Escape from Moscow

        Three different metro trains, two bus rides, a walk across a highway overpass and we were there—a concrete shoebox, the opposite extreme of the pre-fabricated cardboard-walled “Le Chateau” or “Wood Hollow” apartment complexes at home. Inside it wasn’t so bad. A small living room, tiny kitchen, bathroom with tub and shower, and one large bedroom. We shared the bath with a half-dozen Finnish engineering students. The apartment was heated but there wasn’t a thermostat and my body had to adjust to the average temperature of the average suburban resident of Moscow. The Finns were already there.

We spent our mornings taking long rides on the metro and waiting for Nikita to tell us that he had found tickets for us on the train from Moscow to Beijing. Most afternoons Tanya invited us to meet her downtown after she finished work. We walked with her along dark streets past empty shop windows. Even on the sidewalk the difference between Westerners and Muscovites was clear. My step was quick and goal-directed, intended to carry me from one well-heated building to the next in the shortest period of time. Tanya strolled, talking to Calem and pausing to ask questions, watching people, looking back—looking, looking, looking, as if it were a spring day.

“How did you know when you first saw us on the street,” Calem asked her, “that we weren’t Russian?”

“You were smiling,” she said.

Calem brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, beginning a display of the boyish charm that had gotten us into and out of shit across half of Eastern Europe. At a subway station near Moscow State University we descended briefly into the city’s bowels. In the underground there was no graffiti, no loud music, no rubbish, no fear. Communism had been revealed to be a failed ideology but a police state has some advantages, i.e. public order, and when we were there the Russians were just relearning disorder.

We crawled up the stairs to a street-level plaza where old ladies were serving dumplings from big steaming pots. Nearby, a row of shops arced around the edge of the street. We began to walk again, through snow and new ice, then we veered suddenly into an official neighborhood somewhere in the gloom leading to the Kremlin. Only with Tanya’s assistance were we able to avoid the hungry former bureaucrats prowling the sidewalks.

We were not sightseeing in the usual sense. But we did see a sight. We passed a low bridge and on the concrete landing along the banks of the river several men were undressing. “Isn’t that picturesque?” Tanya asked. More grotesque than picturesque was my feeling. The sight of bare-chested men swimming in a river turning to ice only strengthened my determination to get out of Russia. 

Sensing my shock and discomfort, Tanya led us away from the river, down a wide avenue where there was a street market, one of those first difficult post-socialist steps towards an open economy. Vendors were lined up for a block or more on both sides of the street, displaying Red Army watches and memorabilia, bootleg cassettes, cheap jeans, anything that might sell.

Looking at the long string of makeshift stalls, and the customers and sellers lined up like prisoners in the dim light, Tanya spit out, as if it were the most profane curse imaginable, “Speculators!”

“No, Tanya,” Calem said to her, “they’re businessmen.”

The first McDonalds in the new Russia had opened nearby and apparently it was the place to go. Tanya stopped at a public telephone and soon we were joined by one of her friends, a pretty plus-sized girl from St. Petersburg who had just returned from completing a computer course in England. Tanya’s friend had decided, like a great number of her fellow citizens, that Western Europe was where she needed to be. We waited in line outside McDonalds for an hour before being seated, as the conversation got personal.

Standing on the sidewalk in the cold, Tanya and her friend discussed in English, without much participation by me or Calem, the practice of phony marriages to foreigners in order to escape poor Russia.

“If he is handsome—” the girl from St. Pete said as she looked at Calem.

“He does not have to be handsome,” Tanya said, looking at me.

When we got inside we ate quickly and then Calem and the St. Petersburg babe went back to the counter for ice cream

It seemed like sacrilege to me—like those old men dodging ice floes in the river.

 

Nikita was small and beefy, a little too much in the shoulders and not quite enough in the neck. He had regular features and sandy brown hair and a habit of turning his head to the side and tilting his nose up in the air sideways in order to look at whoever he was talking too.

Tanya had met Nikki when he enrolled in an English class she was teaching, and because of the need to maintain a varied list of acquaintances in a shortage-plagued economy they became friends. She did not trust him. Tanya told us a story about giving Nikita one hundred precious dollars (a gift from her sister studying abroad) and asking him to buy her a leather jacket on a trip to Beijing, and Nikita returning with a piece of synthetic junk that couldn’t have cost more than a few rubles. But she kept his telephone number and that was the spirit in which he had been introduced to us—as a connection—someone who could find train tickets on the black market. So far he had been unsuccessful. Everybody wants to complain about good people who do bad but what about fundamentally flawed people, thugs like Nikita, who fail on illicit tasks? Does that makes them worse? That had been the nature of my argument with Calem earlier in the day, before we left the apartment.

We had already done everything possible to satisfy the local bureaucracy without having the tickets themselves. At the Chinese consulate one morning we were informed that a visa would take two days to obtain and that in order to get the visa we first had to show our train tickets to Beijing. But at the train station the clerk said that tickets were only sold on the day of departure. What we were being told was, basically, this: You can’t get the visa without a ticket, and you can’t buy the ticket until a few hours before the train leaves. In other words it’s not possible. You can't get there from here. Fill out this form in triplicate and remember to bring two passport-sized photographs of God.

We were in the former Soviet Union on transit visas and every morning we had more and more the feeling that we were over-staying our welcome. The police had already fined us seventy-five dollars each for not having registered with the authorities within twenty-four hours of our arrival on the train from Kiev. Next the Chinese consul had demanded a letter from the British consulate attesting that Calem was in “good standing” with his government. Then the Chinese asked the same thing of me. The following morning, a little tired of the bullshit, we just stayed in the apartment. In the afternoon Tanya was going to meet us again. As a reward for my dubious help the day before addressing a letter in German to the police chief of Vienna, a woman we’d met in the central post office had promised us tickets to the Bolshoi ballet at the official price of fifty rubles. Tanya acted like we’d won the lottery.

But when the time came to meet her, my feet wouldn’t move. The idea of walking along snowy streets with people trying to sell me ice cream, or even sitting through a performance of Swan Lake by the Bolshoi’s B-Team and knowing that the ballet’s stars had gone West for the winter, was too much. At some point in the evening Tanya would have to tell us that Nikita still hadn’t succeeded in finding train tickets, and she would feel bad because we would feel bad and we would feel worse, for her sake, and probably everybody would say a few more unkind words about Nikki. Then there’d be an hour wait outside in the snow to have dinner at McDonald’s. No way. Nyet. Nyet. Nyet. At least Calem was cool about it though. He must have guessed that my batteries were low. He agreed to go alone to meet Tanya.

Left by myself in the apartment my first stop was the bathroom, to soak in a tub of hot water and read. The apartment was half-warm and dead quiet. Calem had found a foreign language bookstore downtown and one of the books that he had chosen was about a German family’s experience during the Second World War. It was a paperback and the pages began to curl in my hands as the steam rose from the rusty water. The story was about the family’s good fortunes under the Nazis and the changes in family life as the Nazis were being defeated.

At the end of the war, at the end of the book, as the German army was in retreat on all fronts, there was a joke going around Berlin that optimists were learning English and pessimists were learning Russian.

The joke didn’t seem that funny to me.

The next morning we were invited to a meeting with a friend of Nikita’s. Nikki himself could not be there—and Tatiana came to translate. We took the metro and caught two buses and found ourselves in a pretty neighborhood where the streets were lined with ankle-deep snow. The apartment blocks were all alike one after another but they were well-maintained and painted a lighter shade of grey than any other building we had seen in Mother Russia.

As we searched for Nikita’s friend’s flat, Tanya seemed uncomfortable. She kept looking at me as if she expected to hear something critical. We needed, it seemed, a subject of polite conversation. My first try was the weather, then rock n’ roll. No luck.

Sex came next, then the weather again. She still didn’t bite.

“Cold enough for you?”

“Da-a-a-ah,” she said apprehensively.

“I guess we’ll have a white Christmas this year.”

“I beg your pardon?”

It soon became clear that she wasn’t looking at me or Calem at all. Her attention was directed over our shoulders, at the apartment blocks we were passing. Prompted by the sight of what had been the lifestyle of privileged Soviets, Tatiana made a confession. She said that her father had been a member of the Party. But she insisted that she was not.

Of course she was lying, but that was okay because we were friends. Hers seemed to me to be a particularly oriental kind of lie, told to spare the listener any discomfort. She was showing the Asian side of her character the guidebook told us that Russians try so hard to hide.

“My father—” she began to explain.

“Yes?”

“My daddy—”

“Yes, Tanya?”

“My sugar daddy—”

The possibility of further confession was interrupted by the discovery that we were lost. 

Tanya made a call at a public phone to get more precise directions and eventually we arrived at the back entrance of a building and climbed a few flights of stairs. She knocked on a padded door. The door opened and we were sucked into the living room of a flat where the floor was littered with musical instruments.

The apartment’s sole occupant was a big-bellied older man, with a shrewd, pale white, perfectly round face. His entire head was like a bowling ball with whiskers. He was wearing an open housecoat and open slippers and he looked comfortable in his cozy home, like a bear in his den. He looked like—if you had to guess—a bureaucrat and a womanizer.

He and Tanya talked a little, none of which she bothered to translate, until she told us the price: two hundred dollars per ticket, a figure that had already been agreed upon. Money changed hands. As we left with the tickets Tanya whispered that she thought Nikita and Nikita’s musical friend were taking a cut, splitting some of the money between themselves. Once again Calem explained to her the realities of capitalism, which was now the law of the land. Calem completely ignored the theoretical contributions of his countryman Adam Smith and the actions of “the invisible hand.” Instead he made it simple for Tanya. “Everybody takes a cut,” he said, “that’s how the system works.” 

Besides, two hundred dollars for a seven-day train trip seemed reasonable to Calem and me. 

We went back to the metro, the tickets deep in our pockets. There was still one errand to do. Our last stop before leaving Moscow was the consulate of the People’s Republic.

But the Chinese issued our visas without ever asking to see the tickets. The whole process had taken so long that the Chinese consul had lost interest too.

 

We said goodbye to Moscow at midnight.

At Yaroslavsky Station we waited an hour to be allowed to board the train. It was a kind of surrealistic scene. Calem bought ice cream and he stood on the platform in the falling snow, eating an eskimo pie and practicing putting with a golf club that he had brought with him all the way from home. (If you spend a lot of time around the British you get the idea that they cultivate eccentricity in a pretentious way. But if you spend a little more time with them you realize that they really are just out of their fucking minds.)

Most of the other passengers were Chinese who had come to Russia at their own expense on the oldest pilgrimage known to man, barter—exchange—to make a buck. In addition to bags of “souvenirs” they carried food, which turned out to be a wise precaution because we had been warned that the restaurant car would only be worth visiting after five or six days, when we arrived at the Manchurian border and the Chinese took over the cooking. 

There was all the expected confusion as a couple of hundred passengers carrying baggage and packages tried at the same time to board the train and find their compartments. There was the added urgency we had seen in all the socialist or formerly-socialist countries, where people believed that if they didn’t rush and if they didn’t push, there wouldn’t be anything left when they got to the head of the line. Nikita and Tatiana were not there to say goodbye—Nikita because he probably wouldn’t have come if invited, and Tanya because we told her to stay at home in her well-heated apartment. When we reached our compartment we were awed. The second-class sleeping cars were neat and clean, each bed supplied with stiff-fresh linen and thick blankets and an old pillow decorated with the emblem of the extinct Soviet railroads.

A young couple from Tianjin shared our compartment. He worked for a Coca Cola bottling plant but was apparently ambitious, and together he and his wife had paid the equivalent of one hundred dollars for a year-long multiple-entry Russian visa. This was their first trip abroad and they were returning to China loaded down with what seemed to me to be … junk. Odds and ends in plastic bags. Rolls of worthless rubles. A baby carriage, not very well constructed to begin with, already crippled by a broken axle before they boarded the train.

To travel five thousand miles to buy a baby carriage didn’t make much sense to me but the Chinese couple was confident that with one or two more trips they would make a big profit. Despite their satisfaction with business there was tension remaining after their stay in Moscow. At one point the wife called her husband a huai dan which means “bad egg” and is pretty insulting by Chinese standards.

Shame covered the husband’s face like a young girl’s blush.

During the five days until we reached the frontier we passed cold gray Siberian towns that made Moscow look like Malibu. Frost was thick on the ground, and it was only the end of November. The train’s engine struggled forward through drifts of snow.

We were being pulled farther east, technically in the wrong direction, but nonetheless taking me home.