The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (4 page)

“Dinner for my capitalist friends!” he announced.

“Did he just call us his capitalist friends?” I asked Maria.

“Is a joke!”

We asked promoter Andrey if he thought that the bottle of wine he had given us would be an issue at the border. “In this part of the country, it's barely a border,” he said.

(Two years later, it barely was. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, separatist provocateurs began referring to the southeastern provinces of Ukraine as Novorossiya—“New Russia”—and declared a “Donetsk People's Republic.” Unacknowledged Russian arms, tanks, and soldiers poured across the border from the Rostov region. Bombing destroyed the Donetsk airport and much of the city, including the hospital. The train station closed. Heat and water were scarce. Those who could leave the region fled: 1.5 million of the region's prewar population of 4.5 million are said to have gone either to Russia or to western Ukraine, depending on their political sympathies. The Russian government both represented the separatists at peace negotiations and denied any control over them. The American government considered sending arms to the Ukrainians.)

“I don't like U.S.A., but I like you!” said an audience member after the show. The cab we were supposed to take to the bus station sped away in a huff because his trunk was full and we had too many bags. We packed into the next one, and a drunk
jumped in the front seat. I thought he was with the driver until he got out at an intersection, gave us a double thumbs-up to confirm that we had the money, and split.

We passed the new stadium, built to hold Euro 2012 matches. The old one had been tiny and on the outskirts of town. The new one was lit up in blue like Giants Stadium and was almost as big. A massive statue of Winged Victory, also lit, stood out front. The cabdriver gestured to the hotel across the way: “That, too, has been there forever. And now in the last month they're calling it a four-star hotel.” (The stadium was damaged by artillery shelling in 2014, and the Donetsk team now plays on the other side of the country, in L'viv.)

The station was dark, but the security guard, smoking cigs and drinking beer, assured us that the bus to Rostov was coming. He told the driver that it was a four
hryvnia
charge to continue into the parking lot. We got out on the curb instead. The bus pulled up some time later.

It was an hour's wait to board, and a two-year-old girl had the best idea of anyone for making use of her time: jump on the curb, jump off the curb, shake your ass, kick the aluminum wall, get daddy to swing you around like an airplane. Cabdrivers offered to take us the six hours straight to Rostov-on-Don. We all boarded, crammed into every seat. Truly, as Dr. Pangloss never said, this was the worst of all possible worlds.

It was three a.m. when we reached the border crossing. The horizon brightened even as the near-full moon was still in the sky. The Russian authorities filed on, tight-lipped and tight-haired, and I had an idea for a worst-selling pinup calendar: “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control.” A guard mumbled his way through some boilerplate. As he left, someone said, “Use your
street voice!” The guy sitting next to us joked, “He was asking ‘Everyone all right? Need a drink? Not too cold?'”

We sat for three hours at the border, from three a.m. to six a.m. Legions of pigeons were nesting and hatching in the eaves under the tin roof of the Ukrainian exit station, and the cacophony of coos, chirps, and warbles was maddening. We were given two cigarette breaks. A dozen giggling women ran into the field and hoisted their skirts to pee.

Of nineteenth-century Russian customs and border agents, the Marquis de Custine wrote, “The sight of these voluntary automata inspires me with a kind of fear . . . every stranger is treated as culpable upon arriving on the Russian frontier.”

The paranoia and vindictively selective enforcement had begun thousands of miles to the west, at the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We'd expected some procedural difficulty getting an entry visa at the Chinese embassy, located in the shadow of the USS
Intrepid
on the desolate West Side, but had sailed through the lines, frictionless. We simply dropped off our passports, photos, and a check for two hundred bucks and a week later picked up the passports with our photos laminated onto a visa page.

The Russians, though, were a different story. Mark Twain, writing over a hundred years earlier, complained that Russians “are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a complicated passport system.” We were required to fill out the PDF application in advance and show up at the consulate building between nine thirty a.m. and twelve thirty p.m. to apply in person.

The first day, we arrived at ten thirty a.m. and joined the line on the sidewalk, about twenty people deep.

“Well, this shouldn't take too long,” I thought.

Two hours later, only five people had entered the building.

“Come back tomorrow,” said the burly security guard in a thick Russian accent and slammed the iron cage around the door shut.

We looked at our linemates, none of whom seemed shocked. All of them, besides ourselves, were professional line-standers, paid by visa applicants with more money and less free time—or more sense—than we had. They brought books, lined up before the doors opened, and hoped for the best (or, if they were paid by the hour, the worst).

We returned the next day, at nine a.m. this time, and waited a mere hour and a half outside before being ushered through the glass doors into a waiting room, then to a Plexiglas window like a bank teller's. A blonde stereotype of a sadistic Slavic bureaucrat didn't look up from her desk.

“Papers!” she barked, of course. “Passports!”

She read unhurriedly through the applications, marking them with a red pen, first mine, then Maria's.

“Twenty-six!” she said, circling that box forcefully. “It is wrong.” She shoved the papers back through the slot beneath the window.

Item number 11 took one's passport number, issuing country, and dates of validity. Item 26 asked, “List all countries which have ever issued you a passport.” Since she had already entered her passport information, Maria had left it blank instead of entering “United States.”

“Obviously this was just an oversight,” she said to the lady. “Can't I just write it in?”

“No! Reprint it and come back tomorrow.” If she'd had a shutter to slam shut, she would have.

“We've been here two days in a row!”

She muttered to herself, scribbled something in Russian on a Post-it note, slid it to us, and got up from her chair. The interview was over.

“What does the note say?” I asked Maria.

“It says, ‘Can skip line.'”

“We're supposed to show armed guards a Post-it note?”

“Russia is the land of useless formalities,” complained Custine, who was himself detained in customs for twenty-four hours while trying to enter Saint Petersburg. “Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never show enough zeal . . . having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.”

Yet societies that insist on procedure and red tape can be simultaneously riddled with informal, ad hoc loopholes. We arrived early on the third day, not a little dispirited. We knocked on the cage and showed the guard the note. He waved us in.

I should properly introduce my other traveling companion on the Russian leg of our journey: a Frenchman, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, author of the 1839 book
Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
. He served the same role for me in Russia that Rebecca West would in the Balkans: a perceptive, acid perspective from a different era against which to measure my own impressions. Born in 1790, Custine lost both his father and grandfather to the guillotine at an early age. He became an object of scandal when in 1824 he was found unconscious,
stripped, and beaten, the result of a misplaced sexual advance toward another man. He became one of the most notorious homosexuals of his conservative day—“a problem for everyone,” as a contemporary put it—and he grew snide, bitter, and scandalous. He had literary ambitions, but his writing was ignored during his lifetime; Heine called him “a half-man of letters.” But his discomfort in his homeland, and seemingly in his own skin, made him an ideal traveler. “The real travelers,” said his countryman Baudelaire, “are those who leave for the sake of leaving.” Custine was a connoisseur of places, he said, that were “more singular than pretty or convenient; but singularity suffices to amuse a stranger: what we seek in traveling are proofs that we are not at home.” He first wrote a travel book about Spain, which garnered him a complimentary letter from Balzac, who suggested he write about another “semi-European country”—Italy, or perhaps Russia.

Emboldened by Balzac's suggestion and envious of Tocqueville's example, he traveled to Russia in 1839—a short trip, mostly confined to Russia's northwest, but as George F. Kennan, the American Russia hand and Cold Warrior, wrote, Custine “read countries, he claimed, as other people read books.” Custine arrived in Russia a born elitist and returned (despite his personal respect for then Tsar Nicholas I) a confirmed democrat, sickened by what he saw as the debasing effect of authoritarianism on the population. “When [Russian nobles] arrive in Europe,” his German hotelier tells him on his way to Saint Petersburg, “They have a gay, easy, contented air, like horses set free, or birds let loose from their cages. . . . The same persons when they return have long faces and gloomy looks; their words are few and abrupt; their countenances full of care. I conclude
from this, that a country which they quitted with so much joy, and to which they return with so much regret, is a bad country.” The Russian customs agents themselves questioned his motives:

“What is your object in Russia?'”

“To see the country.”

“That is not here a motive for traveling!”

His ensuing judgment of the country was severe, perhaps unfair, certainly condescending, and somehow persistent: perhaps because his pessimism echoes the “curiosity, sarcasm, and carping criticism” he—and I, and many other observers—found among Russians themselves. It is in his role as critic, and as the personification of the opinion of a Europe toward which Russia has historically looked with a mixture of envy, self-deprecation, and defensiveness, that he served his most recent turn in the public eye. In Alexander Sokurov's 2002 film
Russian Ark
, filmed in one ninety-six-minute shot, Custine and an unnamed narrator stroll through the Hermitage and thus through scenes from Russian history, from Peter the Great to World War II, still trying to identify the soul, or the narrative, or the fate, of the nation.

II.

Party for Everybody
(Rostov-on-Don to Saint Petersburg)

T
his was my first vision of Russia: miles of rolling hills, not a house or tree to be seen, the Don steppe, and vast farms. “All this region,” said Herodotus two and a half millennia earlier, “is entirely bare of trees, wild or cultivated . . . the land consisting of a rich and well-watered plain, with excellent pasture, and the rivers being almost as numerous as the canals are in Egypt.” The treelessness, he points out, has an additional complication: “Because there is no wood in Scythia to make a fire with, the method the natives adopt after skinning the animal [for sacrifice] is to strip the flesh from the bones and put it into a cauldron . . . and then make a fire of the bones underneath it. In the absence of a cauldron, they put all the flesh in the animal's paunch . . . and boil it like that. . . . In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.”

Our first Russian show was in Rostov-on-Don, in the far southwest. Rachel Polonsky devotes a chapter of her book
Molotov's Magic Lantern
to the city—the site of the decisive battles of the Russian Civil War (“Take Rostov at all costs, for otherwise disaster threatens,” Lenin warned his armies)—and its prostitutes. The pre-1917 Rostov was the home of a cosmopolitan, industrial nouveau riche: “The river was fouled with factory waste . . . and the water stank, but the main streets were paved, and electric trams ran along the Garden Ring, past banks, fashionable shops, clubs, insurance companies, cinemas and
belle-epoque
private residences,” Polonsky writes. The budding bourgeoisie was crushed and scattered by the Bolshevik cavalry army (which included the Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who wrote his
Red Cavalry
stories about his experiences); then the city itself was left in ruins for a decade after the German occupation in World War II. Rostov-on-Don now has the mix of genuine danger and scruffy sense of irony I associate with cities isolated, troubled, but not without a certain municipal patriotism, like Baltimore or Newark. Three years later, the city would be the main staging area for the Russian incursion into Ukraine: young Russian soldiers understood that “going to exercises in Rostov” meant deployment to eastern Ukraine.

The bar we were playing was called Nemets Perets Kolbasa, which means “German Pepper Sausage.” It's the first line of a teasing playground rhyme dating back to World War II:

        
German, pepper, sausage,

        
Sauerkraut.

        
Ate a mouse without a tail

        
And he said, “Eat that.”
^1
1

The wall outside the club indeed had a mural of a red pepper, a sausage, and a fat, mustachioed man in a Tyrolean cap.

The mistress of the house was Ksusia, who was sweet but odd, with a quality of noncommittal disengagement. When asked a question she didn't know how to or didn't care to answer, she laughed loudly and quickly, then stared into the middle distance until the subject was changed. She had moved to town a year earlier, working at an office with “strange ugly bad people” before taking over management of this little bar (now with adjoining tattoo shop) owned by a handsome, silver-haired fortysomething named Sergey.

After an afternoon nap of jet-lagged, disorienting intensity (I had been awake for thirty solid hours by that point), there was a soundcheck and an interview with a local journalist that was not so much about music—not at all about music, really—as it was an interrogation, of the “Russians are like this/Americans are like this” variety.
^2
2

“Here the average Russian makes $600 a month,” he said. “How much does the average American make? Russians have the idea that every American loves fast food. Is that true? What is your stereotype of Russia?”

I mentioned corruption, and he agreed, but “surely there is also corruption in America?”

“Yes, but I think it happens on higher levels of power and money, and more secretively, not on the level of police and small bureaucrats. You don't get shaken down by traffic cops.”

“Ah—more professionals!”

We laughed. Many Russians, and citizens of other countries in which corruption and repression are the norm, find it frankly unbelievable that the rest of the world doesn't operate in the same fashion.
^3
3
No country is entirely free of corruption, of course, but all exist on a sliding scale between the systemic and the episodic incidences—the difference between countries where it is endemic and considered part of the normal order of things and those where it is infrequent, considered aberrant, and condemned.

“Have you been on public transportation yet?” the journalist continued. “No? Are you scared?”

“No, I've only been here five hours, and I spent four of that dead asleep.”

“They say Russian women are the most beautiful—do you agree?”

“You're going to ask me that in front of my Ukrainian wife?”

The show was fine, if intermittently interrupted by a hulking, friendly drunk everyone called “Mongol.” Ksusia said the neighborhood's main trouble is a couple dozen roving drunks. “Sergey has too big a heart. He thinks if they can come here and hear music and poetry they will be cured.”

She, for her part, finally called the cops on Mongol. (“Actually,” she laughed, “it is just the police academy”—that is, cadets in training, assigned to the drunk patrol.)

Maria and I had the idea of going to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, the birthplace of Chekhov (and the supposed site of Tsar Alexander I's self-exile among the conspiracists who believe he faked his own death), on our day off but were discouraged by the dismissive laughter of everyone we asked about beaches in Taganrog. Guess it's not that kind of waterfront.

Back at the club that night, a French jazz pianist was leading a trio with two Russians and an American lady sitting in on vocals through an improv set. We met a guy from “the most popular band in Rostov,” whose hit was called “Kill the Niggers.” When we looked shocked, we were reassured that it was some kind of joke, though one that went unexplained.

After a few rounds of vodka shots with Sergey, we were delivered to the station. We had twelve hours of sleeper car that night, heading due north to the small city of Voronezh, and the compartment to ourselves. It felt like some kind of reward.

Osip Mandelstam, after the disclosure of his poem “The Stalin Epigram” (“His fat fingers, slimy as worms . . . the huge laughing cockroaches on his upper lip”) in 1933, was arrested and tortured but eventually allowed to choose his place of exile—excluding what were then the twelve major Russian cities. He chose Voronezh, once the center of the People's Will terrorist movement that had led to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and at the time of Mandelstam's exile “a chaotic deposit of poor, small houses, wildly scattered over the ravines and hillsides,” according to the poet Victor Krivulin.

Mandelstam may have chosen Voronezh as a kind of “macabre pun,” a black joke on his situation:
Voron
means “raven”—“the vans in which the arrested were transported were called by the people ‘black ravens' . . . or ‘little ravens' (
voronki
),” Krivulin explained—and a
nosh
is a homicidal robber's knife. Mandelstam ended one of his first poems in exile: “
Voronezh—blazh', Voronezh—voron, nosh
” (Voronezh—you are a whim, Voronezh—you are a raven and a knife).

Mandelstam lived in “the sleepy, sleight-tracked town/Half-town, half-mounted-shore” for three years of poverty and isolation with his wife, Nadezhda. (At one point, his translators Richard and Elizabeth McKane relate, he “resorted . . . to reading his latest poems on the telephone to his NKVD . . . surveillance person.”) He was visited by fellow poet Anna Akhmatova, who wrote about the encounter in her poem “Voronezh”: “In the room of the exiled poet/Fear and the Muse stand duty in turn.” A collection of poems,
The Voronezh Notebooks
, was published only decades after Mandelstam's death, reconstituted by Nadezhda, Akhmatova, and others from poor copies, scraps, and memory.

He was allowed to return from exile in 1937, only to be rearrested the following year. “Happy poverty. . . . Those winter days [in Voronezh] with all their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life,” Nadezhda remembered in her last known letter to her husband. Mandelstam died in December 1938, on a train bound for a Siberian labor camp.

We were picked up in Voronezh by a young punk who worked in market research at an orthopedics company. The talk turned immediately to politics: “Anyone who can think hates Putin. He is just like Lukashenko,” the anachronistic Belarusian dictator.

We were caught in the choking traffic that we would come to find is the hallmark of second-tier Russian cities. “I have old car. 1985 Lada. Don't be afraid!” He pulled a heart-stopping maneuver and gestured to the car in front of him: “A new Lada!”

“Are the new Ladas better?”

“I think no.” As if on cue, the driver in the new Lada killed his engine in the middle of the street, got out, and opened the hood with a frown.

Our host and his dozen friends took us past a bronze statue of the “Russian Bob Dylan,” Vladimir Vysotsky
^4
4
—shirtless with a vest!—and to dinner in a mall at a cavernous establishment that resembled a Medieval Times, with wood-hewn communal tables and heavy benches. Its incoherent decor included taxidermied bears, a mural of wolves playing cards, servers dressed in medieval bodices and jerkins, Brazilian carnival footage playing on TV screens in every corner, and pizza. It was called something that roughly, and roughly accurately, translated as “Confusion Pub.”