The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (7 page)

One of the remnants of Peter's reign is his Kunstkamera, an ethnographic museum of sorts in the manner of a rich dilettante's cabinet of curiosities. The floor
de résistance
is a collection of fetal deformities, human and animal, stored in formaldehyde and displayed for the edification of his people and the debunking
of superstition. There are two-headed cats, hydrocephalics, fetal cyclopses, and fetuses with cephalic hernias (in other words, with brains spilling out of their heads). It shows a portrait of the tsar as ringmaster and barker of his own personal chamber of freaks—and of a man whose sense of the humanity of his fellows was something less than full and empathetic.

Such is the nature of aristocracy, I thought, as we toured Peterhof, the Summer Palace of its namesake and his Romanov heirs. It's sometimes called the Russian Versailles, and it's redolent with the same Olympian self-regard as that icon of elitist indulgence. “The rich would rather choke,” wrote Rebecca West, “than not have their mouths full.” I am not normally given to revolutionary class rage, but all I could think the whole day was: I would've overthrown the crass fuckers too.

That night I dreamed that I was given a key, and in a hallway at a school there was a keyhole like that of a safe-deposit box, except that where a normal keyhole might be oriented in halves, with a 180-degree range of motion, this was divided into sixty-fourths. I turned it to the first sixty-fourth mark and pulled out a small box, six inches wide and two inches high, made of thick metal, with eyeholes at one end like binoculars. I held it to my eyes and inside saw a vision of a green and watery paradise—it was so beautiful I cried and was moved to improve my ways of living, so that I might match this vision. I turned the key another sixty-fourth turn before looking inside again, and this time I was in a boat in a flooded landscape and spoke to a fisherman in another boat in an unfamiliar language. I turned the key again, and again, until I came to the last turn, which revealed simply a small room, and myself within, dressed simply in a white button-down shirt and khaki pants, sitting in a chair and staring back at myself
with eyes that were all black with dilated irises. This was death, and I awoke with gooseflesh that would not abate.

Fantasies of murder and dreams of death. The next morning, I made a brief and solitary pilgrimage to Dostoyevsky's spartan apartment, and we boarded the train for Moscow.

III.

A Real Lenin of Our Time
(Moscow)

M
uch of classical Moscow, the “inland Byzantium,” the third Rome,
^1
1
was destroyed in the auto-immolation of the Napoleonic War, and again in Soviet modernizations and developments. No more, as in Custine's time, the “thousands of pointed steeples, star-spangled belfries, airy turrets, strangely-shaped towers, palaces, and old convents . . . a phalanx of phantoms hovering over the city . . . a series of phantasmagoria, in broad day, which reminds one of the reflected brilliance of lamps in the shop of a lapidary.” In their place was a skyline dominated by the neon-topped high-rises of the past twenty years and the Gothic, even Gotham-ic, Stalinist hulks known as the “Seven Sisters.” It was in one of these manila-tan elephants that our host rented an apartment. Błażej was an avuncular Pole, Maria's cousin, in the employ of a multinational advertising agency and primarily tasked with marketing the candies of the Mars corporation in the former Soviet Bloc. It was his determined dream when exiling himself to Moscow that he would live in one of these iconic buildings—from which, it is said, the secret police still spy on the U.S. Embassy from hidden rooms in the basement.

The inside of Błażej's building was no less grand, forbidding, and monolithic than its exterior. Marble columns and tiles lined the lobby, and the elevators could fit dozens comfortably. The hallways and doors were twelve or more feet high, the latter equipped with brass knockers and carved handles of six-inch circumference.
^2
2

Błażej's lease was arranged under the table with a family whose matriarch had acquired the apartment decades before. They were nominally prohibited from renting it, a prohibition both common and commonly circumvented. The family made it a habit of coming en masse to collect rent.

Belying the authoritarian majesty of the structure, though, was a casino—until recently, owned by Chuck Norris—on the first floor, to the right of the main entrance, serving a cheap and filling cafeteria-style buffet. In the basement was a bar, the Real McCoy, where older American men could meet young Russian women, “both,” Błażej noted, “there for the same purposes.”

The bar was open twenty-four hours. There was a mania for twenty-four-hour service in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. (Anya in Saint Petersburg had just started a new job at a twenty-four-hour Apple Store, working the ten p.m. to ten a.m. shift. The first night someone came in to use the bathroom, she told us. The second night no one came at all.) “Before,” Błażej said, gesturing around the hookah-and-shashlik restaurant where we went for lunch, “they would have a belly dancer as the special attraction. Now there are no more belly dancers and everything is twenty-four hours. Even the flower shops! In case you are coming home late and drunk, you can buy flowers and say, ‘Hey, I'm sorry I'm home late, but here!' Or you wake up at two in the morning thinking, ‘Hey, if only I could buy something.' Good news! You go out and get five tulips and now you can sleep happy.”

Probably this was an extension of the city's long-prevalent enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption. In Moscow, as in Kyiv and Saint Petersburg, there were functionally two economies and two pricing schemes: one for normal people, and one for oligarchs and those with ambitions to the oligarch class. No doubt, round-the-clock availability of whim fulfillment was catnip to the ambitious parvenu. The, yes, twenty-four-hour karaoke bar Błażej frequented offered live-band karaoke (no extra charge) in addition to the DJ.

Custine despaired of the morals of a Russian people degraded by an autocracy that shunted individual responsibility upstairs
from superior to superior and rewarded the underhanded, the black marketeer, and the hustler: “The principle which chiefly actuates their conduct through life is cunning,” he wrote, and a kind of social Darwinism. Błażej had recently attended an advertising awards ceremony, a glittering, upwardly mobile affair, and struck up a conversation with a well-dressed young woman at his table. They exchanged business cards, and he noticed, first, that her card was from Mercedes, and second, that it had a man's name on it.

“It's not my card,” she said. “It's just the car I'm borrowing.” She scribbled a phone number on it.

They turned to watch a speech, and when he turned back she was gone, and so was the iPhone he'd left on the table. He borrowed a phone and called her cell.

“Hello—I just thought maybe you had accidentally grabbed the wrong phone on your way out.”

There was a pause. “If I had taken it,” she asked, “what would you do about it?”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Just as she predicted, I did nothing. I bought a new phone.”

At the entrance to Red Square, a brass disc was set in the cobblestones marking the theoretical center of Moscow, the “zero point” for measuring distances. Tourists stood on the center of the disc, their backs to the square's gate, and tossed coins over their shoulders for luck. Just outside the circle's bounds, a handful of old drunks and hunched women waited, then scurried in to pick up the thrown coins, eyes fixed on the ground, careful not to make eye contact. Their sacks of small change jingled. A
pair of men dressed as Lenin and Stalin posed for pictures on the sidewalk.

Russians have contradictory ideas about propriety. Maria had to wrap a cloth around her waist to cover her shorts, which were considered immodest, in the Kremlin cathedral. In front of me, as we climbed the narrow stairs to the steeple, was a slim woman with a young son. She wore a white mesh bathing suit cover, hemmed high in the back, just long enough to cover a thong and a maxi pad the size of a baguette. But it was, theoretically, a dress, and thus appropriate to the reverential setting.

We went to see dead Lenin in his still-futuristic mausoleum, a squat ziggurat hunched, sleek and gleaming, in the shadow of the Kremlin walls, a mummified alien in a bubble—discordant with both the medieval baroque of the old keep and the deluxe arcade mall opposite. “Like the bones of certain gigantic animals,” said Custine, “the Kremlin proves to us the history of a world which we might doubt until after seeing the remains.” We filed past the graves and busts of all the Soviet leaders and heroes, save the disowned Khrushchev, in the midst of a crowd of Chinese tourists (and there is no crowd like a crowd of Chinese tourists). Inside the bunker was cold and silent but for the shuffle of feet and umbrellas as the guards hustled us along. No pictures allowed, but I didn't feel cheated. I would only have gotten a picture of something that looked like a wax figure, and which for all I knew may well be. “Our grandfather Lenin/Has withered away/He's decayed into mold and wild honey,” goes Yegor Letov and Grazhdanskaya Oborona's classic anti-Soviet song “Everything Is Going According to Plan.” A pair of Chinese tourists stopped and bowed to the bier.

“Lenin!” cried Błażej, a gleeful connoisseur of irony and Strongbow cider, later that night. “I had a friend in university, a real Lenin of our time. He said he'd organize a New Year's party for everyone, asked us for a hundred złoty each. He bought the cheapest vodka, the cheapest beer, the cheapest food, but everyone was having a good time. At some point someone broke something or vomited and I went downstairs to his girlfriend's flat to find him, and I realized they had a whole other party—a VIP party!—with fancy food and so on, all paid for by the cheap party. A real Lenin!”

He ordered another round of drinks. “He was the only true Communist I knew, by the way. He still votes for them.”

We played at an outdoor festival, organized in the parking lot around an old factory building that now housed a collection of boutique clothing stores. The event was nominally in honor of the queen of England's jubilee. A two-story banner with the queen's image hung across the front of the building, and the flyers were in English. Nevertheless, the crowd was entirely Russian, and all were dressed in the international hipster style commonly associated with
Vice
magazine. A small group loosed paper balloons with lit candles inside aloft into the gray drizzle. An American in “the only bluegrass band in Russia” invited us to their weekly jam session, which they hold in a Starbucks.

The Moscow subway was a real triumph. Each station was a spotless museum hall of marble, chandeliers, and socialist realist ceramic murals of jet planes and grain harvests. More important, the trains run every ninety seconds. New York City MTA, I thought, this is your Sputnik moment. I looked at our fellow passengers: A pregnant, leashless dachshund squatted at the feet of
its owner, who was focused on a crossword. A man accessorized his black velour tracksuit with a red plastic gym whistle on a lanyard.

We were on our way to the so-called Fallen Monument Park, where statues of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Molotov, Brezhnev, and the others came to rest after 1992. To which one might say, “Look upon my works, ye mighty,” etc., but looming over the park was an exponentially taller and more decadent monument combining the deification of the will of a single man with the gaudy baroque of the corrupt. It was a hundred-foot steel column studded with the prows, sterns, and flags of various embedded ships and topped by a full ship with a mast twice its length. An outsize statue of Peter the Great, taller than the largest ship was long, grasped the uppermost ship's wheel in one hand and flourished a rolled parchment in the other. The whole thing sat on an artificial island in the middle of the Moscow River and was three hundred feet tall if it was an inch. It was designed by the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, infamous flatterer and megalomaniac gigantophile, who has made a career of designing and building huge monuments and offering them to cities around the world—for example, a forty-foot teardrop titled “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism” for the harbor of Bayonne, New Jersey.

Although Tsereteli has successfully placed such projects in various locations around the world, more often they are rejected for barely disguised reasons of good taste. The Peter statue was conceived and built for the Christopher Columbus quincentennial and offered to the United States, which politely demurred, then to Puerto Rico, which begged off, citing financial problems.
Yuri Lezhkov, the corrupt Moscow mayor and boss, stepped in and offered to buy the statue on one condition: that Tsereteli remove the head of Columbus, add a mustache, and call it Peter the Great. (The now-unnamed
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
remained in situ.) Tsereteli duly complied, and the towering monstrosity was installed in the river and soon voted one of the ten ugliest statues in the world.

We had big plans to go see the Mayakovsky museum (a ramped maze of cartoon propaganda), or the Bulgakov museum (two competing museums, actually, one private and one public, the latter his old apartment, with giant cat graffiti curling up the stairs and an actual obese, fluffy black feline roaming the halls), or the Treasury. Błażej had bigger plans, though, to get drunk in the sun with his colleagues, and steered us to a rooftop patio. When we ordered Bloody Marys, they came in pieces: a tray with tomato mix, a shot glass of vodka, and greens laid out next to each other. Self-assembly drinks, an Ikea of booze. Thus passed the remainder of the long afternoon. We stumbled home past a monumental classical pile of columns and caps. I asked what the building was.

“It looks like the Moscow Opera,” said Błażej, “so, knowing Russia, it must be a supermarket.”

In a globalized and franchised world, the only things left unfamiliar are food and language. Everything else you've seen in pictures. We were to take the Moscow–Almaty train southbound to Samara, boarding in the evening for an overnight ride. We went for Armenian food. The restaurant was, naturally, right next to the Azerbaijani place. On the patio outside, a violinist played along to karaoke tapes. Inside two synths and a singer did
the same alongside cages of songbirds. We picked at rolled eggplant stuffed with spinach and garlic, drank wine, and didn't realize that the train was leaving in forty-five minutes. We hadn't packed.