You Are One of Them (13 page)

Three shots later I was dancing with the others. Corinne jerked around like a marionette. Molly wobbled back and forth like an inflatable toy. The woman from NPR, who finally told me her name was Leslie, closed her eyes in a sort of trance. Some of the people I’d met at Rosie O’Grady’s arrived. Most of the men were grinding with bony Russian women—including the married man from the
Newsweek
bureau, I noticed—but I stayed close to Corinne and her friends, who agreed they wouldn’t sleep with a Russian man for all the money in the world.

“Chauvinist pigs,” said Molly, shiny with sweat.

“There must be exceptions,” I said. The cocktail of smoke and disco lights was making me dizzy.

“I don’t think so,” said Corinne, her breath heavy in my ear. “The women are doing all the work in this country. The men are just getting drunk.”

“The women here are strategic,” said Molly. “Some of them get pregnant on purpose to make their American or European boyfriends marry them.”

A Swedish banker split his pants trying to replicate an Italian’s dance moves, and that’s when Corinne decided it was time for us to go. We stumbled out into the cold.

“Let’s walk for a bit to sober up,” said Corinne.

The air was bracing. I wished I’d worn a hat. I trailed her along a quiet street, and then we were on Tverskaya and Corinne was marching down the steps to cross the street in one of the underground passageways
.
All the big Moscow avenues have crosswalks below the street, like the tunnels that connect New York subway stations, so that cars don’t have to stop for pedestrians. I’d been in this very
perekhod
during the day, when human traffic shuffled through. But now it was four o’clock in the morning and empty except for prostitutes—I counted eleven of them—lined up against the wall like criminals waiting to be identified. Corinne and I stopped in our tracks. An oafish man stood in front of the girls, rocking back and forth on his feet, trying to choose. The girls were young—as young as fourteen, I’d say—and the one he selected reminded me of a rabbit: she had large, frightened eyes, and she stepped forward and then froze, twitching. I averted my own eyes. When I looked up, I could see the backs of her stockinged legs—a black seam slicing down each of her calves—as she disappeared up the stairs with the oaf. The lineup dissolved into the shadows. The other girls clustered in groups of three or four, passing around lighters as they fired up their smokes.

“That was horrible,” I said when we were safely up the stairs on the other side of the street.

“You’ll get used to it,” Corinne said. “There’s a terrible story about a foreigner who went home with a prostitute, had sex with her, and then realized her grandmother was in the other bed in the room and had been there the whole time. Maybe it’s urban legend, but it’s totally plausible.”

“Yikes.”

“You know what they call hookers here?”

I shook my head.

“Night butterflies,” she said.
“Nochnye babochki.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“And you know what the slang for ‘pussy’ is?”

“No.”

“Bunker,”
she said in a Russian accent. “Means the same thing as in English. A bunker, where dicks can hunker down and feel safe.”

“Until the postcoital fallout,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “Sam said you were funny.”

“He did?” It was good to remember that I had friends who didn’t just think I was sad.

“He sings your praises. Did you ever hook up?”

“With Sam? No. We’re just friends.” Sam and I had been friends since our freshman-orientation camping trip. He was a fixture of my campus life.

“I think he has a little crush on you. He talks about you a lot.” She burped. “I’ve been drinking, so it’s full-disclosure time.”

It was nearly five when we got home. I’d never been so intoxicated and haven’t been so since. I spent the next two hours stretched out on the bathroom floor, lifting my head every ten minutes to clutch the toilet bowl. Corinne drank two glasses of water and went to sleep. She had already built up a tolerance for Russia.

U
LITSA
P
ETROVKA WAS
A NARROW STREET.
It was one of the places in Moscow that probably hadn’t changed much in a hundred years, though its Old World charm was tarnished by chipped moldings and peeling paint. The entrance foyer of number 26 was in a state of aggressive decay. A uniformed
militsiya
man stood outside the booth that had been installed next to the elevator, his rifle on prominent display.

“Pasport,”
he said. The word is the same in Russian and English, but he fired it at me in such a threatening manner that it took me a moment to understand. I felt like I was at Checkpoint Charlie and might be shot if I tried to get over the Berlin Wall. I shimmied my passport out of my bag—despite warnings about pickpockets, I refused to carry one of the hidden wallets or fanny packs that so many Americans use—and handed it to him. He studied my passport while I studied him. He could not have been older than I was. His cheeks were pocked with scars, and his chin was corrupted by cystic acne. One pimple was particularly ripe; the pus was practically oozing out.

“Amerikanka?”
he said. I nodded. Obviously I was American, not just because my passport had been issued by the United States but because my body’s stiff, awkward simulation of deference revealed how unaccustomed I was to having my movements monitored. Sure, we had to go through airport security and show ID to buy beer, but we never questioned our freedom or our privacy. In 1995 I was not used to being watched. I was a privileged, white, American girl; I had never before worried that I’d be arrested or detained. The sight of this guard’s gun changed that. He seemed tempted to punish me just because he could.

“Otkuda vy?”
he asked. Where are you from?

“Washington,” I said.
“Iz Vashingtona.”

“CIA?” he said.

“Nyet,”
I said quickly.
“Studyentka.”

I was not a student anymore, but I wasn’t anything else yet. And I didn’t remember the words for any other professions. He raised an eyebrow. I suppose my grasp (a tenuous grasp, but most Americans don’t speak
any
Russian) of his language made him suspicious. Either that or I was so busy trying not to seem suspicious that I was especially suspect.

He picked up the red phone in his booth.
“Allo?”
he said, and then began talking so fast that I couldn’t follow anything, except that he definitely said,
“Amerikanskaya devushka”
(American girl) twice. He paused for a long time, listening and interjecting an occasional
“Ladno”
while I tried not to gawk at the acne on his chin. He hung up the phone and regarded me. I waited. He didn’t release me from his stare.

“Moy pasport
?”
I said, reaching for it. He stepped toward me and adjusted his gun.
“Nelzya,”
he said. It was forbidden.

I didn’t know what to do. There were no cell phones then. The public telephones in Moscow were broken. (“I’ve never found one that works,” Corinne had told me.) I was supposed to meet Svetlana upstairs in the DDBD office on the seventh floor at eleven o’clock. I was late. And it was clear that I was not permitted to move. This was a mistake, I thought. Jenny had been a guest of the Soviet government, so she saw only the best of Russia. But I was on my own in a city so crooked that you couldn’t count on the law to protect you. I didn’t know where the American embassy was, but I vowed to find out as soon as I got my passport back. My mother’s anxiety about Moscow suddenly didn’t seem so unfounded.

I stood there for what felt like hours trying to avoid the officer’s gaze. I did not have the Russian vocabulary to ask why he was keeping me there. I could feel tremors creeping up my body and willed myself not to cry.
I’m going to end up in prison,
I thought.
I’ll be put in one of those cages they lock the accused in during Russian trials, like a zoo animal in the courtroom. I won’t even know why I’m on trial. I’ll be sent to rot in Siberia.
My brain was stuck in these Kafka- and Solzhenitsyn-powered circuits—
Gulag,
I kept thinking,
gulag
—and then I heard the feminine click of heels on the stairs.

“So at last you are here.” I looked up to see Svetlana in a gray pencil skirt and a crisp white blouse. Mascara had caked in the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she looked very professional. She said something feisty to the guard in Russian, and he wilted. With stooped shoulders he gave me my passport and a curt nod. “Do not worry about him,” Svetlana said to me. “He just needs to feel important.”

“Lift ne rabotayet,”
he said, which can be translated as “The elevator isn’t working (right now)” or “The elevator doesn’t work (generally).” The latter seemed more accurate.

I was beginning to understand that elevators never worked in Moscow. “Soon it will be fixed,” people said to save face, but as with so much of the infrastructure, one had the sense that they couldn’t be fixed anytime soon. And so we began the long climb up to the seventh floor. The stairs were wide and dark—the bulbs in each stairwell were out—and despite the grand sweep of the entrance hall the successive flights narrowed. I was short of breath when we reached the top. There were piles of cigarette ash on the floor. Svetlana opened the door and ushered me in.

The office took up the whole floor of the building, and the walls had been knocked down to create one big, open space with large windows looking out at the Bolshoi. The carpet was an industrial gray, and wooden tables were plotted around the room, most of them crowned with desktop PCs. The people at these computers were smoking, and the air was gauzy with unfiltered cigarette smoke. A plate of glass separated two large, private offices from the main room. Blinds were drawn in one; in the other a bearded man sat at a desk and smiled strenuously as he held a phone to his ear.

“Our directors,” said Svetlana, gesturing at the offices.

“So this is an ad agency,” I said. I had never been inside an ad agency, but my impression had been that they were shiny places where the phones never stopped ringing. This smoky, sleepy room did not measure up.

“Come with me,” Sveta said, and led me on a cursory lap around the room.

“Oleg,” she said, indicating a heavy-lidded man playing solitaire on his computer. He held his cigarette in one hand and operated his mouse with the other. “He is art director.” Oleg squinted at me, then returned to his game.

“This is Svetlana,” she said as we passed a desk occupied by a plump, rosy woman in a green satin blouse. “She is bookkeeper. There are three Svetlanas in our company,” she added.

“Volodya,” she said about a lumpen figure in a sweater vest. He was bent over his desk reading a newspaper.

Then she marched to an empty desk in the center. She pulled an extra chair up next to her own and patted the seat, encouraging me. I sat.

“I am copywriter,” she said. She handed me a business card. The word “copywriter” had been transliterated into Cyrillic:

“That’s the word in Russian?”

She nodded. It was one of many English words and phrases that had infected the language. Restaurants all over Moscow now offered a business lunch or, as the menus said in Russian,
(“biznes lanch”).

“I studied architecture,” said Svetlana. “But you know, now the only decent jobs are at foreign companies.”

“So you write ads?”

She nodded vigorously. “Why not? You think I cannot?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She lit a cigarette. Then she pointed at a framed poster on the opposite wall. It was a picture of the New York City skyline, with a giant Lucky Strike pack hovering above the Twin Towers. There was some kind of slogan in Russian on it. I sounded out the Cyrillic in my head.

“Does that say ‘The American Dream’?” I said.

Sveta nodded. “Yes. To advertise Lucky Strike, we sell USA.”

“And it works?”

“When Western brands came to Russia for first time, it was exciting. McDonald’s, Nike, Levi’s, Marlboro. People could not wait to buy. It was—how do you say in English?—status sign?”

“Status symbol.”

“
Tochno.
Status symbol.”

I’d seen the lines outside the first McDonald’s on TV. It was crazy to imagine waiting hours for a Big Mac.

“Everyone wanted to taste USA. It was cool. It was taste of freedom. All you had to do was say something was American or British and people would get in the line to buy it.
Bozhe moy!
The long lines for the free samples of Colgate toothpaste and Tampax. You know Tampax?”

“Too well,” I said. All the smoke was making my eyes water. I surveyed the room. One Russian man I hadn’t seen before looked about my age and was surprisingly preppy. He wore a blue oxford shirt marked with a Ralph Lauren polo pony. I smiled weakly at him and coughed.

“And now the attitudes start to change,” Sveta continued. “People are tired of America. We were superpower and now? Our country is taking money from IMF? People abroad think our stores are empty, that no one has the bread to eat. People think Mother Russia is broken. Yeltsin is always drunk. He is the big joke. People are ready for Russia to rise up and become the superpower again.” She seemed to be directing her aggression toward me.

“The Cold War is over,” I said defensively.

“Da.”
She was emphatic. “But Russia is still great country. Russia is member of UN Security Council. Russia is champion. I am proud to be Russian. People want to be proud to be Russian. They do not want the shame.”

“Of course not.”

“During Communism we had no choice. We bought what there was. Now we have choice, so people want best quality. And the goods from the West were better quality. Better cigarettes, better toothpaste, better shampoo, better tennis shoes, and so on. Now: We must to make Russian products better. New standards. Competition. And so: Why must I smoke Marlboro if I want the quality tobacco? Why not Russian brand? Why must I drink Pepsi if I want the quality cola?”

She held out a can for me. It was white with a red-and-blue logo; at first glance I thought it was a Pepsi. But on closer inspection, I realized that the logo said
CZAR.
The letters were in Russian on one side, in English—in a font reminiscent of old Soviet posters—on the other.

“Czar?” I said.

“Our newest account,” said a British voice. “We’re spelling ‘tsar’ with a
z
because it’s more dynamic.”

The voice belonged to the bearded guy I’d seen through the glass of the director’s office, the one who had been smiling on the phone. He was deflated and paunchy.

Svetlana stood at attention. “Richard, this is the American friend which I told you about. Sarah, this is my boss, Richard.”

“I’m the creative director here at DDBD Moskva,” he said, and rested his fists on his hips, in the ready posture of a superhero. I stood to shake his hand. His fingers were doughy and stained with ink.

“Svetlana here is a real go-getter,” he said. “A real asset to our team.”

Svetlana beamed like a teacher’s pet.

“Taste it,” said Richard, indicating the can in my hand. “I think you’ll find it surprisingly good.”

The can was warm, but there was no point asking for ice. Russians didn’t put ice in their beverages. I popped the lid; the whoosh of released carbonation was convincing. It sounded as authentically American as Coca-Cola. I took a sip. It was sweeter than Coke—sweeter than Pepsi, even—with a metallic aftertaste that made me think of blood.

“Tasty, yes?” said Sveta.

“Ochen,”
I lied. Very.

“The brand won’t launch for another year, but it’s going to be brilliant. Finally a Russian cola that is good enough to compete with the Americans.” Richard seemed more than a little eager to defeat the Americans.

I didn’t tell him that I was half British. I was tempted to remind him that he worked for an American company but decided to steer the conversation out of nationalist waters. “Who are your other clients?” I said.

Richard was delighted to talk about the agency. They had opened its Moscow office in 1994. It was a joint venture with a Russian company. There was an American managing director, he said—“Mike is in New York this week”—and a Russian MD, who sat in the office with the blinds drawn. Their biggest clients were P&G and British American Tobacco. Svetlana lit another cigarette.