You Are One of Them (12 page)

“I’m so relieved I’m not on the Babes page,” I said, commiserating with the others who had been passed over, but cloistered in the bathroom at home under the magnifying lights I studied my deficiencies. My cheekbones were high, my lashes were long, but I was too pale, my boobs were too small. I counted every clogged pore. One nostril was smaller than the other. And I knew that the real flaws were inside. Jenny, I thought, would have been one of the “hot” ones. Not just because of the symmetry in her features but because of the easy harmony of her moods. She was open to other people, she was game. She assumed that people would like her, and so they did.

“This is why you do not have husband,” Svetlana continued after a few minutes.

“You don’t have a husband anymore either,” I said.

She slit her eyes at me. “My ex-husband is Dutch,” she said. “This was the mistake. I wanted to marry foreigner, the man with money. But the Dutch . . .” She paused before she made her pronouncement. “They are not passionate people.”

“Van Gogh wasn’t passionate?” I said.

“He was madman.”

“Where is your ex-husband now?”

“Oh, he is still in Moscow. He has new girlfriend from Scotland. I have seen her once. She is fat and red.” She flicked her cigarette onto the ground and returned the pack to her purse. “And now I live again with my parents. Until I find the new husband. I want an Italian this time. I am studying Italian. It would be nice to live in Napoli. I would eat beautiful pasta every day. I was traveling there last year. You know Napoli?”

I told her I’d been there for a couple of days.

“You cannot imagine how wonderful it is for us now, to be able to travel abroad. To finally see the world,” she said. “This was best thing about perestroika. Life was good then. We were free to travel, but our economy was not so bad. Gorbachev was better than Yeltsin.”

Svetlana proved to be an exacting guide. There was a lot to see, and she was not going to let me skip anything. She unspooled historical dates and facts without pause. “This is very old church,” she said as we entered St. Basil’s. Ivan the Terrible commissioned it in 1555 and then, according to legend, had its architect blinded so that he could never again build something so beautiful. That’s Russia for you: there’s always violence in the wings. After our visit to St. Basil’s, Svetlana took me to GUM, which had begun its transformation from state-run department store to Western-style mall. The empty shelves of perestroika were now filled with foreign goods that few people could afford. The new tenants were Reebok and Benetton and Adidas, though the ubiqitous tracksuits sported on the streets of the city were mostly knockoffs. And the bathrooms, I discovered, were depressingly spartan and devoid of toilet paper.

Svetlana stopped to buy ice cream at a kiosk. It was wrapped in waxy paper; she peeled it away with a gesture that struck me as nostalgic. As she licked the cone, I saw traces of the eager child she must have been.

“What did Jennifer say about me?” I asked her.

“Kogda?”
When?

“You said she told you a lot about me . . .”

“She said you were
grustnaya.
”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“Da,”
she said. “You were sad.”

She told Svetlana I was sad? Did she mean sad as in pathetic? Didn’t she have anything better to say about me? Over the years I’d learned that some people are frightened by sadness, by intense feeling of any kind, and around such people I had learned to stay on guard, aware that revealing any vulnerability would push them away. I had other friends after Jenny, but she was the last person I completely let in, the last one to spend any time with my mother in our haunted house. I was sure that people would like me better if they didn’t know where I came from. In high school I approximated an easygoing air, and in college I found a vaguely literary crowd in which a melancholy streak and bleak humor were practically required for membership. But the fact that Svetlana was dismissing me as “sad” seemed ironic given that she was Russian. Russians had a predilection for the tragic, didn’t they? Surely this was a place where I wouldn’t have to apologize for not being happy all the time. I liked reading the Russians—all those ill-fated love affairs set against desolate landscapes. I was partial to unhappy endings. Misery loves company.

•   •   •

T
HEN WE WENT TO THE
K
REMLIN.
“
Kreml
means ‘fortress,’” Sveta said. Like a game-show hostess, she gestured at the medieval walls that had kept people out for so long. There were two different admission prices: one for Russians, a much higher one for foreigners. This was typical, Svetlana said. All the museums also had a separate price for foreigners. I had no idea how many buildings the Kremlin complex contained. I would have been content to breeze through the grounds, but Svetlana insisted on a lengthy, formal tour. “Here is possible to see world’s largest bell,” she said of the Tsar-kolokol, which cracked before it ever rang and now sits, dormant, beside the bell tower. “Here is possible to see Assumption Cathedral,” she said as we entered the building where heads of the Russian Orthodox Church were buried until the early eighteenth century. “Here you can see icons from twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” This was not an interactive tour. She moved me from point to point like a toy on a factory assembly line. There were other groups of tourists being herded in similar fashion. Many of them clutched guidebooks as if they were security blankets. “Here is possible to see Annunciation Cathedral, built in 1484. Here you can see famous icons of Theophanes.”

“So many cathedrals, so many icons,” I said. So many onion domes, I thought. I was exhausted.

She studied me, trying to make sense of my comment.

“Religion’s making a comeback, isn’t it?” I said.

“What is this ‘comeback’?”

“I mean, it’s coming back. People are rediscovering religion?”

“Yes, well, Orthodox Church is suddenly very—how do you say it?—popular. You know, people followed the party, now they follow church. Unfortunately, I cannot say if they are true believers.”

“So you came here with Jennifer?”

“What?”

“I mean, to the Kremlin. To all these churches.”

“Da, konechno.”
Yes, of course.

“Do you mind if I take a picture of you outside? By the czar’s cannon, maybe?”

“Pochemu?”
Why? Most Russians were understandably wary of cameras.

“My mother wants me to take pictures of the places Jenny visited when she was here . . .”

“When she was here?”

“Da.”

“You understand, of course, is possible she is here now.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“If she’s really alive, tell me where she is.”

“I cannot tell you that. Not yet.” Svetlana smiled. “Now we will see Armory. Many beautiful treasures to behold.”

She had switched back into guide mode. Clearly I wasn’t going to get any more personal information out of her that day. I followed her through the rooms of the Armory Museum in a daze. Sveta pointed at czarist regalia and Fabergé eggs, but I couldn’t focus on the jewels. It was Jenny I was thinking about.

When we finally emerged from the Armory, it was nearly five o’clock and I was famished. “I’m hungry,” I said in Russian. Actually, the construction I used translates as “I want to eat,” which seemed appropriately insistent given how desperately my stomach needed to be filled.

Svetlana nodded. She said she’d take me back to Patriarch’s Ponds and resume our tour another day. “To be continued,” she said. “Yes?”

“Da,”
I said.

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT
C
ORINNE TOLD
me we were going out. I’d been in Moscow for nearly two weeks and had finally adjusted to the time difference. She told me I needed to get out and meet some people. It was Saturday, and Corinne said we’d start at Rosie O’Grady’s, an Irish pub where all the expats went. It was already cold enough to require winter jackets. I wore the same navy peacoat that had shielded me from Vermont winters, but Corinne was in fur.

“I know, I know,” she said when she saw me looking at her coat. “I was against fur before I came here. But then you realize that nothing else keeps you warm enough.”

On the street she said, “We’ll take a cab,” and then stuck out her arm. I hadn’t seen a single taxi since I arrived, but I soon learned that “taking a cab” was a euphemism for sanctioned hitchhiking. People just hailed any car that would stop, negotiated a price, and trusted that he—I never saw a woman driver—would take you where you had asked to go. It was a beat-up Neva that pulled over for us, and I was sure that my mother would be distraught if she knew I was climbing into a stranger’s car, especially after dark, in a city where men were almost never sober. There were no seat belts in the back, and the driver’s face was at best surly, at worst downright hostile, but I kept telling myself,
When in Rome . . .
while Corinne began a rapid-fire exchange in Russian, most of which I couldn’t comprehend. I don’t think I let out my breath until we pulled up in front of the bar fifteen minutes later. Corinne passed some rubles to the front seat and then opened the door. We were out.

There was nothing remarkable about Rosie O’Grady’s: it was a generic Irish pub, with signs for Guinness and wooden stools lining the bar. But as a foreign-owned bar in the city, it was to Moscow’s expats what Rick’s was to the denizens of
Casablanca.
Corinne seemed to know everyone: the
Newsweek
bureau chief who was complaining about his wife back in New York; the NPR reporter who kept twisting the resin bracelets on her arm as she spoke in a husky, smoke-filled voice; the economist from India who preached privatization; the Texan oil worker who bought me a beer and called me—without a trace of irony—“little lady.” After a week spent struggling to piece together the conversations I’d heard in Russian, it was a surreal relief to be surrounded by voices speaking English. They were French, Swedish, Italian, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, German, American, and Irish—the bartender took our orders with a brogue—and though they spoke with varying degrees of proficiency, it was English they conversed in. They traded stories of entanglement with Soviet-style bureaucracy. They bemoaned the lack of customer service. They diagnosed the ailing Russian economy and shook their heads about oligarchs. They told jokes about New Russians.
(New Russian #1: Nice tie. New Russian #2: It cost three hundred dollars. New Russian #1: You fool! You could’ve gotten it for five hundred around the corner.)
And they were full of advice for me, the rookie in their midst.
Don’t use credit cards,
they said.
Even at the fancy restaurants. They’ll steal your card number and charge up a storm. . . . Beware of the Gypsy kids,
they said.
They’ll descend on you around the Metro stations. They might look cute, but they’ll pick your pockets clean.
 . . .
Beware when someone shouts
“Militsiya!”
or “Police!”—it’s just a tactic to divert your attention while someone else steals your money. . . .
Be careful of making agreements with Russians,
they said.
Everyone lies,
they said. . . .
Russians are so xenophobic,
they said.
And racist. . . .
Flowers,
they said.
Russians love flowers. Men and women. Give them flowers on their birthdays or when you visit their homes. But make sure you never give a bouquet with an even number of flowers. It’s bad luck. Eleven flowers, thirteen flowers, but never a dozen.
I was learning a great deal about Russian superstition.
If you put a lot of salt in your cooking, it means you are in love,
Svetlana had told me earlier.
If you brush crumbs off the table into your hand, you will fight with your lover.
And she said,
Don’t ever sit at the corner of a table during a meal, or you will never be married.
I said it was too late: I’d spent many years in corners.

“So what brought you to Moscow?” the expats asked. They offered their own history as pioneers: every story an epic with an adventurous hero. Their expat avatars were less timid, less awkward than the identities they inhabited at home.

“I don’t know,” I said, which has always been my answer when I don’t feel like elaborating.

“She wants to be a journalist,” said Corinne. She was on her third vodka tonic and getting louder and more strident.

They were all getting louder, actually. I hadn’t been around so many drunk people since college. Their drinking was reckless and a little frightening, as each glass erased more of the evening’s composition.
Is this adulthood?
I thought
. I graduated to
this
?
There were plenty of journalists there, from the
New York Times,
the
Washington Pos
t
,
CNN. They burped booze as they passed me their business cards and urged me to get in touch. Someone from the
Moscow Times
assured me he could get me a job as a copy editor. “You’re obviously a smart girl,” he said.

And then Corinne said, “We’re going dancing,” and I found myself carried by the flow back out into the street. There were two women with us—the husky-voiced NPR reporter and an Australian named Molly, who bent over to vomit right there on the sidewalk while Corinne hailed a car. “Propaganda!” Corinne said triumphantly from the front seat as the rest of us squeezed into the back. “Propaganda!” Molly said, with a hiccup. I cracked a window to get some air and hoped that Molly wouldn’t throw up on me, and then I closed my eyes against the driver’s dangerous maneuvers. It was only when the car slammed to a stop that I realized that “Propaganda” was our destination.

Propaganda was a nightclub, and it was dollars that Corinne and the NPR reporter shoved at the bouncer to buy our admission. Inside, techno music throbbed in the semidarkness, and both Russians and foreigners tangled on the dance floor. It was easy to spot the Russian women under the lights: they were much skinnier than the Westerners, and their skin—from years of poor nutrition, perhaps—was sallow. We took a table in the corner—“Not too close to the deejay!” said Corinne—and a petulant waitress took our order. When the shots arrived, I shook my head, but Corinne would not accept my refusal. “You’re in Moscow,” she said. “You have to drink vodka.”