just come back from Russia.” There was a long silence while Mark waited for me to continue. “Um, do you think you could bring me a pack of cigarettes?”

*

Thirty minutes later I was sitting outside of an art gallery in 5 Points, waiting for Mark to disassemble the art installation he’d recently shown there. When I’d left, this area had been run-down and empty, with the storefronts either abandoned or inhabited by cheap Chinese restaurants and sad-looking drugstores. Now, as I sat in the relentless sun at a café table watching Mark wrestle two large ceramic pigs into the front seat of his car, I was perplexed. What had happened while I was gone? The decaying movie theater was now some kind of night club; a trendy boutique lived next to the liquor store that was now proudly touting its selection of artisanal wines. The intermittent bums that had dotted the streets the last time I was here had been replaced by teenagers with facial piercings and young professionals sporting strollers and cell phones. Well, I wondered as I smoked and sweated, how did I get here?

Finally, Mark had loaded up the last of his pigs and was ready to go. I squeezed myself into the backseat of his car and we putted through the suburbs towards my neighborhood. This time when we pulled up in front of my house, there was a car in the open garage; a car my parents were in the process of getting out of.

I watched from the backseat as my mother looked at Mark, whom she had known as long as I had, and registered who it was. She started across the lawn as I fought to disentangle myself from the art in the backseat, a look of surprise and alarm on her face. She was nearly to the car when I squeezed out of it and stood up. She stopped dead in her tracks and we stood looking at each other for a beat and a half. Then she bolted the rest of the way across the yard and grabbed me up in a huge, crushing hug.

“You’re home!” she sobbed.

I hugged her back, burying my face in her shoulder as I cried. After a minute, she stepped away from me and held me at arm’s length, her hands on my shoulders. We were both still crying and she looked at me expectantly, waiting for some kind of explanation.

But I had no answer for anything, only a question. I looked at her, wiping my eyes as Mark bustled around us, unloading and rearranging his car.

“What’s gonna happen next, mom? What’s gonna happen next?”

Home.

NOTES

55. And if this were a movie, I’d want Iggy Pop to play me. Loyal reader in Universal City, CA, perhaps you could make a few phone calls? Continue reading post.

39. My Mistake

2010-01-17T15:48:00.001-08:00

Eventually, the night I’d been waiting for arrived. Although I had been anticipating it for weeks, I still couldn’t quite believe it was happening. I lay in my bed and listened as someone worried the window in the living room, rattling the pane in its frame. Whoever it was pushed and pulled rhythmically on the wood around the glass, trying to get in. As long as I had been preparing for this very moment, despite all my planning and calculating, now that it was actually happening I was paralyzed. The banging of the window in its sill was steady and persistent, and I knew that eventually, very soon, the latch holding it closed would bend and give way and the window would fly open.

I got out of bed and walked stiffly towards the noise. I had thought so many times about what I would do when this moment arrived, how I would feel. Scared? Relieved? Now that it was here I was blank with terror. I stood in the doorway of the bedroom, hypnotized, staring at the curtain as it trembled from the motion of the window behind it. Waves of a fear so visceral it felt like nausea prickled my skin as they passed from my head to my feet and back again, a sensation that owed nothing to any kind of thought, but was solely corporeal, bodily. It was as if the surge of cortisol and adrenalin that flooded my brain when the noise started had finally overloaded my frayed synapses and had wiped every thought I’d ever had out of my head. I stood there watching, suspended.

Finally, there was a mighty push on the window and it crashed inward on its hinges, wide open, pushing back the curtain on its rod. I screamed and dropped to the floor in a crouch, waiting to spring on whoever climbed through. At the exact, very moment that the window banged open, as if its opening had been some sort of trigger or signal, the phone on the end table directly to my left shrilly rang. A rapid series of confused commands shotgunned through my head. ”Get the intruder!” I thought hysterically, “No, wait, get the phone!”

The ringing of the phone continued, 5 rings, 6 six rings, piercing the 3 am silence. I remained huddled on the floor, waiting for a blue-jeaned leg to hook itself over the sill, but there was nothing. A stiff breeze blew through the screenless window, rifling the notebook pages still scattered across the floor. Not taking my eyes off the window, I shifted slightly and picked up the phone. I held it to my ear, breathing hard, saying nothing.

Finally, after many seconds of silence, a Russian man’s voice spoke up. “Robin?” it said, “Are you there?”

I could not answer. It was physically impossible for me to say anything. My mouth was too dry, my thoughts too scattered.

The man continued. “What are you doing? Where have you been? You are no longer at Guardian. I am worried that something bad is happening to you. I will come get you in taxi. I want to see you.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think. What was happening, here? Why, and more importantly, HOW, was Lyosha calling me at 3 am after a silence of so many months? How did he get my phone number? How did he so correctly guess that at that very moment not only something “bad” but actually the worst thing that had ever happened to me was in the process of happening? Were the two things somehow related? Maybe Lyosha had paid someone to follow me home from the Guardian when I’d still worked there, and now he’d sent that same person to terrify me at an appointed time in the middle of the night so that when Lyosha called I’d be completely broken, completely ready to take him up on his taxi. Or maybe it was the complete opposite – a divine intervention. Lyosha had just happened to call exactly at the same time that Marat and his cohort launched their assault, and the ringing phone had scared them away. Or maybe these events were just coincidence. The wind had blown open the window just as Lyosha decided to call me at 3 in the morning. These were just things that happened, and the only meaning they had was the one I in my fear and exhaustion had decided to assign them.

Whatever its origin, Lyosha’s voice as it asked again if I was there, if I was OK, pierced the fog in my brain like a laser. That old saying “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t”? I’d always scoffed at people who said this, much preferring unique, novel misery to the plodding complaints I’d grown familiar with. But in this instance, the idea of saying no to Lyosha and hanging up the phone on the only human voice I’d heard in 8 days, of closing the window and going back to my bed to face the rest of the silent hours until morning, was inconceivable. I didn’t want Lyosha in my apartment – he’d take one look around at the papers and ashtrays and glasses stained with cayenne pepper and immediately know I’d gone nuts. But I agreed to walk up to the main highway to meet him in his taxi.

Twenty minutes later I was propped in the backseat, staring out the window at the sodium arc streetlights as they whizzed by. “You look terrible,” Lyosha’d said by way of greeting. “I was going to take you to Club 011 so we could dance, but let’s just go find some food.” We drove somewhere, to a hotel café that was somehow still open and had its tables set up in the brightly lit lobby. I sat down in the spindly metal chair and leaned against the lobby window, saying nothing, as Lyosha ordered me a chicken salad sandwich.

“Robin!” he said sharply, shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes. Lyosha was settling back into the chair he’d leaned out of when he’d reached across the table to shake me awake. An empty cup of coffee sat in front of him.

“What? What?” I yelped, “What are we doing?”

“You were sleeping,” said Lyosha crossly, standing up and putting on his jacket. “For an hour.”

I looked around the table, disoriented. There was a greasy smudge on the window where my cheek had been resting. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“You need rest. I’m taking you home.”

“No!” I said. “Wait, wait, no, let’s just stay here for a little bit longer. I promise I’ll stay awake. I don’t want to back to my apartment.”

“I’m not taking you back to your apartment,” he said, grabbing the underside of my arm near the shoulder and pulling, “I’m taking you home.”

*

The apartment looked almost the same as it had the day I left, only cleaner.

There was the table where I’d worried about Yeltsin’s referendum, and written my Sadistic Couplets article. There was the orderly kitchen, the bed in the living room, neatly made. I walked across the room without saying anything and lay down on the couch, my back to the room. At last, I could sleep. Lyosha would be there to watch me and make sure nothing bad happened. Just as I was drifting off, I felt Lyosha sit down on the edge of the couch. “Lyosha,” I mumbled, “Leave me alone. Let me sleep.”

“Be quiet, Robin.” Lyosha scratched my back between my shoulder blades. “I am letting you sleep.”

*

I woke up late in the afternoon of the next day, a few hours before sunset. Lyosha was gone, no doubt at work. I walked in the kitchen and fetched half of the sandwich Lyosha’d ordered the night before and sat down at the living room table, chewing slowly and methodically. I had no doubt that Lyosha expected me to be there when he returned, and probably assumed that I was back for good. But there was no way I could move back in with Lyosha. I’d be jobless, penniless, totally dependent on him. I had worked hard to get myself into a situation where I was jobless, penniless, and dependent on no one, and I wasn’t going to give that up. Plus, I still vividly remembered the fear I’d felt the last week of living with Lyosha, the utter certainty that one of his partners or competitors had a score they’d soon settle. I was completely sure that each of us had a bullet with our name on it waiting for us somewhere out there in the city. Whatever violence awaited me in my future, I thought, I wanted it to be my own personal fate. The last thing I wanted was to be caught up in someone else’s conflagration – this was after all why I made it a point to never leave the house. Coming out here and exposing myself like this had been a mistake, I realized as I pulled on my coat and walked to the door. I needed to get home so that I could maintain my vigilance and keep up my guard, and make sure I was still safe.

The 9 or so days between my perceived mistake – assuming that the one person who could’ve helped me get a grip on myself was a threat to be avoided – and my actual mistake are largely missing for me. I remember that I stopped bothering to lie in bed at night and instead sat on the floor in the kitchen, under the window. This was the same place I sat during the day, and as soon as there was enough light in the kitchen I would once again begin my familiar routine. Drink 3 jelly glasses of vodka with cayenne pepper to mute the anxiety for the day, then read. I remember that although I must have been afraid the fear had transmogrified somehow into something more familiar and benign. I remember that during that period I did not leave the house even one time, and that this was OK with me. I would sit right there and wait, I guess I thought, wait for events to unwind to their inexorable conclusion.

Finally, after about a week and a half, I decided to help them along. For reasons that I still don’t understand, I decided that instead of spending another night sitting alone and awake in my apartment, I would go to Club 011 and dance. I decided this at about 2 in the morning, after sitting in the dark silence for 5 hours, and there was no joy or excitement in this thought, no “Hey! I know what I’ll do!” I simply got up right then and walked out of the apartment and up to the main road to hail a taxi, and 30 minutes later I was standing in the basement club, listening to the Cure’s “Caterpillar Girl” echo off the stone walls.

I danced for two hours, sweating and exhausted, speaking to no one, until the DJ packed up and the Serbs with their machine guns announced that everyone had to go home. It was 4 am and I had no idea what to do. I was so tired from dancing and never sleeping and drinking and never eating that I could barely stand, so tired that I couldn’t figure out how to go about getting myself home. And that was when I made it. My mistake.

“Devushka,” said a very handsome man who looked to be about my age as we all shuffled towards the door, “I can get you anything you want. Ecstasy? Heroin? Cocaine?”

“OK,” I said. When I said ‘OK’ I had not meant ‘OK’ as in ‘yes, I’ll take it.’ I had meant it like ‘OK. I hear that sounds are coming out of your mouth.’

Not surprisingly, the man misinterpreted my response. “Let’s go to my apartment,” he said.

“Ahh,” I thought, “so that’s where I’m going now.”

“OK,” I said.

We got in his car and drove a short distance to, coincidentally, the Stalinist wedding-cake building where Lars (Betsy’s friend who had loaned me the gas gun) lived. We stood in the lobby not talking, me saying and thinking nothing, and waited for the elevator. When the elevator came we got in and the man, whose name was Yuri, pressed the button for the very top floor, #32.

Yuri's apartment building

Strangely, seeing Yuri do this did register with me somehow. “How does this boy live in the penthouse of a Stalin building?” I thought, as the doors slid open and Yuri unlocked a gigantic mahogany door – one of only two on the whole floor – with a filigreed brass key. When this building was finished in 1952, it was reserved for the elite of Stalin’s government. The top floor would have been preserved for the elite of the elite. The person who lived here, therefore, would have had to have been one of Stalin’s most cunning, vicious, prolifically successful monsters. Was it perhaps Beria, the head of the secret police, who was well-known for abducting young girls off the street and whose country mansion, demolished after Beria was murdered by Khrushchev in 1953, was found to harbor 19 skeletal remains in its basement? Or maybe Molotov, Stalin’s protégé and the main architect of the genocide in the Ukraine; maybe he lived here when he was in the city. Whoever once lived here, this apartment harbored some seriously malevolent juju, and I felt it, unfortunately, just as the front door clicked shut behind me. It was then that I understood in a detached, academic sort of way what I had done.

I stood near the door and looked around as Yuri locked it and pocketed the key. The bones of the apartment, the thick paneling on the walls, the ornate windows, the pink marble floor, were gorgeous, even if they were shabby and uncared for, moldering. This made the few items scattered around the huge, combined living room/kitchen space look even more sinister. A cheap, sagging couch and a coffee table sat against one wall, both surfaces littered with newspapers and take-out containers. A straight-backed wooden chair sat in the middle of the large room, looking somehow marooned. The kitchen counters were covered with utensils, mainly pots and pans. In the middle of the kitchen, demarcating this room from the living room, was a large island that had a huge stove set into it. On this stove sat a variety of giant pots and kettles, which were empty but dirty, crusted with a strange greenish-gray film. A very strong chemical odor pervaded the apartment. It
stung my eyes and made me feel woozy. I spied one of the doors to the balcony at the far end of the living room. “I’m going outside,” I said.

Yuri and I stood on the balcony looking at the river many stories below. Even though I knew this was the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life and that the probability that it would end well was very, very slim, I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t really feel anything at all, as a matter of fact. I was tired in a way that exceeded any kind of tiredness I’d ever experienced, or ever would experience again. I did not think about what was going to happen because I could not. My brain had stopped working that way. Only the things that were right in front of me right at any given moment registered with me, and even then only very, very slowly. And so when Yuri grabbed me and bent me backwards over the railing, suddenly inverting the river and the intermittent lights on the ground, all I thought was “Oh. Upside down.”

Yuri had me in some kind of grip that was an odd mixture of ardor and threat. One arm was tight around my waist and the other was wrapped around my arms right below the shoulders, pinning them to my body. My feet were lifted off the ground and the waist-high railing was pressing into the middle of my back, two inches above my waist. I was not exactly dangling over the railing, merely balanced on it in an uneasy pivot. An inch or two either way would decide the outcome.

Yuri was attempting to either murder me or clumsily smooch me, it was unclear which. He was sort of kissing my neck and collarbone as my head lolled back and the wind roaring around the building whipped my hair in disorderly circles. With my head hanging limply like this, the taillights of the few cars on the road at this hour looked like tiny red satellites; planes full of people on their way somewhere else. An unknown amount of time passed like this, blank space that for me had the same amount of drama and gravitas that time spent waiting for an elevator has. After a while, I began to feel cold. “Let’s go inside,” I suggested.

Yuri let go of me and followed close behind me as we went back inside. I walked immediately over to the couch and lay down on top of the newspapers there, curled with my back to the room. Yuri grabbed my left shoulder and pulled, prying me onto my back. He climbed on top of me and pinned my arms down with his knees. He had no particular kind of look on his face. Perhaps he was as tired as I was, and was just going through the motions. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” I told him mildly. “I’m just going to sleep.” And then, that’s what I did. I closed my eyes and went to sleep. After a minute, I felt the pressure lift from my arms and I rolled over into my original position, with my back to the room.

I woke up more than 24 hours later, still on the couch. I know it was 24 hours later because we had left the club at about 4:30, and Yuri’s face as he pinned me to the couch had been painted with the first gray streaks of dawn coming in through the room’s big, curtainless windows. Now bright, early-morning sunlight streamed in through the windows and, as I got off the couch and tiptoed around the empty apartment, I saw that a clock on the kitchen counter said 7:45.

Also, I could tell by the way I felt that I’d had not just 2 hours but a very considerable amount of sleep. For one thing, I was ravenously, unbearably hungry, the first time in two months I’d had any kind of bodily sensation besides fear. For another, I was terrified. But not in an inchoate, amorphous, all-encompassing kind of way. No, this time I was terrified in a very concrete, very lucid, very “holy shit what am I doing locked in a drug dealer’s apartment” kind of way. Because I knew, as I stood in the middle of the room and stared at it; I KNEW that the one door out of the apartment would be locked. The only thing that had saved me two nights before, when I’d come here, had been Yuri’s own fatigue and my complete and total passivity and disconnection from reality.

But soon, my god, very soon, things would be different. I was awake now and it was early in the morning, the start of a brand-new day. I’d have the sense and the energy to put up an entertaining and possibly challenging but ultimately futile fight when Yuri and the other men who worked here – because I was absolutely sure now that this was not a home, but a lab – returned any minute now.

I turned abruptly from the door and walked silently and hurriedly through the rooms of the apartment, hoping to find something, anything, I could use as a weapon. But the rooms were, with one exception, completely and utterly empty. Unused. One of them had a small, unmade cot in it, presumably where whoever was on duty rested in between cooking up batches of “ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, or anything you want.”

Shit, SHIT, I thought, what am I going to do? I paced from room to room, growing increasingly more frantic as the morning grew longer. Finally, I decided that I would go to the front door and rip it out of the wall. I would yank the knob out of the wood and slither through the hole it left. I would undo the screws in the hinges with my fingernails. I would douse the door with the chemical residue in the kettles in the kitchen and it would dissolve into mist. Whatever; I was going to get out of that apartment somehow and right now. Filled with the kind of desperate energy that allows mothers to lift minivans off of their toddlers, I raced to the door, grabbed the handle, and yanked as hard as I could.

The heavy door, which was not locked, swung back with such force that it nearly dislocated my shoulder. I stood in the open doorway, chagrined and amazed. Then I bolted out of the apartment and into the hallway and ran until I found the door to the stairs. I had never been so profoundly grateful to be alive, so incredibly conscious of the second chance I had for some reason been given. I ran down the empty morning streets – it was Sunday, probably around 8:30, and few people were out – and to the metro two stops from Yuri’s building. Paid my fare and ran through the lobby and down the short marble staircase to the train platform. I was ecstatic to see as I descended the stairs an actual light at the faraway end of the tunnel. The train would be here soon, and I would be on it and out of this nightmare.

There was one other person on the platform, a grizzled man of indeterminate age clutching a greasy paper bag. He was making his way towards where I stood, looking directly at me, swaying and staggering but clearly bent on delivering some kind of message to me. I stared back at him as the ground beneath our feet began to rumble with the approach of the oncoming train, and then, still looking me full in the face, the man did a kind of unsteady pirouette on one leg and fell off the platform on to the tracks.

There was no doubt whatsoever about what I would do as I looked down at the man where he lay among the newspapers that were starting to stir as the pressure in the tunnel changed as the train neared, as he rocked back and forth slightly with the effort of trying to get up, looking back at me with no expression. I turned on my heel and ran as fast as I have ever run, up the stairs and out of the station and into the bright, empty morning.

*

Days later, things had changed. I still was not sleeping very much and was anxious most of the time. But I had started eating and stopped drinking, and was hallucinating a little less floridly. I had come home and cleaned up the house, spending a few days sitting on the floor of my living room listening to Thelonious Monk and putting the hundreds of pages I’d torn from my notebook back in order. I had started to write again, hesitantly, writing not essays or ideas but lists of the people I might turn to for help in finding employment. I was even leaving the house every day, walking a short ways through the woods to a store that sold bread, soap, canned black olives, and peacock feathers. I did not want to speak to anyone I didn’t know or do anything beyond the absolute basics, but I could see there was a possibility that I might somehow make it.

Then, one day, there was a man on the path I took through the woods to buy my bread. He was a dead man, actually, wearing a light blue jogging suit and the ruined expression of someone who has been shot at close range in the face. He lay there slightly off the path, partially obscured by leaves, and I passed him twice a day on the way to and from the bread store. Others walked on this path, too, and I hoped and expected that one of these people would do something about this, that one day when I passed by he would be gone. But there he was, day after day, a mafia hit or random robbery victim that had been dumped in our quiet suburb.

Finally on the fifth day I could stand it no longer. This man was probably a bad man. He was probably a criminal. But he probably had good people in his life who cared about him, and who were beside themselves right now with fear and sorrow. I decided to do something about the situation, and called the Russian equivalent of 911. The phone rang and rang, and finally a woman answered. “What,” she said gruffly.

“Hello,” I said, “I need to report a shooting in my neighborhood.”

Click. 911, the number you call when your house is on fire, when you’ve accidentally ingested poison, the one tenuous thread between you and your impending mortality, had hung up on me. I called right back.

“Hello,” I said to a different gruff woman, “Someone has been shot on my street.”

Click. The same response.
I carefully put the receiver back in its cradle, and made my decision.

“Fuck this,” I thought, “I’m going home.”

38. The Great Terror

2010-01-13T10:54:00.001-08:00

The citizens of Moscow lay in their beds, waiting, as the dark minutes crept by. They had long since stopped sleeping – almost nobody in the city really slept anymore – but even so, husbands lay beside wives feigning slumber; sisters and brothers measured their breaths and stilled their bodies. In a city like this any display of distress, even to those closest to you, was a reason for suspicion, an admission of guilt. The people who showed weakness were the ones sacrificed first, the ones pushed out by the others so the others could live. Because every night without fail, someone else would be taken. They all heard the hum of the engine, the slamming of the door, the footsteps on the stairs, but still they pretended. We have done nothing and are not afraid, they told the hand that nightly plucked their neighbors from their beds like chocolates from a box. We are innocent, sleeping, invisible. Pass us by.

Some of the people in the city, usually higher-ups in the government who knew how capriciously arbitrary this hand in fact was, stopped pretending, and this gave them a measure of comfort. One of these men, a general in the Army, packed a small suitcase so he’d be ready when they came for him, then sat on his balcony for the three days that it took them to arrive, drinking wine and enjoying the weather. Another man, a minister of an important department, kept his loaded pistol next to his bed. He understood the inexorableness of what was happening, the futility of arguing. He understood that in times like these, pulling the trigger yourself was the only freedom you had.

The bureaucrats who were being consumed by the system they had helped create were the smart ones. They knew that the difference between life and death for thousands of people was, literally, the position of their name on a page in a phone book. The mayors of towns in every nook and cranny of the empire, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, had been given a monthly quota to fill. The directive would arrive on the first of each month, signed by Stalin himself. 130,000 cancers to be excised from the body of the city this time, 150,000 the next. The local Soviets hoped that by offering others up to the ravenous state, they themselves would be spared. The idea was not just to meet, but to exceed, the numbers. The blood on their hands was the badge of their loyalty.

In the early years of the Terror, there were rules. Insane, mad rules, but rules nonetheless. Everyone knew that Igor disappeared because he was the first to stop clapping after the speech by the local party boss. So, they reminded themselves, keep clapping. Be the loudest singer, the most passionate shouter, the quickest cap-doffer, and perhaps it will not be your turn tonight. Everyone knew that it was Yelena’s nice apartment and the covetousness of her neighbors that sealed her fate. So, they said, don’t have anything that anyone else might want. But now, as Stalin’s paranoia increased and his appetite grew and grew, there was finally no pretense of cause and effect. You could be, and would be, arrested for anything. For nothing. The leaders of the towns and cities would close their eyes and pick names at random out of the telephone directory. The Ivanovs, at 152 Sandy Lane. The whole family, gone.

If the people had known how truly arbitrary Stalin’s Terror was, how very little they had to lose, would things have been different? Surely the people, realizing that for all practical purposes they were already dead, would have risen up in protest? But history has shown us again and again that it is impossible for most people to understand this, to believe that their entire existence is as meaningful and ephemeral as dew on grass. It must be something we – or someone else -- has done, they say, when faced with calamity. It was the Jews poisoning the wells, the congregation not praying fervently enough, the debauchery of the city, my own lack of devotion to the cause. We’ll fix it, they thought, we’ll do this or not do that, and you’ll see. And this is the essence of the Terror, finally; this faulty belief of yours that makes you human and refuses you any solace or rest. The belief that somehow, you control what happens to you.

I lay in my own bed in the suburbs of Moscow in the middle of another sleepless night, learning this lesson. There was no single event that occurred that revealed this truth to me and set me down the dark and terrible path I was now traveling. Ostensibly, the escalating violence in the city was what started it. There was no law in this town at all, no structure to protect us as we went about our daily lives, no explanation for anything that happened. The people in the hotel restaurant in Petersburg who died when men burst in and sprayed the room with gunfire, my acquaintance who was shot in the face during a robbery, my schoolmate – someone I had sat next to and practiced dialog drills with – found bound to a chair in an apartment in Alma-Aty, his throat slit and passport missing. Like everybody, I struggled to find the meaning behind these events, the reason for them. I could not cope with the idea that at any moment, for no reason at all, my number might come up. If I accepted this truth, I feared that like the bureaucrats in Stalin’s time I’d choose to rush headlong towards my fate instead of waiting passively for it to befall me. And so instead, like the deluded victims of Stalin’s terror, like anyone living in a world that has gone crazy, I searched for an answer. The one I came up with only made me feel worse.

I would walk home each day with my loaf of bread or carton of milk and would imagine – I was just imagining it, right? – the stares of my neighbors. If they were looking at me just a little too closely, and I was all of the sudden certain that they were, it could only be for one reason. I was the only American, the only foreigner, in this neighborhood. Everybody else in the buildings that lined my small street was a normal, working-class Russian. I remembered what had happened to me, the only American in my dorm, when word got out that I lived there. I remembered what I learned in school about Stalin’s Terror: how the neighbors would turn on the better-off members of the community out of envy and desperation. And I remembered what happens in any society to outsiders when that society starts to crumble.

Most of the people in my neighborhood were unemployed, and like everyone in the country, they were desperately poor. They hung around in the street all day and into the evening, smoking and talking, watching me as I came and went. They noticed that each day I brought home a little bread or a few eggs – not much, but still something. I could hear their voices right outside my first-floor living room window as they stood on the curb, passing the time. What were they talking about, I wondered as I lay in my bed, what ideas were they having? I was most afraid of Marat, the teenaged son of my landlady. He lived in the building next to me and never once exhibited any kind of criminal behavior or bad intent. But in my mind, as the days went by and I became more and more afraid, he was the leader of a gang of teenagers that would make its move soon, any day now. They wouldn’t do it out of any innate evilness, I knew. They’d do it because, in times like these, it was them or me.

I cursed myself for not taking a gun when I left Lyosha, and for not listening when that man warned me to find an apartment with a steel door. I was completely alone and unprotected here, with no way to defend myself. Absolutely anything could happen, and one of these nights, I was sure, it would. I stopped sleeping at night and lay in the bed fully clothed, clutching a wrench I had purchased at the emigrant market. I had tried for a few nights to sleep under the bed, thinking that when they broke in they would not be able to find me, but then realized that of course they’d look under the bed. They’d surround the bed and peek under it and there I’d be, trapped. It was better to be able to move quickly, I decided. If they broke in through the bedroom window, I’d run to the kitchen window and leap to the street. If they broke in the front door, I’d dive out the bedroom window and disappear into the woods behind my building. The critical thing was to be alert, to always be listening, so I’d be ready when the time came.

I was losing my mind; really, honestly, losing my mind. I knew this, but there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it. Every time I would make an effort to sit myself down and take stock of the situation, to get a grip on reality, I would run up against the fact that the reality was terrifying and dangerous. I was not making up the mafia hits and the shoot-outs on the street, the murders and attempted murders of the people I knew, the skyrocketing crimes against foreigners as the natives got more and more desperate. And OK, maybe I was imagining the stares of my neighbors and the plans of Marat. But then again, maybe I wasn’t.

My efforts to cope with the crippling anxiety I felt at all times only made things worse. I stopped leaving the house most days, stopped visiting the people I knew who were still in Moscow, because I wanted to limit my exposure to the outside world and its potential for violence. This resulted in a terrible isolation that robbed me of any alternate perspective I might have gotten from others. I was alone with my thoughts and my fears, and they grew louder and louder each day until they drowned out everything else. I knew better than to try to dispel them, but I hoped to at least dampen them with the only two activities I engaged in those days.

The first was drinking. I would get out of bed in the morning, at first light, and would lie down on the couch with a jelly glass full of vodka, exhausted and relieved and amazed at having survived another night. I did not want to think about what drinking vodka at 5am might actually mean about me, though, so I would stir in a spoonful of cayenne pepper. Someone – Galina Petrovna? Nadejda Alexandrovna? – had once recommended treating a cold with this concoction. And so, I told myself as the liquid seared my throat, this is not vodka, this is medicine. I need this, I thought, as I poured and measured my third glass of the morning. I am not well.

The second was reading. I no longer wrote anything at all; in fact, several days earlier, in a fit of some kind of mania, I had ripped all the pages out of my spiral notebooks and had stood on the couch in the living room and thrown them all up in the air. They rained down around me, hundreds and hundreds of pages covered with all the words that made up my life in Moscow, and blanketed the entire living room in a disorderly paper blizzard. That had been days ago, and the papers still lay there, crinkling as I walked on them. I also, for the first and only time in my life, no longer listened to music. I’d stopped abruptly one day a week or so ago. I’d been sitting at my table drinking vodka and listening to “This Old Porch,” by Lyle Lovett. “This old porch is just a long time of waiting and forgetting,” sang Lyle, “and remembering the coming back, and not crying about the leaving.” I got up and switched off the tape. It was too dangerous to listen to this music. I needed to disappear, I told myself, to be unheard and invisible. That was the only way to stay safe.

The best way to disappear, I found, even better than drinking, was by reading. I was so frightened by this point that I had to force myself to leave the house for food and vodka, but reading was different. Reading was the only thing that gave me any comfort at all; I could completely and utterly vanish for as long as the book lasted. Reading became so critical to me that, in spite of my fear, I would scurry out once a week to the English-language bookstore over by Red Square and buy as many books as I could hide in the waistband of my pants. I had always been a voracious reader, but not a particularly weighty one. But now, teetering on the cusp of some fairly serious mental illness, I dove in as deep as I could. I read the entire works of Kafka and Orwell, of Kundera and Hegel, of Kant and Barthes and Rand. I read everything Dostoyevsky wrote, and then re-read The Idiot one more time for good measure. I read all of Bulgakov, the entire USA cycle by John Dos Pasos; The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, and my old friend Gogol. So bad off was I that I even read Ulysses, by James Joyce. I skipped all the Twain and the Dickens and the Austin and the Hemmingway. A bunch of lightweights they were, I decided. I did not want to read anything that made me feel good or offered me any kind of distraction or hope. I wanted to read people who created maps of the landscape I was now inhabiting, whose characters were damned simply because they were alive.

I would sit in the kitchen next to the open oven door and read a book in one day. It was the only thing I had to do to fill up the time. The amount I was reading was exhausting me mentally, and it was also exhausting the few funds I had left now that I was no longer working. I could see where this was going – the math was pretty simple – and I knew that eventually if I did not stop I would run completely out of money. Then I would not only be bookless, but homeless. But I did not care. I could not stop. I thought vaguely every once in a while about looking for another job. Then I would picture myself twitching in a chair in front of the editor of the Moscow Times and would abandon the thought. Getting the job at the Guardian had been like being struck by benevolent lightening. The odds that something like this would happen again were approximately zero. I still had no skills and no resume, and now, to make matters worse, I was crazy. The despair and fear I was experiencing over what I was doing drove me to do even more of it to try to stop thinking about it, and dug me deeper and deeper into my hole.

My biggest problem, though, the reason I believe that I was actually, certifiably crazy – even more than the alcohol, even more than the Ayn Rand -- was my complete lack of sleep. I never, ever slept. Literally. Perhaps every three days I would drift off in the late morning for 45 minutes or so, but I quickly learned that the price for this lack of attention was too high to pay. I would start awake from my murky sleep and would leap to my feet, terrified. They were here! They had been waiting for me to let my guard down and now they were here! I would run to the bedroom and look everywhere, under the bed, in the small refrigerator where I kept my clothes, behind the curtains covering the windows. I’d go from room to room doing the same thing, sure that they had gotten in, sure that while I was checking behind the stove in the kitchen they had moved to the shower in the bathroom. It was better to remain awake, I resolved. That way I’d be aware of everything that was going on around me at every moment, and would never, ever be surprised.

After about 4 days of vodka-fueled insomnia, I began to hallucinate. Bright lights flashed in the corners of my eyes, dark blobs spidered their way across my vision. That was it, I decided, the nail in the coffin. Somewhere I recognized that I was now so ill, and so compromised, that the “true” nature of reality no longer mattered. Even if I had wanted to, I could no longer ascertain what was real and what wasn’t, what might hurt me and what might not. Even if I had wanted to call for help, I no longer knew how. The days of sitting myself down and giving myself a stiff talking to were long gone, and no longer mattered. What mattered right now was this very minute, this very page, this very breath. I wrapped myself up in my terror, and waited for morning.

37. Faith No More

2010-01-01T06:03:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-27T09:45:00.001-08:00

Vic Chesnutt.

36. Workers of the Guardian, Unite!

2009-12-23T08:17:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-20T05:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

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.

31. Moscow Remont

2009-11-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

There are a variety of methods cities use to tell people that something is broken and thus no longer usable. Out of service. Not working. Needs fixin'. Shit out of luck. But in Moscow, apparently, there was only one way: "remont." And as the collapse of the government, industry, economy, and society deepened, that terse little word could be found on everything. A million doors, lifts, metro cars, pay telephones, streetlights, sidewalks; all of them bore signs alerting residents that the things around them that they once took for granted could no longer be counted on. As winter turned slowly to spring and the melting snow revealed the extent of the city's problems, I saw that sign everywhere. It got to where I expected Yeltsin to be sporting a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word when he appeared on television, and I was certain that if I opened my atlas I'd see it stamped in crude black letters across the whole sorry country. Remont was so ubiquitous that I started to think of it as kind of a civic motto. In the same way we in Florida were used to seeing "The Sunshine State" on license plates and souvenirs, I anticipated that soon some kind of tourism campaign would be launched to capitalize on the one thing my adopted city was becoming famous for. "Moscow: It's Broken."

This sign resonated with me not just because it was a constant visual reminder of the city's decay. That was dispiriting, certainly, but more than that, the sign was emblematic of Russians and their culture in a way that I sympathized with, but that worried me deeply. Because this sign, far from being an innocuous little suggestion to step carefully or try another telephone, was an Orwellian denial of reality, a refusal to call the devil by its name, a tiny Potemkin village. If remont had meant "out of order," well, it wouldn't have caused me such existential angst every time I saw it. But it didn't. Remont meant "repair." As in "under (or in the process of) repair."

It wasn't enough just to label something broken in this once proud capital, oh no. The bureaucracy of the state, as usual, had to go around making promises it was never going to keep. "That gas main? Oh, yeah, we're working on it!" "That listing water tower? No problem! Repairs are occurring as we speak!" Liar, liar, pants on fire. That gaping pothole you are claiming is "in the process of repair" has been there so long that the bones of tiny dinosaurs litter the bottom of it. And look, your civic works committee is so non-existent that the remont signs themselves are broken! It was immediately obvious that no repairs of any kind were occurring, and that none would ever, ever, be forthcoming. Repair? By whom? With what? What for?

Eventually, this stupid, lying sign -- this totem that embodied the lazy, entropic sorriness at the heart of the whole world's problems -- irritated me so much that I realized I'd have to change the way I looked at it or else be in a perennial snit. There was no escaping the word. Absolutely everything was "under repair." And so I searched for other interpretations. Maybe instead of a bald-faced lie, this sign was actually an example of optimism and hope. Maybe the Russians that hung the sign on things did so as a kind of invocation. In this case, the word was not a description, no. It was an incantation, an imperative. A spell. "REPAIR!" the sign would command whatever item it was attached to. "Elevator, heal thyself!"

Apparently, I was not the only one who was bothered by the situation. The other Americans at the Moscow Guardian were tired of seeing the listing, fading signs attached to nearly every immobile object in the city. And so, with typical American can-do naivete, they resolved to fix things themselves. At our next weekly staff meeting Jason announced the birth of a new section of the magazine. "Moscow Remont" would be our effort to pitch in and assist the city we both loved and hated. Each week, Stu and Brad would locate something under remont, and would, under cover of darkness, remont it themselves. They'd change the lightbulbs in the underground subway crossing, unstick the door to the public library, patch up the sidewalk in front of the Kremlin. They'd publish before and after pictures of their work, and exact directions to it, so that homesick expats could go view the repairs and pretend, just for a moment, that they lived in a city that was not falling totally and utterly apart.

This sounded like a fine idea to me, and I was moved by the fact that, under all the snark, Jason had hopes that the column would inspire others to take the care of the place they called home into their own hands. But deep down, I knew it would be fruitless. Although I never said this to Jason or to any of the other staffers, I knew that it would never work.

When I was little, my mother was a speech pathologist and took me with her to a variety of residences where low-income children needed her help. I paid close attention to these places and noticed that, although all the people living there were poor, that was often the only thing they had in common. Some of the places were grim and sour, and smelled like stale smoke and old grease. But then others had magnolia flowers in an empty coffee can on the wobbly table. The sagging couch would be covered with a stained but colorful chenille bedspread. And most importantly, the room would be clean. The families residing in these places lived lives made unstable and chaotic by constant want, by never having enough to get by, but their efforts to bring order and beauty to their surroundings revealed a basic decency, a fundamental sanity. I grew up believing that your outsides -- the objects you surround yourself with, the environment you create for yourself -- reflect your insides. The fact that individual people, or communities of people, find certain aspects of their environment acceptable or unbearable reveals a lot about those people, and about that society.

For instance, my I once took my German friend Cory on a trip to the North Georgia mountains. I pointed out the window to the rhododendrons and the waterfalls, but all she saw were the hulks of abandoned cars rusting in the forest, the McDonald's bags fluttering in the bushes. "How can you people live like this?" she exclaimed, appalled. When I think about what Cory saw as a visitor to my country, and when I look around at the strip malls and McMansions that litter the landscape, I understand that Americans value mobility -- the freedom to pick up and move at a moment's notice -- and commerce, and convenience. When I see houses surrounded by oceans of lawns and curtained windows lit with the blue glow of televisions, I understand that we value our privacy, and our leisure. And sure, maybe some enterprising Russians might come to our country and decide to knock down Zaxby's Chicken and replace it with a library, or to tear up our front lawns and replace them with vegetable gardens. But to really meaningfully transform our country's exterior landscape, they'd have to first redecorate our interiors, to change the values that define us as Americans. And that is a tall order.

This is why, as Stu and Brad paid a visit to the burned-out lightbulb vendor, I knew that their idealistic Moscow Remont plan was destined to fail. The darkened vestibules and broken windows and jagged edges that were everywhere in the city were the outter expressions of what was (to this American observer, at least) a chaotic, illogical, and thoroughly incomprehensible interior environment.

Take, for instance, the lines in the grocery store. To buy something in Russia one had to stand in not one, but three, lines. First, you would stand in the line to view the products. You'd wait for as long as it took -- usually an hour -- to see what was on sale. You'd eventually make your way to the front and, if you were lucky, find something you wanted or needed. You'd tell the woman behind the counter that you wanted those three eggs, right there. She'd hand you a ticket that meant you had visited her station. The ticket would not say what you wanted on it (e.g., three eggs), it would simply say "dairy counter" or "produce." You'd take the ticket and go stand in the second line, the line to pay. This line was of course as long as the first, and if you were a foreigner with a limited grasp of the language you'd spend your second hour of line standing repeating "three eggs, three eggs" to yourself, because god forbid you reached the cashier and forgot how to say what you were paying for. If that ever happened, it was back to the end of line number one for you. The cashier would expertly tally your total on an abacus (really, an abacus), would divest you of your first ticket, and would hand you another one proving you'd paid. Thus would begin your last stand, in the line to hand the ticket to the lady you'd originally spoken with in line number one. You'd stand in that final line and when you got to the front, you'd hand the lady the ticket and she'd hand you your purchase.

I'm sure by now you have several quite reasonable questions about this whole process, but since space is limited I'll only address a few. What if, by the time you reached the head of the third line, all the eggs had been purchased by the hoards of people in front of you? What if you timed your visit badly and the woman in the third line decided to take her state-mandated "pererive" (break) while you were waiting? What if you died of old age while standing there? Well, tough. This is NOT a service-oriented culture, American line-stander. No eggs for you!

Or, consider the cookie vendor. I'd braved lines number 1 and 2, and had bought a half-kilo of ginger snaps. When I got to the front of line number 3, I stood and watched as the conscientious woman behind the counter weighed out my purchase. The old-fashioned scale told us that I currently had .48th of a kilo, and the worker was intent on giving me what I'd paid for. She picked up a ginger snap and broke it in half. Put one half on on the scale, and threw the other half away. When the half she'd put on the scale tipped the weight over to .51, she removed the half-cookie and threw it away, too. She picked up another cookie and broke it in half. Threw one half away, and put the other half on the scale. Point 49. No good. Into the trash with the cookie half. There were so many things, as she threw the ninth cookie away and the line stretched out endlessly, patiently, behind me, that I longed to say to this woman. But I knew that even if I could have figured out how to say "break that half a cookie in half and see what happens," it would have been pointless. This is not a culture that values efficiency, or an individual's time, or the conservation of ginger snaps. In the end, body vibrating with impatience and eyes brimming with tears, I begged the lady, please, please, it's all right. Just give me my cookies. Please. But it was not to be. I had paid for .50, and .50 I would get.

And then there was the flaming Penguin. Julia, the Guardian's translator, and I were walking on a downtown boulevard on our way to be stung by bees (I'll explain later) when we passed a large, ornate building, the top two floors of which were engulfed in flames. The residents on the lower floors stood on their balconies frantically hurling their possessions over the railings to the busy street below, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered. Julia and I stopped across the street and watched.

"Another one," said Julia, sadly. "What a shame."

"What are you talking about?" I asked her. Was this something that happened on a regular basis? Julia explained that it was common, for desirable locations like this one, for the mafia to decide to buy and renovate the building as an investment. They'd approach the residents of the apartments in the building and make an offer. The residents would decline, aware that inflation and a housing shortage would make it difficult for them to secure other lodging. The mafia would nod and go away, and then a week or so later would return and set the top floors of the building on fire, forcing the residents to flee. "Why the top floors?" I asked Julia.

"Well, they don't want to burn the whole building down," said Julia. "They simply want the residents to leave. They're going to refurbish the building anyway, and sell the apartments to foreigners. It's enough to just burn the top floors."

"OK, but, where's the fire department?" I asked.

Julia laughed. "This is a mafia fire, Robin," she said, looking at me pityingly. "There will be no fire department." Then, suddenly, Julia brightened. "Oh, look!" she said, grabbing my hand and pulling on it, "A Penguin!" Julia was pointing across the street at the burning building, which had on its ground floor a "Penguin," a Western-owned ice-cream chain that was very popular in Moscow. Indeed, a steady stream of customers entered and exited the store, licking at cones of green pistachio as blankets and clothing rained down on them from above.

As Julia tugged on my arm, I tried to reason with her. "Julia," I said, digging in my heels, "I'm not going in there! That building's on fire!"

"Yes!" called Julia over her shoulder as she abandoned me on the sidewalk and flitted across the street, "But the Penguin's still open!"

Finally, there's the gum. As the ruble continued to plummet and hard currency became more and more valuable, dollar stores (establishments that only allowed people to pay with Western money), began to give change for purchases not in money, but in chewing gum. I remember the first time this happened. I was buying my Old El Paso taco kit at the Irish House Bar and Supermarket, and instead of the 63 cents in change I was owed, the cashier handed me several sticks of Wriggley's spearmint gum.

"What's this?" I asked her, confused.

"No more change in money," she said. "Exact change only, or you get gum."

It seems that these dollar stores had wisely decided to hoard every bit of hard currency they collected, and thus had instituted the "gum only" policy. This made a certain amount of sense, if you thought about it. For practical, survival-oriented reasons, these businesses weren't going to relinquish their hard currency, but they still had to give their customers change. There was no way they could give change in rubles, though. With one dollar now fetching 5000 rubles, the building was not large enough to store the amount of rubles they'd need to give out change to a day's worth of purchasers. But gum...Gum was easy to carry, and tasty, and could be traded for other things. And unlike rubles, gum was popular, and could be used to fix things.

When gum first started being used as change, the system was haphazard. You'd pay for something and receive "some gum" as change. Very quickly, however, gum assumed the weight and importance that paper once had. Just like we'd all once agreed that this piece of paper would symbolize this amount of wealth, now we all agreed that this amount of Juicy Fruit would represent this much buying power. It was not uncommon to be standing in line and hear the person in front you say, "Hey! I gave you a five. I want nine pieces of gum!" In a place where most money was worthless, where mint-green and taffy-pink rubles came to not just resemble but actually behave like play money, substituting candy for currency was utterly fitting. As for myself, I readily adapted, frequenting the Shamrock store on the Ring Road because they gave out their change in grape Hubba Bubble, my favorite.

So you see why, as I watched Stu and Brad prepare for their first guerrilla remont, all I could do was shake my head. Moscow was broken, all right, but in ways that no broom, or hammer, or elbow grease could ever fix.

brief hiatus

2009-11-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

(Above, Jim and I sing at a gallery opening in The Hague. This pic was swiped without permission from Leah Pritchard's Flicker stream . You should go there immediately and look at all her photos, because, boy, can she take a picture.)

*****

Well, I'm back from Crossing Border, where I sang backup for Jim White, my Southern Gothic Husband^TM. Sorry about knocking down the fourth wall, here, but I figure Potemkin will keep for one more day.

I really want to thank our hosts, Louis and his son Michele, for having us and for being so kind to us. I've been to many festivals, and I think this one is the best organized, with the nicest facilities, and the best acts of any I've ever attended. If anyone is planning a vacation, why not consider Crossing Border in 2010? There's something for everyone -- music (this year featured Yo La Tengo, The Low Anthem, Natalie Merchant, Steve Earle, Gomez, Stephen Malkimus, God Help the Girl, Grizzly Bear, Tegan & Sara, the Bony King of Nowhere, and about 50,000 more), literature (Denis Johnson, Jay McInerney, Nick Kent, the very hilarious James Kelman (besides Cindy, Denis Johnson's wife, my favorite person there -- check out his gritty and resonant novels), and a whole slew of visual artists that this sentence is already too long to include. The best thing is that everyone is playing all together in one place, in small rooms, so you have a great opportunity to interact with the artists.

Inspired by all the smart people around me, I did my own creative work at Camp Rockstar, outlining the remaining chapters of Potemkin and resolving to finish the story by the end of December, one year after I started. I will have finally written my first book, something I was never sure I could do, and even if it gathers dust in my closet for the rest of my life I will feel like I've achieved something important. Thank you, readers and well-wishers, for your attention and encouragement. This journey would have been far too scary to make on my own.

Now, back to work. Next chapter: Moscow Remont.

*****

Go here http://audio.omroep.nl/radio6/vpro/deavonden/20091123-19.mp3 and forward to 30.00 to hear us sing a couple of songs on Dutch radio. This is the first time I ever sang on the radio, and I was nervous, but it turned out OK.

30. This Is Not My Beautiful House

2009-11-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

It took me a week to find my next apartment. I’d been all over town looking at every kind of residence, from single rooms in co-ops to palatial refurbs with stainless steel appliances. The problems I found were similar to those encountered by urban dwellers everywhere. The affordable, bigger places were all in grim boxes a mile from the outer metro stops. These buildings hulked together in, to use Hedrick Smith’s excellent description, “mind-numbing monotony.” I feared that even completely sober I would not be able to pick out my building from the wasteland of gray concrete blocks, and tried to imagine walking to my lobby door across the plank that one realtor had brought with him so that we could traverse the polluted, shin-high mud in the courtyard. The in-town apartments, though extremely reasonable by today’s standards, were still more than I could afford on my own. One such place I visited, over by the Byeloruski train station, was a cute, plant-and-light-filled apartment on the third floor of an older building. The asking price was $350 a month, but I was certain I could negotiate the man down to $250, the upper limit of what I could pay. Surprisingly, the man would not budge. “No,” he said, walking over to the front door and kicking it gently with his boot, “You are paying for the steel door. Believe me, you want a steel door.”

Steel door or not, I couldn’t swing the rent, and so I kept on. Finally, I found it. It was a two-bedroom apartment, a rarity in the city as far as I knew, in a leafy section of town only 3 metro stops from the ring road. Even better, it was within walking distance of where I worked. It was owned, somehow, by a family that lived in the building next door, a mother, father, and teenaged son. They were asking $200 for this giant, clean, cheerful apartment, so I handed the grateful mother the first month’s rent right there on the spot and asked how soon I could move in.

The next morning, after Lyosha left for work, I packed my things in my big nylon suitcase, leaving behind everything Lyosha and I had acquired together in our 9 weeks of knowing each other, and sat down to write the letter. I had broken up with boyfriends in some mighty weaselly ways before (one time hiding behind a potted plant at the airport while my boyfriend, a nice man who didn’t deserve such treatment, paced fruitlessly around the baggage carousel), but never through a letter. I had no idea what to write to Lyosha. On the one hand, I didn’t want to hurt him. In spite of our problems and the violent environment we lived in, I had watched him in many different situations and knew that he was a good and honorable person. And though he was maybe not the world’s best boyfriend, I owed him a debt for helping me get oriented in this new city, for encouraging me to write, and for caring about me when no one else in the city even knew I was alive. But then on the other, I did not want him to become enraged by the fact that I had the gall to leave him and come after me. I was almost certain that he wouldn’t – he seemed pretty busy and our affair had always been more of a friendly partnership than a murder ballad waiting to happen. But all the same, I had to be careful. I owed Lyosha some kind of explanation, and some kind of goodbye. But what kind?

“Dear Lyosha, it’s not you, it’s me. I just have this thing about being shot. I hope we can still be friends.” No, no, no. “Dear Lyosha, I will always cherish our times together, except for the ones where you got beaten by the police and thrown in jail and left me with your psycho parents on a board for 3 weeks and then shot somebody.” Hmmm, this was going to be tough.

In the end, I wrote a friendly letter that tried not to assign responsibility to anyone or say anything specific about why I left. I said that it was time for me to move on, that things had changed between us, and that I thought we’d both be happier apart. I thanked him for all his help, told him I’d miss him and always think fondly of him, and then got the hell out of there.

*
Two hours later, I was unpacking in my new apartment. As a present to myself after landing the job at the Guardian I had purchased a small radio/cassette player, and I set it up in the living room and popped in a tape given to me by the person who, 4 years and several lifetimes later, I would marry. Otis Redding sang about life down in the valley and I hummed along and put my t-shirts in the tiny, ‘50’s-era refrigerator that served as a wardrobe. I had purchased a bouquet of wildflowers from the vendors outside of the Sokol metro, my stop, and was finishing up arranging them in a glass on the windowsill of the sunny kitchen when there was a knock on the front door. I cautiously opened it to find Nina, my landlady, standing there clutching what appeared to be about a 25-pound bag of table salt. “Good day, Robin,” she said, shifting the unwieldy brown bag towards me, “I have brought you a welcome gift.”

I immediately became nervous. There is in Russia an old saying that goes something like “you never really know someone until you’ve eaten a kilo of salt with him.” I’d always assumed this meant, “until you’ve spent a lot of time with him.” But maybe I’d been mistaken. Maybe in Russia they took this literally, and Nina now expected me to sit down at the table with her with the bag she’d brought over and two spoons. No matter how quickly Nina wanted to cement our friendship, though, I was not about to eat 12 pounds of salt in one sitting. I searched for the words for “I’ve got high blood pressure” while Nina stood in the doorway, waiting for me to say something. Suddenly I also recalled that a traditional way of welcoming someone in Russia was to bring them a gift of bread and salt. Perhaps Nina was out of bread and had decided to compensate with an extra-large portion of salt.

“Thank you, Nina,” I grunted as I plopped the heavy bag in the hallway behind me. “I can always use salt.”

“Erm, Robin,” she said, shy all of the sudden, “We would like to invite you to our home for dinner this evening.”

“Oh no, no, Nina. That’s very kind of you, but I’m just getting settled and have a lot of unpacking to do, and”

“But you are a lonely girl!” said Nina. “You must come and be our guest.”⁴³

Eventually, I decided that the risk of alienating my landlady on my first day in the apartment was greater than the tedium of dining with strangers, and so a few hours later I pulled the wildflowers from their glass on the sill, grabbed my keys, and walked to the building next door.

Nina’s sullen 17-year-old son, Marat, opened the door and ushered me in. Inside, on the living room coffee table, was a huge spread of zakuski, a tureen of borscht, a fluffy, sugary torte, and several bottles of vodka. I sat in the middle of the couch as the other 9 occupants of the room, which included Nina, her husband, and Nina’s brothers and their spouses piled up next to me or pulled up stiff-legged chairs from the kitchen. We ate the food in uncomfortable silence broken by my hosts’ polite but insistent questions. They could not quite figure out what I was doing living alone in this huge apartment in the suburbs of Moscow, and thus kept asking me the same questions over and over. “So, will your husband be joining you soon?” “You say you don’t have a husband? Why not?” “Your family is not from Russia?” “And so, why did you come to Russia, again?” “You say you wanted to come here?”

We finished up the food after several hours and then one of Nina’s brothers, whose name was not Bob but who I will call Bob, reached across the coffee table and snagged one of the vodka bottles. “Let us toast our American guest!” he cried, pouring from the bottle into a clutch of large shot glasses perched on an end table. We drank and then drank again, them making long and heartfelt speeches about my health and the felicity of my being there to snarf up all their food, me making halting and increasingly ridiculous attempts to return the toasts. “Bu zdarovna!” I said at one point, raising my shot glass, which caused even these extremely polite people to snicker behind their hands. (I’d meant to say “Na zdarovna,” or “To your health,” perhaps the most basic of Russian toasts, but what I’d actually said was “gesundheit!”)

At any rate, now that the vodka was flowing and people were laughing, I had hope that the evening would become more lively. My hopes were dashed, however, when Bob walked over to the shelf in the living room and pulled out a photo album. “Let us show you some family pictures!” he said, plopping on the couch next to me as his sister-in-law hastily scooted over. He opened the album and I prepared myself for hours of wedding portraits and New Years snapshots. “This,” Bob pointed to a sepia-toned picture of a boy about Marat’s age, “Is Max. He was our cousin. You see he is wearing a uniform? Yes, he fought in the Great Patriotic War, you know, the one against the Nazis. He was in the advance guard of youths that protected the towns outside Moscow. His job was to put on the grenades and throw himself on the coming tanks.”

“You mean to throw grenades at the tanks?” Certainly I had misunderstood this man.

“No no, he strapped a grenade on his body and blew up a German tank. We were all very proud of him.”

Clearly, I had dramatically underestimated this photo album. I leaned forward as Bob continued. “This is Nina on the civil defense brigade.” He pointed at a much younger Nina, wearing a red scarf and laughing with her friends as they hefted what appeared to metal buckets of sand.

“Was this during the war?” I frowned at Nina, who was not old enough to have been in the war, surely.

“No, this was after. In the late ‘50s, during the Cold War. On our subotniks (volunteer Saturdays when neighbors came together for civic projects) we practiced drills for the nuclear war.”

“Really!” I grew excited, “My mother told me about those! They used to have to hide under their school desks to protect themselves.” My hosts looked at me in confusion so I jumped up and demonstrated, crouching near the leaf of the coffee table and covering my head like the kids I’d seen in those grainy old films. “They used to have to go to the train station and practice evacuating. She told me about that! She said she was terrified.” I got to my feet and stood there as the slow realization dawned on all of us that it was these very people -- Nina with her scarf and Bob with his paunch -- who had occasioned my mother’s fear. I cleared my throat, embarrassed, and sat back down. Bob poured us all another vodka.

“You are interested in history?” said Bob. “Well then, perhaps you will like these.” Bob flipped to a section of the book showing pictures of a younger version of himself, dressed in uniform and standing on a beach next to palm trees. “I am in Cuba, here.”

“What year was this?” I asked him, though, having done some quick calculations, I already knew.

“1962.” The family was quiet, watching me.

“Boje moy,” I sighed, grabbing Bob’s sleeve and tugging it back and forth. “This was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?”

“How do you know about this?” said Bob.

“We live in Florida,” I explained. “People still talk about it. We were certain we were all about to be annihilated.”

“So were we,” said Bob.

We all looked at each other for a couple of silent moments. Finally, my landlady, tiny little Nina, spoke up. “I am so sorry,” she said, “We would never annihilate you.”

“Me neither,” I said.

*

Later that night, after the plates were cleared and the vodka was drunk and the dinner was over, I sat in my new apartment, stuffed full of borscht and surveying the Brubeckesque, 1950s-era curtains that hung in my living room window. I looked around in the quiet at the blonde wooden end tables, the Bakelite red plastic telephone, and the creamsicle wallpaper. I had somehow stumbled into some alternate universe where people as friendly and polite and solicitous as my own mother spent their childhoods hauling buckets of sand and guarding missile bases while she spent hers hiding under desks and getting elected homecoming queen. Suddenly acutely confused by everything, not sure what to think, I went over to my spiral notebook and scribbled out an important message. When I’d finished, I got up and went into the small bathroom, taping what I’d written on the wall directly in front of the toilet.

From then on I and anyone who had the misfortune to use my bathroom would be confronted with the best description of what life here, in this weird country that spanned 11 time zones and folded history and family and everything I’d grown up with in on itself like some strange symmetrical origami, was like.

*

Once in a Lifetime⁴⁴

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
You may ask yourself, how do I work this?
You may ask yourself, where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, into silent water
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
You may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?
You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, into silent water
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us
Time isn't holding us, time doesn't hold you back
Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us
Time isn't holding us...
Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime (?)
Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime

NOTES

43. So, after several months of being referred to by strangers as “kashmor” (a nightmare), I had finally moved up in the world and achieved the status of “lonely girl.” I thought then and think now that what these Russians were actually saying when they called me the “lonely girl” was really “the girl who is alone.” The fact that the Russian word for “alone” is the same as the word for “lonely” is very telling, though, as is the fact that I always assumed they were applying the latter meaning to me whenever they said it. Continue reading post.

44. Funny the way the world works, but for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here, I’ve had many opportunities to converse with David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads and one of the people who wrote the lyrics that I hung in my bathroom and that became a kind of mantra for me during my final months in Russia. And I'll bet he thinks that each time I see him I am dancing back and forth with excited star-struckedness. But what he doesn’t realize is that the real reason I can’t sit still when I’m with him is that his presence evokes in me a decidedly Pavlovian response. Any time I hear that song or even think about the Talking Heads, I suddenly have an irresistible urge to pee. Continue reading post.

29. Cat and Mouse

2009-10-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

The next morning, I lay in bed feigning sleep as Lyosha got up and prepared for work. When I heard the front door click shut, I opened my eyes and swung my feet off the couch. Stepping over the roses Lyosha had brought me the night before, faded now to a sad, crumpled yellow, I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil. Then I sat down in the living room with a strong cup of tea and flipped to the back of the most recent Guardian. “Kvartiri,” the heading said, “Apartments.”

I wasn’t completely sure what Lyosha had done with the pistol I’d handed him, but I was certain I didn’t want the details. And for me, who ALWAYS wants the details of EVERYTHING, even something as banal as a trip to the dry cleaners, my lack of interest in the events of the night before was a signal that some reptilian part of my brain – the part responsible for survival – had switched on and taken over. I never once consciously thought about what the previous night suggested; about who I was really living with and what he was capable of, about the high likelihood that whoever Lyosha was tangling with would one evening sometime very soon kick down our door and spray us both with gunfire. I didn’t consciously think about these things as I held halting, confusing conversations with leasing agents, as I counted the savings I had left and calculated what my $400 per month salary would afford me. I didn’t consciously think about what Lyosha would do on the morning he woke to find me gone, or on the day that he caught sight of me on the street. I didn’t consciously think about anything at all, as a matter of fact.

I would spend the final week that I lived with Lyosha feeling like the protagonist of a Lifetime made-for-TV movie. Keeping as low a profile as possible, being cheerful but not too cheerful lest he become suspicious, cringing every time the phone rang because I was sure Lyosha would answer it to find a realtor returning my call. I was playing a game with Lyosha, one where he would believe everything was absolutely normal while I smiled and cooked and plotted. If I won this game the prize would be an apartment I could barely afford in a section of town I did not know. I’d be nervous, and lonely, and disoriented, and alive. That was as good as it would get.

Fortunately, I had other consolations. That Monday at our weekly staff meeting, Brad, the layout guy, told a story that piqued everyone’s curiosity. Brad and his girlfriend Caroline had foolishly assumed that the movie theater near Brad’s apartment – which advertised its schedule on posters outside of the metro – was actually showing movies. When they arrived at the theater to watch the movie that the theater had said would be running, they were surprised to find the place locked up tight. Undaunted, they banged on the doors and after a while an old woman poked her head out. “What do you want?” she snapped.

“Uh, we want to see a movie?” replied Brad, who had a flair for the obvious.

“Impossible!” barked the old lady, “The kittens are all sleeping now! Would you like to buy a ticket for next week?”

“Next week?” said Brad, “No! We want to see the movie now, not next week.”

The woman frowned. “What movie?”

“The movie playing in this movie theater.” Brad pointed at a sign near the door that said “Movie Theater” to bolster his case.

“This is not a movie theater,” said the old lady.

“Well then, what is it?”

“It’s the cat circus,” said the woman.

Oh, well, cat circus, movie theater…the confusion is understandable. It’s an easy mistake to make. Brad related this story to the rest of the staff at the Guardian and suggested that the cat circus might make for an interesting entry in the “Around Moscow” section of the magazine.

“Do you want to do it?” asked Jason.

“No,” said Brad through clenched teeth, “I do not want to go to the cat circus. I want to see a movie.”

“Oh oh, pick me! Pick me!” I bounced in my seat and waved my arms, excited. What could be better than going to a cat circus? The whole idea was so strange, and so wrong for so many reasons. Who would even come up with an idea like this? When a person goes to see a circus, she goes to see something different. Something unique. She doesn’t pay good money to watch the creature she sees every damn day whether she wants to or not. Elephants? Tigers? Bears on balls? OK! Hell, even a couple of raccoons in a trash can would be exotic enough to justify leaving your house a on weeknight and dropping 50 rubles. But cats? And then, what would these cats, animals notorious for their ability to sleep for days at a time and for their lack of concern about whether you’re having any fun or not; what would these cats do at the circus? Hairball hacking, butt licking, ankle twining, playing with the occasional string – these were the most interesting activities I’d seen cats engage in. If these Russian folks could dress this up into a spectacle worth seeing…well, it’d be interesting enough just to see them try.

On the other hand, growing up in Florida I had spent many hours at various “theme parks” staring at alligators sleeping in murky enclosures or looking at dusty dioramas portraying Ponce De Leon’s first meeting with the natives. And far from being bad, boring memories, they were the threads that made the fabric of life in Florida special. They were the things that were strange and interesting, and that I loved, about my home state. Maybe this cat circus would turn out to be the quaint Russian version of Weeki-Wachee. At the very least, the cat circus would get me out of the house for an evening and away from the mafia hit I was certain was immanent.

Sadly, five minutes into the show, I realized that my first assessment of the cat circus had been the correct one. Bored, mildly annoyed cats sat on boxes while unsavory-looking adult “clowns” capered around them to the tinny music issuing from a boom box on the edge of the stage. A cat sat on a skateboard and rolled halfway across the stage, and then sat on the skateboard some more. They stepped daintly through hoops held up by the clapping, snapping master of ceremonies, then sat down and washed their ears. As the cats wandered listlessly around the stage, sniffing at the moth-eaten curtain, the human members of the show tried to salvage the evening by involving the audience in the spectacle. They dragged mortified adults out of their seats and lobbed rings at them, or drew unflattering caricatures of them that the other audience members laughed at derisively. In a more litigious society, this theater would have closed down long before, crushed by lawsuits filed by audience members who were forced into the act and thus had their characters defamed and their credibility ruined. The program the old woman had given me at the door proclaimed that the cat circus was “World Famous in Japan.” But as talented as this may have meant the clowns were, the cats were obviously the smartest members of the troupe.

Dismayed, I decided to try my luck with the Theater of Mice. I’m not making this up; when Brad announced the existence of the cat circus, our Russian translator, Julia, had spoken up and said, “You mean the Theater of Mice?”

This of course meant that in addition to a cat circus, there was also in Moscow a mouse theater. And since I was already covering the cats, Jason decided I should round out the week with a visit to the mice.

So, a day after the cat debacle, I called the telephone number Julia had provided me with.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this the Theater of Mice?”

“What?”

“The mouse theater. Is this the mouse theater?”

“No!” Click.

The next day, I tried again. I dialed the same number, and after a few rings someone who sounded very similar to the person I’d spoken with the day before answered.

“Hello. Is this the Theater of Mice?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“Where are you located?”

“On Ilidorovno Street.”

“OK. Can I get tickets there?”

“No. You must call 947-30-42.”

Obediently, I hung up and called the number. “Hello. Do you have tickets for the Theater of Mice?”

“The what?”

“THE THEATER OF MICE. The mouse theater! Do you have tickets?”

“No.” Click.

Wise to the way these things worked by now, I called right back. The very same woman answered. “Tickets to the mouse theater?” the woman sounded smooth and professional, “Da, we have them.”

“Great! Where are you located?”

“We are located on Bluhskivnayaostenkostrovnaskiblah Street.”

“What?” I yelled into the phone, “Where?”

“On Verablahdniskosternoblednaya Street.”

Still not understanding the woman, I gave up and said, “Oh-kay…what metro stop are you near?”

“TAGANSKAYA!” shouted the woman, slamming down the phone.

The next day, I got on the metro and went to the Taganskaya stop. Outside the station, on the pedestrian plaza, was a metal tubular structure with a sign on the outside that said “KACCA” (tickets). Could this be the very kacca that sold mouse theater tickets? I decided to ask.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman behind the glass, “Do you sell mouse theater tickets here?”

“No!” said the woman crossly. I sighed and rode the metro all the way back home. When I got there, I decided to try one last time. I called the number that Julia had given me. Soon, a woman answered. “Theater of Mice,” she said.

“Hello,” I said, momentarily stunned, “Can I buy tickets for today’s performance?”

“Of course!” said the woman. She gave me directions to the theater, and off I went to catch the 5:00 matinee.

When I arrived at the theater, a huge building painted bright blue and sporting a sculpture of a dancing elephant on its roof, I stood in line with approximately 6 million five-year-olds and their two harried mothers. I began to feel strange as the people in front of me asked for their tickets. “Five, please.” “Twelve, please.” “Four thousand, please.”

At last, it was my turn. “One please,” I whispered to the woman in the booth.

“ONE?” yelled the ticket lady as the mothers around me pulled their charges closer to them, eyeing me suspiciously. “You’re ALONE?”

Ashamed, wishing fervently that I had rented a kid or two before coming here, I took my ticket and slunk into the theater lobby. I stood in line for cotton candy, noting that it cost twice as much as the ticket to the show did. I made my purchase and went into the auditorium to take my seat. As I was getting settled, a little girl in the row in front of me turned around and stared at me. “Mama!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, “Look! The lonely girl has cotton candy!”

Finally, the show began. Unlike the cat circus, the people running this show had the sense to let the animals stand on their own instead of trying and failing to get them to do tricks. And also unlike the cat circus, these animals were unique and interesting to watch. A baby elephant, several colorful tropical birds, snakes and ferrets – this was less a show and more like a visit to an exotic pet store. And although there was not one mouse in evidence the entire time, I didn’t mind. I sat in the warm theater and ate my cotton candy and looked around me at the kids and their parents having fun, and forgot about everything for a while.

28. Unhappy in Our Own Way

2009-10-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy began his big giant potboiler of a novel, Anna Karenina, with the memorable “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He then spent 864 more pages restating that fairly simple concept in way-less-concise, numbingly detailed prose. And though I am still bitter after all these years about my college encounter with Anna Karenina, I am glad Tolstoy gave us that first sentence. It’s true, there are lots of ways families can be unhappy. And in early April, Lyosha and I were trying out every one of them.

“What is the matter with you,” Lyosha would spit at me on the rare afternoons when he came home in between his jobs, “Can you not keep this place clean? If you cannot do it, I will hire real woman to show you.”

“Why are you all the time smoking in here?” He’d wave the hand not holding his Dunhill in front of his face and fix me with an angry look. “It smells like ashtray.”

“Why do you buy this black bread? Why will you not iron my shirt? Why do you keep moving my pistol?” It was one thing after another with Lyosha and, collapse of society aside, I had no idea why he had suddenly become so ornery and contrary.

OK, I had a few ideas. I hesitate to bring this up on a public forum where anyone can comment, but I can be a challenge to live with. Yes, yes, it’s true. Even for American men who are more tolerant of sloth and quirk, and who have less-rigid ideas of how women “should” behave, I can sometimes be a trial. Poor Lyosha, the product of a deeply chauvinistic culture, probably had no idea what to think.

I wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly, I just wasn’t the kind of girl he’d expected after the shine wore off. He’d asked me to bring him his ironed work shirt and I’d shown up 45 minutes late, wheezing with anxiety over the riot in the metro tunnel on the way to meet him and clutching a sodden gray rag of an Oxford. He’d looked at me in confusion and said, “Why did you not take taxi?”

I came home, drunk and exalted, to find a hungry Lyosha sitting in the dark of the kitchen. He listened to me bubble out my latest story, unsure why spending the day with homeless men and trinket peddlers was so exciting to me. He didn’t understand the charm of the Sadistic Couplets the way I’d assumed he would; at least, not when he’d worked all day and come home to a cold empty house.

But no matter how many times his mom made me write it, I would never be an efficient housewife. I did not make beds. I did not bake bread. Instead, I sat at the table in the living room all day, for hours and hours, and chain smoked and drank tea out of a grotty plastic bottle and wrote, piling crumpled pieces of paper around the chair legs and leaving a dust of ashes all over the furniture. I alternated between being completely absorbed by what I was working on or maniacally hyper over the things I was learning. I was so busy most days that I didn’t have time to shop for fresh food or to cook it, and instead snacked haphazardly on boiled potatoes or tuna fish out of the can. I assumed that since we were splitting the rent, each had demanding jobs, and were both reasonably functional adults, we would take care of ourselves.

In short, it was becoming more and more apparent that I was the girl to have fun with, but not the one to marry. Lyosha made this explicit one night towards the end when we were sitting at Rosie O’Grady’s drinking beer and discussing the political rally I’d attend the next day. Lyosha did not want me to go. I was irritated, telling him that he liked the idea of me being a journalist but found the reality somehow beneath him. I was wrong, he countered, he was just scared for me. “You don’t know what you are doing,” he told me. “You are crazy. You are…you are…” he looked around the room in frustration, trying to find the words to describe the mess that I apparently was, “…you are Hell’s Angel without bike.”

Poor Lyosha. How could he know that, far from being an insult, this was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me? “A Hell’s Angel without bike…” To this day, when I’m sitting at my kid’s daycare singing Halloween songs with peanut butter in my hair and a napkin of gummy bears in my lap; to this day I will look around at the other parents in the room and think “Look out, people. You don’t know it, but I am Hell’s Angel without bike,” and will suddenly feel overwhelmingly glad.
Softened by Lyosha’s concern and his inadvertent compliment, I put forth new effort domestically, doing the shopping, sweeping the floors, opening the windows to air out our two rooms. But it didn’t really matter because, as I was soon to find out, not all of the problems Lyosha was having could be blamed on my sloppy housekeeping skills.

It was 2 am and I was asleep. Lyosha very rarely came home these days, and I was getting used to and comfortable with living by myself. So when the front door crashed open and Lyosha strode in, I was anxious. What was he doing here, anyway? And why was he so agitated?

He ignored me as I lay in bed with the covers pulled up to my nose, and instead walked purposefully around the small living/bedroom, pulling open cabinet doors and yanking open drawers. He was muttering, pawing through his and my clothes, his search growing more and more frantic and sloppy as each second passed. Finally with a yelp he pulled the drawers out by their handles and shook their contents onto the floor. He dropped the empty drawers on the rug and turned to my table, sweeping the notebook and scarf and newspapers that lay there onto the rug. Still not satisfied, he turned on me.

“Where is it?” he hollered, raising his hands and shaking them in front of him impatiently, “Where did you put it?”

“Lyosha, what are you talking about?” I sat up in bed and blinked at him innocently, though I was afraid I knew exactly what he wanted.

“My gun! You stupid…Where is my gun? Where have you put it?”

“Lyosha, I don’t know…I don’t have your gun. Maybe you left it in a taxi.”

“NO,” shouted Lyosha, lunging towards me. I cringed into the corner of the bed and he stopped and made a visible effort to calm himself. “Robin,” he said, raking his hand through his hair, trying to reason with me, “You do not understand. You do not understand. I have got to have my gun. If I cannot find it…” his voice trailed off as he put his hand to his mouth and looked helplessly around the room.

He was right, I had in fact hidden his gun. His increasingly icy behavior over the past week had begun to frighten me. He no longer tried to correct me or snapped at me impatiently – lately he just looked right through me, like I no longer existed. I didn’t know why this was happening but it worried me enough to put his pistol somewhere out of the range of his impulses. Just in case.

Now, I sat watching him carefully. He was furious, I could see that, but more than that, he was scared. I saw it in the way his hands shook and the way his eyes darted back and forth from wall to wall, corner to corner. I smelled it the sweat that was coming off of him; metallic and sharp. I knew that Lyosha would eventually find his gun, and I worried that if I continued to deny him the first thing he’d do with it would be shoot me. And so I made a bet with myself. I weighed the Lyosha I had known – the long nights of singing and storytelling, of shopping together for food for our home, of holding hands in a drafty hospital lobby – against the barely controlled rage I saw before me now. I got up and crossed the room to the pink, shoe-shaped vase someone had given us as a housewarming present, and fished out Lyosha’s 9 millimeter. He snatched it out of my hand and without so much as a glance at me, ran out the door.

I’m not sure how much later, I was again asleep when the front door opened a second time, though this time more quietly. “Darling, darling,” whispered Lyosha, leaning over the bed. “Wake up. I brought these for you. I’m so sorry about earlier. Look, I brought these for you.”

I opened my eyes to find Lyosha’s face half-hidden behind an enormous bouquet of white roses. He was smiling at me hopefully and calling me darling, two things the old Lyosha did often; two things he hadn’t done in a long time. “Lyosha,” I squinted at him in the blue light from the street, coming slowly awake. His face and the collar of his white work shirt were covered with a spray of glossy black dots, like pin pricks, like poppy seeds. “Lyosha,” I said to him as he climbed in bed beside me, still in his street clothes, “What happened? What did you do?”

“Maybe tomorrow, OK?” he blinked at me drowsily and then closed his eyes, the blood on his cheek smearing red across the pillow like the smile on his sleeping face.

27. The Three Cheeses

2009-10-14T13:02:00.001-07:00

I sat at the table in the living room of my most current residence, trying to write. I’d been so excited about moving here and finally getting out from under the Reign of Valentina. The apartment seemed perfect. Very centrally located on the Ring Road, with the Smolenskaya metro stop literally right next door, it promised to dramatically curb the time I spent traveling around the city looking for food and interviews. And the building itself! I’d never lived in a place like this before. I don’t know exactly what to call the architectural style of the structure (it was kind of a classical foundation with frosting touches of gothic and baroque added for interest), but after a lifetime of ranch houses and pasteboard apartments, I was ecstatic to live somewhere with character (even if that character was rather sinister).

In other words, I should have been happy. But try as I might to act cheerful and optimistic, to ignore the creeping discontent all around me, I at last had to admit that things were not working. And so lately instead of writing, I found myself trying to analyze what was happening, trying to pinpoint the source of my unease and dissatisfaction.

The obvious place to start – my relationship with Lyosha – provided few clues. Something was going wrong; things were incredibly strained between us all of the sudden. But why? If I could have identified something concrete, like stress from our jobs, or health problems, I could have taken measures to try to repair things. But nothing obvious had occurred to cause the confrontations between us that sprung up nearly every day, and that would eventually end in violence. It was as if the energy had simply shifted somehow, like the sun had gone behind a cloud.

Perhaps, I thought, as I stood looking out the bay window at the busy street below, it’s the weather. I had never understood T.S. Eliot’s famous assertion that “April is the cruelest month.” ³⁷ Obviously, he’d never spent a summer in Florida. If he had, he’d have known that August kicks April’s butt all over the calendar in terms of humidified, white-hot, mosquito-buzzing misery. But now, experiencing the tentative start of a Moscow spring, I knew that Eliot was right. That part about Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain? He nailed it exactly, this unbearableness that never quite left you and that ranged in intensity from a dull toothache to a pang of nostalgia for something that hadn’t even happened yet. The turning of the snow to slush, the undecided color of the sky, the unfamiliar weight and smell of the air: all of this left you as unsettled and nervous as the wind.

The most probable reason for our unhappiness, though, was one I tried to bury as far down in my consciousness as I’m burying it in this blog entry. All around us, as people waited for their metro trains and watched their soap operas, the country was falling apart.

The most obvious example was what was happening with Yeltsin and the parliament. In mid-March, irritated by the economic reforms Yeltsin was pushing and smarting from their loss of power after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Russian parliament announced that they were stripping Yeltsin of his presidential authority. Yeltsin countered by asserting on March 20 that any parliamentary law or decree was null and void and did not have to be obeyed. Yeltsin would take his case to the people, he announced, holding a public referendum on April 25 that would settle the question of who was really in charge. Until then, we were all supposed to hold our breath.

Or, in some cases, let out a bunch of hot air. Unbeknownst to me, while I was busy wolfing down eclairs and hiding in rugs, the western press was scaring the bejesus out of my mother with lurid headlines prophesying the immediate end of the world. When I finally got ahold of her after a three-week silence that must have nearly undone her given the daily trumpeting of doom from the media, she shamed me by sobbing, “Don’t you die on foreign soil!” into the phone. ³⁸

How could I tell her that for a large majority of Russians, this political struggle amounted to kids fighting in the back of the minivan. “I am so the president!” “Are not!” “Am so!” Yeltsin and his little friends could fight over who was touching whom all they wanted – the adults in the country were busy trying to keep the vehicle on an increasingly bumpy road. Sure, there were some demonstrations. I had covered one for the Guardian on March 27, visiting a pro-Yeltsin march and rally that attracted (by some estimates) 300,000 fed-up Muscovites. But most people flat out did not care about the Constitutional Crisis embroiling their leaders. They were too busy trying to survive.

In 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was clear that Yeltsin’s initial “Shock Therapy” policy of privatizing everything and ending all price controls and government subsidies in an effort to create insta-Capitalism had plunged the country into poverty and instability.³⁹ Capital was fleeing the country, oligarchs were calling in favors to take control of formerly government-owned institutions, and the value of the ruble was plummeting now that it was no longer propped up by the state. In an effort to stanch the bleeding, the Central Bank and the government of Russia began printing money hand over fist. State spending to support failing industry, shore up commercial banks, and finance its exploding debt further weakened the currency. ⁴⁰ At the start of 1993, the deficit was 20% of the GDP of Russia⁴¹ , and inflation was at 2000%.

What this meant for the average Russian was simple: shortages and hunger. Russia could no longer afford to pay for imported goods with rubles, and internal producers couldn’t bear the cost of supplies or raw materials, so the amount of products on “regular” (non-dollar) grocery stores decreased. And at 2000% inflation, a quart of milk that cost 12 rubles in 1990 now cost 240 (of course, salary increases did not keep pace with the price of goods). Inflation was so intense that the cost of goods would change from morning to night – you were left with a permanent, gnawing sense of anxiety that you had better get out there RIGHT NOW and purchase whatever you’d need for the rest of your life, because by the end of the day there’d be another two zeros added on to the price tag. But then you’d remember that 240 rubles might as well be 2400 rubles for all you cared, because all you had was 20 rubles and that would buy…nothing at all.⁴²

I tried to cope with the situation around me with humor, suggesting to my co-workers that a traditional party game would soon be turned on its head (“Guess how many rubles there are in the jar and you win a jellybean!”). I laughed along with the Russian stranger who I went to buy a dresser from when I opened one of the drawers and found it stuffed with 1 ruble notes. “I’ll lower the price if you take those, too,” he said, rolling his eyes. And we all thought it was a riot (or soon would be) that the exchange rate in Russia (how many rubles would a dollar get you) was pegged not to a chunk of gold or some policy decision somewhere, but to the daily cost of a Snickers bar. This formula, referred to by actual, serious people as the “black market Snickers index,” assumed that a Snickers bar was in reality worth about one dollar, and so however many rubles it took to purchase a Snickers, that was how many rubles you’d get for a dollar.

It was easy for me to laugh, though. I was an American, with someplace else to go if it came right down to it. I had $5000 in my pocket and a new job that paid a whopping $400 a month. But it paid in dollars, and that was all that mattered. To the Russians I saw everyday in the store, on the street, standing outside of the metro holding up single shoes, hoping that -- what? – a one-legged buyer would hop by and allow them to eat that night? To those people, this was death by a thousand paper cuts, an unmitigated disaster.

This was the reason that most Russians, unlike everyone else in the world in March of 1993, blandly shrugged at the news of the power struggle between Yeltsin and parliament. They hadn’t the time, energy, or inclination to worry about it. This did not mean that they were docile, however. The women in particular were furious with the situation they found themselves in, and they demonstrated in small yet vocal ways. One woman’s protest stuck with me so much that it’s become a kind of organizing principle for me (just like “always find the second exit when you enter a room” did after the Leningrad riot).

I was standing in a long line in a ruble grocery store, waiting to buy a quart of milk and a few eggs (this, along with a row of dented canned tuna, was all the store was selling). We all stood in the line silently, resigned to our fate, when suddenly there was a stir near the front. A round woman with dyed auburn hair stepped out of the line and angrily addressed the rest of us.

“What has this country come to?” she yelled, clearly at her breaking point. She held up three fingers and shook them at us. “During Breshnev’s time there were three kinds of cheese in the stores! THREE DIFFERENT KINDS!” Another person in the line, a stranger, led the sobbing woman out, patting her and murmuring to her. I looked at the faces of the people around me, wondering about the woman’s outburst. On the one hand, she was right. Things were better back then, if by better you mean a society that’s reasonably stable and pretty much meets the needs of its citizens. On the other hand, though, I’m not sure even a variety of cheeses can compensate for a system of government that murdered 50 million of this woman’s countrymen. Surely these people agreed, right? Surely these people would roll their eyes at this woman and say “True, there’s no Gouda, but at least we’re free!”

But of course, nobody did. Nobody did because you can’t eat freedom, and by now most of these tired Russians would gladly have traded a couple of minutes of freedom for a nice warm pot roast. The concept that people are willing to trade their liberty for security is certainly not new, of course. What was a revelation to me was what it took to make this one woman decide to abandon the whole enterprise. It wasn’t the big things -- the interminable protest marches, the boring speeches, the political in-fighting. Instead, it was standing at the grocery store the way she’d done a thousand times, staring blankly at the refrigerated dairy counter, waiting her turn. And suddenly her eyes focused on what she was actually looking at, a couple of quarts of milk and some sad cans of tuna, and it occurred to her, you know, when I used to come in here I could buy cheese to take home and put in my noodles. And I like noodles with cheese. What the hell happened?

And that was all it took. A decade of hard-won reforms, generations of gulags and exiles and self-published magazines in basements done in because someone moved this woman’s cheese. I stood in that line and wondered what it would be for the other people around me, and what it would be for me and my fellow Americans if, god forbid, we were ever in the same situation as these Russians. What would be our tipping point? How much pressure could we take before the ideals we assumed we believed in seemed suddenly quaint and silly?

These are questions I'm still asking myself all these years later. I don't know the answers to them yet, but I have a sense that some day soon, I might.

NOTES

37. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html The Wasteland. It’s really good. Continue reading post.

38. I am still so, so sorry about this, mom. Especially now that I have a daughter, I can imagine how terrified I would be if my kid moved to a violent, unstable country and dropped inexplicably out of contact after fairly regular phone calls. If you want to take me out to the woodshed next time I visit, I don’t blame you (I'll give you plenty off lead time so you can acquire a woodshed). Continue reading post.

39. I am getting nearly all of this information from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia and the sources it cites at the bottom of the article. Continue reading post.

40. Thank god that could never happen in America. Continue reading post.

41. Compare this to our current deficit after the stimulus, which is 12.3% of the GDP. http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-and-demography/us-fiscal-deficit-projected-at-123-of-gdp-in-2009/ Continue reading post.

42. And so it is particularly noteworthy that, at least in 1993, most Russians continued to support Yeltsin and the status quo. This is a measure both of how profoundly Yeltsin’s actions during the 1991 coup had affected most Russians (he was still a hero to most everyone for standing up on that tank), as well as how completely disenfranchised most Russians were from their system of governance. Wow, they probably told themselves, our leader is doing something terrible that’s making everyone suffer? You don’t say! Continue reading post.

26. The Sadistic Couplets

2009-10-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

A kindhearted uncle
Helped with a match
No, he won’t finish the construction
He was numbed with paralysis
I’ll be dreaming for a long while
About her blue eyes on a pine tree

I lurked by the chain link fence surrounding the kindergarten, waiting for one of the tiny Russians playing in the yard to approach me so I could recite the poem I’d so carefully memorized. Unfortunately, none of the children even looked in my direction. The adults minding them, however…that was a different situation entirely. The women in charge of the class stood by the school’s doorway and watched me with stony faces, wondering why I’d come back to their fence for a second day, and how long I’d stay this time. I tried to allay their fears, squinting up at the leafless trees like a disoriented birdwatcher, checking the non-existent watch on my wrist like someone with a reputable place to be. When the older teacher bent towards the younger one to whisper something, never taking her eyes off of me, I figured it was time to leave.

My Russian professor in Gainesville was either mistaken or had deceived me, and now I was in trouble. “Oh yes,” he had said, when he told me about the Sadistic Couplets, “every Russian knows of them. They are very, very popular. With everyone!” We had been having a casual discussion about Russian versus American humor, and I had trotted out something I was sure would shock him: the dead baby joke (you know, what’s red and white and goes round and round?). He blinked placidly and responded with something that did actually shock me. The Sadistic Couplets, he explained, were mordant verses obliquely describing the deaths of hapless peasants or whole countries full of innocent bystanders. He recited a few of them to me and I was immediately hooked, not so much for their humor but for their subtle violence and absurd perspective on tragedy. In my first staff meeting at the Guardian I suggested a piece on these troubling ditties, promising that I’d find out where they came from, what they meant, and why they (according to my Russian professor, at least) had such a hold on the Russian imagination. My idea had been enthusiastically received and I’d set out full of determination, but now, on my third day of research, I was starting to worry.

Little boy
Sits on his father’s knee
What a lovely red button, he says
Madagascar was a nice island

I’d started, quite logically I thought, by walking up to random children I saw on the street and saying, “What do you know about the Sadistic Couplets?” This had produced interesting, yet unprintable, responses. The kids, bless their little hearts, were loath to talk to a frizzy-haired, hunting-boot-clad stranger on the street about much of anything, and gave me a wide and mainly silent berth.

I’d decided I’d have more luck talking to kids if I had an official sponsor, so I resolved to go to the local kindergarten, win the trust of the teachers, and interview the entire class at one time. This proved more difficult than I’d counted on, however, perhaps because I got off on a bad foot. Afraid to walk in the front door and ask for an interview about the Russian equivalent of dead baby jokes, I instead haunted the fence outside the playground for several days, hoping someone would come close enough to hear me.

Now I was walking briskly down the sidewalk, looking over my shoulder for the policemen I was sure would soon be pursuing me. I hated to go home. I’d never find the answer to the Couplets’ origin there. But where else could I go? I walked towards the new apartment I shared with Lyosha, a 2-room flat in a gothic building that sat across the street from one end of the Arbat, Moscow’s pedestrian shopping street. I stood on the corner outside of my building and gave it one last try. “Excuse me!” I collared random adults as they hurried by, “Do you know about the Sadistic Couplets?”

To my surprise and relief, every person I spoke to stopped dead in their tracks. Some would gaze into their childhoods with misty eyes, others would hop excitedly from one foot to another, beaming. Nearly every person I accosted responded to my initial question by happily rattling off a long rhyming stream of Russian. My teacher was right; adults of a certain age knew all about these poems. Sadly, though, not one of them could tell me where they came from. “Stalin’s daughter made them up!” they’d say, or “They were passed down by the tsars.” Everyone agreed that they’d known them since childhood and never given them much thought. They were part of the landscape they inhabited; noteworthy the way unusually shaped rock formations are, and worthy of about as much analysis.

I knew from their answers that I was on to something with these Couplets. I’ve always believed that the things that are so ingrained in your consciousness that you no longer see them are the things most worth looking at. They give you clues about why you think the way you do, why you believe the things you do, and why you value the things you do. They are the canvas your day-to-day experience is painted on, these things you take for granted. Maybe I was reading too much into perverse doggerel, here, but I really thought that the Couplets said something important about Russians and Russian culture. It’s one thing to respond to oppression or terror or poverty or to the slow grind of a life you’ll never control by popping a cap in its ass or posturing as someone who’s made it to easy street. It’s quite another to enshrine the brutal waywardness of existence in a handful of bloody children’s stanzas. That’s life for you, these poems said; you may think everything’s going along splendidly but even the most innocent of gestures by those with the purest of motives eventually, inexorably, result in cinematic disaster. And what can we do about this, these poems seem to ask? Just laugh. Ultimately, that’s all any sane person can do.

Two lovers lay
In a field of tall wheat
Quietly, quietly comes the combine
Grandmother spits out the cloth
She has found inside her bread

Excited by the response I received from strangers on the street, I decided to press on. I’d go up and down the Arbat, I decided, and see if I could find something more interesting than military watches. Though I usually avoided the Arbat with its aggressive vendors of cheap tourist trinkets, today it seemed like a reasonable place to research. The Sadistic Couplets would be a very difficult topic to discuss with my limited Russian. Perhaps on the Arbat I’d find people who could speak English and would not mind talking to a foreigner.

I walked down the middle of the street, looking for a likely target for my questions. “Devushka!” yelled a man at one table who was brandishing a string of amber beads, “Special price for strangers!”

I stayed away from everyone who hollered at me or attempted to menace me with commerce, but about halfway down the street, I stopped at a table displaying black lacquered jewelry. The eight boys behind it ignored me completely as they drank their Troika beer and hummed along to the guitar that the one in the middle was playing. It was a relatively warm day for April in Moscow, the sun was shining, and these boys were enjoying their day. I poked at the pins for a while and then the guy with the guitar stood up. “You would like a pin?” he said politely, in perfect English. I looked at him. He was a bit younger than me, probably 19 or so, and with his flybacked shoulder-length hair and even features, he looked like Shaun Cassidy.

“Well,” I said in English, “I’m writing an article about something called the Sadistic Couplets. Do you know anything about the Sadistic Couplets?”

“Oleg,” called the boy, turning his head towards a guy near the edge of the table, “Do we know anything about the Sadistic Couplets?”

Oleg surveyed me for a few seconds and, apparently finding me acceptable, stood up. “Of course we do!”

The boys all began talking to me at once, peppering me with verses which I struggled to write down in the small reporter’s notebook I was carrying. Suddenly their leader, the Shaun Cassidy boy, waved his arms at us. “Quiet, quiet,” he hissed, “Here come some customers. You,” he pointed at me, “Come back here behind the table and we’ll finish in a minute.” I stepped around the table and stood in the midst of the group as a fanny-packed, sweat-suited clutch of older folks made their way towards us. When they were still a few tables away, Shaun Cassidy picked up his guitar and began to sing. The other boys joined in.

“Esli znali vi, kak mnye dorogi, podmoskovni vechera.” As they sang the plaintive refrain and ignored the approaching group, I realized what was going on. If Russia had a theme song, the tune they had chosen, Moscow Nights, would have been it. In the same way that “Take Me out to the Ballgame” is closely associated with “things American,” Moscow Nights evokes Russia for millions of people. It’s one of the very first things you learn when you start learning Russian, and you practically have to sing it to the customs guards to be allowed in the country. Even for people who have never heard it, the song somehow sounds like Russia: beautiful and haunted. These clever boys were bringing out the big guns to attract the group to their table, luring them over by creating an Authentic Russian Experience the tourists could talk about on the bus back to the hotel.

And sure enough, it worked. The small crowd bypassed the last few tables and walked straight over to ours. The handsome boys continued singing as the tourists began discussing the pins. “Do you think Jennifer would like this one?” said one lady in an American accent to her husband. Without waiting for an answer, she held the pin out to me, the only non-singing, standing person behind the table. “HOW MUCH IS THIS ONE?” she said very slowly and loudly.

I had no idea what the pins cost, but I had an idea of what this American lady might pay. So, “1000 rubles,” I replied (about $1.30).

The woman blinked and jerked her head back in surprise. “You’re an American!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I knew that “writing an article about the Sadistic Couplets” would only confuse her, so I put my hand on the shoulder of Shaun Cassidy, who had now stopped singing, and said, “I’m selling pins with my Russian husband to try to help finance his singing career. He is a musician, you see. And also an artist. Yes, he made these pins.” I smiled at Shaun lovingly and he smiled back at me, batting his gray eyes.

“How darling!” enthused the woman, who was my grandmother’s age. “Everyone, everyone, did you hear this? This American girl is married to this Russian boy and they are selling pins!”

For the next 10 minutes the 8 or so people in the group fawned all over the two of us, taking pictures of Shaun and me with our arms around each other, or with him kissing my cheek and me rolling my eyes at the camera like “Men! What can you do?” They patted me and cooed at me, a young girl so far away from her own grandparents. And happily, they bought several pins each.

When they departed, chattering excitedly about the story they’d purchased with their jewelry, Shaun and his friends looked at me in silence for a second. Then Shaun, whose name turned out to be Kostya, said, “What are you doing today? Would you like a beer?”

I ended up spending the rest of the day – about 5 hours – sitting behind the table with Kostya and his friends, drinking beer, singing Russian folk songs, and exploiting our non-existent wedding vows to sell loads of pins at a 50% mark-up to tourists from all over America and Western Europe. Several beers into the experience I was slouched happily in the warm sun, listening to the boys sing, when I suddenly remembered why I was there. As absolutely comfortable as I was with these people and with my new vocation, I still had to find out where the Couplets came from. Even though it was apparently my calling, I couldn’t just drink and lie and sell pins all day. So I brought the topic up again with Kostya and his friends.

“We know some Couplets,” he said, “but if you really want to know about them, you need to talk to Ivan.”

“Who’s Ivan?” I asked.

“He is…bezdomni,” said Kostya, flicking the underside of his jawbone with his middle finger, the Russian gesture that meant someone was an alcoholic, “He sweeps this street.”

“Will he talk to me?”

“Sure, if you buy him some beer.” I handed some rubles over to Kostya and he in turn handed them to one of the other boys, with instructions to fetch both Ivan and Ivan’s beer.

After a short time, the boy reappeared toting a plastic sack of green bottles and shepherding a very old, very dirty man. The man wore a padded canvas jacket and stained green trousers. He was hunched over in a permanent stoop, and his hands as they reached for the bottle were purple with frostbite scars. Nonetheless, he smiled at me wickedly, the bringer of beer, and proceeded to lecture me for several hours about his past as a ballet dancer, his time in the army, the indignities of homelessness, the sorry state of today’s youth (“not you, Kostya”), and his favorite dishes from childhood. I had had a million conversations just like this with homeless people back in Jacksonville (minus the frostbite and the ballet dancing), and I was perversely grateful for the continuity poor Ivan and his suffering provided. No matter where in the world you go, I guess, when the costumes and accents and trappings fall off, what you really want is someone to talk to, to share a drink with.

With Kostya translating, I was able to collect several pages of Couplets from Ivan, who knew hundreds of them. But like everyone else, he could not tell me where they came from or when he’d first heard them. I realized I’d never deliver on the promises I’d made when I first suggested writing about the couplets. But as I sat in the fading afternoon listening to Ivan recite the poems as if he’d written them himself -- a little raised fist in defiance of his circumstances -- I realized I didn’t care. I had found what I needed today.

An old man found a grenade in the field
He went with his finding to the party district committee
Pulled out the pin and threw it in the window
The man is old, for him it’s all the same.

25. A Simple Outing Goes Terribly Awry

2009-09-30T07:37:00.000-07:00

The escalator I was standing at the top of disappeared into the darkness below, the passengers in front of me swallowed up in the belly of the metro station. I tried to stay calm, but there were too many people in the metro. It was 4:56 on a weekday, and the stations in the center of Moscow, where I was headed, closed their trains to incoming traffic every day at 5 to accommodate rush hour. People were running in droves to the station, frantic about missing their train and being stuck on the outskirts of the city for 2 hours while workers downtown came home to the suburbs. I was caught up in the crush as soon as I got close to the station’s doors, and though I tried to turn around and push my way back towards the outside, there was no use. The people with their thick coats and expressionless faces swirled and eddied around me, dragging me like an undertow towards the escalators.

I was creating a bottleneck at the top of one of the two escalators as I braced my hands on the wood surrounding the moving handrails. People were piling up on my back, shouting and angry, and I knew that soon I’d either have to step on the escalator or be pushed down it. I took a deep breath and stepped on.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I thought, once we get down into the station and have a chance to spread out. Maybe it’s just the small lobby and narrow escalators that are causing the passengers to pile up. I hoped so. I didn’t know what would happen if I got trapped in a huge crowd of people, but I knew from experience that it would not be good.

Two years before, on my first visit to Russia in 1991, my classmates and I had traveled to Petersburg (then still called Leningrad) to visit the Hermitage Museum. My 4 close friends and I stayed on the huge plaza outside the museum long after the rest of the group had left, renting horses to ride around the square and photographing the palace’s chalky green exterior. Eventually the sky took on the fragile cerulean color that passes for darkness during the white nights in this city, and we began to make our way back to the hotel for dinner. As we were nearing the archway at the edge of the square, we passed a large crowd of bedraggled, camouflage-wearing men coming onto the plaza. As they marched towards the statue of the winged angel in the center of the square, I noticed their pasty complexions and long stringy hair. This was very unusual – Russia in the early ‘90s did not encourage its menfolk to go around looking like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. My friends and I stood aside to let the men – maybe 30 in all – pass by, and as they did I asked a Russian woman standing beside us who they were. “They are Afghan veterans,” she replied, looking angry. “They are protesting because they’ve been forgotten.”

I had heard all about the horrific Soviet war in Afghanistan; how it was rumored to have been even more brutal and unwinnable than our Vietnam. We stood in silence as the men began to march quietly around the statue. No one yelled or chanted, or brandished a sign. This was still a communist country, after all, and the price of dissent and protest was probably pretty high. And so the men walked quietly in their circle, as if to say, “See? We are still here.”

My friends and I continued our walk, taking the smaller streets that paralleled Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad’s main drag. We were in no hurry, stopping often to look at the beautiful art-nouveau buildings and courtyards that made the city the “Paris of the North.” After a while, we made the decision to walk up a couple of blocks and get on the more crowded, better-lit main boulevard. We came out of an alley onto a small street that ran perpendicular to Nevsky Prospect. We were walking up the middle of the empty street towards Nevsky and were almost to the corner when suddenly, from around the corner we were walking towards, thundered a huge stampede of terrified people.

We were far enough back on the small street that there was a moment to take in the scene before it engulfed us and we became part of it. The front of the frantic crowd, which numbered probably in the hundreds, was made up of a motley assortment of people. Men in camo from the protest ran next to students in jeans and t-shirts or folks dressed in business attire who had probably been caught up by the crowd as they were walking home from work and now were irrevocably absorbed by it. Just like we were about to be.

Sometimes I have the kinds of dreams, which I hear are quite common, where I am facing some terrible threat that it’s essential I run from. I run as fast and as hard as I can, but it’s as though my legs and arms are encased in viscous, thickening amber. No matter how hard I try, no matter how much energy I exert, I only move forward in tiny, exhausting increments. The experience, for me, of seeing this crowd rushing towards me like a human tsunami was just like one of those dreams. I remember every second of it; still, because it felt like years between my first apprehension of the danger I was in and the moment that danger became real.

I was the person closest to Nevsky and the crowd surging around the corner, and I gaped at the people running towards us for what seemed like minutes. Then suddenly some synapse fired mightily in my brain and the word “RUN!” ricocheted through my body like a gunshot. I spun around in the small street, poised to go. I saw the backs of my friends as they ran for their lives and then I was knocked off my feet as the crowd hit me. I fell flat in the middle of the street and the entire mob of people ran right over me, not stopping or slowing for a second in their desperation to get away from whatever was chasing them. I don’t remember anything about the actual experience of being trampled by hundreds of people. Later, I’d remember stories I’d read about Who concerts and pilgrimages to Mecca, and I’d tell myself that I was lucky to be alive and relatively uninjured because a stampede is an excellent way to die horribly. But when it was happening it was exactly like being knocked down at the beach by a wave. I was sucked under, sand in my mouth and ears, eyes shut tight, and rolled and bounced by a force I couldn’t negotiate with or even see clearly. There was no sound, no pain, no nothing. Just movement.

After what was probably only seconds the crowd passed over me and I lay on my face in the street, gasping and bleeding. It seemed like I lay there for a very long time before I realized I was still alive and it occurred to me to wonder what these people were running from. Whatever it was, I was probably going to find out any second, I realized. I got on my hands and knees in the middle of the street, hanging my head between my shoulder blades and spitting grit out of my mouth. Then I carefully put one foot flat on the ground, so that I was now kneeling in the middle of the street like a suitor proposing marriage. I put my palms on the street, preparing to push myself into a standing position, and raised my head. As I did, 300 policemen dressed in full riot gear tore around the corner. They had white helmets with plastic visors pulled down over their faces, black shields that they carried in front of them on one arm, and truncheons raised over their heads. They were a wall of rubber and plastic and blue uniform; they didn’t look like individual people the way the first crowd had, they looked like a single, howling machine. I realized that when they got to me, the first straggler they’d come upon, they’d fall on me like sharks in bloody water. They’d beat to me to death, and it would hurt, and even if I could speak their language I could never explain the unhappy happenstance of my presence to them, this terrible misunderstanding.

There was nothing I could possibly do; I had the feeling that running would just make it worse, and so I stayed in the kneeling position I was in and bowed my head, shielding it as best I could with my arms, and waited. The police closed in on me and suddenly, painfully, I felt a man’s fingers dig into my shoulders. The man snatched me to my feet like a doll and dragged me backwards out of the street and to the wall of the building next to us. He threw my back up against the wall and put his whole body against mine, pressing me into the stone and bracing his raised arms over my head. When he did this, I saw his face for the first time and realized it was someone I knew. It was Dan Quinonez, my closest friend in my school group. Maybe he’d turned around and run back, or maybe he’d hidden in a doorway until the first crowd had passed; I don’t know how he did it but however he did he had come back for me. I grabbed onto his shirt like a drowning person and began screaming over and over, hysterical now that I thought I might live through this.

All around us, on every side, the police fanned out and began brutally beating the citizens who were trapped by the bottleneck that had formed as the street narrowed into an alley. I peeked under Dan’s raised arms and over his shoulder and saw people, unconscious and bleeding, being thrown like sacks of potatoes into an idling white van. I watched a policeman hit an older woman with a beehive hair-do on the head with his stick. She crumpled to the ground in her white polyester dress with the patent-leather belt, a receptionist or secretary who’d made the mistake of leaving her office a few minutes late. There was utter mayhem everywhere as people tried to escape, and we were right on the very edge of it, unable to move. It was only a matter of time until the policemen saw us, the two people standing absolutely frozen against a building, the easy targets, and made their way over. And soon enough, one did.

A policeman ran towards us with his stick raised, breath ragged with excitement. His helmet had been knocked off and his blonde hair was wild. I looked straight at his face as he prepared to hit Dan on the back of the head and he looked back at me. His eyes were blue. The policeman didn’t hesitate, but instead of hitting Dan he grabbed a stranger who had been cowering against the wall right next to us, a man in a suit. He hit the man with his stick until he fell on the sidewalk at our feet, and then he kicked the man over and over in the stomach. Each time his boot made contact the man, who was unconscious now and bleeding out of his ear, kicked out his own foot in a kind of involuntary twitch and nailed me painfully in the ankle. I looked down at the man’s foot as it reflexively kicked me and with the kind of detachment that often accompanies terror or trauma, noticed that it was encased in a brown sandal. A brown sandal, I thought, how strange. Who wears sandals with suits?

The next thing I remember, my friends from school were supporting me as they walked me down the far end of Nevsky towards the hotel. I had apparently fainted, the first and only time that’s ever happened, and to this day I don’t know how we’d made it out of the riot, or how Dan had found our friends. We walked carefully and in silence down the street, me checking myself for injuries. My ribs were bruised painfully, but not cracked or broken. I had bruises and welts and bleeding scrapes all over me, and the next morning I’d notice that every muscle in my body seemed to have been pulled, but I was lucky. The most permanent scar I took away from that experience was a visceral terror of crowds. I know how little it takes for a cloud to pass over a gathering and turn it from a peaceful, sunny group to one with murderous intent. It takes nothing at all, really, just a random event, an unlucky second, a change in the wind.

I remembered all of this as I rode the escalator down the metro, palms sweating. It was imperative, I knew, that I stay calm. Crowds have their own kind of febrile intelligence, one that bears little resemblance to the thoughts and feelings of the individuals comprising it. Any kind of strong emotion – fear, happiness, excitement – can spread like a virus through a crowd and influence its behavior. A panicked person in a crowd is a match in a parched forest, I knew, so I tried as hard as I could to breathe deeply and control my anxiety as the escalator bored its way through the granite under the city.

After nearly a minute (the escalators in the Moscow metro are some of the longest in the world), I stepped off the escalator and onto a train platform, though not the one I needed, unfortunately. Armed policemen stood at intervals, guarding the edges of the platform against clumsy passengers. The crowd streamed through the short area where the trains arrived and departed and up a flight of marble stairs that led to an ornate tunnel.

This passageway connected one train platform to another, and was relatively short – you could see the stairs leading up and out at the other end – but it was so completely jammed with people that we were barely moving. The only forward progress we made, in fact, was due to the pressure people entering the tunnel were putting on those already in it. We were squeezed more and more tightly together as people pressed in behind us, until every available bit of space was taken by coats and shoulders and knees and shoes. I folded my arms up against my chest, Egyptian-mummy style, and tilted my head back so I was looking at the ceiling instead of suffocating in the coat of the person in front of me. My feet barely touched the floor as, every 45 seconds or so, we shuffled ahead a few centimeters. There was no need to walk; we were so wedged against each other that many of us, me included, were just dragged in the direction the crowd wanted to go. I tried to ignore everything except the ceiling I was looking at and the warm, moist air that floated above the crowd as it exhaled and breathed in again. Sweat trickled down from my hairline and stung my eyes, but I kept absolutely still, thinking nothing. I could stand there like that all day if I had to, moving forward in tiny spurts, if only we could keep make progress, if only there was hope that one day we’d get out.

After about 15 minutes of this, I was almost to the narrow staircase at the other end of the tunnel, the one that would let me out of this marble coffin deep underground. I was about 8 rows back from the exit and was beginning to feel hope when suddenly, something happened. Down the staircase in front of us, the one we were all yearning to climb, came 5 or 6 men. They were going the wrong way, pushing and elbowing their way through a crowd that had no room even for an extra breath, and no patience to spare. People at the front of the crowd, nearest the stairs, began shouting and pushing at the men, telling them there was no room, that they had to turn around and go back. The men didn’t listen, but turned slightly sideways, butting their way through the people with their shoulders.

There was a moment of quiet disequilibrium while the crowd waited to see what would happen; what it would do. Then an old woman three people ahead of me screamed and fainted. I saw her slump backwards, head lolling back, but she didn’t fall because there was nowhere to fall. She hung suspended there in the crowd for a second, and then chaos erupted. The people in front of me began fighting with everyone around them, grabbing each other’s shoulders and wrenching each other back and forth. People were falling on top of each other, knocked over by the sudden burst of violent movement. As the people in front of me grappled with each other on the floor or struggled to pull themselves up before they were crushed, I did what the people in Leningrad had done to me 2 years before: I ran over their backs. I pulled myself up onto the mass of people flailing before me and scrambled over them and to the stairway five feet in front of me. The people behind me were doing the same thing, surging over the ones on the ground in their panicked desire to reach the exit, and I ran from the sound of them, pulling myself up the stairs with both hands clutching the railing.

Finally, I exited the stairwell and came out onto my platform. I stationed myself against a pillar, afraid the roiling crowd would push me off the edge and into the gully where the tracks lay. The howling and yelling of the people still trapped in the tunnel echoed up the marble staircase until it was drowned out by the sound of my approaching train.

24. My Departure

2009-09-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

“Robin, can I ask you something if it does not offend you?” I was lying on the bed in my room reading “Cold Sassy Tree” and daydreaming about Spanish moss when Valentina poked her head in the door. I nodded and she asked her question, most of which I didn’t understand. “Why did you bleh bleh bleh bleh big bag bleh bleh bleh bleh?”

Hmmm, I thought, too tired to ask her to repeat herself. What could she have just said to me? “Why” + “big bag.” Hmmm. Well, I decided, she can only be asking me why 1/4 of my suitcase is taken up by a giant bag of condoms. That’s the only thing connected to me that is both in a “big bag” and would warrant a “why” kind of question. I knew it was only a matter of time before she’d see it and would want to know what the hell was going on.

“Well, you see,” I took a deep breath. It was possible that if I explained the condoms well enough the first time, she’d drop the whole subject. “It’s because I heard they are like blue jeans in Moscow. Expensive, and hard to find. I thought I’d be able to use them to trade with.”

Valentina squinted at me. “What are you talking about?”

I squinted back. “Condoms. What are you talking about?”

Without a word, Valentina turned on her heel and left the room. Seconds later she was back holding a big bag of dates that I’d purchased a month and a half ago at the market and had finally thrown away just the night before.

“Oh, that big bag!” I replayed the conversation in my head:

Valentina: Robin, why have you thrown away a big bag of dates?

Robin: Because they are like blue jeans!

No wonder she was squinting at me! But now, of course, I had bigger problems.

“Condoms!” she looked around nervously at the room’s ceiling, like the condoms were bats that would soon dive from the rafters and tangle themselves in her hair. “What condoms?”

“No. Not condoms.” I said this as firmly as I could and then decided not to say anything else at all. Maybe she’d just think I’d had a stroke, or something.

There was a short pause and then Valentina said “Robin, come in here.” I followed her into the kitchen and she pointed to a chair at the dinette. I sat in it while she leaned on the counter, writing something on a pad of paper. Eventually she brought the paper over to me and instructed me to copy the two sentences she’d written at the top of the page. “Write this down until you remember it,” she demanded. “It is very important.”

I had no idea what the sentences said, so I reached for my dictionary and flipped through the pages. Finally, I looked up at Valentina. “Seriozno?” I asked her. “You seriously want me to write this?”

“Da,” she replied, crossing her arms and looking at me with no expression. It was clear that she would sit there until I did what she said, plus I was afraid that if I fussed too much she’d start asking questions about condoms again. So I took up the pencil and copied her spidery writing.

“I am an efficient housewife,” I wrote again and again, “I do not throw things away.”

*

Things at home had improved considerably since the publication of my first article. Lyosha had apparently read it to his family, and the fact that I was writing about their culture in a magazine that other people were reading suddenly justified the hours I spent scribbling in my spiral at the dinette table. Now Valentina was emptying ashtrays for me and refilling my teacup so I didn’t have to get up, and calling me “Robinka” instead of “the American” when she gossiped about me to her friends on the telephone.

Still, though, I had to get out of there. I was rapidly reaching the point where I couldn’t take it any more. They were nice enough, and in their own nosy, argumentative, completely dysfunctional way they really did care about each other and about me. But I was in serious need of some space of my own, and some quiet alone time. I knew this for certain the night Lyosha came home drunk.

The entire time I lived with his family, Lyosha slept there exactly once: the very first night we were there, the night he bribed his way out of jail with several hundred dollars and a carton of Marlboro reds. The rest of the time? Who knows? I think he was staying with Alex, his best friend. But it’s very possible he had some other American girlfriend in some other apartment in the city. And maybe she was a nice, calm accountant. Maybe he preferred to live there. I couldn’t really blame him.

Anyway, after my article appeared Lyosha began showing up more regularly, eating dinner with the family and taking me out with him to Rosie O’Grady’s. One night he came to the apartment around 2am. He was with his friend Alex, and both of them were so intoxicated they literally could not stand up.

“Hey! Hey!” I’d been sitting at the dinette reading when the door opened and they staggered in. I ran into the bedroom as they collapsed in Lyosha’s bed and on the board. “Hey! What are you doing here? Where am I supposed to sleep?”

“Go sleep with my sister,” slurred Lyosha, passing out cold.

Dammit, I was not going to sleep with his sister. There was no way. But then, where was I going to sleep? The hallway? The kitchen table? The bathtub? At least Anna had her own room, so I’d be out of the way. I shook my head angrily and went to go sleep with his sister.

I opened the door to Anna’s room, which I had never actually been in. It was neat and clean, with a large Oriental rug on the floor and a tidy little couch bed, upon which Anna lay. I tried to imagine slinking into the single bed with Anna. There was barely room for one person. For both of us to sleep there, Anna would have to clutch the tapestry hanging on the wall above the couch to provide some kind of anchor, and I in turn would have to cling to her back as I lay half on, half off the pad. It’d be like we were bivouacked on the side of a mountain. If either of us let go or moved, that’d be it.

Crap, I thought, looking around the room. Finally, too tired to stand up for very much longer, I gave up and just laid down on my back in the middle of the carpet. After only a minute, though, I became very uncomfortable. For one thing, I was freezing. But even worse was how exposed and naked I felt, lying there in the middle of the floor like a discarded sock. I curled up into a ball and lay on my side, hugging my legs to me, but it was no good. I’d never get to sleep like this.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I scooted over to the edge of the rectangular rug that was closest to the door and, lying on my back, grabbed the fringe with my right hand. Then, holding on, I rolled in the other direction as hard as I could. The rug followed me, and before I knew it I had rolled across the room and over to the far wall. I lay rolled up in the carpet like an Oriental burrito, completely hidden from sight. Toasty warm and cozy as an American girl in a rug, as the old saying goes, I finally fell asleep.

What seemed like only minutes later, I opened my eyes. It was morning, apparently, and the entire family was standing in the hallway in front of the side-by-side doors to Anna and Lyosha’s rooms, discussing me.

“Well, where is she?” demanded Valentina.

“I told you. I don’t know,” replied a very hung-over-sounding Lyosha.

“Maybe she left!” It was impossible to miss the hope in Anna’s voice.

“No,” said Lyosha. “I told her to sleep in your room. That’s the last I saw of her.”

Oh no, I thought, here they come. They’re going to find me in this rug – absolutely they will – and when they do it will be all over for me. For if there’s one thing Russians hate with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns, it’s the floor. I don’t know why. My google searches for “why do Russians hate the floor,” “stay off the floor in Russia,” and “Russians get off the floor” returned only one result, which only deepens the mystery. Surely the more obvious, banal answers (e.g., “the floor is dirty”) can’t account for the level of antipathy and disdain Russians have for this part of the house. And it isn’t just Russian floors Russians hate. Au contraire, mon frère. They hate all floors, everywhere, no matter their nationality. Once, for instance, I was over at my Russian teacher’s house back in Gainesville and I dropped the hat I was holding onto their spotlessly clean living room carpet. Every Russian in the room leapt up immediately and, pointing at the hat, shrieked “Shapka na polu! Shapka na polu!”

I knew this about Russians and therefore tried to avoid the floor at all costs. I tried not even to walk on it. But now here I was, the family getting ever nearer as they entered Anna’s room to look for evidence of my disappearance. And sure enough, they noticed immediately that something was different.

“Anna!” barked Valentina, “What happened to your rug?”

Anna still sounded sleepy; she had apparently just walked out of her room without noticing the naked floor. But now I heard footsteps approaching. I closed my eyes, bracing myself. A strong pair of hands gripped the top of the rug, unrolling it back out across the floor and exposing me, the tasty filling. I lay at their feet blinking up at them as they stood around me in a semi-circle, staring and silent. Finally, Anna spoke up. “Oh my god. She’s in the rug!”

“You stupid, stupid girl,” muttered Alexander, throwing up his arms in disgust and heading towards the kitchen.

“Why are you in the rug?” said Lyosha kindly, as he and his mother and sister looked down at me.

“You were drunk.” I blinked. “I had no place to sleep.”

“Didn’t I tell you men have no shame!” hollered Valentina, turning and running angrily out of the room.

“Lyosha,” I looked up at him from my spot at the edge of the rug. “Lyosha. I have got to get out of here. I cannot take living with your family any more. Do you understand me? We have got to move.”

Lyosha stared back at me, his face puffy from a night of drinking and the unusual angle from which I was seeing him. “OK,” he said finally, wearily. “OK.”

23. My Arrival

2009-09-11T12:23:00.001-07:00

I didn’t just spend the three weeks I lived with this family watching Mexican soap operas, assaulting poultry, and stealing eclairs. Most of my time there, in fact, was given over to an activity that quickly morphed from a once-a-day kind of thing to a sort of hobby, and then into a full-blown compulsion: calling the Moscow Guardian.

On my last visit to the Guardian I'd dropped off my superstitions article and was promised another $100 when it ran. I was not assigned any further freelance work or given any indication of what the status of the job opening was; I was merely told to call and check back later. A few days after that visit, I got thrown out of the apartment and into the maelstrom of domesticity I currently found myself in. I was terrified that they might have called my old number and found it disconnected. The prospect of a job writing not just for a magazine, but for a magazine like the Guardian, was the only thing keeping me afloat, the only reason I wasn’t full-on panicking. Somewhere out there, maybe, I had a job. If I could just get the people who worked there to answer the damn phone.

I called and called, day after day, for weeks. Sometimes somebody would actually pick up the phone, but Jason, the editor, was never available. What was he doing? Getting another black eye “playing baseball”?³⁴ Drinking champagne out of the copy editor’s navel? Most likely, he wasn’t available because he and the rest of the staff were sitting around a big conference table with printouts of my two articles, marking various phrases with highlighter pens and chortling. Those bastards! As ring followed ring followed ring I became more paranoid, more convinced that I’d be without a job forever. And if I didn’t have a job, I knew, I’d never be able to leave home. I’d have to live with my ersatz parents forever, or at least until they arranged for someone to marry me.

Finally, in the middle of my third week with the family, someone who could tell me something answered the phone. It was Dave Addis, the co-editor (along with Jason Stanford). I had never met Dave, so I launched breathlessly into my prepared speech. “Hello,” I said, “My name is Robin Sweat.³⁵ I have done some freelance work for you folks and I wanted to”

“Robin?” Dave cut me off, “Robin Sweat? When are you coming in here?”

“Um, is there a reason for me to come in there? I didn’t know I was supposed to. I was calling to find out when my article would run.”

“Run? It’s running right now! Hold on…” I heard him flipping through pages, “Yeah, here it is. It just came out today. Page 23. Home cures, right?”

“Right,” I squeaked. We had what I’m sure was some kind of extremely important conversation after this – I remember gripping the phone and trying to respond as concisely as possible to his questions – but I have no memory of it at all. As soon as he said “It’s running right now,” my head filled up with what felt like warm lint. A pounding, whooshing sound – the noise of my heart beating loud in my ears --blocked out everything else and I was overwhelmed with a sense of disbelief and gratitude so acute it rendered me nearly insensible. Eventually, after making an appointment to come in two days from then, I got off the phone with the pesky man who was preventing me from dashing out and seeing my story in print with my very own eyes. I ran around the empty apartment in a frenzy, snatching up my coat and hat and scarf and keys and gun and cigarettes – so much to remember! – and hurriedly tying my boots. Where could I go, where could I go, I wondered. Where could I find a copy of this magazine?

I hurled myself out of the apartment building and into the courtyard, rushing over the filthy snow towards the boulevard and trying to think. “Let’s see, let’s see…” I thought. “Ah ha! Tren-Mos Bistro!”³⁶ Tren Mos Bistro was a place downtown that sold $50 pizza to ex-pats and was owned by two beefy fellows, one from Trenton, NJ, and one from Moscow (two cities renowned for their pizza). I personally never hung out there on a regular basis, but I did have a book of matches someone had given me that had their logo on it, and so I jumped on the metro and off I went.

A short time later I walked into the lobby of Tren-Mos, kicking gray ice off the toes of my boots. “No no no,” said the snooty maitre d', “Theese ees not thee Tren-Mos Beestr-O! Theese ees thee restau-RANT!” It seems that there were two Tren-Moses several miles apart, and I’d chosen the wrong one. An easy mistake to make! I walked towards a bus stop in the direction the host pointed when he firmly escorted me out, and after a while the bus arrived. I got on, taking one of the last empty seats, and we lumbered into traffic. We’d driven maybe a block and a half when the driver pulled over in front of a big, signless stone building, turned off the engine, and got out. She walked into the building purposefully while we, her passengers, sat there looking at each other. Finally after about ten minutes, something highly unusual happened. The passengers, strangers to each other, began to discuss the situation.

“What do we do?” said a lady with a fur coat and honey-colored hair. “Should we just sit here?”

“Let’s just wait,” suggested an older man, “She’s sure to come back soon.” We all sat in silence for another five minutes.

“Well, I’m not waiting anymore,” said a man in a suit, standing up and folding his newspaper. He walked towards the bus’ open door and about 15 people followed him. The rest of us just sat there. I wondered why. Maybe the other passengers were too tired to go through the hassle of waiting for and catching another bus. Maybe they’d only brought one ticket with them, or didn’t want to use up another one. Maybe they were just complacent, docile folks who preferred not to make waves. Or maybe, like me, they wanted to see what would happen next.

Finally, after another 5 or so minutes, the driver came back out and without a word of explanation started the bus again. The passengers around me, removed from the novelty of the situation, became strangers once again. We’d been driving for no more than 3 minutes when an odd, rubbery smell began to permeate the bus. I looked around but could not see where it was coming from. The driver pulled the bus over yet again, and yet again she turned it off. Then she stood up and turned to address us.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in a very matter-of-fact voice, “The bus is on fire. You must please leave the bus.” We all got to our feet and as matter-of-factly as the driver, walked off the bus.

Sighing at the heavy sleet that was falling around me, I turned my back on the bus (which was now visibly, indisputably on fire) and began walking towards the center of town. Where was I? Dammit, I couldn’t let burning public transportation distract me. I had to press on. I had to find that magazine! I decided to go to the Hotel Metropole, the swankiest hotel in Moscow. I was absolutely certain that the potentates and mobsters staying there would want to know about Russian home cures, and thus was sure there’d be a big stack of Guardians. But alas, I was disappointed. Nothing at the Hotel Rossia, either. At Casino Moscow a place I had never been but was soon to spend an inordinate amount of time in (mainly drinking tequila and singing Mack the Knife in Jacko’s Bar), there were likewise no Guardians. Wow, I thought. This is either a really popular or a really unpopular magazine. Pilsner Bar? Lots and lots of prostitutes, but no magazines.

Finally, in desperation, I decided to try to find the Tren-Mos Bistro. I had been there once and it seemed like I had seen a Guardian there. I asked several passers-by but all of them either ignored me or yelled at me. I’d be switched if I’d hire a taxi right outside of a hard-currency bar, and on Tverskaya Boulevard no less – might as well just hand over your wallet – but eventually I relented. The only problem was, not one of the professional taxis knew where it was. Totally dispirited now, certain that the universe was trying to tell me something about the feasibility of my writing career, I turned away from the center of town and began walking. I didn’t know where to, and I didn’t care. After about half a mile, a private car rattled up beside me and the driver rolled down his window. “Do you need a ride?”

I was soaked to the bone, having walked for hours in the unceasing sleet. I would let this man chop me up in little pieces and bury me in his basement in a series of pickle jars if he would just allow me to sit in his warm car for a minute. But of course, this was useless. This average Russian man would not know where Tren-Mos Bistro was.

“Tren-Mos Bistro! Of COURSE I know where it is!” I hopped in his car and 4 minutes later, inexplicably, we were there. “Oh no no, I cannot take your money! I only offered you a ride because it was raining! Please, do not insult me!”

I walked inside and there it was. The mother lode. I snatched up 40 or so copies of the magazine, marveling at the bright yellow cover that had MY NAME ON IT, right on the front! My name was in a magazine! A magazine that was not run off on a copy machine, but had actual staples! And even better, my name was in this magazine not because I’d done something illegal or accidently injured lots of people. No! My name was in the magazine because it was attached to something I WROTE, something I wrote that someone else agreed was good enough to let see the light of day.

Now, this is going to be an unpopular sentiment, one which will probably lead to years of therapy for my beloved daughter when she finally learns how to read. And I am sorry I am such a loathsomely selfish person. But I have to say, I think this was the single most exciting moment of my entire life. Standing in the filthy slush outside of an over-priced bistro, cars whizzing by, gray sky pissing down rain; this was exactly where I was meant to be. This was the chance I had to not be a waitress for the rest of my life, or a perennial student, or a frustrated bookstore clerk, or a bitter alcoholic. This was the chance to tell somebody a story about something interesting and have them, maybe, listen. This was the chance to be a writer, a real writer, something I had been practicing for since I found my mother’s manual typewriter in the closet with the high-tops and the Jeopardy home game the year I turned 8. This was it, my foot in the door, the door that would one day, if I was very lucky, open on the life I knew I wanted. The one that would, for me, have the most meaning.

Feeling psychotically exuberant, I staggered down the street and onto the metro. “I’ve got a secret, you people riding the metro,” I pressed my lips together and squeezing my eyes closed, trying hard not to make little squeaking noises. I sped off the metro at Borovitskaya, on my way to Rosie O’Grady’s. I wasn’t planning to brag, or even to drink. There was just no way on earth I could go home to that somber apartment and sit and watch soap operas. I’d explode. Rosie O’Grady’s was brand-new, and clean, and it was owned and run by Irish people, which made it sort of like hanging out with members of my own family. (Cue Cheers theme song.) Rosie O’Grady’s was the place I went in Moscow when I wanted to relax and get in out of the cold. It was the place I went when I was exhausted, or depressed. It was my home away from home away from home.

I opened the door and Colm, the bartender, shouted out a greeting, “There she is, my favorite journalist!” I looked and sure enough, he was reading a copy of the Guardian.

“Hey!” yelled Bob, an American banker, “You’re a journalist! We always wondered what you were doing here! We figured you were an oil worker!” I was absorbed into an enthusiastic crowd of ex-pat well-wishers, some of whom I’d spoken with before, some I barely recognized. They congratulated me and bought me beer after beer and generally acted like people who knew how scary it is to try to make a life in a strange place, and who know how good it feels when your efforts to do so start to bear fruit.

Many, many hours later, the taxi I’d fallen into pulled up outside my apartment building. I quietly tried the handle of the door and was shocked when I opened it to find Lyosha lurking in the hallway.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. The hallway was dark; it was nearly 1am.

“Come in the kitchen,” gloated Lyosha, pulling on my arm. We entered the room and I was absolutely floored to find the whole family at the table, which was laid with pastry (though not eclairs, thank god) and champagne.

“Congratulations!” they all hollered at me, shaking their arms above their heads and clapping their hands. They wrapped my fingers around a champagne glass and toasted me, while Lyosha held my hand and beamed at me. “I read your article,” he said, “Now you are real writer.”

“Oh, Robinka!” cried Valentina, who, oddly, seemed to be near tears, “We are ALL so PROUD of you!” And she threw herself on me in a huge bear hug.

Good heavens, I thought as I lay on the spinning bed an hour later. Is this what achieving your dream was like? Would every day be like this? Full of goodwill and free beer and people cheering at me when I walked by? This whole writer thing, only 12 or so hours into it, was turning out to be a pretty good gig. I closed my eyes, as happy as I had ever been in my life, and was at once asleep.

NOTES

34. I believe you, Jason. Just messin’. Continue reading post.
35. My maiden name, sadly. Continue reading post.
36. And also: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-13/news/mn-23397_1_contract-killing Continue reading post.

22. I Do Éclair!

2009-09-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

So life was better at home, in the same way that things improve for kidnapping victims once they develop full-blown Stockholm syndrome. I was aware that “Valentina now yells at me at a slightly lower volume” was not the same thing as “a healthy and mutually enriching friendship,” but at this point I was willing to take what I could get. And being friends with Valentina, which consisted largely of me asking her questions about cooking and sitting with her while she watched TV, did have its perks.

For one thing, I finally felt safe enough to move off the board I’d been sleeping on and into Lyosha’s unused bed. This was a major step up for me. After only five days of sleeping on a sagging piece of plywood I had developed sciatica, a painful nerve condition that sent searing bolts of pain from my hip down my outer leg and into the soles of my feet. I also was becoming uncomfortably familiar with the family’s standard poodle, Norris, which was the way I kept myself warm on the board. Spooning with this poodle night after night was not healthy, I knew. The close proximity of my face and skin to the dog’s curly hair resulted in itchy, uncomfortable rashes (for me, not him), plus I felt like I was leading poor Norris on. It was time for him to develop close relationships with a member of his own species and stop waiting around for something that would never happen. So after the Mexican Soap Opera Accords I began sleeping in the bed like a proper human and using the board as a desk, and my quality of life improved dramatically.

Even more importantly, I was now invited to eat with the family at the table. Whole new vistas of food opened up to me overnight, some of which I wish had remained obscured. I no longer lived on a diet of cigarettes, hot tea, and anxiety, but now could look forward to breakfasts of cheese toast and cold herring in mayonnaise, lunches of cheese toast and shredded raw beets in mayonnaise, and dinners of pizza topped with boiled potatoes and mayonnaise, or spaghetti noodles with peas and mayonnaise³².

Sometimes, on particularly fortunate days, we’d have non-mayonnaise-based dishes like “golubtzi,” cabbage leaves stuffed with hamburger and onions and baked with a rich, tangy sauce of sour cream. Or tasty homemade “pelmeny,” delightful little doughy pockets stuffed with savory spiced meat – not at all like the kind in the blue and white cardboard boxes you found in the stores.

Whatever else she was, Valentina was an outstanding cook, and in the three weeks I spent with this family I actually gained weight, something difficult to do in post-collapse Russia but not impossible if you really focused. And boy, did I focus. When finally given access to properly prepared, hot food, I lost all sense of propriety. Like a turkey, I would eat until the food in front of me ran out, was taken away by someone else, or I died.

The family would watch me consume piece after piece of cheese toast and glass after glass of whole milk, gaping at my gluttonous display as only people who’ve never been to the Golden Corral on all-you-can-eat-fried-shrimp night ever could. I tried to stop, honestly. Dimly I was aware that I was consuming huge quantities of this family’s resources while contributing absolutely nothing to my upkeep, but hunger and relief and the need to comfort myself with massive doses of carbohydrates always won out. Now that I’m grown, and home, and capable of pulling my own grocery-store-maintained weight, I look back on those weeks with the family and cringe at my obliviousness. Yes, these were not friendly people; yes I had nowhere to go and no money to offer them. But the locust-like swath I cut through their pantry at a time when the cost of food was literally rising hour by hour still makes me feel ashamed. Particularly shameful is what happened when I came home one night to find myself alone in the apartment with a box of eclairs.

I’d been out that afternoon aimlessly riding the metro while listening to the Pixies’ Tromp Le Monde on my Walkman, loitering in the smoked oysters aisle at the Irish House grocery store – anything to get some air and get out of that stifling-for-so-many-reasons apartment. Finally I’d returned to find the apartment totally empty, something that had never before happened. There was no sign of where the family had gone, or when they’d return. Overjoyed, I rushed into my room, snatched my spiral notebook, and sped into the kitchen. But my plans to sit at the dinette and write in blessed solitude evaporated as soon as I entered the room. There, in the middle of the table, caressed by wrinkled wax paper, lay 16 eclairs.

Now, on a good day in a prosperous country surrounded by vending machines and all-you-can-eat buffets, it would be nearly impossible for me to pass up an éclair³³. In Russia near the end of a bleak winter and an even bleaker social experiment, it was out of the question. I would have to have one. Not so much because I was hungry, or even wanted one so much right then, but because it was highly likely that soon I’d be killed by the police or the mafia or Valentina or by a random heat-pump explosion somewhere on the streets of Moscow. The odds were pretty good that if I didn’t eat an éclair right then, I might never, ever have one again. And that just would not do. So, in the same way that lovers cling to each other a little too long on the train platform, anticipating the distance that will soon separate them, I picked up one of the 16 eclairs and solemnly, almost prayerfully, ate it. And then, of course, I ate another one.

One éclair was no problem. Reasonable, even. Even if the family DID notice that one of the eclairs was missing, which they probably wouldn’t; well, sue me. I ate an éclair. Two eclairs…that’s pushing the bounds of good manners, certainly. But plenty of people eat two eclairs – it happens all the time! And these eclairs weren’t like big fat American eclairs. They were much smaller, about the size of a jumbo hot dog. So really, two Russian eclairs was really just like eating one American éclair. And by that logic, four Russian eclairs was really just 2 American ones according to the Russo-American pastry exchange rate. And we’ve already established that there’s nothing wrong with eating two eclairs. Right?

The only thing was, the family would definitely notice that someone had been into their eclairs. Twelve eclairs is much different than 16 eclairs. No matter how artfully I tried to arrange them, there was no hiding the fact that 4 eclairs just were not there. I would have to do something, now. If the family, which had never been to America and thus had no notion of relative éclair sizes, were to come home right now, they would see only that I had eaten 4 of their cherished eclairs in one sitting.

But what could I do? I couldn’t throw them away. Even ignoring the fact that they’d find the evidence in the trash, I could not bring myself to discard perfectly good eclairs in such an environment of want and privation. Could I hide them? Stash them away somewhere and eat them later? I looked around the kitchen like a cornered weasel. No, that was no good. If Valentina found them stuffed in my suitcase or coat pocket, it’d be worse for me than owning up to eating them, which I also knew I was not about to do. My only recourse, obviously, was to eat every last one of those 16 eclairs and hide the wax paper in the sock I was wearing. And so that’s exactly what I did. I sat in the kitchen, hunched in my chair, and robotically inserted the 14 remaining eclairs into my mouth. Upper lip sweating as I grimly chewed, ears straining for the sound of the key in the door, feeling sick and filthy and not at all happy, I finished the eclairs and went into the bathroom. “Eclairs, you say?” I stared at my face in the mirror, widening my eyes and shaking my head, “How strange! No, I haven’t seen them anywhere.”

I tried hard to blame them as I lay curled on Lyosha’s bed, clutching my stomach. It’s not your fault, I told myself. Who would be so irresponsible as to leave a box of eclairs out in the middle of the dinette, in plain view, during the collapse of society? That’s just asking for trouble. But then a smaller voice spoke up in my head, a voice that I didn’t want to hear because it sounded too much like my conscience. “Today it’s eclairs,” the voice sneered. “Tomorrow it’ll be the last seat on the lifeboat; the only parachute. Face it, Robin, you’re not the person you hoped you’d be when the chips are down. If you’re capable of depriving this entire family of a rare, hard-won treat just because you really like eclairs and haven’t had one in a while, what else are you capable of? If you’ll sell your soul for a pastry, what else will you do?”

Very shortly, I would find out.

NOTES

32. What, no cheese toast? Continue reading post.

33. Or a deviled egg, just so you know. Continue reading post.

21. Detente

2009-08-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

And then all of the sudden, magically, mysteriously, things got better.

I don’t know why. Was it pity? I can picture the family gathered around the kitchen table at breakfast while I slogged through the city looking for a present for their son. “Yes, she’s rather dense,” they’d all agree, “but what do you expect? She comes from a place where no one knows how to operate a washing machine. Where people will sell you a “bushel” of grain that’s only 27 kilograms instead of the 27.2155422 kilograms it should properly be.” The family would nod sympathetically and then Valentina would pipe up. “And you know,” she’d say, “Chickens in America have no bones!” The family would collectively imagine a verdant green pasture strewn with limp poultry, the chickens dragging themselves towards the henhouse by their beaks, unable to get in out of the rain. “No wonder,” they’d say, “America sounds like a nightmare.”

Or maybe it was fear. Valentina would have told the rest of the family about my assault on the chicken the night before; would have described the crazed look in my eye and my skill with a Pepsi bottle. “She’s a loose cannon,” I can picture her whispering, “We need to treat her as delicately as possible.”

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because they realized that I, like them, was a person with a past and a history and a family.

My fourth afternoon with the family, I arrived home from shopping for Lyosha to find Anna out with friends and Valentina and Alexander sitting at the dinette, eating dinner. Having eaten absolutely nothing all day, I braved going into the kitchen while the family was there and opened the refrigerator, looking for the chicken I’d made the night before. “We ate it already,” said Valentina, “But there’s some cheese toast here if you’d like it.” I sat down at the dinette with them, trying to make myself as small as possible, and began devouring the leftover toast.

The couple sat in silence for a while, and then, surprisingly, Alexander asked me the first real question any of them had asked since my arrival. “Where in America are you from?”

What’s this? I was instantly suspicious. These people want to know even the most basic and rudimentary information about the stranger who’s been living under their roof for the past four days? How can this be? Obviously, they believed that I was hatched, or grown in some kind of tube. So why bother? But still, here it was. An opportunity.

“Um…Jacksonville,” I said, and when they stared at me blankly, “In Florida.” There was no response, so I hurried on. “What about you?” I asked Alexander.

“Sochi,” replied Alexander. “It’s a resort city on the Black Sea.”

“Oh,” I said. “That sounds nice.”

“It was,” said Alexander, somewhat bitterly, “But no one goes there anymore because soon there will be a war.”

“Hmmm,” I quickly tried to change the subject, “What is Sochi close to?” To my surprise, Valentina disappeared and then returned clutching a large atlas. The two of them sat knee to knee with me and flipped through the atlas, eventually pointing to Alexander’s home city.

“And now, you will show us your city,” said Valentina. I thumbed through the atlas to the map of America, which until recently had been for me the starting point for any exploration, the center of the world. There was Jacksonville, a place I hated and couldn’t wait to leave, nestled in the curve of the state’s northeast border. Suddenly, surprisingly overwhelmed by homesickness, I scrutinized the map, as if squinting hard enough at it would reveal the house I grew up in, my mother and stepfather standing in the yard, waving up at me.

Valentina flipped the atlas closed and stood up. “I’m going to watch my show,” she said to me, coldly, “Why don’t you come.”

I followed Valentina into the living room, which was also the couple’s bedroom, and sat down at the far end of the couch. Valentina turned on the set and soon the room echoed with the schmaltzy strains of the theme of the most popular show in Moscow: a Mexican soap opera called “Maya Vtoraya Mat” (literally, “my second,” or step, mother). Although I myself hated soap operas, it was impossible to avoid this one. Everybody but everybody watched it unceasingly and devotedly. At the show’s conclusion the entire city shut down, something I was familiar with from the “who shot JR?” hysteria of 1980s America.

Valentina quickly became absorbed in the action, which centered on the romantic exploits of a swarthy gentleman named Ramon and featured an inordinately high number of heavily made-up women falling down stairs. As I said, I dislike soap operas, but if there’s one thing I DO love it’s heavily made-up women falling down stairs, and so soon I too was watching with interest. After a while, I noticed that each time Ramon would gaze piercingly at the maid, pour a glass of champagne for the naïve, recent convent initiate, or pull a dagger from his billowy satin shirt, Valentina would cluck disapprovingly and whisper, “Akh, Ramon…”

Here, I decided, was the way to ingratiate myself with this family and guarantee that there would be no more Chicken Incidents. Each time Valentina muttered something about Ramon, I resolved, I too would castigate him. Valentina would see that we were kindred spirits, on the same page. Fortunately, I’d had many complete strangers yell disparaging comments at me while in Moscow, so I had lots of phrases to try.

“Oh, bednaya jeezin!” (“Oh, terrible life!”) I moaned, as the heroine’s beneficent husband met his end in a fiery collision.

“Da!” agreed Valentina, looking at me sideways from her seat on the couch.

“Kak chornoy den!” (“What a black day!”) I emoted, as the town doctor opened the letter that would irrevocably change everything. “Soglasno, soglasno,” confirmed Valentina, leaning forward and twining her fingers.

“Kashmor!” I cried, as yet another heavily made-up woman hurled herself down a grand, curving staircase. (At that time I had no idea what this word meant, but people on the metro said it to me all the time, generally while staring at my LL Bean hunting boots, so I assumed it was not complimentary. And indeed, when I took the time to look the word up in my Katzner’s dictionary, I found that I was right. “Nightmare,” that’s what the word meant.)

An hour later the credits rolled and Valentina sat back on the couch, satisfied. I immediately stood up to leave, not wanting to jeopardize the small strides I’d made in connecting with this family. I’d made it almost to the door of the living room when Valentina spoke. “Robin,” she said to me in a voice that was stern but had an undercurrent of…what was that? Hope? Loneliness?

I turned and looked at her, waiting. “It comes on again tomorrow at 7:00.”

I nodded, and went to get ready for bed.

20. Room and Board

2009-08-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

As much as I wanted to, I could not blame Lyosha’s parents for disliking me. Who is this girl we’ve been saddled with, they must have asked themselves. This loud American girl who mangles our mother tongue and laughs when nothing’s funny? Who brought with her to our house a plastic tube of frozen tea and a giant bag of condoms? Who was completely unknown to us and to our son (who is now, incidentally, in jail) only three weeks ago? As pathologically unfriendly as these two middle-aged Russians were, I had to empathize with them. I wouldn’t have liked me either. Although I knew I was a good person deep down and that nearly all of my ulterior motives revolved around experiencing something new rather than taking advantage of someone, the evidence against me in this case was pretty damning.

When Lyosha’s father Alexander showed up unexpectedly at our old apartment, muddying the foyer that I had just finished scrubbing, he said not a word to me as he carried plastic bags of his son’s dress shirts down to his car. I was desperate to ask him about Lyosha. Surely the reason he’d come was because somehow, from somewhere, Lyosha had called him. But it wasn’t until we were both in the car, me in the backseat surrounded by pillows and suitcases and bags of food, that he finally spoke. He muttered something at the windshield of the car, not moving his head or looking at me in the rearview mirror. But this was an opening, perhaps, a topic that an awkward first conversation and thus a modicum of understanding might be built around. “I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward eagerly, “I didn’t hear you.”

“I SAID,” repeated Alexander in a loud, exasperated voice, “I hope you and Lyosha are using birth control, because we DO NOT want any American grandchildren.”

*

That had been 4 days ago, and things had improved not at all since then. The members of the family that lived in the apartment – Lyosha’s mom and dad and Anna, his 16-year-old sister, seemed to barely tolerate my presence in the large apartment. I would lie in Lyosha’s old room on my bed -- a board his mother had set up on two sawhorses -- and listen while the family had breakfast together. Glasses would clink and the smell of toast would taunt me with memories of meals with my own family. Finally, Anna would leave for her German classes at the university, and Lyosha’s mom would depart for her job cooking food at a state cafeteria. I would wait a while before slinking out of Lyosha’s room and into the kitchen where Alexander sat, unemployed, drinking tea and smoking and staring straight ahead. Trying not to disturb the air around me lest Alexander notice me and become angry, I’d quietly pour a cup of tea from the kettle that was always on, and would carefully sit down at the small dinette across from Alexander to begin another day of writing and fretting.

Yesterday morning, I’d come out and taken my place at the table. Alexander and I had been sitting there in complete silence for about 15 minutes when I decided to light a cigarette. Alexander, who was right then smoking his own cigarette, snarled at me. “No smoking!” he hollered, slamming his fist down on the table, “Valentina Fedorovna does not approve!”

“Who is Valentina Fedorovna?” I asked him, confused. “An author?”

I had had many Russians – some of them literally strangers – buttonhole me and talk earnestly to me about the tenants espoused by one or another healer, mystic, channeler, natural foods advocate, past-life reader, UFO contactor, supplement peddler, nationalist apocalyptic cult leader, and/or yoga teacher. The failure of communism, it seemed, had plunged Russian society into a kind of existential darkness. People stumbled around in confusion, squinting at all manner of flickering shadows and strange reflections, hoping to find some way to orient themselves. Perhaps this Valentina Fedorovna, writer of sensationalist treatises on the evils of hot-water baths, psychic vampirism, and smoking, had given Alexander something to believe in now that everything else -- from his national ethos to his job as a photographer -- had evaporated.

“An author? An AUTHOR?!?!” Alexander was nearly apoplectic with rage as he stared at me, eyes bulging. “No, you idiot. Valentina Fedorovna is not ‘an author.’ Valentina Fedorovna is LYOSHA’S MOTHER. And she believes that only prostitutes smoke. So put out your cigarette!”

Every one of my exchanges with this family had resulted in the same dismal outcome: me humiliated, bewildered, and angry, and them further convinced of my impenetrable stupidity. Take, for example, what happened at 5 am on my second morning there.

“Girl!” shouts Lyosha’s dad, throwing open the door to my room, “Girl! How many kilograms in a bushel?”

I scramble off the plywood board and onto my feet, desperately trying to remember this seemingly basic piece of information. “Uh…” I begin, but Alexander cuts me off.

“What’s the matter?” he sneers, “Didn’t they teach you any math in America?”

Or there was yesterday, when I tried to build some goodwill by doing the family’s laundry. I stuff the clothes in the laundromat-style appliance, astounded by the idea that this family is well-off enough to actually have their own machine³¹. I stand, hypnotized by the whirring and banging washer, until the light indicating it is operating goes off. Then, unfortunately just as sister Anna rounds the corner into the hallway, I make the idiotic decision to open the door.

“NO!” shrieks a panicked Anna as I open the small glass door on the front of the machine and, I don’t know, probably 150 gallons of water gush out. There is so much water coming out of such a small hole that the washing machine is projectile vomiting, Linda Blair-like -- spraying freezing cold water and sopping wet clothes all over the opposite wall of the hallway, the parquet floor, and Anna and me.

We stand there, soaked and stunned as the geyser of laundry subsides, and then Anna begins to tremble with anger. “WHY did you open the door?” she chokes, running her rapidly pruning fingertips through her sodden hair, “What were you thinking?”

“I thought, I thought,” I stammer, “I thought it was done!”

“It was!” yells Anna, reaching around behind the machine and producing a long yellow hose, one end of which is attached to the washer, “You’re supposed to drain it in the bathtub! What is WRONG with you? Don’t they have WASHING MACHINES in America?”

And then there was yesterday night, when something happened that will, hereafter, always be known as “The Chicken Incident.”

It’s midnight, and I am curled up on the plywood board with Norris, the family’s giant standard poodle. Suddenly, the door bangs open and I awake to the sight of a hulking silhouette blocking the light from the hallway. I shade my eyes as the shadow draws near, wincing as it raises its arm threateningly. The hand attached to this arm is clutching something that hangs, dead and limp, dripping on the floor.

“Robin,” says Valentina Fedorovna in a flat, murderous tone, “Get up and cook this chicken. Get up, RIGHT NOW.”

I stumble out of bed and follow Valentina, confused, into the kitchen. She plops the chicken on the counter next to the sink, and then sits down at the dinette to wait. I look at the chicken, which Lyosha had purchased for me back in the halcyon days of singing and whiskey and sleeping on an actual bed. This is not like any chicken I have ever seen, however. For one thing, it is a whole bird, with stubs where its head and feet used to go. It’s encased in thick, fatty skin as well, and I hazard a guess that underneath this skin there probably lie bones, and also, ominously, innards.

It’s not that I’ve never cooked chicken before. Oh no. I’m a chicken cooker from way back. It’s just that my chicken experience up to this point has involved removing a Styrofoam tray from the refrigerator, peeling back the plastic wrap, and stir-frying the breast meat “tenders” so conveniently prepackaged for me by the processing plant. Never in a million years would I have considered buying an entire chicken – that’s crazy talk! I am not a roaster or a baker, I cringe at the thought of dark meat, and the idea of sticking my hand up a bird’s butt in order to yank out its entrails had always seemed charmingly medieval, but certainly not something I myself would ever participate in.

But now here it is, midnight, and I’m standing in the cramped kitchen in my pajamas looking from the bird on the counter to Valentina, absorbed in a tabloid newspaper at the table. There is no exit. I will have to cook this chicken.

I turn my head to the side and, averting my eyes, pull off the bird’s rubbery skin. That went better than I’d hoped, so I take courage and look directly at the chicken. The skin of its breast gleams dully in the wan light from the stove hood. I decide that I will use the large knife lying on the counter to cut through the middle of the chicken and then, when it is cleaved in two, I will do something (simmer? Flambé?) to the two breast halves. I stick the knife right where the chicken’s heart must once have hammered and am dismayed when after sinking a ¼ of an inch it comes to rest against bone. I try again, inserting the knife on the other side and down slightly, near the chicken’s appendix. No luck. Hoping that Valentina will not look up from her paper, I poke the chicken again and again, looking for a way to gain entry. I tell myself that I am not actually stabbing the chicken per se, merely tenderizing it, but as my frustration and anxiety grow so does the arc of my arm until I am not just stabbing this chicken but murdering it. I’m holding the knife handle in my fist now, thinking nothing, sweating, blindly plunging the blade into the naked chicken as it helplessly shields itself behind the shower curtain. No, wait. Get a hold of yourself.

Feeling something like shame, I discard the knife and decide to use my hands. I poke my fingers into the concave area where the chicken’s neck ends and pull as hard as I can. The tiny bones near the top of the chicken splinter, but the bird stays resolutely in one piece. Grunting with effort and resisting the urge to prop my foot against the counter to get more leverage, I grasp the slippery bird anywhere my fingers can gain purchase, pulling and mauling. I’m growing increasingly desperate; terrified by the certain knowledge that soon Valentina will look up from her seat at the table and see what I am doing. If this happens, I know, she will punish me. She’ll hang the bird around my neck and make me sit outside where the neighbors can see me; a chicken stockade.

And so, frantic now, I look around the kitchen for some blunt instrument I can use as a cudgel. A rolling pin? A cast-iron skillet? Ah, there it is: a Pepsi bottle! Without thinking, I grab the glass bottle and begin viciously whamming the chicken with it over and over. Somewhere I realize that I have lost all reason, that I gave up trying to prepare this chicken long ago and am now basically just assaulting it, but I can’t stop. The thick bottom of the Pepsi bottle thuds against the bird’s flesh and I’m grunting with the effort of my blows. Behind me there is an alarmed rustle of newspaper and then Valentina is standing next to me at the counter, horrified.

“What are you doing? What are you doing?” she yells at me as I deliver one last mighty hammer and the chicken gives up the ghost and splits in two.

“Agh!” I yell, beside myself, “Bones!”

“Yes!” says Valentina, who is visibly frightened, “Chickens have bones!”

“Not in America!” I yell back. “American chickens don’t have bones!”

Finally, two hours after I started, I am left with a stringy pile of meat big enough to feed a very small child. Exhausted, I sauté the scraps with sour cream and paprika, hoping the sauce will cover the evidence of my crime. Valentina surveys my creation and nods approvingly. “Fine,” she says, “You may go to bed now.” I totter off to my board and fall into a fitful sleep, dreaming of poultry chasing me with Pepsi bottles.

The next morning I leave before the rest of the family wakes up and spend the entire day out on the street looking for Lyosha’s birthday present. On the way back from Christian Dior, fountain pen tucked deep in my coat pocket, I formulate a plan. I can’t go back to that house, I tell myself. Anyplace is better than there. So I’ll go back to my old apartment, I decide. Surely they have by now fixed the window that Lyosha broke the night we went dancing. I’ll go back there, I decide, and in full view of the dejournaya and everyone I’ll break it again. Then I’ll sit in the lobby and wait for the police to come. They’ll take me to jail, a place blessedly free of washing machines and chickens, a place where no one is surprised when a woman smokes. It won’t be so bad, I tell myself. But of course, I don’t do this. Instead I board the metro and go back to the prison I know; the prison of family and home.

NOTES

31. Actually, to be honest, the chance to wash clothes in an actual washing machine instead of the bathtub, which was how I’d been doing laundry, was so enticing I could not resist it. The zesty tang of the caked Polish laundry detergent, the thrill of mashing the chunky plastic button marked “kholodno” (cold), the anticipation of the rinse and then the spin – honestly, the excitement was almost too much to bear. Continue reading post.

19. Pens, Pie Crusts, and Pantyhose

2009-08-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

I shifted in my boots, craning my neck over the snow-dusted shoulders of the people in front of me. The line was long, so long that it wrapped around the building and obscured what it led to. I thought about giving up and going somewhere else, but I reasoned that if the line was this long the thing at the end of it had to be good.

Since moving in with Lyosha’s parents 4 days earlier I’d spent most of my time wandering the slushy streets of the city, trying to find reasons to stay out of the house. It wasn’t easy. It’s one thing to lurk around in Gainesville, Florida, my most recent American address. Maybe stop in for a slice at Leonardo’s, or plant myself in the grass out front of the library and watch the krishnas feed people their daily vegetarian lunch. American towns, especially American college towns, are full of diversions. Moscow in early March, not so much.

My treks through the dirty and downtrodden city were not completely without purpose, however. I was on a kind of mission, actually, one that I clung to but which was proving awfully hard to accomplish. I was looking for a birthday present for Lyosha, who would turn 21 that Saturday. I felt a certain amount of anxiety about buying this gift. For one thing, working at the bar and at the computer company Lyosha made a lot more money than I did (about $600 US dollars per week compared to, uh, zero). If he wanted something, he could afford to buy it himself, and he usually did. For another thing, Lyosha’s taste ran towards the pricey. Sick of living in a society where a shipment of mismatched orthopedic shoes from Czechoslovakia was cause for wild celebration, Lyosha threw himself into the acquisition of luxury as soon as he secured a steady income. This was a difference between us that both of us noticed and puzzled over. Whereas I was content to wear the same pair of jeans for days at a time and rarely was interested in buying anything other than food, Lyosha bought suits designed by people whose names I couldn’t pronounce and spent a lot of time thinking about shoes.

I chalked this up to novelty. In the Soviet Union, which was notorious for the poor quality and plain old absence of consumer goods, nobody had much choice of what to buy. You bought what was available and were thankful for it. In America, where “going shopping” is actually an acceptable leisure activity and consumer spending (that is, “buying stuff”) makes up a whopping 70% of the GDP²⁹, it’s the complete opposite. If I had had the money and the inclination, I as an American could have bought a diamond-encrusted platinum toilet. When Russians (at least those who could afford it) finally got access to actual consumer goods, they went wild in the same way American college students do when they visit Amsterdam and realize that pot really and truly is legal there.³⁰

In contrast, because I’d grown up surrounded by a surfeit of consumer goods, I tended towards the opposite response. “Yeah, big deal, stuff,” I thought, as only one who never wanted for stuff ever could. “What’s all the carrying on?” Lyosha was the one who most often commented on this difference between us. “I don’t understand you,” he would say, brow wrinkling with worry. “You are from America, and yet you dress like…” At this point our conversation would usually devolve into singing, or smooching, or the drinking of more whiskey (or all three if it was a particularly good night).

So anyway, here I was, standing in this line, waiting to see what would be at the end of it. I was certain it’d be something good. I had spent hours roaming the kiosks in front of metro stations, trying to convince myself that what Lyosha really wanted was a flowered vinyl shower cap or a sparkly purple vibrator that played Mariah Carey songs. I wandered the tourist strip at the Arbat, fingering the lacquered boxes and military watches and rejecting anything that caught my eye. Any item I was interested in, I was interested in precisely because of its Russian-ness. But that was the last thing my Lyosha wanted, I knew. I pictured the stares and smirks of Olga and Julia, light glinting off their razor-sharp cheekbones, as Lyosha opened the luridly painted Yeltsin-Stalin nesting doll I’d purchased for him. This would never do. I’d have to find something else.

Finally, in desperation, I had gone to the one ritzy store in town. Almost overnight, like a glossy white mushroom after a hard rain, a Christian Dior store had sprouted on the first floor of GUM (Russia’s only shopping mall). I along with everyone else in town had marveled at the optimism of the store’s backers. Christian Dior? In Moscow? Surely the number of middle-aged women and impoverished girlfriends standing in inscrutable lines was greater than the number of upwardly mobile Lyoshas in this city? But maybe not. I’d gone in the store in my boots and filthy coat, attracting derisive stares from the flawless staff and resisting the urge to holler “But I’m an AMERICAN!” I’d waded through monogrammed underwear and engraved baby rattles and located something I knew Lyosha would want: a sleek and well-balanced fountain pen. I could picture Lyosha at his office, surrounded by British ex-pats, pulling out his finely crafted pen and signing his name with a proud flourish. I knew this pen would be more to Lyosha than just something to write with. It would say to his co-workers, look, I am one of you. I have a fine pen, and what do you have? But $120? I couldn’t afford that; there was no way. Feeling like the protagonist in an O. Henry story, I left the store and trudged aimlessly through the narrow alleys of Kitai-Gorod (Chinatown) that bordered Red Square.

And suddenly there it was. The line. I’d been in Moscow for only 2 months but already I knew what every other resident there knew: if you see a long line, stand in it. It doesn’t matter what’s at the end of it. Oranges from Georgia? Lipstick from Poland? In the peculiar logic of this city, if someone else wants it, it must be worth having. So I, like my stalwart, alert, venal, exhausted countrymen, took my place in the endless line.

After more than an hour, I crowded to the front with a clutch of Muscovites who’d been waiting with me. We clustered around the old man at his upended cardboard box, watching him demonstrate the wares he had for sale. I slid my eyes to the side, looking at the housewives and businessmen standing next to me, trying to ascertain whether they knew what it was they were seeing. The Russians stood, amazed, looking at the shiny object the salesman held in his palm. As for me, I had seen this tool before in antique shops back home. At the end of a small wooden handle was a dimpled metal wheel that rolled when you pushed it across something. It looked like a tiny pizza cutter, but I knew that its intended use was decorating pie crusts. The man selling it today, however, was using it to tear decorative lines in pantyhose. He demonstrated on a section of nylons he’d pulled tight over the top of a paper cup.

“Oooh,” said the crowd as the small wheel pricked at the fabric, ripping a series of small holes. The people gathered there had faith that one day a line would lead to pantyhose so they’d have something to artfully ruin, and thus they bought eagerly, thrusting rubles at the man faster than he could pocket them. I turned away, resigned, and headed back towards Christian Dior.

NOTES

29. And that, incidentally, is why if people tell you that “the recession is over!” you should not believe them. More than half of our economic activity in this country is not making things to sell, but buying other people’s (mainly imported) stuff. And as long as people keep losing their jobs and homes, ask yourself, where are they getting the money to buy this stuff? Where are they getting the money to prop up 70% of our GDP? Continue reading post.

30. Interestingly, I learned in my public health classes at UGA that it is recent immigrants to the US who often practice the most harmful health behaviors simply because they can. For example, I learned about the decreasing rate of breast feeding among Hispanics thanks to the widespread availability of formula in the US, something that may have been hard to find in their homelands. Likewise, many people have noted that newly arrived Mexican immigrants have much higher rates of obesity in the US than in Mexico because of the easy availability of cheap convenience food. Hell, why spend all day grinding corn for a high-fiber tortilla when you can dash down to the McDonald’s for an entire meal?

This information, which makes a lot of intuitive sense, was corroborated by a conversation I had with my grandmother, who lived through the Depression. We were discussing my burgeoning interest in gardening and canning when she snorted and said, “No canning for me! I spent half my childhood stuck in a hot kitchen with my mother, canning goddamned string beans. As long as there are canned vegetables and frozen dinners in the grocery store, that’s where I’m headed. You won’t catch me growing a garden. Gardening’s for poor folks.” Continue reading post.

18. Rude Awakenings, Part 2

2009-07-13T11:26:00.001-07:00

There wasn’t much blood on the floor, just a single glossy drop the size of a pencil’s eraser. Not much blood at all, really, but still…

I stood there looking at it, bright and somehow cheerful on the yellow linoleum of my apartment’s entryway, and that’s when I realized. This was the end of what had, for me, essentially been a vacation in a foreign country, a holiday in other people’s misery. The note-taking and detached observation were over and I was now personally, irrevocably involved. In other words, I was in serious trouble.

Only 6 hours earlier, this had seemed like one of the better nights of my life. Lyosha had burst in the door uncharacteristically early, at 1 am, and had surprised me at my perch at the kitchen table. “To hell with my job,” he yelled, “Let’s go dancing!” We leapt right then into a taxi and sped towards a stadium that had once hosted the Moscow Olympics, but now was a kaleidoscope of pastel lights and billowing clouds of machine-generated fog. Rich girls with spaghetti-strap dresses and straightened hair stood, bored, around the empty dance floor as the bass line of Joy Division’s “Transmission” thumped out a rhythm and I started to dance.

I am not necessarily a good dancer, but I am indisputably an enthusiastic one.²⁸ I love love love to dance, and I rarely got to, especially in dreary old Moscow, so the chance to cut loose to one of my favorite songs in a city where no one knew me (and thus would not be around to scoff the next day) was irresistible. I spun in my bare feet and rolled-up jeans, careening around the deserted dance floor and knocking over the empty plastic cups that were left on peripheral tables with my mass of frizzy red hair. The girls standing on the edges hugged their elbows and shielded their cigarettes, wincing away from me as, typhoon-like, I passed them. Lyosha showed up with two Jack and Cokes which he immediately deposited on a table. “You are crazy! Where are your shoes?” he yelled at me as he grabbed my waist and threw me around, laughing, “You are an embarrassment!” We were wildly excited and happy, anonymous in this silly cavernous space. We got progressively drunker and danced to every song, Lyosha bobbing and dipping as he unfurled me in an exaggerated tango. Finally, at 4:30 am, it was time to go home. We staggered out to a waiting taxi, drunk as two very drunk skunks, and several minutes later pulled up in front of our building.

That’s when things started to go spectacularly wrong. The glass door to the lobby was locked, which we expected. We knew we would have to ring the bell and wake the dejournaya, the old lady who kept tabs on the building’s entryway, and we knew she would not be pleased. We knew this not only because it was nearly 5:00 in the morning, but also because the dejournaya was never pleased, regardless of what time it was. The Russian version of the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes could show up with 1 million rubles (granted, that’d be only about $120) and a big bouquet of roses and the dejournaya would scowl and refuse to let them in. That’s because the role of the dejournaya is NOT actually to let people in, but to keep tabs on the goings-on in the building and report possible anti-Soviet activities to the authorities. The fact that there are no longer any authorities to report to; the fact that the entire country is now one big anti-Soviet activity, has only made the dejournaya more resolute in her unreasonableness. To whit: Although we rang the bell and apologized for waking her, although we courteously pointed out that it was well below zero and snowing quite hard, although we pleaded with her to please allow us entry into the apartment we were paying for, she was having none of it.

“No!” she hollered, turning her housecoat-clad back on us, “I am not letting you in! You will just have to stay out there!”

Lyosha and I looked at each other. “What are we going to do?” I asked. “We can’t stay out here. We’ll freeze!” I figured that we’d go somewhere – Serge’s, maybe – until the sun came up and we could get back in. I was gearing up to discuss our options for dealing with the situation, when suddenly Lyosha emitted a kind of strangled, enraged growl and smashed his fist through the window next to the door. I jumped back as glass sprayed everywhere and Lyosha stuck his whole arm in the window, scrabbling for the door handle. The dejournaya went completely crazy, raking her fingers down her cheeks and screaming in absolute wide-eyed terror. Lyosha threw open the door and advanced on the hysterical old lady, who had retreated, sobbing, to the cot in the small room where she lived.

“You!” yelled Lyosha, “I’ve had it with you! I’ll kill you! I swear I’ll kill you!” Lyosha showed no sign of backing down, and though in theory I agreed that dejournayas more or less deserved to have bad things happen to them, the reality of menacing an old woman was more than I could take. I ran through the lobby and grabbed Lyosha’s arm, pulling him out of the room and begging him to stop. The moment we reached the stairs, the dejournaya rallied, becoming meaner than ever. “You’ll be sorry for this!” she cried, “You’ll be sorry!”

I was never more relieved to be inside our calm, warm apartment than that night. Mending fences with the dejournaya – something we’d have to do if we were ever to be let in the building again – would be time-consuming and probably also expensive. Lyosha would have to pay for the window and apologize, both things I was sure he would do once morning came and he’d had some rest. But we’d think about these things later. Right now we were exhausted. Right now, what we needed was sleep.

An hour later I was curled under the duvet, gradually coming awake to the harsh mechanical sound of a buzzer. “What’s that?” I said to Lyosha, was also lying awake under the duvet.

“Nothing,” he whispered, sticking his fingers in my ears and pulling me close, “Go back to sleep.”

Dimly, I knew that something was happening that required attention; that whoever was ringing our door’s buzzer was not just going to go away. Someone needed to get up and address the situation. But that someone was not going to be me, not now. I wanted to ask Lyosha what was happening, what we were going to do, but I was already half asleep again. So instead I curled up more tightly under the covers and whispered to Lyosha, “Can I stay with you?”

“I think you must,” he said.

*

I’m not sure how long it was after the buzzer that they kicked the door in – it might have been 5 minutes or an hour -- I was so sound asleep that I could not tell. All I know was that suddenly there was a tremendous bang from the hallway behind us and four men exploded into the apartment. These men were not wearing any kind of uniform at all, and so I did not immediately peg them as cops or connect their presence in our house to the incident in the lobby. One of the men grabbed Lyosha out of the bed and threw him on the living room floor. Another man descended upon me, pulling at the duvet as I shrank into the corner. From behind the man I heard Lyosha yelling, “Don’t hurt her! She is my wife! It’s not her fault!” The man stopped and turned to Lyosha. I pulled the blanket over my head and closed my eyes as Lyosha cried and yelled in the hands of the men in the living room. “Don’t look, Robin,” he yelled in English, “Stay under the covers!”

Finally, the men dragged Lyosha into the entryway, preparing to take him somewhere. Where? Siberia? The bottom of the Moskva River? I rolled over on my stomach and peeked out from under the duvet. I could see the shadows the men cast on the entryway hall, but couldn’t tell who was talking, or what they were saying, or what was happening.

After a minute, Lyosha hurriedly walked in the room and began pulling on his pants. He put on his warm coat and reached in its pocket, looking down at the wad of dollars he found there. He looked scared, something I had not yet seen, and he wasn’t speaking to me. “Lyosha,” I said, sitting up in the bed with the covers around me, “What’s going on? Who are these men?”

“They are police,” he said flatly, “They are taking me to jail. Do not worry.”

“What? Wait, what?” The information that Lyosha was being arrested refused to register with me. “When will you come back?” I whined, “What should I do?”

“Stay in bed,” said Lyosha curtly, grabbing a carton of cigarettes and walking stiffly out of the room. For some reason, seeing Lyosha take the carton of cigarettes terrified me more than anything that had happened so far. Later I’d realize that he was using them for bribes, but at the time all I could think was that he’d be in jail long enough to smoke a full carton of cigarettes. This was not good at all. I had no idea what to do in a situation like this. I knew I should call someone, but who? A lawyer? His parents? Serge? And what would I say?

“Lyosha!” I yelled after him, “When will you come back?” But there was no answer. The men had already gone.

I got out of bed and shakily made a cup of tea. I sat at the kitchen table, smoking my remaining cigarettes and writing down everything that had just happened in my notebook. I felt that perhaps if I wrote it down it would become more like a story, with a tidy beginning and end, rather than a disaster that could see Lyosha in a Russian prison and me deported, or homeless, or worse. I was just finishing up when there was a timid knock on the door. I got up and nervously opened it. In the doorway stood a woman I’d never seen before. “Yes?” I said.

She was, she explained, the landlady of this apartment. She was so sorry to have to tell me this, she said, but I would have to leave. There was no way, she apologized, that I could stay here after the “scandal” of the broken window.

I was dismayed to hear this information, but was not particularly surprised. I’d assumed something like this might happen. At the end of that month, we’d have to live somewhere else. “OK,” I told the woman, “When Lyosha comes back we will find another place to live.”

“Oh no,” responded the woman, not unkindly, “You must leave now. If you are not out in 30 minutes, I will have no choice but to call the police.”

I shut the door and stood there, leaning my head against the wall of the foyer. Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to move all of my stuff, all of Lyosha’s stuff, all of the stuff – pots and pans, vases and pictures – that we had acquired together. How to do this, I wondered. And more importantly, where to move it to? I closed my eyes, trying to stay calm, trying to think. After a while, I decided to get moving. I’d carry our stuff outside and pile it by the curb. I would worry about one thing at a time. The important thing was to clear out of there as soon as possible, to make sure I wouldn’t have to talk to the police. I could worry about what to do then, then.

Resolved to get started, I opened my eyes. And that’s when I saw it, the spot of blood, its color already darkening as it dried. I stood looking at it for minutes, transfixed, my head emptying of all the thoughts and noise and chaos of the morning.

Finally I turned and walked into the kitchen to gather some things. I came back into the hallway, got down on my knees, and began scrubbing the floor.

NOTES

28. Exhibit A: Many years later, when I was in my 30s, I went out with a group of people I had met only that very evening to the pre-opening party for a very chi-chi nightclub (Karma, I believe it was called) in downtown Atlanta. By this stage in my life I was the antithesis of the kind of person who would be at a place called Karma; in fact, I hardly ever went out at all. But on this night the circumstances were similar to the ones I described above: surrounded by strangers, never going to see these people again, empty dance floor, unusual feelings of freedom and liberation – and so before I knew it I had taken off my shoes and was doing an elaborate and highly aerobic dance in the middle of the empty floor. The fancy VIPs who had been invited to this party leaned against the bar texting into their cell phones and generally ignoring everything around them, but gradually I began to notice that I was making an impression. No doubt inspired by my awesomeness, 5 people were now doing their own little self-contained dances in my vicinity. Happy as I was to have motivated these people to express themselves, I needed room to flail around, and so I danced over to another area of the floor. Annoyingly, the 5 strangers followed me, snapping their fingers and bobbing their heads. Eventually, the five people were actually surrounding me in a small circle. All of them were facing me, dancing and clapping and saying “Yeah!”

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, but, thinking about it, I realized that I’d always known it was just a matter of time before my sophisticated and funky grooves amassed a following. Who could blame these poor, rhythmically challenged people for falling under the sway of my lightening-fast footwork? My thoughts were confirmed when one of the 5, a man, leaned forward and yelled, “Are you Robin?”

OK now, this WAS kind of strange. Seriously, at this point I was 31 years old and a computer programmer. I shopped for business-casual clothes at Brooks Brothers and knew a lot about the pros and cons of granite vs. corian counter tops. It was, even I had to admit, HIGHLY unlikely that this haute couture hippie in front of me would have heard about my dancing skills. But, I told myself, stranger things have happened. It was a fact that these people were cheering me on as I danced, and it was also a fact that they somehow knew my name, so, I decided, my reputation must have preceded me. And so, “Yes! I am!” I hollered back to the man.

“Sweet!” the man yelled back, growing very excited, “That’s awesome! Can I buy some?”

I stopped dancing, right there in the middle of the floor, and squinted at the guy, who was still shuffling around happily. “What?” I yelled at him over the music.

“X, man!” yelled the guy. “You said you were rolling!” (“rolling” is a slang term for being out of your head on Ecstasy, the drug that launched the dance-centered rave culture)

“NO!” I shouted at him, “I said I was ROBIN!”

“Oh,” now the guy stopped dancing. “Sorry.”

Heh. Any embarrassment I might have felt over this misunderstanding was quickly subsumed by happiness over the fact that I apparently have so much fun dancing – and that fun is so obvious to everyone – that even stone cold sober I appear to be tripping on Ecstasy. Wow, I realized, as the hippies slunk off in disappointment and another song started, I really DO like to dance.

Exhibit B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WjmzPdqXrI

Continue reading post.

17. Rude Awakenings, Part 1

2009-06-20T05:57:00.000-07:00

In my dream, I was leading four confused Japanese tourists through the streets of Moscow, pointing things out and explaining them. I was happy to be a tour guide and excited to show my clients around, but I was also concerned. Owww, I thought, my stomach hurts. Would the Japanese tourists be offended if I ducked into the bathroom for just…a…second? I jumped out of bed before my eyes were even open and made it to the bathroom just in time. I was not happy about throwing up yet again, but compared to the Cheese Incident this bout of nausea seemed mild. Probably just something not agreeing with me. That’s all. I stumbled back to bed, still not fully awake, and fell asleep again immediately.

I’m not sure what made me sick. I’d had a low-key day and a quiet night at home. I’d made some soup and then, partly out of boredom and partly out of curiosity, decided to turn on the TV for the first time. I sat on the couch bed and watched a Russian-made documentary about, surprisingly, Henry Ford. Although I couldn’t understand everything the narrator was saying, his effusive tone suggested that this was a complimentary look at the great American businessman and industrialist, and this confused me. The corpse of Communism is barely even cold, Russian people, and now you’re making eyes at one of the mack daddies of Western capitalism? Have you no shame at all?

I looked at the black and white footage of factories and Model-Ts and felt a strange, in-between kind of feeling. Would the Russians watching this program associate the US with industry and invention thanks to the content of the film, or would the show’s grainy home movies make us look somehow quaint and archaic? By focusing on such an old accomplishment in America’s history, were the show’s producers implicitly suggesting we’d done nothing noteworthy since? Kind of like the shows about Russia I used to see towards the end of the cold war, back in the ‘80s. If the writers were feeling generous, before they got down to the business of enumerating all the ways Russians were going to kill us they’d throw in a clip or two about how brave the Russians were during WWII, and how Sputnik proved some smart people must have lived there. I remember watching these films and wondering what happened. How’d Russians go from kicking Nazi butt and putting the first man in space to focusing all their time and energy on destroying us? The Henry Ford documentary offered no clues, only more questions.

I’d been asleep for less than an hour when the front door of the apartment banged open and Lyosha charged in. “Robin, Robin, get up!” He pulled my arm and I groaned, shielding my eyes from the overhead light and looking at the clock on the television. It was 3:30 in the morning.

“Get up, Robin, hurry! We’ve got to go over to Serge and Anna’s house. Come on, they’re waiting downstairs to drive us.”

“What? No, Lyosha, I can’t go anywhere. What are you talking about? It’s the middle of the night. I’m sick…I just threw up…” I rolled over on my side and pulled the covers up to my neck. If Lyosha wanted to hang out with Serge at 3:30 am on a Wednesday, that was fine with me. I’d just stay here.

“Absolutely not,” said Lyosha, rolling me over and preparing to pick me up off of the couch. “It’s Maslenitsa, a major holiday. You have to be there. You have to come with me. Serge’s whole family is expecting you.”

Maslenitsa? I had no idea what this holiday was – had never in all my studies of Russia and Russian religion ever even read the word. No one the previous day had said anything about it; I’d overheard no talk about Maslenitsa plans while riding the metro, had seen no “Happy Maslenitsa!” banners hanging in the streets. I tried to figure out based on the name of the holiday what it might be celebrating or commemorating, and all I could come up with was…butter? This was a holiday in honor of butter? Surely that can’t be right. I like butter as much as the next person, but I’m not sure I’d devote a whole day to it. How major could a holiday based on butter really be?

I tried several times to explain to Lyosha about throwing up and not feeling well and not caring all that much about butter, but he was having none of it. I had never seen him like this. Usually he was very solicitous towards me, and concerned about my well-being and comfort. But this time he simply crossed his arms and shook his head. “I don’t care,” he told me. “This is important. You have to come.” And so, protesting the entire way, I put my trench coat on over my pajamas and stumbled down the stairs to the waiting car.

An hour later, I sat propped in Serge’s mother’s kitchen, still buttoned up in my coat. I leaned my back against the wall next to the stove and watched Serge’s mom cook the rich little pancakes that Russians call bliny. Serge, Anna, and Lyosha sat at the table with me. “So,” I said to Serge, “This is Maslenitsa. What are we supposed to do?”

“You eat, you eat!” cried Serge’s mom, plunking a steaming plate of pancakes down in the middle of the table. Hmmm, I thought, calculating. An hour and a half ago I had been barfing and dreaming about the Japanese. How could I now be expected to wolf down a bunch of pancakes? I sincerely did not want to insult these nice people by refusing their food, but neither did I want to throw their food up all over them the way I had done at Nadejda Alexandrovna’s house. But then on the other hand, perhaps pancakes would be ok. They were bland and small, and seemed relatively safe. Maybe I could slowly eat one or even two. Maybe things would be all right.

“Here we are!” sang Serge’s mother, returning to the table with an array of plates balanced along her arms like an IHOP waitress. She sat the plates down on the table and my hopes evaporated. A glop of pickled herring in mayonnaise, ribbons of raw, fragrant salmon. Thick rings of pungent purple onions and little gravel-like piles of capers. And of course, the omnipresent dish of rich, whole-milk smetana, or Russian sour cream. This was before I lived in Miami Beach and ate at Rascal House every time I got the chance. I had never seen food like this before and even in the best of times would have had no idea what to do with it. In the state I was in on this morning, I was terrified. I’d be calling Ralph on the porcelain telephone in no time with a spread like this.

“Here!” said Serge, helpfully, “Let me prepare you a pancake!” He loaded the small circle with raw salmon, onions, and fresh dill, folded it into a kind of taco, and handed it to me. I ate it. Then I ate the next one he handed me, with the capers and herring. Then the one after that, with the raspberry preserves and sour cream. And the caviar and butter. And the sliced white cheese and cucumber. And on and on and on until I forgot about throwing up and threw myself instead into eating any and everything that was handed to me. For a while I was just like one of them, gathered at the table eating pancakes with a quiet intensity that no Thanksgiving dinner I’ve attended has ever matched.

Finally, with a sigh that sounded almost relieved, Serge leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “Well,” he said, “That’s that.” He looked at me and at his other friends at the table and smiled. It was 7:30 in the morning.

“That’s it?” I asked, looking around in confusion at my tablemates. “Aren’t we supposed to go to church or something? Or open presents? Or anything?“

“Robin’s right!” yelled Serge, jumping out of his chair and throwing open a cabinet. “Now we must drink!” A collective cheer went up from the group and we proceeded to sit in the kitchen for several more hours, until way past noon, drinking bottles of vodka with Serge’s elderly mother, sharing ribald toasts and jokes, and smoking like chimneys.

At one point many, many drinks into our conversation, I mentioned that although I was in favor of any holiday that encouraged drinking vodka at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning, I still had no idea what we were celebrating, or why. As Serge launched into his explanation of the holiday, I fell in love once and for all with Russia.

It turns out that Maslenitsa, or “Butter Week,” is not just a single holiday, oh no, but an entire SEVEN DAYS of pancake-themed madness. The week is ostensibly meant to celebrate the end of winter, but what pancakes have to do with spring is anybody’s guess. And what the events Serge described have to do with anything at all, I am still not sure. ²⁶

The week of Maslenitsa kicks off with Pancake Day, a day entirely devoted to eating as many bliny with as many toppings as possible. Next comes Mother-in-Law Day, a day where sons-in-law visit their wives’ mothers, eat pancakes, and pretend to get along. There is a brief and violent break in the pancake action the next day, which is called Sledding Day. On this day, the entire town tramps out to the local snowy hill to help young singles choose mates based on their sledding prowess. Not surprisingly, this day is also sometimes called Fist-Fight Day. Seriously. After sledding day, there comes Son-in-Law Day, when mothers-in-law visit their daughters’ husbands, eat pancakes, and pretend to get along. Then comes the day that I was most excited about: I’m So Damn Guilty Day. This is a day when complete strangers come up to each other on the street and confess their deepest, darkest secrets. As Serge explained this day to me, I made a mental note to find another spiral notebook. Finally, there is Scarecrow Day, when a straw effigy that Serge said “represents the Virgin Mary” is dragged through the streets, pelted with snowballs by the locals, and then set on fire. ²⁷

Well. Serge finished his description, which was relayed to me in basically one long sentence, and looked at the clock on the kitchen counter. “Boje moy!” he said, “We’ve got to get going!”

The others in the kitchen jumped up and began bustling around. “Wait!” I said to them, “Going? Where are we going?”

“Over to Anna’s parents’ to eat pancakes with her family,” responded Serge.

I stood up, embarrassed. This whole time I had been sitting with my trenchcoat buttoned up to my neck, but now I unbuttoned it, revealing to my hosts the bright blue Hello Kitty pajamas I’d been wearing when Lyosha dragged me out of bed all those hours ago. “I don’t think I can go,” I said sheepishly. “I’m wearing my pajamas.”

There was a small pause in the activity as Serge and his family studied me, thinking. Then Anna leaned in to me, nearly toppling us both over as she draped herself on me for a drunken hug. “Oh Robin,” she cried, “No one will care. It’s Maslenitsa!”

NOTES

26. In fact, until the writing of this entry prompted me to do a little research, I was convinced that my notes about this holiday were the wholly fabricated results of a vodka-induced delirium. I was fairly sure that Serge actually DID say all those things I ended up writing down, but…nahhhh. Turns out that although the details Serge gave me differ slightly from the information available on the internet, Maslenitsa really is the crazy mixed up pancake extravaganza Serge described. This makes me feel a lot better, both about my memory and about Serge. The thought that he’d make something like this up always troubled me slightly. Continue reading post.

27. I find it curious that this was the only mention of anything religious in a week of festivities that are obviously based on some kind of pagan understanding of the world. The gorging on food, displays of strength and skill, and the burning of the effigy all have lots of counterparts in other pre-Christian holidays. And in fact, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I didn’t recognize until RIGHT NOW that Maslenitsa is the Russian equivalent of Mardi Gras. Duh. It’s the week before Lent, you big dummy, THAT’S why everyone’s eating everything they can, drinking like fish, and getting in fist fights with their mothers in law. In my defense, though, the Soviets apparently were quite successful in stamping out the holiday week, so successful that the pancakes of Maslenitsa were virtually forgotten for nearly 85 years. In the first years after the fall of communism, celebrating the holiday was less a way to mark holy days, and more a way to assert independence from that hated regime. Apparently, Maslenitsa is now once again a major holiday in Russia, and both the pre-Christian and Orthodox aspects of the week are recognized. But back in 1993, the holiday was completely secularized for most Russians. Although I asked many people about the origin of the events, or what they were supposed to mean or do, no one could tell me. “I don’t know,” they’d shrug, “We just eat pancakes.”

Stuff like this fascinates me – the meaning behind rituals and the societal factors that cause the rituals to either recede in importance or come to the fore. For instance, until the start of the latest Iraq war, most Americans thought Memorial Day was the holiday where everyone buys heavily discounted mattresses. Now, though, we stand around our barbeque grills with people who have lost limbs or children, and we remember the day’s original meaning. Continue reading post.

16. Tea for One

2009-06-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

Pretty, petite Olga uncrossed her booted legs and reached down into the plastic shopping bag she’d brought with her. Russian burbled from her mouth, vowels and consonants sparkling and foaming as she drew a newspaper-wrapped package from the bag. She turned to Julia and, still talking, began violently whacking whatever was in the newspaper against the metal edge of my kitchen table. I leaned forward in my chair as Olga set the parcel on her knees and began unwrapping it. Inside was a dried whole fish, its bones splintered by Olga’s attack.

Julia reached over to the paper in Olga’s lap and with two manicured fingernails peeled off a shred of smoked meat. The two girls ignored me, chattering away and digging at the flesh of the unfortunate fish. I stared at its dull black eyes and looked back up at my guests. With their sleek hair, chirping conversation, and systematic fish nibbling, they reminded me of otters.

I sighed, trying hard not to show my annoyance. Julia and Olga were the latest in a fairly steady stream of visitors who were sent, Mary-Poppins-like, by Lyosha to keep me company. These girls (and they were always girls) were friends of Lyosha’s sister Anna, or of Lyosha’s best friend’s girlfriend, or of Serge’s wife, but were complete strangers to me. They’d knock on my door unexpectedly and I’d invite them in to sit at my kitchen table for what would sometimes turn out to be hours. We would ask each other polite, stilted questions about our countries and each other and then, when the questions ran out, we would sit in awkward silence until finally, finally, the girl would sigh into the airless room and announce suddenly that she was sorry but she had to go. I too would sigh, but from relief, and would usher the girl out of the apartment and gratefully return to my spiral notebook.

I still feel bad about my uncharitable attitude towards these visitors. These girls were sent with the best of intentions, to keep me from being lonely and to offer their friendship. And how was I responding? How was I representing my country, my friend Lyosha, and myself? Not very well at all, I’m afraid. Some of this was my fault but some of it, really, wasn’t.

The fact of the matter is that even without all of my misanthropic leanings and inability to make small talk, I am a horribly rude hostess by Russian standards. If you ever have an opportunity to visit a Russian acquaintance, take note of how your friend treats you. Notice that as soon as you arrive, your friend (or his wife, if your friend is male) will scurry into the kitchen and return shortly thereafter with a cooked-from-scratch five-course meal. You will be served an array of cold zakuski, or appetizers, such as tomatoes and cucumbers with fresh dill, or sliced cheese and kielbasa on rounds of hard bread. You will also probably be given some kind of hot dish, like boiled potatoes and beef cubes, or soup. Always there will be bread, and beer, vodka, or tea, and something for dessert, like a torte or homemade raspberry compote.

Keep in mind, here, that this is what will happen to you if you drop by for a visit. If you were to actually plan to come over you’d probably arrive to find a butter sculpture of your likeness in the center of the table, and napkins bearing your monogram. I am not making any of this up or even really exaggerating very much. Russians are some of the most hospitable people I have ever met anywhere – they know how to treat a guest. But believe me, there is a dark side to all of this goodwill.

Have you ever seen the movie Goodfellas? It’s one of my favorite movies, and one of my favorite scenes in it is the one where Joe Pesci has just shot a mobster in a bar for disrespecting him in front of his friends. These same friends have to go help him bury the body, but first they have to stop by Pesci’s house so they can run in and get a knife big enough to dismember the corpse in the trunk. Sadly, Joe’s mother is there, and nobody ever “runs in” anywhere where an Italian mother lurks. Hours later the guys are still there eating homemade spaghetti and meatballs with real garlic bread, and talking to Joe’s mother about her oil painting. This is exactly how I felt whenever I visited Russian friends. “Thank you so much for this delicious food. It really is delicious, seriously, but, you know, I wasn’t even really all that hungry to begin with, and I’ve really got something I’ve got to go do…”

But no. It doesn’t matter what you, the guest, actually want. What matters is that the hosts are allowed to display their ability to provide their guests with such bounty. And the guest had better be prepared to show the appropriate amount of thanks and awe at the spread he’s provided with. To refuse the food, even politely and with an excellent excuse such as doctor’s note documenting a recent bout with Salmonella, is to mortally insult the host and his or her entire family. The fact that several members of said family probably are, like Pesci, perfectly capable of dismembering your lifeless body only adds to the tension.

By the time I got my apartment in Russia, I’d visited plenty of Russians and knew that this was what Russian people do when guests come to visit. Only much, much later, after I got older and got more sense and settled down a bit, did I realize that if a Russian person visited me, they’d probably be expecting the same kind of treatment. My attitude towards the whole cross-cultural visiting thing back then was “I do what you expect when I visit your house, so you do what I expect when you visit mine.”

If someone comes to visit me, I’ll welcome them warmly. I might even hug them. I’ll usher them in and we’ll plop on the living room couch and begin catching each other up. Twenty minutes into the conversation I’ll say something like “Hey! Where are my manners? Would you like a glass of water?” If they say yes, which they don’t always do, I’ll get up and get them a glass of water (even though they know full well where the kitchen is and could easily get it themselves). I’ll even ask if they want ice. I’ll return with the glass of water and the visit will continue. I actually consider myself a great hostess by American standards because, as you’ll notice, there is no mention of “watching TV” anywhere in the above description. I have visited people and have spent the whole time sitting on their couches saying nothing and watching Friends reruns. And you know what? This is just fine with me. I don’t want to put my hosts out or cause them to do anything special just because I came to visit. If I want something, I’m grown up enough and secure enough to ask for it. I hate being fussed over. “Leave me alone”; that’s my visiting philosophy.

I have found that most of my American friends share this attitude. Why is this? Why are American social rituals so shabby compared to other cultures? Well, one reason might be that the American landscape, with a few exceptions, is not really set up for visiting. We live in exurban cul-de-sacs and alongside multi-lane highways. One doesn’t just “drop by” – you have to mean to go somewhere in this country, and you usually have to drive to get there. Our houses are not configured for spontaneous chatting either. Most houses are separated from the life of the street by a desert of lawn. There are few front porches where people might sit and wave to passing neighbors; instead, our homes present a blank facade of garage door to the outside world. If people put what matters to them out in front, on display, then what matters to Americans is not visiting, but driving.

Also, Americans are busy. We work a lot, and commute to these jobs. We run our children to and fro and drive back and forth to grocery stores. We don’t have a lot of time, even for our own families. When we’re done with our jobs and our family responsibilities we want to rest, to watch TV, to forget about the day for a while. The last thing we want is for someone to drop in on us. This was the absolute hardest thing for me to get used to in Russia, the idea that it was acceptable to just drop in unannounced on someone. I would consider this the height of rudeness back home in America – to bust in on someone’s personal time and demand that they stop what they’re doing to pay attention to you. But it happened all the time in Russia. And here it was, happening again.

Nauseated by the sharp, salty smell of Julia and Olga’s fish jerky, I got up and opened the refrigerator. I had recently found a plastic water bottle with a cap on it, like the kind Evian comes in only much larger. This bottle held about 2 quarts of liquid, probably, and as soon as I found it I put it to work holding my iced tea. I love iced tea – everyone I grew up with drank it all day long and I think my mother may have actually put it in my baby bottle. I felt the lack of a constant glass of iced tea acutely, so once or twice a week I’d brew up a batch of pungent Georgian tea and sweeten it liberally with sugar. The bottle would go into the freezer, where I would check it every hour or so, breaking up the ice that formed over and over until I had, if not iced tea exactly, a sort of tea slushy. It was almost like sitting on an Alabama porch in the summertime, if you overlooked the fact that it was 10 below outside and nobody here ever said “y’all.”

To my surprise, any Russian who opened my refrigerator and saw the bottle would grill me for several minutes in shocked disbelief. “What is this?” they’d cry, turning from the fridge and looking at me like they’d found a severed head in the crisper drawer. “Tea? TEA!?!? With ICE in it?” Lyosha actually brought people over to our apartment just to look at the tea, something I at first found funny but soon began to take umbrage at. In protest, I refused to actually drink the tea in front of these gawkers no matter how much they wheedled. Let them just wonder what it is I do with the tea, I thought.

Julia and Olga were no exception. I sat back down at the table, where their conversation continued without a lapse, uncapped the bottle, and took a swig. Immediately, the girls ceased their talking and stared at me. “Oh my God,” said Olga, “What is that?”

“It’s…it’s tea,” I confessed. “It’s frozen tea in a plastic bottle.” I held it out to them. “Would you like to try some?”

Julia dropped the strip of greasy dried fish she’d been holding onto the crumpled newspaper in Olga’s lap and recoiled. “Ugh, no!” she cried, “That’s disgusting!”

Julia and Olga beat a hasty retreat from my apartment and I made a mental note to look for a peephole the next time I visited the emigrant market, and to stock up on more tea.

15. Red Ticket

2009-05-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

And so began the happiest, most peaceful two weeks I would know in Moscow. I settled quickly into a routine at my new apartment at 66 Sykharevskaya (Little Sugar River), a routine that revolved around the two most important things in my life: writing and Lyosha. I had finally gotten to know Lyosha better (moving in with someone will do that), and the more I learned about him, the more I grew to respect him. In spite of what the flowers on our first date suggested, Lyosha did not work at a funeral home. Nor was he a Mafioso in the traditional sense. The entire time I was with him, I never once saw a pair of mirrored sunglasses or a color-coordinated nylon tracksuit – the national uniform of the Russian mafia. True, some of Lyosha’s business dealings were technically illegal, but when you’re living under the law of a failed communist state, distinctions like this are meaningless.

What Lyosha was was the hardest worker I had ever met. Every morning he would wake up at 6 to prepare for his job at a telecom company I’ll call Narcomet. This was a British-Russian joint venture involved in creating a modern networking infrastructure in backwards old Russia. Ostensibly, Lyosha’s job was “computer engineer,” but since he knew nothing about computers or engineering, he was quickly involved in something far more shady and important. His task was to help the officers of Narcomet get their materials and equipment through customs and into the country, a position that required a certain level of connections, street smarts, and the ability to successfully trade favors and deliver bribes. Lyosha, who had started his career on the streets of the city at age 13 selling black-market trinkets to tourists for dollars, knew how to work the system and get things done. For his trouble, he was paid $90 a week at this full-time job.

Immediately after leaving the offices of Narcomet, Lyosha would go across town to his second job as a bartender at the Olympic Penta, an expensive hotel for foreigners. Here, he would work each night from 6pm until 12am and would make his real salary, the one that kept him in expensive suits. Lyosha was extremely fortunate to have not one but two hard-currency jobs, and this knowledge made the 3 or so hours he slept each night bearable. In a country that was mired in poverty and stagnation, Lyosha was moving forward, and he knew it. One day, Lyosha would have the ability to move up or even out, if exhaustion didn’t kill him first.

Lyosha’s punishing schedule meant that I spent most of my time in the apartment alone. I would wake up with Lyosha, see him off to work, and spend the rest of the morning writing and drinking tea in the cozy kitchen. In the afternoon I would visit the markets, or occasionally a hard-currency store, and would shop for food. I’d come home, clean the apartment, and cook a soup or a stew for Lyosha to eat when he arrived home from his bartending job. For the first time in my life I was a housewife, and I loved it.

Lyosha would arrive home after his shift at the Penta and, too wired to sleep, would roust me from my bed on the couch. We’d sit at the kitchen table for hours, well into the night, drinking tea or sometimes whiskey, smoking innumerable Marlboros, and talking. We’d share songs and poems from our cultures, Lyosha moving me to tears as he sang the great poetess Akmatova’s verses about memories recorded in a tattered blue notebook.

“Broad and yellow is the evening light,” he sang, holding my hand,
“The coolness of April is dear.
You, of course, are several years late,
Even so, I'm happy you're here.

Sit close at hand and look at me,
With those eyes, so cheerful and mild:
This blue notebook is full, you see,
Full of poems I wrote as a child.

Forgive me, forgive me, for having grieved
For ignoring the sunlight, too.
And especially for having believed
That so many others were you.”

When it was my turn I shared a song that also made me cry from homesickness and longing. My mother had taught me it when I was a toddler, and as I sang it to Lyosha in our 3 am kitchen it brought back happy memories of childhood. It went like this:

No matter how young a prune may be
He’s always getting wrinkled
A baby prune is like his dad
‘Cept he’s not wrinkled half as bad
Little seed inside the prune
Is it night or is it noon
What you doin’ pruney
Hmmm?

I wiped at the corner of my eye as Lyosha tilted his head and asked with appropriate solemnity, “What is this, ‘pruney’?”

We traded stories about our families, Lyosha asking for details about what it was like growing up in sun-drenched Florida and me wondering what a childhood under the gray cloud of Breshnev must have entailed. To both of our credits, neither of us asked about Disney World or the Young Pioneers. We both knew that real life was more complex than what we read in the paper or saw on TV, and this was one of the reasons we liked each other. Lyosha described a turbulent relationship with his parents. His mother, best as I could tell, was the head chef for the communist party ²⁵. Perhaps because of her close association with this political party, she was appalled by Lyosha’s black-market activities and barely spoke to him during his teen years. Of course, now that his nascent entrepreneurial instincts had blossomed into a lucrative position with a Western company, his mother was willing to let bygones be bygones.

Some of Lyosha’s friends were not so fortunate. For instance, I was surprised to learn that Serge, a tough 28-year-old whose sense of humor made him my favorite of Lyosha’s comrades, had only just recently been released from a “jolty dom.”

“A jolty dom…” I intoned, impressed. I had read about the Soviet practice of locking dissidents away in “yellow houses,” Russian slang for insane asylums, but never expected to personally know someone who had experienced this treatment – especially not someone approximately my age. That kind of thing happened to Mayakovsky, or Vaclav Havel, not cheerful, sardonic Serge. But there it was. Serge had made the terrible mistake of being too ambitious; of creating a black-market tourist postcard empire that was too successful to ignore. For this crime the budding capitalist had been snatched off the streets near Red Square and socked away for years in the madhouse, and most certainly would still have been there had the Soviet Union not collapsed. As it was, immediately after his release Serge had purchased his own apartment, and his status as one of the first private homeowners in the country gave him enormous cache amongst his friends.

I made no attempt to hide my fascination with stories like these – sometimes I even took notes while he was talking -- and usually Lyosha seemed gratified to have an appreciative and curious listener. Sometimes, though, the reality of what he was telling me, the terrible cost to people he knew and loved, would become too much for him and he would grow angry and resentful. “Look at you,” he said to me on one of these occasions, “Thinking about article you will write. You think this is interesting, but to me, to us…”

“You want to know what is main difference between us, between you and me?” One of our main topics of conversation was the similarities and differences between Russians and Americans, two societies whose long history as enemies had, ironically, bound us together in certain complex ways. “Let me tell you story. Back before Revolution, when Tsar still lived, Russians would go hunting for wolves. They would go into forest, a team of men, and walk for days, finding where wolves lived. When they knew a place where wolves would be, they would mark area with red flag, so everyone would know, so they would find it later. This flag is what they called “red ticket,” a signal to hunters that wolves could be shot there. They would come back to the place and hide behind snow bank, at edge of trees. They would make calls of wounded animals, and wolves would hear and come running out of forest towards them. The wolves were fooled, running straight into guns of hunters. They had no chance to escape.”

Lyosha stood up from the table abruptly and yanked open a drawer in the kitchen counter. He pulled out his Soviet passport, brandishing the document with its dark maroon cover at me. “This,” he spat, throwing the passport on the table in front of me, “This is our red ticket. We are born with it, we are marked by it, and with it we have no chance.”

Lyosha turned on his heel and left the kitchen, closing himself up in the bathroom. I finished my whiskey and looked at the table, sticky with the rings left by our glasses. The passport lay there among the ashtrays and walnut shells, accusing me. A short while later I heard the shower go on, a signal that our conversation was over for the night. I got up from the kitchen table and put Lyosha’s red ticket back in the drawer, then sat down and opened my spiral notebook, waiting for morning to come.

NOTES

25. Although I asked about this many times, I never was able to establish whether Lyosha’s mother was “a” head chef, or THE head chef. The Russian language has no articles – no “a” or “the.” If for some strange reason you ever want to mimic a Russian accent – maybe you’ve landed the role of Boris or Natasha in the Broadway version of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” – the easiest way to do this is to drop all articles from your sentences. So instead of saying, for example, “Do you have a silencer for the pistol?”, instead say, “Do you have silencer for pistol?” Another handy tip: Change all present-tense verbs to present participles; e.g., “Those hunting boots look lovely with that dress,” becomes “Those hunting boots, they are looking lovely with that dress.” Finally, substitute appropriate prepositions with ones that are not quite correct. For example, instead of saying “It is up to you,” say, as Lyosha always did, “It is up from you.” Continue reading post.

14. Brokedown Palace

2009-04-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

So there were these seven Armenians in a Lada…

Yeah, this sounds like the start of a dirty joke, but keep reading.

There were these seven Armenians in a Lada. I don’t know where they were going or why they had so many people stuffed into one small car. It must have been a terribly tight squeeze. The Armenians were riding through the streets of downtown Moscow on their way somewhere, laughing, smoking, listening to the radio. But down below the streets of the city, something sinister was happening.

Down below the streets of the city, a hot water pipe had burst. This was a big pipe, too, about 35 feet underground, and it had been spewing hot water, unnoticed, for days. How is it possible for a hot water pipe to burst and gush out hundreds of gallons of water per second for days on end without anyone noticing, you ask? Well, silly you. This is a city where cashiers still use abacuses (abacai?) to figure change. This is a city where even in the middle of dark and bitter February the power goes off and stays off for days. This is a city where factory workers and public servants long ago stopped getting paid for their work. Some of them still show up, like Romeroesque zombies with a residual memory of the life they used to have, but most sit at home watching Mexican soap operas or spend their days standing outside in the snow, holding up the goods they have to sell. So who was there to notice?

The unsuspecting motorists drove around the monument in the middle of the Lubyanka traffic circle, unaware of what was happening beneath their feet. The water churned and roiled, eroding the thick brown dirt on which the road was laid. After a few days, all that remained was a thin layer of asphalt over the hole the water had worn away, a crispy wisp of tarmac between the everyday world and the boiling mud bubbling 35 feet below. You see where I am going with this by now, right?

Perhaps if there had only been 5 Armenians instead of 7…well, it’s hard to say what would have happened. What we do know is that when the hapless riders passed over the hole in their boxy car, that crust of road gave way and those Armenians disappeared into the ground like they’d never been there to begin with, swallowed up by the earth to be scalded alive like characters in some ancient epic.

Meanwhile, on Tverskaya Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares in the city, an electric tram creeps through 4:30 traffic. Packed with tired commuters on their way home from what passes for work these days, it squeezes past a gasoline truck waiting at the light in the lane to the tram’s left. When it does, the rear-view mirror on the driver’s side sinks into the cheep aluminum of the gas truck’s body and tears a long gash down its side. Fuel pours onto the tram and the surrounding automobiles and puddles on the roadway. The light turns green; the tram driver, unaware of what has happened, presses the accelerator and sparks shower down from the rod that connects the tram to the wire that powers it. The people on the sidewalk watch in horror as the tram and the truck and several of the cars that just happened to be waiting at that light are immediately engulfed in flames. Passengers in the burning tram hurl themselves out the windows and fall, smoking, into the flaming puddles on the roadway. The next day, the lead picture in the newspaper will show the cleanup of the horrible accident. A worker lifting a charred body off the pavement to sweep underneath it with a broom made of sticks.

There are so many stories that illustrate what happens when the glue that holds a society together starts to weaken. There’s the old lady I saw everyday on the street for a while, lying frozen in the snow. There’s no one to call about this, apparently; public services have disintegrated to the point where dead people on the street are responsible for their own removal. Eventually someone sees to her, removing the clothes that she no longer needs. And finally, days later, she’s gone like she never was there. There’s the woman in the farmer’s market who bought meat to take home to her family and, when slicing it hours later, felt her knife hit something hard in the meat’s secret pink center. She looked more closely and found it was a bullet. But even in Russia, they don’t shoot cows.

There were the gypsies at the train stations who would advance on you with dirty hypodermic needles, making stabbing motions and demanding money while their filthy children clung to your knees. The mafia hit near the Arbat where the victim sat sprawled in the backseat for days while the police measured the distance from his car to the curb again and again, another useless exercise. The pensioners who stood in front of every metro stop in the city holding the used shoes they had to sell, row after row of silent, snowy sentinels.

The ambient misery around me would eventually coalesce into a constant sense of dread that has never quite left me, but then, two months into my stay in the country, it was still manageable. I took note of everything going on and it worried me, but the thing that was hardest for me to deal with was not the individual acts of violence or desperation, but the complete collapse of an infrastructure that in my country one never even noticed. In America things like roads and bridges and buildings don’t usually inspire much thought. They are the backdrops against which everyday life is lived. We don’t notice them because they work. But what if these foundations became so worn, or so unmonitored, or so broken that every time you went out there was a distinct possibility that you’d be crushed by falling stones, immolated by exploding boilers, or sucked into the earth as the ground gave way beneath your feet? How do you plan for something like this, or guard against it? These are things that we in America, thank goodness, have the luxury of never having to contemplate.

For the very first time I began to viscerally realize the essential fragility of our existence in the world; how it’s not the cinematic evil of people that does you in, but the mundane banality of a valve that didn’t close correctly, or a hose that broke. To me, this was unbearable. I could cope with the story of my death being something interesting, or exotic. The fact that my whole life might cease because of weak mortar or fragile cables seemed so unfair. I began to have strange phobias, and attacks of anxiety. I feared riding the metro in from my dorm to the city center because the train had to cross over the wide Moskva River on a flaking, rusty trestle. The train would come to a stop in the middle of the bridge, waiting for the train ahead of us to move on, and we’d creak and sway as the wind howling down the river broadsided us. I looked at the bored faces of the other passengers. Reading, sleeping, grumpy. Didn’t they know that soon we’d be swept off the tracks and into the filthy gray water? Couldn’t they imagine the car sinking into the freezing murky darkness, water rushing in the seams of the windows, our ears popping as we rolled and tumbled in the car to the bottom?

These were the fears that I couldn’t fit into the “pros” column of the list I’d made when trying to decide whether to move in with Lyosha. I looked around at the uncharted territory I was in and knew that I needed a guide to help me navigate. One of the reasons I cast my lot with Lyosha was because it looked like he could read a map. I hoped and prayed that I was right.

13. In the Hospital

2009-04-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

I awoke several hours later to the sound of a key in the lock. I sat up as the door opened and Lyosha stepped in. “Welcome home!” he beamed, throwing out his arms and advancing on me. I stood up and returned his hug and then we sat down on the couch.

“Well…” I said, not sure what to do. “What should we do?”

“We must go shopping to find food,” he reasonably replied. This sounded like a good idea to me, so I gathered my things and clipped my coat together. I followed Lyosha to the elevator and out the front door and across a snowy courtyard. We walked for a while down a residential street, holding hands, until Lyosha stopped in front of a very large gray building. “OK,” he said, “Here we are.”

I looked at the five-story building suspiciously. It was a squat, ugly structure built of gray concrete and mottled window glass. There was no sign on the outside but I could tell that whatever kind of building this was, it was definitely not a grocery store. “Come on,” said Lyosha, pulling me by the hand towards the building’s entrance.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said, rocking back slightly on my heels. “Where are we? This isn’t a grocery store. What are we doing?”

Lyosha turned to face me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Robin, this is hospital. We must go here before we go shopping.”

“No, no!” I yelled, shaking off his hands and walking back the way we’d come. “No, I am NOT going to a Russian hospital. Forget it, no. Absolutely not.”

“Robin,” he yelled, running after me and grabbing my good arm, “If you don’t go to doctor your arm is going to fall off. Look,” he said, turning around and pulling up his coat and the back of his dress shirt to reveal a long, ropy scar down the middle of his lower back, “I know all about hospital. I have been many times. There is nothing for you to worry about. I will take care of everything. Please, trust me.”

I stared at the twisted, puffy scar tissue on Lyosha’s back and at his face, which was looking at me pleadingly over his shoulder. Honestly, this did not inspire confidence. The scar was huge; on either side of the long central line of tissue I could see large circle-shaped areas where the stitches had entered. It looked like clumsily rendered Halloween makeup; like what you would paint on your temple if you were going to a party dressed as Frankenstein. “Oh my God, Lyosha,” I said, “What happened to you?”

“I had back surgery two years ago, when I was 18,” he said, dropping his shirt and coat and stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I was in hospital for very long time. But I am OK now. You will see. There is nothing to be afraid of. I will come with you and I will take care of everything.”

I stood in the falling snow, looking at Lyosha and trying to decide. The very last thing I wanted to do was entrust myself to post-collapse medical care. The stories I had heard from people who had experienced it were terrifying.¹⁹ But then on the other hand, what choice did I have? I had spent most of the previous day trying to find a western doctor who would see me. I had visited the “American clinic,” a facility catering solely to westerners and staffed by French doctors. “It will be $700.00 to register with us,” said the receptionist at the desk as my arm dripped all over her appointment book. I was unwilling to put potato skins on the wound, and unable to afford the fee to even get in the door at the clinic, so what else could I do? And I had to do something. The burn on my arm was not healing at all. It was weeping pus at an alarming rate, obliging me to wash and wring out my bandana several times a day. The skin at the edges had taken on a disturbing greenish-gray hue, and although I tried to tell myself I was imagining things, my arm was emitting a fetid, unwholesome odor. Things were serious, I knew. I had to do something, and soon. Otherwise Lyosha was right. I would lose my arm.

“OK,” I sighed, “OK. But NO SHOTS. If they try to give me a shot, I’m leaving.”

“OK. No shots.” Lyosha took me by the hand and we walked up the stairs and pulled open the metal double doors of the hospital’s entrance.

Now, a few words about hospitals in post-Soviet Russia:

The 1996 “Country Data” book about Russia, produced by the Library of Congress, uses words like “crisis,” “catastrophic,” “corrupt,” and “crappy” to describe the healthcare system in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. ²⁰ It goes on to list the following facts:

· Between 1990 and 1994, state funding for healthcare declined from 3.4 percent of the national budget to 1.8 percent. In 1998, state funding for healthcare was a measly $158 American dollars per year.²¹
· Low salaries have made corruption common among medical personnel, who often extract bribes for both materials and services.
· Soviet-era supplies of materials and drugs have been depleted and are not being adequately replenished due to the collapse in value of the ruble.
· 42 percent of the country's hospitals and 30 percent of its clinics lack hot water.12 percent and 7 percent, respectively, have no running water at all.
· About 18 percent of hospitals and 15 percent of clinics are not connected to a sewerage system
· Only 12 percent in both categories have central heating.
· Even in the best hospitals, medical personnel do not regularly wash their hands, surgical instruments are not always properly sterilized, and rates of infection are abnormally high.
· 80 percent of Russians needing medical assistance use traditional folk healers in lieu of doctors. These healers offer personalized attention and affordable cures such as birch bark and cranberries to cure a variety of complaints.
· Russians with access to a plot of land often grow their own herbs, and books describing home cures have become popular. Long-practiced cures such as wrapping oneself in a vinegar-soaked blanket and drinking one's own urine have become more widespread in the 1990s.

So let’s review. The healthcare system I was about to subject myself to was bad enough to make drinking your own urine seem preferable to visiting a doctor. And the truth of the statistics was obvious as soon as Lyosha pulled open the doors.

We walked together into a cavernous, gloomy room that served as the hospital’s registration and waiting area. Immediately to our left, a cranky woman sat behind a smeared and greasy plexiglass window, looking more like a taxi dispatcher than an intake nurse. Lyosha had warned me not to say anything at all while we were in the hospital, warning that if they found out I was an American they’d charge me $1500 for the staph infection they were about to give me. So he leaned towards the small circle cut in the plastic and said a few words to the sullen official, gesturing my way occasionally as I stood there in mute silence. The woman looked at him angrily, annoyed that he’d interrupted her reading. Apparently there were no forms to fill out and sign, no discussions to be had about payment, or allergies, or next of kin. This woman’s job was simply to point, and she did so, towards the interior of the waiting room. Lyosha took my hand and pulled me further inside.

The room we were to wait in was long and narrow. Down the middle of the room ran four huge concrete pillars that supported the ceiling 5 stories above us. Standing by the entryway, looking into the lobby, the victim, er, patient, saw a row of large windows, several of which were broken, lining the left of the space. On the other side, three small doors were cut into one area of the vast expanse of gray concrete that made up the room’s right wall, and they huddled there together like crooked teeth. The back wall was covered with light green tiles, many of which had come loose and now lay broken in piles where they fell. The room was as cold as the outside –perhaps colder because of all the concrete -- and the only light came from the streaked, sooty windows. There were several chairs with dented and rusty legs pushed against the windowsills, and Lyosha led me towards them.

I sat on the windowsill and lit a cigarette, dropping the spent match on the dirt that covered the floor. I am not saying, here, that the floor was dirty. I am saying that there was actual DIRT spread over the faded tiles of the waiting room floor. You could see where someone – the receptionist? a doctor? – had swept it into an even brown layer that stretched across the expanse of the room. I spent a lot of time wondering about this. If you’re going to bother to neatly sweep the dirt, as someone had, why not sweep it out the door? Was the dirt perhaps cleaner than the floor underneath? I looked around at various areas of the room and began to piece together an answer. In most of the lobby, the dirt was a uniform light brown color. In other areas, though, there were circles and patches that were darker. The dirt had absorbed whatever liquid (water, oh please god let it just be water) had spilled, absolving the hospital staff from the task of mopping. That had to be it. If what I knew about Russian hospitals was true, they were chronically short-staffed. The remaining workers would not have time to mop up the blood that the woman tracked in from under her skirt as she went into early and painful labor, or the vomit from the drunk who’d been brought in, half-blind and frost bitten. Not even these exhausted, overworked Russians could leave bodily fluids lying in puddles on the waiting room floor, though. They’d have to clean them up. The dirt provided an absorbent layer that would soak things up until they could be dealt with, I figured. This was, I guess, an attempt to adjust to an impossible situation. To cope. These people were poor, but not animals. Surely in better times they’d had actual floors, actual lights. Actual health care.

Lyosha and I sat in the windows, not speaking, until finally one of the doors opened and a nurse poked her head out. She motioned to us and we walked across the lobby and through the doorway, and into an area that would be familiar to anyone who has visited an emergency room. There was a small intake area immediately inside the doorway, with chairs and blood pressure cuffs and scales. The nurse sat at a desk to the left of the doorway and began to ask questions to Lyosha about why I was there. ²² I sat in a chair, looking around and saying nothing. Since our arrival to the hospital, I’d been wondering about the other patients. Where were they? Now, as Lyosha and the nurse talked quietly to each other, I found out. Down a hallway to my right, a woman began to scream. She screamed and screamed and screamed, a harsh, rasping sound, and after a while I realized that what she was screaming was words. I listened and listened, thinking about prefixes and conjugations and the genitive case, and slowly I understood that what she was screaming was “Just kill me! Just kill me!” I was delighted -- a completely inappropriate response that only someone struggling to learn a new language would understand. Yay! I thought, I understood her! Maybe that meant my Russian was improving. And oh yeah, that poor, poor woman. My god, where was I and what was happening to me?

A short time later a man appeared and gestured for us to follow him. We did, and he led us into an operating room. This room, which was painted a sickly salmon color, did have electricity, and featured a flimsy metal table in its center. Upon this table lay an old woman. She was fully dressed in her street clothes – heavy coat, crocheted hat and scarf – and she turned her head to look at us as we entered. The two doctors who stood over the incision in her leg smoked their cigarettes and drank coffee from small paper cups, ignoring us completely. ²³ I sat down in a chair against the wall, flabbergasted. I was now eye-level with the woman, who smiled sweetly at me and said “good day.”

“Hello,” I said, not sure how to respond in a situation like this. She turned her head away and sighed, looking at the ceiling as the doctors extinguished their cigarettes and picked up their tools.

The man who had led us in pulled up a chair across from me and introduced himself. His name was Evgeny Rudolphovitch, and he would be seeing to my arm. He unwrapped the bandana and I scrutinized the floor, dreading what was about to happen. In a nearby corner of the room, I noticed, was a dirty puddle of water. I looked up at the ceiling and saw that it was leaking into a metal bucket that had been placed underneath to catch the steady drip. In this bucket was a variety of stained gauze and used syringes. I looked back at the doctor, who was staring at me expectantly. “Shto?” I said.

“He wants to know if you have had tetanus shot,” said Lyosha, who was standing behind the doctor.

“Da da!” I stammered, trying to pull my arm away from the doctor. Evgeny nodded and picked up a small pair of scissors. “Wait!” I yelled, startling him. I looked at Lyosha, in a panic. “Isn’t he going to give me something for the pain?”

“What?” Lyosha squinted at me, not understanding.

“The pain!” I repeated, “What about the pain?”

“Yes,” confirmed Lyosha. “There will be pain.

In fact, there was no pain. I watched, transfixed, as the doctor took the scissors and carefully cut away the ropes of skin the bordered the burn, revealing a much bigger injury than I’d realized I had. He removed the flesh and my fingers, which had been curled down into a useless claw, finally unclenched. I wiggled my fingers, ecstatic. The doctor stood up and returned with a tongue depressor and a pot of bright orange paste, which he slathered on my wrist. Then he wrapped the whole thing tightly in clean white gauze and sat back, satisfied. “That’s it,” he said, patting my arm.

“Am I going to die?” I asked him directly.

He laughed and spoke to me kindly. No, he said, I was definitely not going to die. I should come to see him three more times after this, once a week, so that he could change the bandage and reapply the ointment. I should keep my arm clean, and dry. And no, he said again, I was not going to die.

I was so grateful to this man, who on subsequent visits would tell me that he worked 18-hour days at the hospital and made $13 a month. Evgeny Rudolphovitch was single-handedly holding up the collapsing Russian healthcare industry, and he was doing it with gentle kindness. I am convinced that he saved my arm and probably also my life. We stood up and Lyosha handed him 5 American dollars. ²⁴ We said our goodbyes to Evgeny and to the lady on the table, and left the hospital without speaking to anyone else.

Twenty minutes later we were standing among the aisles of a hard-currency grocery store. Lyosha was off somewhere, shopping, and I was standing in the baking aisle, staring numbly at bags of powdered sugar and wiggling my fingers. Suddenly Lyosha appeared from around the corner. He had in his hand a bottle of unopened Jack Daniels. “You did very well,” he said, pulling the plastic off the neck of the bottle and handing it to me. We drank the whiskey together as we shopped for food for our new home, giddy with good health and possibility.

NOTES

19 A thorough internet search using keywords like “Russian hospital nightmare” and “Russian hospitals; the horror…the horror…” yielded only one result. The explanation for this is obvious, and is probably the motto of the Russian healthcare industry: Dead men tell no tales. The one document that did come up, though, corroborates the story I am about to tell to the point of plagiarism. Keep in mind as you read this article that the author is a black man from South Africa, so the bar for terror and suffering for him is likely set pretty high. Also, note that the facility he was taken to, judging by the picture in his article, looks like a day spa compared to the place I visited. https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2263/407/3/Jansen%20(2006)d.pdf. Continue reading post.

20. OK, well, maybe not “crappy.” Continue reading post.

21. All of the bulleted items in this list are, for the most part, direct quotes from the Country Book. The only exception is the stat about per-capita spending on healthcare, which came from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia Continue reading post.

22. During my time with Lyosha I always wondered why other Russians immediately would talk to him about things that concerned me, instead of to me. Was it because he was a man, and people in this deeply chauvinist culture deferred to the man by default? Or was there something about me that made people assume I was feeble? This all would have bothered me more except for the fact that when it came to communicating with most Russians about most things, I might as well have been. I was intensely grateful that Lyosha was there to handle things for me. Just getting myself from one place to another without getting sick, assaulted, or mortally injuring myself was more than I could deal with. Continue reading post.

23. If I were you, I wouldn’t believe me either. I wish I were making this up. Continue reading post.

24. When I visited Evgeny for my follow-up appointments I always gave him $10 and some kind of food, like a bag of oranges or walnuts. It is to his credit that he went ahead and healed me anyway. He cut off a valuable source of revenue by doing so. Continue reading post.

12. Important Meetings

2009-04-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

It was 10:00 on a Thursday morning, and I was drunk. The fact that I was in a faculty office at Moscow State University, surrounded by professors, didn’t change things one bit. The fact that it was these very professors who were responsible for my condition, these evil, conniving members of the folklore department; well, drunk is drunk, no matter who’s pouring. I swayed in a chair at the end of the table while the 12 people gathered there waited to hear why I had interrupted their weekly meeting. I swallowed hard and looked down at the page I’d torn from my spiral notebook. The questions I’d written beforehand swam between the faint blue lines. I took a deep breath and started to speak.

“Wait!” cried one of the professors, reaching behind him for the plate that sat on a cluttered, paper-strewn desk. “Now is not the time for talking! Our guest must have more cake!”

Oh good lord. How many cakes would I have to eat before these people would let me interview them? I’d already had three: a brownie bar with thick vanilla icing, a shortbread torte topped with strawberry jam, and something that looked like a pile of albino dog poo but that I’d decided to tell myself was marzipan. I looked down at the plate that was now sitting in front of me. Five more cakes. Could I do it? Could I eat 8 whole cakes at 10:00 on a Thursday morning?

“Eat them! Eat them!” said a plump woman to my right, leaning over and pouring into my glass the remains of the bottle of vodka they’d opened when I’d arrived 45 minutes earlier.

I’d actually gotten to the folklore department office much earlier than 9:15 a.m., but it had taken me more than an hour of smoking and pacing in the hallway to screw up my courage and open the door. When I did, cautiously poking my head in and interrupting what was apparently their weekly planning meeting, they had snagged me like one of those bird-eating spiders you see on the Discovery Channel, positioned me in a chair at the end of the table, and broken out the liquor. Apparently no one ever wanted to talk to the folklorists about anything, ever, so a visit from an outsider, and an American outsider at that, was big news. I tried again and again to protest the vodka and the cakes that soon emerged, but it was useless. In Russia, I knew, you consumed what was offered until it was gone. So I sat at the table while the professors watched me in silence, and ate the five remaining cakes.

Finally, the interview began. I’d managed to tell them before being mauled by pastry that I was an American journalist and wanted to ask them some questions for an article I was writing about Russian superstitions. What they did not know was that I had written my thesis on the synthesis of pagan beliefs with modern-day, secular Russia, and that I’d had to flee my own country because everyone there was fed up with me button-holing them and nattering on about Prince Vladimir and the Rusalki. But now at last I was among my peers; among people who’d devoted their entire careers to the acquisition of interesting and esoteric yet ultimately useless information. In spite of the vodka and the diabetic coma I was lapsing into, I was ready and eager to talk. I’d been preparing for this very conversation for the last four years.

I spent hours talking with these people about how the Kievan Prince Vladimir had, in the year 988, decreed that the citizens of his newly created empire would accept the faith of Orthodoxy or see their heads on stakes, and about the power of religion to simultaneously bind a nation together and obscure its mistakes behind a veil of righteousness. We talked about the communists and how they co-opted sacred expression for the civil religion they were creating, taking rituals, holidays, and beliefs that people had kept for centuries and subverting them with a modern, secular spin. And we discussed Russia’s current situation, talking about how easy it was to control the population – especially in a time of transition and unrest – by invoking something, anything, beyond the immediate misery people found themselves in. By the time I left, the professors were hopping with agitation over the creeping religious fundamentalism evident during this current period of collapse and what it might mean for the future, and had, I’m afraid, a completely skewed perspective about Americans and their interests. As for me, I wondered as I said goodbye and staggered down the stairs about why it was that I could barely ask for directions on the street but could speak at length about Patriarch Alexei’s efforts to leverage the Nazi invasion to strengthen the Orthodox church. Go figure.

I stepped out of the building into the cold noon light. I wanted nothing more than to take the keys Lyosha had given me the day before and go home to my new apartment to sleep off my morning bender. But I had an appointment with someone that I had to keep. This meeting was important; the topic we would discuss, delicate. If I screwed up this meeting and came across as someone who spent her mornings drinking vodka with folklorists, it could sabotage my whole future in Moscow. I was on my way to my dorm room to meet Alexei, a representative from the organization that had helped me enroll in school at Moscow State, and which had provided me with a place to stay and a visa to enter the country. I had called this organization the day before to let them know that I was dropping out of school and moving out of the dorms and into an apartment. This information had not gone over well at all. In spite of the fact that I was 22 and presumably adult enough to make decisions that would no doubt get me killed, the director of the agency threatened to revoke my visa if I went through with my plans. “You have entered the country to be a student,” he told me icily. “If you are not going to be a student, there is no legal reason for you to be here. And we do not want to be held responsible for what might happen to you if you leave the dorms.” I wondered if he’d be willing to be responsible for what would happen to me if I stayed in the dorms, but decided not to ask.

After much wrangling, the director of the agency agreed that he would hand over my visa to me if I allowed an employee to go with me to my new apartment, just to make sure everything was on the up and up. I was not happy with this compromise, especially since I myself had not yet been to the apartment and had no idea at all what would be waiting for me when I got there, but I had no choice but to agree. Alexei would bring a car and my visa, the director said, and if he deemed the situation acceptable I’d be on my own.
I went up to my room for what I hoped would be the last time and fetched my suitcase. As I dragged it out into the hallway Eric appeared in his doorway. “Hey,” he said, “I haven’t seen you in a long time. What’s going on?”

“Well,” I said, putting down the bag and blowing the hair out of my eyes, “I’ve dropped out of school and become a journalist, and now I’m moving in with a Mafioso I’ve just met. Plus, I think I might have gangrene.”

“Oh,” said Eric, not sure whether or not I was serious. Come to think of it, neither was I. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks.” I picked up the bag again and dragged it through the dust on the floor to the elevators.

Alexei was right on time. I climbed into his car and said how do you do, hoping to give off an air of serious, mature professionalism. Alexei was in his 40s and spoke excellent English. The first thing he asked me when I got in the car, even before asking where we were going, was whether I had any American music we could listen to on our drive. “I certainly do!” I said, hopping out of the car and opening the backseat where my suitcase lay. I had brought with me from America my entire cassette collection, and was as excited as he was to finally be able to listen to them. We drove through town towards the address Lyosha had given me as Tom Waits and Emmylou Harris and Al Green sang about diners and warehouses and loneliness. At a stoplight, Alexei turned to me and got down to business. “So,” he said, “Who are you moving in with?”

Oddly, I had not thought one bit about what I would tell these people when they asked the obvious questions about where I’d found the apartment and who I’d share it with. “Oh, ha ha!” I said, stalling, “I’m moving in with…an old woman. Yes, a very old woman…named…Natasha. I, uh, met her through the woman my friend Betsy is living with. She needs a boarder.”

“Hmmm,” said Alexei mildly. “Well, I will look forward to meeting her.”

Shit, I thought, that was dumb. The chances that Natasha would be there to meet Alexei were really very slim, I knew. But what if Lyosha was there when we arrived? How would I explain that?

“Oh, well, she probably won’t be there. She works, you see. As a telephone operator. But her son might be there. He comes by the apartment often, Natasha says. It’s sort of like his second home.”

“I see,” said Alexei, and I could tell that he really did see. Whatever else he was, he was certainly no fool. For now, at least, it seemed as though he would not stand in the way of my plans. Instead of asking me further questions that would have immediately exposed my pathetic lies, he was content to drum his fingers on the steering wheel and bob his head to Husker Du. “This is great music,” he said with relish. “I love music!”

We arrived at our destination, a 12-story yellow apartment building that had probably been built in the ‘50s, and took the elevator up to the 6th floor. I was in an agony of nervousness as I turned the key in the lock, not only because of what Alexei might see, but also because this was my first glimpse of my new home. For better or for worse, this was where I’d be living. I opened the door and we walked into a completely empty 2-room apartment. There was furniture, sure. A couch in the living room that folded down into a bed, a “shaf,” or set of shelves that stood in the living room of every Russian apartment ever built, a table and chairs pushed into the corner of the bright and cheerful kitchen. There was even a TV. What there wasn’t, unfortunately, was any sign at all of habitation. No pictures hanging on the walls, or dishes in the sink, or towels in the bathroom. No clothes in the closet or knickknacks on the shelves. This Natasha, she sure was a minimalist.

There was one thing in the apartment, though, and both of us saw it as soon as we opened the door. On a telephone table in the foyer, there was a gun. A big black 9mm gun, in fact, brooding there on the blonde wood like a malevolent beetle. Underneath it was a slip of paper bearing Lyosha’s masculine handwriting. I turned to Alexei, who was staring at the gun and the note underneath it. “Ha ha,” I said weakly, “Looks like no one is home.”

“Robin,” he started, and I reached out and grabbed his wrist and stared into his eyes.

“Thank you so much for driving me here, Alexei,” I said. “I am very relieved to get out of the dorms. They were not safe for me. And now that I have a job working at a magazine and a decent place to live, I’m sure I will be fine. I want to give you this as a token of my thanks.” I held out the mix tape we’d been listening to in the car.

“Really?” Alexei tried to hide his excitement, and failed.

“Yes, absolutely. Please take it. From your American friend.” Really, this was shameless.

“Oh, thank you so much!” Alexei took my folded up visa out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me, replacing it with the tape I’d just given him. We shook hands, he wished me good luck, and then I was alone in the apartment with my suitcase and my gun. I went into the living room and lay down on the couch, and fell immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Pictures, finally!

2009-03-29T06:31:00.001-07:00

Here, scroll down: http://potemkin.blogspot.com/2008/12/will-real-dmitri-orlov-please-stand-up.html