Yuri Druzhnikov
A Streetlight Moscow Style
From I was Born in a Line
This time my Russian odyssey begins in Helsinki. The producer making a documentary based on my book took me out to dinner one evening. Two attractive-looking women in fur coats stop our car.
“So, you boys want to have fun?” they offer in fluent Russian, “Two hundred dollars apiece.”
“What do they want?” asks the producer.
I switch to English. He turns to the back seat and asks his wife in Finnish. She smiles and answers us in German: “Too expensive.”
“Tell them,” says the producer, “that my wife won't let me.”
In the dark the girls have not noticed his wife. Once they do, they lose interest and concentrate their attention on other clients.
“There are hundreds of them here,” comments the producer indifferently. “The Bolsheviks returned Finland to us after the Revolution; the prostitutes are taking it over again.”
Next morning I took the flight to Moscow. Because of the recent flood of Russian passengers, Finnair also makes the announcements in Russian. But in the Russian text of the announcement there is an added phrase: “Please do not forget to return the headphones.”
The people sitting next to me in the plane are a family: Mother, Father, and two children. Father, about forty, has a stern and pushy look about him characteristic of the new generation of powerful people who are up to any challenge. Mother is unsophisticated but pretty, fifteen years or so younger than he. They are arguing in whispers, I'm not sure why.
The woman glances at me sideways, and asks for the time in Russian. There is a watch on her wrist, so it's clear that she is checking whether or not I can follow their argument. I make the uncomprehending noises in English, feeling a little guilty about it. The quarrel flares up, and now the subject becomes clear. It seems they smuggled a handful of uncut diamonds out of Russia. The wife hid the biggest of the stones behind a chest of drawers in a hotel on the island of Corsica to keep it safe.
If you happen to be on vacation in a small Corsican hotel, don't forget to pick up the cached stone; it is behind the commode to the left of the door.
My neighbors carefully return the headphones. Dad, like all businessmen in his milieu is dressed in a dark suit and a long navy blue overcoat; if you have a sudden urge to return your newly-found diamond to its rightful owner, you may not have some trouble finding him. Bankers in Moscow dress like funeral-home employees. The “uniform” makes it easier for hired assassins not to miss their targets. The cops are happy too. I saw an incident where a highway patrolman used his own gloved hand to obsequiously brush the snow off a new Mercedes occupied by a young man in a navy-blue overcoat.
The last New Year was welcomed in Moscow without much festivity—communists incessantly scrambled for power, fascists screamed out their slogans near the Bolshoi theater, mud covered the sidewalks despite the Mayor's order to clean the streets twice a day—these problems made everyday life somewhat subdued.
A friend of mine is now stuck without a car. Car theft is rampant, people are used to it. Stolen cars are seldom found, usually only if they have been abandoned by the thieves. The latest wave of thefts has even hit the government car pools where the cars are equipped with anti-theft devices and kept at night in especially protected garages.
Another novelty: newspapers are carrying headlines like the one in Moskovsky Komsomolets: “A white Mercedes was just stolen from Masha Rasputina, the favorite singer of the wealthy.” A few days later the car is back in its place in front of Masha's house. The newspaper says “We are grateful for the return of Masha Rasputina's car.” A publicity stunt? Who knows...
The Communists are threatening to take power. Once again just like in the old days some friends and I sit in the kitchen and argue whether or not they should be outlawed like the Nazis in Germany. Why is raping a person a crime when raping a whole country goes unpunished? Isn't it clear that there can be no dialogue with these people? But a local optimist puts in his two cents' worth: he patiently explains to the foreigner–me that the appearance of a new comrade Hitler is hardly possible. If even Yeltsin, with his huge bureaucratic apparatus, and with the heads of all the powerful ministries devoted to him, is taking years to put the country in order, how can one outsider do it? The outsider would need money, and all the money is now abroad, it cannot be confiscated the way Lenin did in his time. There are several mafias in the country, and any one would be prevented from taking power by combined opposition from the others.
This mess seems to suit everyone except the pensioners. Finally there is a true separation between the state and the individual, whom the government now does not really give a damn about. I don't know how much the authorities should be interfering with the private life, but the principle as it stands now is “live as you like.” For many this is hard. Where can you apply your talents? How do you survive?
The most frequent kind of advertising on Moscow walls (aside from offers by practitioners of the oldest profession) runs something like this: “Immediate earning potential in your free time. Call.” No name of the organization, just the phone number and a first name. I call “Valya.” I am told to come to an “informational meeting” and bring 50,000 rubles in cash.
“Is this an earning potential, or paying potential?”
Valya answers, “earning.”
“What am I paying for?”
“It's the registration fee.”
By this point the research has become tedious.
A friend of mine, a first class surgeon who spends his Sundays selling pantyhose at a flea market, earns more this way than at the hospital. In need of some emergency money? You can always sell your phone number for three million rubles (about $600). If you are a Muscovite it shouldn't be too hard to become reaccustomed to living without a phone.
Day by day in Moscow there are more foreigners and former emigres, people who couldn't adapt to the life in the States, Germany, Australia. Some have permanent or temporary girlfriends and boyfriends here, others even a second family, distinct from the one in New York or Cologne. This is what is called “homeland relief.” Some former émigrés are doing some serious business here, others use the Muscovites' lack of knowledge to pass themselves off as Western experts. One appears regularly on the TV screen voicing banalities about politics, another reads a series of lectures at one of the universities and, according to his department chair, mainly reminisced about his parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbors and their pets.
Kvetching and exaggerating problems still are some of the favorite pastimes. My friend looks around and says, “Look how bleakly everyone is dressed—black, brown, gray!” Surely, there is some truth in that, but people's clothes are new, and there are many beauties showing off the latest fashions. Mayor Luzhkov ordered all of the tallest buildings in the city to be lit up at night. People comment, “Now you can see the poverty better.”
One of Yeltsyn's ministers complains to me: it used to be that the dissidents were under surveillance; now his own phone and the phones of all the functionaries are bugged in order to help provide their superiors with a scapegoat in case of a scandal.
Instead of “complain” the word “analyze” has come into use. As always, the “analyzers” are an inner circle, but the lucky ones are doing it as a part of their job and receive a decent salary for it. These are people who complain more than others—probably because they know more. The former Party Central Committee buildings surrounding the Old Plaza are filled with the “analysts'” desks, each equipped with a computer terminal. Their offices are usually empty because the “analysts” are taking three-hour lunches in the neighborhood restaurants, “analyzing” their private businesses and the trips abroad.
The second favorite pastime is conveyor-belt begging. One morning in the metro two women passed down the aisle only a few minutes apart, holding identically stenciled signs: “Please help! My child has heart problems, I need money for an operation.” People in high positions are different from the beggars only in that they ask for more. The habit of begging has suffused all levels of society. I was asked in various places 1) To translate a play and produce it on Broadway, 2) To find a nice American for a daughter, 3) To find a rich American woman for a son, 4) To organize a lecture tour of twenty, or even better, thirty American universities. Someone even asked me to find in America a writers' colony with free housing where he could spend a month or two writing poetry: “Here, you know, one can't find the peace to do it.”
A provincial publisher with whom I am acquainted bought me a German beer and asked if I could procure for him some typesetting equipment in America. I said the only thing I could “procure” was another manuscript.
The editor-in-chief of a fashionable paper whispers: “How can we get an investment from over there?”
“What do you mean?”
“We urgently need two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“I could maybe donate $250,” I say. “Two hundred and fifty thousand would be a little hard to come by. What do you need so much money for?”
“To establish democracy,” he explains modestly.
Democracy is crawling out of every hole. Of some things there are plenty, some others are missing. The freedom of culture is clearly there, but the main problem as I see it, is a lack of the culture of freedom, a reasonable structure to this sudden all-permissiveness. A phrase from some magazine story jumped out at me, “Elections in June: we will be picking a madam for our brothel.”
Tragedies–small and large–abound. According to official statistics 700,000 people in Moscow caught the flu. The rumor has it there were considerably more than that. During my three-week visit two acquaintances were hit by cars, one woman fell down a slippery staircase in the subway and broke her hand.
A sign in a student cafeteria at a university where I was invited to speak: “There is food, but no entrance.” It turned out that with the staircase broken the only way to get in was through the kitchen.
Near the Airport subway station there is a new supermarket with a flashy name “American Store Russia.” The store is empty–no one can afford the prices. I walk among the shelves. Two cashiers stare and a security guard follows in my footsteps to make sure I don't put a can of yogurt in my pocket.
I try out a new Russian car Oka, fresh out of a store: wires are hanging loose, bolts aren't screwed in, the doors don't lock. There is definitely a freedom of slack. Most of the goods produced, from table spoons down to a government decree, are fit for a garbage can. Still, as suppressed Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov used to say, “I am not surprised when the streetcars don't run, I am surprised when they do.”
One thing that is on everybody's mind is politics, even more now than before, under the totalitarian ideology.
Scene: the Central Cinematographers' Club. An evening honoring a great actor who passed away some time ago. All of the Beau Monde is present. All the speakers discuss the presidential elections, ignoring the man they have gathered to remember.
Many theaters are filthy and decrepit. But the actors, especially the young ones are incredible. Their art is based on sheer enthusiasm, the attendance levels are based on the quantity of sex in the play. In an overall decent production, two main protagonists have intercourse on the floor, on the sofa, and standing up; none of this has anything to do with the plot.
The new TV broadcasting is varied and interesting, justifying by its very existence the collapse of the old regime. Here too there is a lot of sex, but because of the TV audience's short attention span it consists mainly of quickies. Every evening they show dead bodies on the screen—dead bodies in the streets, in the morgue, at the cemeteries. Every bit of the news has to horrify the audience. Why? It is horrifying enough to try and cross a street. The traffic is awful and in order to get to the other side of the road you have to throw yourself under the wheels.
Various kinds of publications continue budding from each other. In the editorial offices people with different political beliefs cannot get along. New Yunost (New Youth) split away from Yunost, New Literary Supplement from the old Literary Supplement, leaving a subscriber confused and not understanding that the differences are based on the editors' ambitions rather than the essence. The word “new” is generally dangerous, in Moscow it immediately becomes obsolete.
The journalistic life is different in the post-censorship era, but in old publications there still exists the same strict control over the author's thoughts. They castrate the thesis, change the title, aborting the main thought. For the old editors, the writer's production is still a kind of pre-fab, to be assembled according to a mysterious standard.
The circulation of an old, formerly prestigious newspaper fell so much that the editor-in-chief gives his colleagues bogus figures. The newspaper's staff consists of two hundred people, most of them quite old. Once a buyer offered to privatize the newspaper, but said that he would only be able to keep on 50 employees. The editor-in-chief told him that the decision could only be made by a majority vote. The result? 150 to 50 against, and another newspaper was doomed.
“America is a land of contrasts.” It is peculiar that this catch phrase once routinely used by the Soviet propaganda to describe the United States now fits Russia considerably better. Saturday at the Russian State Library (the Russian equivalent of the Library of Congress), I spend two hours in the line to the coat check only to be faced with a kindly notice, “We don't take coats with broken hangers.”
I am here for a friendly meeting with the workers of the Special Section that houses books published abroad in Russian which were formerly strictly forbidden from circulation. When this department was opened to the public about two years ago they held an exhibition of my books, the very books which caused me to be blacklisted in Russia for fifteen years.
When you want a cup of tea in the library cafeteria you must first purchase a cup and a tea bag, and then schlep to another room where a central heating pipe on the wall is broken and there is a continuous stream of hot water. The windows are broken and an icy wind blows through.
The book fairs on the streets are still brimming with semi-literate garbage. Before there used to be only one kind of reading for the majority of the population—the books published by the government; a privileged few also had access to samizdat (typewritten and Xeroxed copies of books). Now it is easy to get lost in the whole spectrum of literature available on the market. Good books, however, are still hard to come by. But small bookstores are popping up in private apartments and basements: “Eidos,” “Reflections,” “October 19.” At night they hold literary readings, tea—a different kind of cultural life.
To relieve the boredom of my flight back I picked up a fresh edition of a Russian literature textbook for the elementary school. In paperback, printed on tissue-quality paper it fell apart after one reading. Aside from an excessively patriotic tone, the content was pleasant enough, beginning with poems by classical Zhukovsky and followed by Pushkin, Lermontov, Noble prize winner Ivan Bunin. There were a lot of poems about nature. Suddenly towards the end I stumbled upon a poem by Sergei Mikhalkov, a noted official children's writer of Soviet times. He was denouncing evil American landowners who torture their African slaves. There was no indication of the poem being anything but a description of the current state of affairs. In general, the textbook was utterly devoid of any hint of the modern age. The words automobile, television, freedom, democracy were notoriously absent.
I called the airport information to check on my flight. Fifteen minutes on hold, then the machine hung up on me. Once in the airport I found out that Delta, in true Russian style, had quietly canceled its flight to Frankfurt.
“Let him fly Aeroflot,” said one sleepy employee to another.
“Aeroflot,” I retorted, “is out of the question!”
I would not have been quite so adamant if it weren't for a fresh joke: On a flight from New York to Odessa there is an announcement, “Our flight is progressing splendidly, however, the left engine has quit.” Sometime later, “Our flight is still progressing successfully, however, the right engine has also quit. For our passengers who can swim, the coast is twenty kilometers to the left. Our passengers who cannot swim, THANK YOU FOR FLYING AEROFLOT!”
Luckily there was a seat on a Lufthansa flight.
After one of my lectures I was given a sickle as a gift. They wanted to give me a hammer as well, but I didn't take it because it was too heavy. The border guards made me open the suitcase, three of them fiddled with the sickle for a while, then asked why I needed it. I didn't need the damn thing, but what business was it of theirs? They debated this question as if I was taking the last sickle in Russia and now the peasants wouldn't be able to reap their crops. After making sure that it was not made of platinum or titanium they gave it back to me. The next question concerned books, since had a few volumes of the new Pushkin's collected works with me.
“Collected works are not permitted,” he said cheerfully.
“This is a reprint, it's sold all over the world.”
We argued for a long time while the line behind me waited silently. I had a few other things that had to be checked thoroughly—manuscripts and some film, stuff which I found to my surprise still had to be declared. But the border guards fixated on the Pushkin. Having lost about twenty minutes I was ready to throw it out when the guard looked at the “Cultural Exchange” stamp in my visa and said, “Okay, but hide the books quickly.” His kind gesture had a criminal air to it.
Instead of uniformed soldiers, young women now work in the passport control booths, all of them sporting peroxide blonde hair. One of them stares at my passport for about five minutes, writes something down, and commands very soldier-like:
“Look straight at me, I have to check your face.”
All the border guards all over the world “check your face,” but nowhere do they manage to make it sound quite so insulting. And speaking of entry visas, which are still required, the Minister of Internal Affairs says on television that the authorities have no idea how many foreigners are residing in Russia; the figure could range anywhere from half to three quarters of a million. And the uncertainty results not from those whose “faces are checked” at Sheremetyevo airport, but from those who easily cross the borders in Siberia and in the Caucasus.
The baggage handler and I debated about the weight of my suitcase. She was also extremely vague about the code needed to register the luggage to Sacramento. As a result my luggage wound up somewhere where I did not.
An Irish diplomat I met in the plane told me that these days a trip to Moscow is sort of like “a stint in the factories of the mid-19th century, when Marx was writing. You breathe smog, eat lousy food, and for a souvenir you bring home the flu…”
Speaking of Marx and Engels, I saw them on TV assiduously dancing a cancan, thus brightening some sub-moronic interviews given by the communist Zuganov faction.
Moscow, who are you?
Do you bewitch, or are bewitched?
Are you forging freedom,
Or shackled are?
What thought is wrinkling your brow?
You are the world's conspirator.
Or maybe a bright window
Into other times,
Or an accomplished cat…
Velimir Khlebnikov, a futurist poet, who died after the revolution, like all geniuses, sounds somewhat naïve. Moscow really is forging freedom while she herself is shackled, but her anarchy can be charming. The world conspiracy remains an idee fixe in the cortexes of eternal Lenininsts, the bright window to Europe is covered in grime. And some really accomplished cats are offering their services in Helsinki and hanging out in front of every hotel in the capital.
“I love Russia with a strange kind of love.” This line, written by Mikhail Lermontov a hundred and fifty five years ago is truly ageless.
Right before leaving I am at the corner of Red Army Street in a very prestigious area populated mainly by intellectuals the streetlight is lit up on all four sides with green, yellow, and red, all at the same time. Cars honk, bump into each other, pedestrians crawl around in the mud like ants, trying to avoid being run down (it's spring, the snow is melting). The driver of a Toyota outsmarts everyone by to driving on the sidewalk; I hear a snippet of a song from his window:
Farewell, Sera, my gypsy woman,
Your lips were sweet as wine.
A broken streetlight, it seems to me, hangs above Russia. Wherever you try to go, it shines simultaneously green, yellow, and red.
Translated by Ilya Druzhnikov
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