Flirting with Danger (5 page)

I used to tell Dima we should start a diet clinic in Moscow, a cinch since there was not one appetizing thing to eat in the entire country. “Think of the fortune we’d make,” I told him. “ ‘Come to Moscow, guaranteed to lose ten pounds in a week.’ ” Russians just didn’t understand how to market their country properly, I thought. But my husband was not amused. He could not imagine the idea of a place where marketing is designed to tempt consumers into buying because there is so much choice available. He was sure I was exaggerating about the bounty of supermarkets back home. He got frustrated with my descriptions of life in the United States.

“Sometimes I think you are a KGB plant and you make up all these stories of this luxurious life in the West as one more way to torment us,” he said to me once. “The West probably doesn’t even exist. They just train you at some camp outside of Moscow.” It was hard to tell if he was joking.

When I did muster up the stomach to hit the shops, there was the fear of being trampled by the babushkas, who were perhaps the best secret weapon in Russia. Their average height was about five feet, three inches—so was their width, and they had physical power and aggression a hundred times their body size. They would charge off to the shops early in the morning, a stampeding herd of woolly coats and furry hats. Bundled up in multiple layers of clothing, they were insulated from the cold and also from each other. In Moscow’s dilapidated public-transport system, they were constantly sardined into subway cars or trams. Their bulky attire might afford them a
few inches of breathing room. Moscow’s sidewalks were packed with people swarming to and from the metro. In contrast, its wide avenues were deserted. Few people had private cars, so the roads were traffic-free.

As many as two million people would pour into Moscow from the outskirts each day to try to buy milk or butter, which were unavailable a mere fifty miles outside the capital. Those lucky enough to have permits to live in Moscow also seemed to spend their days scouring the shops for food. A permit to live in Moscow was so desirable, it was commonly the basis of a marriage. Living space was in such deficit that couples sometimes shared their tiny apartments even after divorce. Many Soviets were still living in
communalkas
, or communal apartments, where several families shared a kitchen and bathroom.

A divorced policeman once told me he had to share one room in a
communalka
with his ex-wife. They divided the tiny room with a blanket not thick enough to smother the noises of his ex-wife’s love-making with her new boyfriend. Life in the
communalka
was a prime source of satire for Soviet playwrights and filmmakers. For the average citizen, it was a glaring example of the indignity of the system. Privacy is such an alien concept, there is not even a word for it in the Russian language. When Dima and I registered for our marriage, we were handed a shabbily printed pamphlet telling us what to expect on our wedding night. Privacy is so elusive that the first piece of advice on the brochure was to be alone with each other—easy task for the average Soviet couple.

Dima and I lived in several different places in Moscow. They all run together in my head, because they were almost all the same. The entranceways stank of urine. They had one room with a sofa that turned into a bed at night and a television set. Dima was addicted to old Soviet war movies, which was about all that ever
seemed to be on. The kitchen was tiny with a small linoleum table with plastic chairs. The furniture was always the same because all the shops sold one standard-issue. Most apartments looked alike, with one style fitting all. There was one design for sofa beds made all over the Soviet Union, one design for chairs, one design for curtains, and one design for plates. Everyone had the same coffee table. To break the monotony, some Soviets would stick on the wall anything Western they could find, an out-of-date calendar or a poster advertising Pepsi. The bathrooms were divided: there would be a tiny closet-sized toilet, often without a seat, and ripped-up pieces of
Pravda
instead of toilet paper; next door there was a plain washbasin and a cracked, stained bathtub.

Sometimes it was so cold outside I went stir-crazy, unable to leave the apartment all day. Russian friends were always trying to introduce me to winter virtues such as ice-skating and walks in the snow. They found it invigorating, but I didn’t. My feet and nose were always frozen and took hours to defrost after each foray outdoors.

Nobody in Moscow ever seemed to be at work. The streets were full of people devoted to scavenging the shops for supplies. Often one office worker would hit the streets and bring back booty to his or her coworkers. Shopping had to be a full-time preoccupation involving cunning, perseverance, and community spirit or Soviets would have starved.

I had no willing babushka or officemates as a network of people to pick up whatever they stumbled across during the day. I learned to shop without preconceived notions. I’d go as a blank slate and not expect to find eggs, butter, or milk—just be pleasantly surprised by whatever vaguely edible foodstuff I did stumble upon. I got used to Soviet life, to the wretched bathrooms and to the cold, to the secrecy and the fear. But I never could get past the food situation. I was always hungry.

Yet the friendship, generosity, and depth I found among Russians made up for everything the country lacked in creature comforts. When your mind is hardened by deprivation, undistracted by the temptations of a consumer society, you can spend more time with loftier thoughts. Russians shrugged off the daily hardships of life. Instead they would set the table with whatever they had, and drink vodka, recite poetry to each other, and sing late into the night. To me, they looked like gentle spirits trapped in gruff exteriors. Russia was like a narcotic for me, a place where suffering was revered as a high art form. Russians seemed to have cornered the market in tormented souls. My mother had taught me to worry about everyone else’s problems and not dwell on my own, always reminding me that someone else had it worse. “Think of the soldiers in the trenches,” she always said. I took her advice to heart. Here was a whole country that had it worse. There was no room for worry about my own wounds.

The simplest things in Russia often seemed intense, such an emotional roller coaster. Every friendship with a foreigner was fraught with danger, yet Russians were hungry for contact with the West. Many would take great risks to know me and learn from me about the world outside. I was their conduit to Western music, books, and a forbidden way of life. Many were desperate to know the lyrics of songs by the Beatles, or glance through a fashion magazine for a peek at Western life.

I would often meet Russian friends at a busy metro stop to keep from being noticed, and then we’d wander the chilly streets or drink knee-numbing port wine in the parks. We would discuss Solzhenitsyn and other banned works that I had read and they had not. I would often call them from a phone-box and never from my home phone, since I assumed it must be bugged. Outsiders like me could
relay information contrary to the daily dose of disinformation fed by the government.

Even though I was married and living with Dima, few Soviets would risk having me in their homes. Those who did often had treasures to show me. Artists with a lifetime’s worth of work hidden away in a closet or under a bed because it was not politically acceptable would sometimes make me the first audience to whom they could show their work, since showing another Soviet was a risk. The system bred distrust. Everyone was so worried about being bugged that it meant the KGB had less bugging to do.

Dima and I had a tumultuous time. It turned out there was another woman, a pretty blond harpist called Natasha. Dima was infatuated with her long before he met me. I gradually learned that she too was determined to get out of Russia and was shopping around for a Western husband. So she was never going to marry Dima. He insisted the relationship was over but I always wondered if they were secretly plotting to marry two suckers, use the marriages to get out of Russia, and then hook up together in the West. Sometimes he would go out at night and tell me I could not go with him. “It would be bad for them to have an American there,” he would say. Naive as I was, I did not argue with that, worried that I might get someone in trouble just by turning up. So I never knew whether he was really going to see Natasha, or someone else. My suspicions were aggravated by Dima’s lack of interest in me when we got into bed most nights.

When people in the United States asked if I was married, I would say, “Sort of. I was a cold-war bride,” not sure if my marriage was a product of politics, or a victim of it.

My marriage felt like a sham. But that was the model that was familiar to me; that was what my parents’ marriage had felt like. It
felt uncomfortable, but it was a discomfort to which I was accustomed.

Over the years I would come back to Russia in various incarnations. I worked as a tour guide, bringing American doctors and lawyers on educational exchanges. I worked for U.S. television and magazine bureaus as a translator and interpreter of Soviet life, especially valuable because I straddled two worlds by living among the Russians. They were lonely years. I didn’t feel as if I lived in one place or the other. My friend Lori came to Russia and met Dima and my Russian friends. Her knowledge of that part of my life bound us forever. She was the only one of my American friends who understood Russia’s lure for me. For a while it infected her too, and she visited several times. As for Dima, since the Soviets were stingy with visas, I had to find all kinds of ways to keep returning to see him. He may not have been much of a real husband to me, but he was an extraordinary guide into the Soviet psyche, which looked so impenetrable from the outside.

An American in Moscow

I
got my start in television in part because I was such a lousy housekeeper, a failing I inherited from my mother. Back in America and in between visas, I cleaned houses to earn money to pay for graduate school at Columbia University in New York. One employer, who worked at NBC News, was so eager to get me out of her bathrooms, she offered me a job as her assistant at NBC News in New York covering the elections in 1982. It was menial work, but once I got back to Moscow it opened doors for me.

I started working in Moscow’s NBC bureau whenever I came back to see Dima, staying a few months each time. Because I spoke Russian, I could go out on the street with the camera crews and try to interview ordinary Soviets. Most of them were too afraid to talk to us, but a few would. Sometimes we would stand in the cold in Pushkin Square asking person after person to answer a simple question about their lives, but they would move past us hurriedly, hoping
nobody noticed the brief contact they had with the foreign media.

My job also opened a new realm of conflict with Dima. He was always trying to get me to help myself to supplies from the NBC office. There were cupboards full of imported cleaning fluids, paper towels, canned foods, peanut butter, and coffee. He could not understand why I was so reluctant to take whatever wasn’t locked up. Any self-respecting Soviet worker would consider it a duty to rip off his place of employment for whatever he could find, even though they would give the shirt off their back or their last ruble to a comrade. When everything is owned by the state, no one takes responsibility for anything. It was hard to explain to Dima why I was unwilling to steal from my Western employer. In Russia, it was expected. I did end up “borrowing” an occasional roll of soft, American toilet paper from the office, but Dima was always disappointed in me.

In the early 1980s, journalists and diplomats still lived in walled-off compounds shielded from real Soviet life. Foreigners shopped at comparatively well stocked food shops, whose windows were hidden behind thick black curtains so as not to invite the envy of ordinary Russians, who were not allowed in. These stores were benignly called
beriozkas
, or “little white birch tree,” and foreign currency was required. Russian rubles weren’t good enough for the delicacies sold there. Among the treats were Hungarian chickens and Finnish biscuits, genuine gourmet items in the Soviet Union, where no chicken in a store was ever edible. Occasionally I would slink off to one of the “special” shops with my stash of dollars because I could not resist a luxury like a bag of peanuts or a decent chocolate bar. I would invariably get caught by a curious babushka on the metro. Dazzled by the fancy packaging, she would interrogate me as to where I found such goodies, usually resulting in an embarrassed
exchange when she realized I was privileged enough to shop where she could not. I hated those moments. I wanted her to know that the borscht she lovingly made for her family was much better than whatever packaged junk food I had succumbed to. Dima discouraged such weakness: he didn’t like to see hard currency, which was like gold, wasted on mere food. He could put anything in his stomach and assumed I should too. Dima preferred we spent what few dollars we had on much more essential items, like his wardrobe.