hugest essay + photo post!!

[motorbike]

"After the traditional oohs and aahs and attempts to determine the provenance of the baby's nose, the guests arranged themselves in a circle and began to chat. New parents and couples awaiting children, having given victorious once-overs to the less fortunate invitees, started up an endless, or rather a literally three-hour-long discussion of the details which would comprise the childhood of their progeny. Childhood was comprised of onesies, which should be put on over the head or over the butt, super-strollers, which "you can't even find here" and which were mired in customs on the road from Düsseldorf, and also something in the vein of self-boiling bottles, self-sucking pacifiers, and self-cleaning diapers. Euros were converted into dollars and dollars into rubles. I was impressed by the attention, and the purely ladylike piety and breathlessness with which "pregnant" husbands entered the debate. The rest of the guests, those whose kids were older (I figured among these) and also those who for various reasons had no children, began to yawn and to fidget. We ate the caviar, the salad, the sushi, and emptied several bottles of good red wine. The baby itself had long ago been carried to the outskirts of the gathering and sort of forgotten. Conversation stuck on the subject of French velour mini-pantaloons. No child should have to do without pantaloons, we agreed, and left."

- Russian ELLE, letter from the editor.

*

Russia needs Russian babies. The population is waning, already lessened by six million since the turn of the millennium. There is even a magazine sold at the kiosks here entitled I Want A Baby!, with the exclamation mark. Its prospective audience is not gender-biased. Seemingly unattached young dudes lunching in the Kamergensky plaza will size me up with this in mind; in the Metro they will give up their seats to my grandmother, then glance over with a polite but slightly critical air, as if to gauge my baby-incubating potential. Most of my former schoolmates are already sending their children to kindergarten; a few years ago I myself evaded a proposal from a friend of my family, who has since achieved the dual whammys of airline pilot and father. Grandma is still pretty pissed about this; she feels she is overdue for grandchildren. "In my day there was no planning," she informs me while my expression hovers gamely between shock and discomfort.



If one talks to well-heeled Muscovites about babies, they will either already have them or Want One!, with an exclamation mark. But ask them about Putin, or the Hockey Disaster of Vancouver '10, and they will respond with something quick and dry. A shrug usually accompanies the broadness of their opinion, the general consensus being that talking too much politics is suspicious -- or worse, boring. Anyway, the kids are хорошо. They drive Audi sedans and drink Mojitos in night-clubs named after futurists. A few of my acquaintances have attended schools in America, but found the environment somehow too puritan; some were so anxious to return to their native city that they failed to complete their overseas education. In Moscow, you may smoke at the theater -- just take the stairs from the main hall and mind ashing on the marble. You may, in fact, cheerfully ignore any basic sign or law that keeps people from getting struck by trains, gunning their cars into oncoming traffic, gunning from their cars into oncoming traffic, or falling through the ice on the reservoir. I have heard myths and legends of open-container and nudity regulations, but legends aren't enough to keep people from lighting summer bonfires by the Moscow river for partying, skinny-dipping, and the roasting of sausages. Laissez-faire is the national approach, social and economical: What will be, will be. Russians make no excuses.

In the city center they wear YSL, the women always in heels, sipping at beers and tossing away the butts of their cigarettes. Real Moscow girls are all about nine feet tall, slim and put-together, crowding the Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Galleria while I roll about their ankles like a little ball of chub, craning my neck to read about Massine and the ballerinas. Ever notice how many European expressionists ran about with Russian girlfriends? Or with handsome Russian choreographers? This is what I mean. Recently I succeeded in the ultimate test of blending-in when one of them (a girl, not a handsome choreographer, sadly) asked me for directions; later, when I preeningly related this to my great-aunt, she observed that the suggestion of Russianness lay not in my appearance but in the way I carry myself. I'm pretty sure this was a backhanded compliment. Since Moscow women outnumber their potential husbands, they must perfect themselves to get what they want. They are graceful, aggressive, and educated. They all seem to know what to say in fine company. Though there's nothing to it of reservation or subservience, Russian femininity is fundamentally about wearing those heels; the corresponding American standard seems sort of gender-confused by comparison.



Me, I will always be intrinsically foreign. My dipthonged accent can be construed either as American or as приезжий (super boorish). At home I read classics to keep up my fluency; my language is stuck on Master and Margarita, Lenka Panteleev, The Golden Calf. Despite myself I pepper it with slang I pick up on the fly. I am young. I am hip. I am at the movies, attending Clash of the Titans with some friends, who seem caught up in unironic anticipation. In translation, to my basically endless private delight, it is TITAN BATTLE.



"What the hell, S," says K of a guy friend running late. "He never leaves on time. We'll miss the previews."

I say something like, "Son of the bitch! I recommend that you utilize your cellular phone to tell him we are going the hell ahead." I am like Spock in Star Trek IV, the one about the whales.

But surely it is best to err on the side of briskness. I attempt to sound assertive. I tell waiters Please and Excuse me, then I catch myself and turn my nose to mimic the national standard. In order to clear people out of your way here, you are expected to grunt, "Out of the way", lest your polite nudges and apologies be ignored. The woman at the shoe-shop quotes me 1,100 rubles for new boot-soles; her boss shakes his head and quotes me 800 instead. She all but throws the change in my face. Out of pure habit I sincerely say, "Thank you, you have been very helpful." She stares at me like I am a crazy person. I curl my lip and cap the debate with a well-placed "Ehhh," just to be safe.

Sometimes I lose words. A dozen synonyms in multiple languages will come to their funerals, but the original, necessary words will be wiped from memory until I lay my hands on a sexy thesaurus. My mother and I have experienced this phenomenon together; racking our brains for a certain English adjective, we will share a glance and spit out the same Russian synonym in frustration. The best way round this is the long way. You have to beat around what you mean until the person you have just involved in an involuntary game of charades blurts the word you have lost. Or else, not daring to illuminate the exchange, they will only look at you in awe of the things coming out of your mouth. I am pretty sure that in my various attempts to describe the American political system I have called Bush and Reagan "slave-owners". I have called the health-care bill a "panacea" and the Los Angeles school district a "big mound of poop". I ought to become a Russian writer, known for my satirical perspective on the First World, when all along I would be innocently trying to dissect nepotism.

In the metro, I lean on the ticket counter. "Ehhh, woman." (Woman is a brisk term for addressing women.) Her eyes never leave her magazine. (Does she Want a Baby!, you wonder.) She tells me she's listening. "Ten rides," I demand assertively. "Please. If you would be so kind, please."

*

So okay, I might have a bit of trouble now and then, but the magnitude of my приезжий-ness is mitigated by my position as An American with a purported residence in that anal, sun-drenched, Thank-You-parroting country. Whither TITAN BATTLE and Sunday afternoon television.

"What kind of car do you drive in California?"

"A BMW."

"Ogo!"

"No, it's not very new... 1998..."

"Ogooo!"

I cover my face with my hands. My buddies chuckle, but even as I glow like a red Nondenominational Holiday light I judge they're laughing with, not at me. They are a good bunch, to a one disarmingly generous, open, and kind. They insist on gifting me with any small thing I confess to liking until I decide it is less mortifying for me to sort of noncommittally nod my appreciation for music, books, cigarettes. In turn they let me know they dig my sunglasses, my messiah status re: the new season of Lost, my vintage Fred Perry.

They stay up late. Before long I am traveling under the dual clouds of heightened self-consciousness and jet-lag, unaccustomed to the rhythm of the Northern weekend. Moscow is less than a month away from White Nights, and like a little kid I find myself falling asleep to twilight and the sounds of teenage posturing outside my window. A novel is prone in my hand -- not even Mary Renault can combat this. I also manage to fall asleep at the ballet, in the back-seats of cars, and eventually in the leaf-cup booth of a bar whose tables are arranged on the branches of an enormous, artificial tree.





It is probably two in the morning, but it may be nine at night. I can't remember having dinner. At my family's homes, everything comes with sour cream; at restaurants, everything comes with meat. A male friend leans in to offer me some kind of space-age European Kent, and mentions that that the first thing he looks at on a woman is her hands. He is twenty-nine and momentarily sans girlfriend. I tell him he sounds about a million years old.

"You need a manicure," he jokes.

It's actually too dark in the bar to really see, but I start feeling better. I have spent the morning using Communist-era tools to attach new legs to my grandmother's mid-century set of side-tables. ("Before your grandfather proposed, he bought side-tables. To show me he meant business.") My grandmother does not own a screw-driver like a normal person; the worn stamp on her шило reads 80 kopecks -- steep for its day. My cuticles are atrocious. Ruined, I am a woman ruined.



(hammer)

*

Upon my visit to the bakery in Гастроном Весна, located along the horrible New Arbat, the helpful store manager seems unable to grasp that I have not gotten there by car. While giving me directions to another bakery, he names roads instead of Metro stations and comes up short, looking embarrassed -- whether for me or for himself I'm not too sure. These days only pensioners, the poor, and the very young use public transport. Never mind that the world-famous Moscow Metro was designed with a retrospective eye on the 30s, by postwar men and women who were as gifted in their minds as they were with sight. (Fellow residents of SoCal might understand the melancholy with which the marble stations beg for some regentrification.) The largest part of the population prefers to plug the roads with cars: boxy old Ladas, Волгаs and Жигулиs; Renaults, four-wheel-drive Peugeots with their dope-ass logos; a variety of makes and models from Japan, Europe, and America -- anywhere the getting is cheaper than inside the border, which is to say: everywhere. Three years ago the government made noise to pass a law taxing vehicles with right-sided steering; the population flipped out and the motion flopped.



Unable to hail a shuttle with my grody unmanicured worker's hands (I Want a Copy of Marx in Russian!), I climb aboard the trolley-bus. It differs from regular buses by its pair of extended feelers that run along overhanging electrical wires as the transport literally crawls through the districts of the third ring. The avenue that skims Сокол, the район where I attended primary school, is halfway closed-off, resembling some post-bombing ruin: they are building a new tunnel to mitigate the now-constant traffic jams in the region. Perched above the dust and fumes like a rajah, I try not to breathe or imagine my lifespan shortening. The bottom floors along the avenue are lined with bright plastic to spare the eye: 24-hour groceries, vendors of second-rate fashion, cafes and restaurants with names that make me vaguely homesick. Sbarro has come across the Atlantic as Сбарро, Subway as Сабвай, Starbucks as Старбакс. Only Pepsi has mysteriously escaped the conversion, presumably by virtue of its vast international prowess. The most logical reason for all this Cyrillification seems to be a universal tendency to forget one's high-school English (простите, tourists!), but I prefer to see in it a lurking trace of Russian nationalism.



Recall that the old nobility spoke French. Following the revolution, when the vernacular was standardized, there wasn't much need for Russian adjectives denoting luxury. (At the time you could still find these in Puskin, and notably in the poems of Anna Akhmatova, but even Akhmatova's work gets simple and bleak towards the end.) Say, for instance, Comrade You meant to sell your bicycle. You might take out a listing in the want-ad section of Правда: Bicycle, 10 rubles. None of that bourgeois nonsense, "Vintage Schwinn Flyer, 1971, Florida-orange lacquer frame, great condition, one-of-a-kind!" My grandmother, the designer, says the Union fell because it never held a fashion show, and I suspect that the old Communist vocabulary held little to no commercial buzzwords: without comparison shopping, there's simply no need for advertisement.

Until roughly 1995, Russia had no true middle class. Isn't that sort of crazy? A thousand years' worth of nation, a century of Mad Men across the ocean, and nobody to buy Big Macs. Sure, in Communist times there were ballerinas (and handsome choreographers), celebrities of music, masters or sport, stars of the myriad propaganda programs engaging the average citizen, but on closer inspection all of them were still mere servants. Their status was doomed to hover between those of the public and the government; besides, they were few. Fast-forward to now, 2010, Spring, the thawing nation: advertisements for optimum middle-class living are everywhere. You can't spit a wad of JuicyFruit (JUICE AND FRUIT! YOU BUY!!!) gum without hitting one; they are insidious: plastered across buses, storefronts, elevator walls, billboards, Metro cards, invading your privacy from the doors of public bathrooms. In Moscow, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems stupid: surely it's thought that dictates language, not the other way around!

Granted, I didn't come of age here. All I really remember of Russian wordsmithery are abbreviations aped by George Orwell, that master of genre propaganda: Колхоз, the Collective Household, Мосгортранс, Moscow City Transport, Гаспрод, Росдорбанк. How beautiful is doublespeak in its sparity, its Spartan-ness! Just like Futurism with its worship of negative space, or the lovely side-tables whose legs I am not sorry I fixed. Of course, it also means that Russian terms of adornment always come across a little ungainly. The lexicon is not yet advanced enough to generate anything so Edwardian as "parkside" or "lakeview"; a respectable banner hanging overhead reads, "NEW APARTMENTS. NEXT TO PARK. CLOSE TO LAKE." NICE!!! YOU BUY!!!

BALLET: MAN MADE OF SAND!!! YOU BUY TICKET NOW!!!

TITANS ARE BATTLING IN APRIL OF YEAR 2010!!!

But maybe it's just me.

Don't get me wrong: the Russian language is deep and complex. Since its alphabet houses seven more letters than the Latin, it should contain an exponentially greater number of words, permitting specificity beyond Latin's wildest imaginings. All jokes sound better in Russian. (It's also hard to pronounce if you haven't grown up with it on your tongue, regardless of academic mastery; a wonderful RusLit professor once told me that in order to identify foreign moles during the Cold War, Russians would have suspects say пыль.) And this is all before you include the slew of European -- largely French, but read on -- words mixed in with the rest, bent into new and frequently unique semantic shapes. I include a brief list of the ones I personally find most notorious, and which I occasionally mistake for their Franco-English counterparts:

I say: "Hey, do you see a rosette anywhere? Gotta charge my laptop."
I mean: разетка: an electrical outlet.
You think: rosette: a rose-shaped decoration, typically made from ribbons.

I say: "What kind of person does not own an etagere! How do you change lightbulbs?"
I mean: етажерка: a step-ladder.
You think: etagère: a piece of light furniture very similar to the English what-not, which was extensively made in France during the latter part of the 18th century.

(Kidding.)

I say: "Pass me that tabouret, I need to sit down."
I mean: табуретка: a low stool.
You think: tabouret: a stand used by Victorians to display flowers.

And urban-dwelling citizens of the Federation (me! also: old people) can get pretty serious about proper word use. Besides the one about right-side steering, two other recently failed motions have concerned grammar and spelling, respectively: first, a motion to change the gendered noun for coffee from the neutral to the masculine, since everyone makes this mistake (cue national flipout); second, a motion to change the spelling of yogurt to the French-inspired йагурт (ditto). I wonder, then, how one would conjugate сексапил, which is "sex appeal" transliterated, but has also found a life of its own on magazine covers and billboards advertising the Venus razor. Think Japan and パーソコム. Think xerox, think kleenex. In Russia, you can also think памперс, "pampers", but really "diapers". What globalist linguistics! What progress! I wish I could discuss in depth the Sapir-Whorf impact of Russian advertising. Finally I get it, finally, finally language dictates thought; at last it all makes sense from our point of view in our hot-dog-eat-hot-dog corner of the world! I Want Capitalism!

Except I can barely bear to look at it using my eyes. About three-fourths of Russian graphic design looks like shit. The rest is arguably ripping off the fine work of the Dutch, or the work of Americans who ripped off the Dutch. What can I say? Northern Europeans are tits at design, as are the Japanese. But the Russians seem to be missing something. Perhaps the key lies in using fewer tie-dye backgrounds. Horror vacue.

Less is more. Less is more, I chant, standing on the floor of the LeRoi home improvement warehouse, picking out curtains. The surrounding setup could be mistaken for the Home Depot, except everyone is surlier and sort of more pungent, and everything is covered in mad patterns, neon colors, or both. Here's a set of bathroom faux-marble in opalescent black veined with indigo, decorated all over with a print of palm trees, and every now and then the coup de grâce: a huge, gold-embossed tile featuring some sort of Chinoiserie landscape, peasants and mountains and all. A wealthy-looking woman examines the thing with palpable appreciation. Oh, god. Or no, hang on, here's a kitchen made entirely of frosted glass whose surface teems with leaf-shapes in orange, yellow, red, vermillion. The recommended wallpaper is more leaves. Leaves on leaves on leaves, a kitchen wilderness to get lost in every morning as you brew your overpriced coffee. In a country where the sun stays under the grey horizon three months out of the year, this sort of thing might be necessary for mental health purposes, but my own mental health is suddenly under fire. More isSsssssS.... LesSSssSsSSSsssss?



Too bad the local IKEA is prohibitively overpriced.

It isn't even "LeRoi". Everyone calls it Леруа, a word of great etymological mystery until I see it written out in Latin.

"The King!" I cry joyously. As in, Of Criminally Horrible Interior Design! Solved, solved!

"What," says my cousin.



Oh, but there are also heavier newcomers to the lexicon. Теракт, terr-act, terrorist action. On the Friday following the Metro bombings, I light a candle at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Cathedral is new; it stands on the cellars of its predecessor, burnt by the Red Army in the 1920s. Women must cover their heads before entering. I am not particularly religious; this just seems like the right thing to do. On the trains in the city center, people are carrying red carnations, always two or four: even numbers for the dead. Medvedyev is frank on the nine o'clock news. He doesn't give a speech to calm the people; he gnashes his teeth and vows that the streets shall run red with terrorist blood. It's always odd to watch this stuff in countries outside the US; I am far too accustomed to the contention between CNN (boring) and FOX (infuriating, sadly not irrelevant). Obama goes up to make bolstering, diplomatic speeches; the evil of Glenn Back is mitigated by the circus of his medium. Moscow newscasts are not as complicated. I doubt they are fair or balanced, but at the least they are unilaterally frank.

I mean, no one who blows up Metros deserves a trial.

Right?

And only twenty years after glasnost!

....Ha?

Gorbachev and his immediate successor are hated by most of the retired population. I think I've already told the story of the бабушки near Yeltsin's tomb. "He destroyed our country," they spat at me. "It is only right that he should have a monument this ugly." In one part, at least, those steely-eyed old ladies were correct: the tomb looks like someone pooped out a Russian flag. My own grandmother agrees, but then anything can be made beautiful in the glow of nostalgia.

"But if life in the USSR was as good as you claim, why did Borishnikov run?" (In London, he saw Audis and Mojitos.)

"He was spoiled," she pronounces. "And you have been brainwashed."

By both sides, I think.

It's nearly impossible to truly educate oneself when there is no vacuum where thought can develop independently.

*

My grandmother, sitting beside me on the couch, speechless over the thirty-five lives lost in the Metro, tells me a story about bandits.

"Criminals in my day were different. No less dangerous, but rational. It was a different time," she sighs.

This is the story:

Two years after the war, the government instituted a public lottery to boost morale. Every working citizen of Moscow received a number; then, every few months, some would be drawn from the pool. The awards were monetary sums ranging from 500 to 10,000 rubles.

Olya, my great-great-aunt, my grandmother's mother's sister, won ten thousand. In those days, when people in the countryside still wore the animal pelts that had warmed them in wartime, this was an inconceivable sum, perhaps a hundred thousand by the current dollar estimate. Olya wisely kept the fact of her winnings to herself.

The youngest of my great-aunts had just been born in a communal hospital, thrust into the world behind a bedsheet hung across darning thread to give her mother privacy. Having more than four children finally entitled the extended family to two rooms in a newly-built apartment complex, where they still barely had space to sleep. My grandmother's immediate relatives -- her parents, her little brother, her three sisters -- shared a sofa and two cots until Olya, newly rich, bought them a third. She also bought the women cosmetics, a dresser, a vanity mirror. For the men she bought tools for gardening and woodwork. For everyone there was new clothing. It was difficult to buy so much -- so little -- without letting on how much she could actually buy.

No surprise that she was still found out. When Olya's coworkers compared their numbers, it was clear that the most recent winner had come from their midst.

One night not long after, two men came into the room where my grandmother slept with her family. She herself had to share with her next-oldest sister, lying head to toe and fighting over the one scratchy blanket they had to keep warm.

The men demanded to see everyone's documents. It was not unusual at the time to undergo periodic checks of one's status as a legitimate citizen: plenty of people in Moscow preferred to lurk under the radar, living on stolen money and seized housing. The building had a special inspector to conduct these checks, as well as a land-manager who supervised the inspector and resolved any civil disputes among the residents. Liuda, the oldest of the girls, was the first to see through the dark and catch on that neither of the men fit either profile. She hopped out of bed and intercepted them politely at the door. One stayed to speak with her, the indistinguishable hulk of him bending to the shade of the slim sister in her pale night-clothes. They made small-talk while the man positioned himself between the doorposts, blocking passage. Both he and his partner were tall and bulky; he was the bigger.

The other man, the partner, walked into the room, still demanding the documents. My grandmother's father was already up and telling both of them to be on their way.

"Look around you. Everyone is legal here."

The man said, "If you won't produce the documents, I'll just have to find them myself." My grandmother caught a glimpse of his eyes then.

("Everyday people, you or I, we don't have eyes like that. I could see that in his life he had done terrible things. A dangerous person.")

Her father was now standing, drawing himself up. He had just come back from the Liberation, all the way from Berlin, mostly on foot. He was still thin and weak. What my grandmother remembers was the dart of his glance -- to the table, the walls, any place that might hold a weapon. And all the while the man's eyes darting too, here and there and all around that tiny room with so many people jammed inside, poverty the likes of which you hardly ever see anymore. It was as if he could not decide where to start searching for the money. Every possible place must have looked ridiculous; out of all those sad pieces of half-furniture, which could conceal so many thousands? He looked at my grandmother and her sister, curled like small animals under their rag of a blanket.

Finally, he said, "I apologize. We did not mean to disturb you. No one will bother you again." Meaning, of course, he had decided that no one in his gang would be allowed to search for the secret rubles.

Liuda, meanwhile, had begun to chat in earnest with the man at the door. My grandmother saw him tilt back his head and let out a big bear of a laugh, frightening but friendly, too.

Then the two men left. No one in the building ever saw them again.

*



In the space of a week, the foot of snow remaining in the woods across the street vanishes without a trace. The trees are the first to fight their way towards spring; their root systems heat with anticipation until they melt dark circles into the white about their trunks. Their branches swell with baby leaves like green hi-liter. The ice on the river is the next to go. The reservoir just beyond is rumored to have two meters still, but now and then the tiny shapes of fishermen can be glimpsed around its edges. Trout from Москва Река must be pretty toxic to eat; I wonder what these dudes do with their catches. In the streets, the ubiquitous belted overcoat is supplanted by the ubiquitous blazer and the faux-leather bomber, worn in brown or grey with a light scarf, skinnys and boots. The skin flakes from the backs of my hands until I freak out and buy moisturizer. The sidewalks dry into puddles, then into dust, wanting rain. The city is choked with exaust-fumes, its sea of traffic homogeneous and mud-grey. On the day after Easter every car regains its color and shine, as if by Orthodox miracle, and everywhere the air is tangy with the fresh paint on buildings -- a scent as nostalgic as the peculiar sharpness given off by Metro trains. Scattered showers are finally forecast for the day I leave for Los Angeles. My cousins say the country is sad to see me go, but I rather think Russia is merely reminding us not to get too comfortable in our blazers. More snow could still be on the way. No May until it's May, you know?

The Moscow I'll always remember is the Moscow of White Nights -- lavender with twilight, the activity of every day so uncomplicated that it compels me to industry, society. Meanwhile, back home, my late taxes are waiting to be sent. A pile of 1040EZ forms. Rent, bills.

I sleep through the flight back. At passport inspection, I realize that I've also slept through the customs forms.

"It's cool," says the young inspector. "I've got an extra. You can stay up here while you fill it out."

My lip is all set to curl, but I realize the mechanism is no longer necessary. I give the inspector the most genuine smile I've got left in me.

"Oh, thank you, thanks so much. If this were Russia, they would have devised some elaborate punishment for missing a form. Like sending me all the way back to the plane for a copy."

He laughs. "Russia, huh. Well, welcome home."

And maybe I start crying a little. He pretends not to notice; he knows I'm in no shape. I get my bags. I check my Twitter feed. When Mom asks me what I want for dinner, I express my longing for a quesadilla made with a pair of fresh tortillas.

"Sour cream?" asks the dude at the drive-through.

"Oh, no thank you," I tell him. "Oh, gosh. No. Gracias, uh, no."

*