What is a Nazi, Pt. 2

People may be a bit confused about the title of yesterday's blog. This entry will clear it all up.
I came back to Moscow from France last Wednesday, and when I landed I didn't feel like seeing anybody. So until Saturday night I just kind of hung around, reading and sleeping, apart from one well-paid class with private students. On Saturday night, though, I decided to call a few people and let them know I was back. One of them, my friend Alexei, is in Germany, so I called Dima, the warm-hearted communist mini-bus driver I spoke of in the last post.
I gave him a call around 4, and he "generously" offered to "let" me come to his place. I use quotation marks because he lives pretty far, and I often see this as being a way to get me to do all the traveling to meet up. On the other hand, in Russia it is considered a real gesture of friendship and generosity to invite someone into your home, especially if the person sleeps in your place.
I chose to accept his offer, and go all the way over to his place. I always feel a bit uncomfortable accepting such offers, because I know there is going to be hard drinking and salty food until the wee hours of the morning. I have, as I mentioned, stopped drinking both alcohol and caffeine, and Russians are often hurt when you don't drink with them. And besides, the last metro leaves at 1 am, which means you are obliged to sleep at the other person's house.
I decided to go for it anyways. I got my stuff together, walked to the metro and off I went. When I arrived at the station in the kind of ghetto-y southeast of Moscow, I gave Dima a call, and he promised he would arrive soon with bicycles and that we'd ride to his house. While waiting, I took a look around- nothing special, blaring idiotic dance beats coming from the inside of kebab shops with neon lights, gray sky, shabby-looking Soviet highrises, rows of pre-fab kiosks selling fruit and vegetables and alcohol, some open green spaces, and across the street the House of Culture, which had been a factory but was now a center for theatre performances. As soon as he arrived he gave me a big hug and asked how my trip to France had been. He explained how to use the shifters, even though I told him I knew how, then gave me the worse bike, telling me it was the better one. Whatever. It soon became apparent from his riding that he was drunk, and he began complaining that he lived in a ghetto, and that he had been fighting with his wife.
We stopped in a kiosk and he asked me what beer I wanted, and I refused explaining I wasn't going to drink a drop till Christmas. He couldn't quite grasp it, and when I explained some he just interrupted, telling me I had to drink. I was tempted, but stayed strong. Finally he went in and got me some kvas, a non-alcoholic drink made (I think) from rye, and again we were off, this time to a big artificial lake held in by rocks held back by chicken wire. Seeing a syringe on the ground, I asked him whether people shoot up here even during the daytime, and he said yes, at all hours of the day. He said such people come up and demand all your possessions, but that they're weak, and you just tell them to get out. He also said someone had drowned his friend in this very lake 20 years ago. I also mentioned I was looking for a new place to live, as the landlady is raising the rent, and he said we'd go to a friend's place, as he was offering a free room for only 10000 rubles, around half of what I am paying now.
Off we went, arriving at some low five-story flats. The whole neighborhood smelled like shit, a fact I was prepared to ignore considering the price. I asked Dima how he knew this guy, and he said it was an old school friend, a real honest guy, but an alcoholic. He added that I should never bring cash to the apartment. In typical Moscow fashion, I began calculating whether this was a good deal or not. I'd save 400us over my current flat, more after the price hike, but I'd have to go to the bank more often to deposit the cash my private students pay me, so as to avoid getting bumrushed by this guy. (I think the very fact that I considered the offer not unattractive says a lot about the Moscow real estate market: "take any offer").
It was already quite dark, and we were off again, this time crossing over some railroad tracks on foot. Lots of beer bottles, some syringes, highrises in the distance. Dima began telling me about how he had pressured four different women into getting abortions- this had happened four times- and that he could never forgive himself.
After arriving at his apartment, Dima told me how his parents had gotten divorced at age 60, how his father, who was a complete drunk, was living in the spare room and how poor he was, although the whole flat had just been renovated and even had a nice Italian coffee machine. Soon, not entirely drunk, he was launching into a tirade about Jews, telling me that Hitler was a Jew because in the Bible it says the world would end after the Jews started living together in the desert, and that Hitler on the Jews urging killed the Jews so they'd all live together in the desert. He asked if I had a girlfriend, and he called her a whore, and asked if I knew that 1 in 5 Russians has AIDS (that's not so, it's more like 1 percent), asked if I had syphilis, and whether I wanted to sleep with a French woman he knew. Not long after he was offering me a small pebble and telling me that it was a sign of friendship and happiness, and that my angel wasn't with me because I was too naive and stupid to accept Christ into my life. He demanded I put the pebble, which had a small hole in it so that you can wear it on a necklace. He speculated for quite awhile about how the hole had gotten in the necklace, and concluded that it had been made by a mollusk.
Afterwards we went to a bar and met his wife and the French woman, who turned out to be well overweight, 40, and not French.
Afterwards we returned to his home with his wife, and he began ranting again, this time about people from the Caucasus. His wife said they need to all be killed, they come to Russia and "occupy our territory", they "even own businesses, and the bosses tell Russians what to do", "we need to kick them out or kill them", "we need to break their heads in", "they aren't people", "they're like Jews", "they found a severed head in the supermarket, who knocked that head off? WHO? Who do you think?", "Russian women sell themselves, and then these dark men think they can hit on any Russian woman. The last time one did that I got some Russian men together and they beat him up", "soon there's going to be war between rich and poor, and the dark people [Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijainis] are going to lose", "our taxi driver [we had taken a brief taxi ride after which Dima embraced the taxi driver, who was from Tajikstan and with whom we had had a very cordial conversation], today I hug him, and when the war comes, I will be ready to kill him". All this over a giant bowl of mayonnaise-globbed vegetables, my favorite. Dima even drank the mayo-veggie runoff from the bowl, the sound of which greatly complicated my task of eating the vegetables, and when a chunk of tomato fell on the table, Dima slurped that shit right up off the table with his lips and went back to talking about how Georgians are dirty.
Hoping to hear more idiotic ravings, I asked if he thought that Africans have the same violent character as Georgians. His wife said that Africans smell. I said that wasn't so, and his wife countered that "black people squat in the 60 degrees [Centigrade] sun, doing nothing all day, how do you think they are going to smell?"
I wound up sleeping at their place, and the next day, Dima and I were watching Olympic boxing, the match was between a black French guy and a Russian. Dima said, "you remember you asked me whether Africans have the same character as Georgians. Well, look how the African is hitting the Russian guy. You see how he hits him? You see how he grabs the Russian? What do you think?" I wanted to tell him that it's fucking boxing match, people hit and grab each other, but in these moments I just maintain an air of respect and wait until it's time to leave. I may even try get this guy on film at his very worst.
American xenophobes talk about expulsion and border closure. Russian xenophobes talk about extermination and enslavement. That's probably just because Russian xenophobes on the whole have more of a grievance with the world their American counterparts do and dream of being able to relish seeing someone below them. I always think of asking such people how they are in any way different from Nazis. You see, in Russia, people are often quite comfortable with the content of Nazism, as their country was the one most responsible for defeating Nazi Germany and the one that suffered most because of the war. But I would be very afraid to tell people with such views that they are in fact Nazis.
It is a banal point to make, but Nazism and communism have a lot of similarities, or at least get their support from the same quarters. Nazis and communists alike have a hate of the rich, and especially among the Russians I have met who long for the old regime, there is a marked hate of Jews characterized by wild conspiracy theories running the gamut from "the Massad is reading my icq's" to "Hitler was a Jew and the Final Solution was all part of their big plan. In Europe, the accepted historical narrative says that the Jews were the group that suffered most in the Second World War. In Germany or France or Britain, anti-Semitism is far less acceptable than here because people saw the barbarism it resulted in. In Russia, on the other hand, communists, and by association, Russia itself, are seen as the main victims, not Jews. That view is not such a complete stretch, but this narrative means that anti-Semitism was never so completely discredited as it was in Western Europe or North America. I'll be writing more about racism in Russia, and trying to see how typical all this is.

What is a Nazi? (part 1)

Recently I gave up three vices- alcohol, caffeine and the news. The first two are more important, because they are linked. In the morning I usually drink a cup of strong coffee or tea. In the case of tea, I extract its maximum potential using the following method: I put the tea leaves onto a small sieve and pour the still-boiling water directly onto the leaves, occasionally stopping and pressing with a spoon on them to squeeze out more 'juice', then I start to pour again, until the glass os full of very strong tea. Then I pour the tea into a second cup, letting the tea pass throught the nearly exhausted leaves once more. I leave the last inch or so of drink to be poured directly into the second cup, without the last bit of tea coming into contact with the tea leaves again, because the tea at the bottom of the cup is stronger and by letting it pass through the already used leaves again, you lose more caffeine than you gain. This wakes me up quite thoroughly, but by no means guarantees a cheerful mood. During the day, I drink more tea or coffee at all of the places I give classes. The result is that at the end of the day I am completely wired, and unable to sleep. Unless I drink alcohol, particularly red wine, which tends to put me right away into a sleep so deep that the next day I require caffeine.
This is the result of a schedule which is difficult without bearing any resemblance to a routine. Every day my schedule changes, and because I am a serious, on time kind of guy my only choice is to be able to wake up completely at a moment's notice and swing into feverish action. And afterwards it is impossible to turn off and go to sleep.
I can see the results of all this on my face. When I arrived in Moscow two years ago at the age of 26, people thought I was 19. People now more regularly guess my age. Some say that that is because I look more sure of myself, one positive result of my experiences here, but I think they are just being nice. There are incipient exhaustion wrinkles around my eyes, and I plan to stop them by avoiding alcohol and caffeine completely.
A few months ago, I had a student at a big accounting company far from home early in the morning, and after a long metro (tube/subway) ride, I had about a 20 minute walk, from which I was occasionally spared by the company's minibus service. On one particularly sour morning, the driver was listening to Dire Straits, and asked whether I liked the music. I said yes, and he asked whether I liked only sad music. I said not necessarily, which he didn't believe, and asked why I always look so pissed off. Afterwards we chatted a bit and got acquainted.
A few weeks later, when the weather was better, we met and he brought his 10-year old son. We first went into Moscow's most crowded shopping mall, which has a little food court, and he offered me beer and pancakes, refusing to let me pay. Afterwards we went for a little stroll near the Kremlin. He pointed out the Russian Historical Museum, which previously was the Museum of Lenin. He recalled, in 1990, reclining on Lenin's old couch and having a smoke with the cops, who by that time had ceased to care about the upkeep of the old idols. As we continued past the museum, I asked him whether he thought such a system could return, and he said yes, and even hoped so. I had noted that he was religious, and told him of my surprise. He said that food was much cheaper back then, and that everyone had a chance to do what he wanted. Unable to really counter people's thoughts when speaking Russian, I just listened. I asked him where he was going to draw the line between not enough, enough and too much property and added that I was thinking of getting a new bike. He said there was nothing wrong with that, until I added that I already had four. He looked at me in shock, pointed across the street to a fashionable 19th century flat, and asked whether I thought it was fair that one person can own such a building when so many in Moscow are homeless.
I said no, and he replied that my fifth bike was the same thing, and that that was the last he was going to say on the topic. I took this for the tactic of someone who knows his arguments are vulnerable, even untenable, but cannot leave them. He does, after all, own a dacha in the countryside. Why doesn't he let some bums live in it?

People of Unimpeachable Honesty

I said in a previous posting that I have met very few people of "unimpeachable honesty". That isn't true. I have met numerous people who, for completely unselfish reasons have helped me out, particularly in the are of housing. While it is true that I have been thrown out of my flat on numerous occasions, it is also undeniable that I have been picked up in the dead of night in an emergency by a stranger, a friend of a friend, and housed for weeks by people I barely knew.

A Dog Always Crawls Back to its Vomit

Well, I am back in Frowntown, having returned from France after an extended vacation. I felt a bit queasy about coming back to Moscow, and upon getting out of the airplane the queasiness was transmuted into hate and horror. Not immediately, mind you, but kind of step by step as I on my homeward path encountered the things and people that make this place so unpleasant so frequently: sullen, sag-shouldered afrophobe cops who can't make a living without stealing from africans; girls with legs up to their necks and nothing in their heads because as a rule men think of women as soup and sex machines and not as conversation partners; sundry drunks; and the vast number of people with innocent, kindly faces which make you feel like maybe you're just wrong about these people in general.
During my vacation in France, I had left the flat to Charlemagne, who was to hold the fort until my return, paying part of the rent and making sure no one else moved in in my place. Instead, I found out, he had bailed at the last minute, leaving the flat to an unnamed Canadian. The idea of a Canadian male living in my flat worried me, because several months ago, while looking for a flatmate, I had met a Canadian who seemed like an alright guy, until he revealed that he brings back multiple prostitutes of both sexes, or sometimes only men, to the apartment. I didn't relish the idea of waking up at 3am to a quartet of male orgasms six months ago, and so I didn't let him take the room. I still don't relish the idea, so the idea that maybe the same Canadian was in my flat waiting for me to come back was rather unsettling.
Instead, upon arrival I was greeted by my landlord Leonid, one of the few people of unalloyed honesty I have met in this city. During my absence, no one was living in the flat, which means he made almost no money the entire time I was gone. He gave me the key, and we entered together, turned on the fridge and unblocked the gas, and started unpacking some of my stuff. Unfortunately though, he informed me that rent is going up as of September. The only bad thing about the flat is the rent. Leonid and his wife Ludmilla both have just plain unrealistic expectations about what people can afford to pay to stay in the flat, what they are demanding is WELL above market prices. They aren't trying to rip me off, they just have an inflated expectation of what they can earn from this flat.
Today I called a German woman who lives in Moscow and who was considering living in my other room starting from September, ie, just when I need her to come, but she found the price ridiculous. I told her that there was no parasite real estate agent to pay, and no deposit to pay either, but she was unimpressed and harangued me some about prices and then hung up. In typical Moscow fashion (I would have done the same in her position) she called back to wheedle me down to a lower price and offer unwanted advice. As we continued speaking, she made a few mistakes in her German, and her Russian accent became more apparent, which made me think she was more Russian than German. I told her I was willing to pay such a high price because I had been thrown out and ripped off too many times in the past, and was willing to pay a higher price for stability. She countered that she had never had such experiences, and that she hoped I'd understand that she was willing to pay 40 percent less than what my landlord was demanding, and that starting tomorrow she was going to start searching intensively for a room to live in, ie, I should accept her offer immediately or face paying the whole rent myself.
One thread that ran through the conversation was that Moscow is a city of liars and cheats, and that when you find someone honest, you have to hold onto them, even if it is expensive. As her Russian accent became more apparent, I felt a certain pleasure in having thus shamed this woman for her nationality before it had even become apparent to me, and a measure of shame in my pleasure. The reasons behind my shame, anger, and pleasure will become more apparent as you continue to read this blog.

I am back

It has been awhile since I last posted, in fact about a month. Here's what has happened since then: I got some more hiking and camping gear in Marseille for my walk across the Pyrenees, then took the train up Hendayes where the hiking path starts. I walked for about three weeks, saw many beautiful places, but in the end got tendonitis and have had to stop walking. Right now I am in a small town called Revel, hanging out at the house of some friends I met on a more successful walk across France two years. Really great people, they really invited me right off the street to get to know their family and sleep in their house just as it was about to start raining.
Some random thoughts and impressions from my Pyrenees walk:
-I walked on a well-known hiking route known as the GR10, which goes all the way from the Atlantic ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, staying on the French side of the Pyrenees. The path is quite hard, mainly because it stays so close to towns so that you can buy food. The thing is, towns are located in valleys, whereas the most interesting hiking is in the mountains. That means a fairly predictable rhythym of a long climb in the morning, followed by a long descent in the evening.
-In the higher parts of the path, at around 2000m, the water is so clean it is almost sweet.
-Living in a big city with an air pollution problem made me forget what it is like to have a sense of smell.
-Coming from crazy Moscow to tranquil France is actually a bit boring. What I understand by the word adventure has changed a lot in the last two years, and I was kind of hoping before coming back to France for a second long walk that I would repeat the same amazing experience of the first time. Beautiful sights? Yes. Nice people? Yes. Spontaneous meetings with unexpected people? Yes, but rarely on the hiking path itself. There are just plain way too many people on the GR10 for you to be seen as anything more than a tourist by the inhabitants of the places you pass by.
-As soon as I left the hiking path, people became more welcoming towards me: I have been invited four times to people houses, whereas that doesn't happen on the beaten path.
-I jumped into a nearly ice cold spring high in the mountains. I suggest you do the same if you get a chance. It is so cold it hurts, but then for the rest of the day you feel just great.
That's all for now.
Tim