Flirting with Danger (9 page)

Alessio came from the sanest family I had ever encountered: it seemed modeled after some fifties-style happy-family situation comedy, but an Italian version. I had never met any adult who had a family he liked enough to vacation with. We skied each winter in Cortina, the exclusive resort in the Dolomites for the Italian jet set, to please his Venetian mother. In the summer we went to Sicily to his father’s family castle. The usual rivalries between northern and southern Italians were played out between Alessio’s parents, but it was playful banter compared with the cultural savagery that was waged in my home. Alessio had an idyllic upbringing with all the best schools and breeding. At twenty-one he spoke five languages. But no matter how loving and accepting his family was of me, I always felt defective around them. Yet I felt loved and cherished by this man who cooked and cared for me like nobody ever had. I had
a real life with Alessio instead of some fantasy relationship with a husband living eight thousand miles away. And I could always disqualify him on account of his age, making sure he posed no threat to the walls protecting my inner sanctuary from real commitment. It was bliss. Until my career got in the way.

In August 1991, I was heading to Ireland for a family reunion of sorts with some of my mother’s family. When I landed in Dublin, I saw a CNN report on a television in the airport, saying that hard-line communists were trying to take over the leadership of the Soviet Union and had Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest. I was stunned. I went directly to the Soviet embassy in Dublin and demanded a visa. With their country in confusion, the embassy staff was in a state of flux and doing some things out of the ordinary, like giving me a visa on the spot instead of the usual bureaucracy and delays. I called CNN and told them I had a visa in hand and was on my way. Then I called my mother to tell her I would try to make it for the second week of our vacation. I never got there; instead I ended up moving back to Moscow.

I hadn’t been to Russia in almost five years, but it was only asleep, dormant inside me like a bear in hibernation, about to wake up and pull me back into its lair.

On the Aeroflot flight into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, there was a giddy feeling among the passengers and even among the usually dour cabin crew. Everybody was drinking, not sullenly in their own seats as usual, but in a partylike atmosphere of excitement. Everyone shared whatever information they had about the momentous events unfolding. Even the captain spoke to us from the cockpit, updating us on the crowds out in the streets. I too was excited. I had a feeling the Soviet Union was in for some big changes.

The country I had known in the early 1980s survived on a system
of badly concocted lies obvious to anyone who looked beneath the surface. The nightly news boasted of impressive harvests, yet there was no food in the shops. The factories were reported to be overfulfilling their production plans, yet there wasn’t a pair of shoes to buy. They put men and women in space, but there was no toilet paper for sale. All governments distort the truth to some degree, but Soviet leaders seemed to set a new standard: every day there were blatant falsehoods about how great life was for the Soviet man and woman. “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us,” was a common saying in those days.

Now, in 1991, it was all coming apart. I never really believed the people had the energy to unmask the big lie. Actually, it seemed to crumble under its own rotting foundations. It was as if the country had a collective nervous breakdown, left with no choice but to overhaul everything it had once believed in. I was curious to see what lurked beneath. I had the sense that Russia and I were about to embark on a journey of discovery together, and I’d learn what lay beneath my surface as well.

The coup failed within days. For reporters, Russia was on the brink of a new and far more open society as the old ways unraveled. Newly reformed Soviet officials, anxious to behave like people in the rest of the world, started allowing us to go everywhere to film anything. The same stone-faced officials who for years had automatically said
nyet
to everything, now wanted to do things the way they thought they were done in the West, casting about for new rules to follow. Everything they had once believed, they were now told, was wrong. It was devastating to have to face the realization that their values, education, institutions, and way of life were built around a sham. They were like newborns in need of something to cling to. Naively and trustingly they looked to the West for
all the answers. It took a few years before Russians realized the West wouldn’t be showing them the way, and that they would need to search for it themselves.

A few weeks after the attempted August coup, the newly appointed KGB chief granted CNN permission to do a live broadcast from inside KGB headquarters. For decades Russians and Westerners had heard tales of the notorious Lubyanka prison underneath the building in central Moscow. During Stalin’s era, political prisoners had been tortured to death there. A monument to the Polish revolutionary who had founded the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had dominated the square for years, as if watching over KGB headquarters. Just days before our broadcast, crowds had toppled the statue. People cheered while Iron Felix, as the giant statue was known, dangled from a noose as a crane removed it from outside the KGB building, which for so long had terrorized ordinary Russians. Here we were, laying cables through dusty corridors, flinging open windows that had been shut tight for years. The old KGB guards stood around in a mixture of disgust and amazement as representatives of the enemy they had fought for decades demanded more electrical outlets. When we asked to shoot a nuclear silo training center, it was no problem. Government ministers were now giving us their home numbers, all in their zeal to be open and normal.

Every day another previously hidden aspect of Soviet society was suddenly available to our cameras. The special Western-standard hospital, serving top party officials, let us in to film, as did the practically medieval hospitals catering to everyday citizens. We filmed psychiatric institutions, orphanages, atomic power stations. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, we could get deported just for filming a bridge or other “highly sensitive” subject.

After I had spent two months covering the Soviet dis-Union, my
bosses at CNN called one day and asked if Alessio and I would transfer to Moscow as field producers. It seemed like a dream come true, a foreign posting for a news organization that was emerging as a significant player in world affairs. My job would be to come up with stories to shape CNN’s coverage, to travel throughout the country, to take care of the innumerable tasks behind reporting, shooting footage, and transmitting it for broadcast. I knew it was my chance to share the country I knew so well, which seemed so misunderstood in the U.S. media. I felt a sense of mission, to show the world that Russia may look big and threatening, but it was full of charm and delight. I also felt strongly that what happened in Russia was relevant and interesting to the rest of the world. The breakup of an empire was going to be a painful process, and Russians, often insecure and emotionally fragile, would need understanding from the outside world.

Alessio and I excitedly packed up our comfortable life in Atlanta and headed to Moscow. Once we got there, however, things were harder between us than I had expected. I distanced myself from him almost as soon as I landed, throwing myself into reporting on the chaos of Russia. Part of me was uncomfortable in the normal world he and I had created, and was relieved to be back in mayhem. I picked on him and discredited him in my mind, faulting him for not loving Russia the way I did. He kept his distance from Russians: perhaps not feeling as comfortable in the chaos, he preferred hanging out with other expatriates.

I quickly got swept up by life among Russian friends, old and new. Sasha Minkin, a theater critic who used to take me to underground theater when I was a student, was thriving under the new regime. In the Soviet days, the censors wouldn’t clear plays of questionable content, so they would remain in terminal rehearsal, sometimes for years. Sasha had been daring, writing on the borderline of
what was permitted by critiquing the system in the guise of theater critiques, rendering his work relatively unnoticed. Now, with glasnost, Sasha’s criticism went far beyond the theater and he became a leading investigative reporter for the fledgling democratic press.

A woman I knew from my student days, a professor of Marxism and Leninism at Moscow State University, had become the editor of a glossy magazine teaching newly rich Russians how to spend their excess wealth on the finer, more decadent things in life. Some of my old friends, black marketeers trading blue jeans in the 1980s, were now becoming multimillionaires in the new Russia, starting up oil companies or otherwise exploiting Russia’s vast natural resources.

In a desperate attempt to keep my relationship with Alessio going, I had the idea that a bloodhound puppy might help us, or at least distract us from the estrangement that was settling in between us. Anyone who has had any contact with bloodhounds knows that, of all breeds of dog, they are among the most challenging creatures to love. Nobody would go out and choose to have one except from ignorance or psychosis. Perhaps our psyches constantly re-create our childhood dynamics, either in the hope it will all turn out better the next time or because it is simply familiar. Just as children of alcoholics often marry drinkers, children of bloodhound owners go out and willfully get bloodhounds. My mother had grown up with them because her mother had bred them. We had had one, named Doucette, when I was a child. Doucette died tragically as a puppy, falling over a cliff, and I had always longed for another one. Just as a woman whose husband died young at war might idolize him, preserving forever that first blush of love, never having had a chance to get to know his bad habits, I too remembered only the cute floppy ears and sad eyes and none of Doucette’s other more trying attributes.

Alessio and I went to the Bird Market one Saturday morning in search of a puppy to bind us together. The Bird Market is a strange place in the center of Moscow. Under communism it was one of the few places where free-market capitalism flourished and continues to do so in the new Russia. People come to sell animals of all types. Babushkas beckon buyers with conspiratorial looks, opening their heavy woolen coats to display kittens and puppies huddled against the cold in the warm inside pockets. It is a delightful place with birds chirping and exotic animals of all kinds, though the pain of Russia is also on display. I once saw an old woman crouched on the ice with her sad old red-eyed Saint Bernard named Charlie, the thick folds of fur on his neck draped with the medals of dog-show championships. The two looked as though they had been through a lot together. Nevertheless, judging from the condition of the woman, Charlie was about to be sold so she could buy another bottle of vodka.

There were no bloodhounds that day but we got word of where there was one for sale. We followed a lead to a typical Soviet apartment block, where a family of three shared their one-room apartment with three bloodhounds and a rooster, who was spitting seeds in a corner. Two dogs were lounging on the sofa and a third was curled up in a chair. I immediately fell in love with Sara. We took her home. She was big, slobbery, stubborn, and completely deranged. She also had a bladder problem that required a trip outside every two hours, even in the middle of subzero Russian nights. If anything, she contributed to Alessio’s departure from my life.

“Siobhan, there are no bad dogs,” said my mother when I called inquiring about some of Sara’s problems, implying that any canine shortcoming is the fault of its human companion. Sara regularly devoured silk scarves and countless pairs of shoes, the newer and more expensive, the better. She especially loved to gnaw on Alessio’s
favorite antiques. Sara lumbered around dragging those long silky ears through the grime of Moscow’s streets. She was oblivious to any command, lost in her own peculiar world of scents. She was a giant nose and ears on legs. Sara was such a generator of slobber that I was amazed anyone would come to my house more than once. She greeted visitors by shoving her wet jowl and snout into their crotch to get a good whiff. And then, after they thought they’d escaped her, she would hurl some slobber at them from across the room. Nobody left my apartment without being slimed. I thought I should start offering raincoats at the door. Every time I was angry with her, she stared at me with those sad, bloodshot eyes and my heart would melt. She was difficult to love, but I did. When Sara escaped in Gorky Park one afternoon, my world stood still.

“Don’t let her off the leash,” I shouted to Alessio as he headed out with Sara for an afternoon walk. Hours later Alessio returned to the office, ashen and alone. He had let her off the leash and, sensitive to any sound, she had bolted when a band struck up in the open-air theater in the center of the park. He had spent hours hunting for her before steeling himself to tell me. I was crushed. She was a pain in the ass most of the time, but the thought of the poor thing wandering around Moscow’s busy streets alone and scared of every noise broke my heart. It was a good thing there was no news that day. I mobilized the entire bureau to recapture my runaway hound. Russians, usually the masters of sloth, can be transformed by a crisis: everyone, from the drivers and the cook to the workers renovating the office, stopped what they were doing to join the search. The cameramen took the TV lights out and roamed the park till three
A.M
. hunting for her. We put up flyers all over the park promising a ten thousand–ruble reward—equal to about a hundred dollars, and several months’ wages in those days—for her safe return. We heard nothing encouraging, although I had calls all day and night from
grannies who thought they had seen her, or just to offer their sympathy and support.

The staff in the CNN bureau put together a heart-wrenching video, pleading for Sara’s safe return. Our bureau manager, Lena, was a world-class dog lover who regularly rounded up Moscow’s strays and brought them into the office. We always had a number of homeless dogs living in the bureau, and I spent many hours calling around in search of homes among the expatriate community. One of our biggest problems with them occurred when we were broadcasting from the bureau: producers in Atlanta would ask what all the barking was about in the background. We usually lied and said it was packs of wild dogs in the courtyard below. We also made sure to clear out the kennel when the top brass came to visit. Lena, who I suspect may actually prefer that the CNN bureau forget news altogether and convert it to an animal rescue center, arranged to have the video shown on local television one evening. Meanwhile, I continued to ask everywhere about Sara. In the shops where customers were generally greeted with snarling indifference, the sales-clerks stopped what they were doing to speculate with me about where she may have gone. Finally one old woman called to say she had overheard salesgirls in a confectionery store on October Square talking about a stray dog they had been feeding. That old Soviet habit of eavesdropping and relaying suspicious information that kept the nation in a state of fear for decades finally worked in my favor. My favorite driver, Volodya, a large burly guy who had jowls rivaling Sara’s, rushed over there with me. We interrogated the staff, and learned that a stray bloodhound had turned up. A couple of guys across the way at the watch factory had taken her in.