Swansong

For several weeks I had been planning to go on a bike trip from Moscow to Iaroslavl, famous for its churches and located four days away by bicycle. Actually, at first there were a lot of different possible destinations: Syktyvkar, located one month away by bike; Samara, around three weeks away and boasting Russia’s most famous beer factory outlet restaurant, “On the Floor [of a body water]”, located right next to the Volga; Murmansk, which I had single-handedly obliterated in 1987 in my stealth fighter. Initially, the main factor driving my choice of destination was the degree of isolation of the road leading to it. But soon another factor came to play a role: time. I accepted a job offer from a former student who’d moved to Kiev, and only a certain number of days remained before my departure, so I had to settle on a shorter trip, which meant I decided on Iaroslavl. One advantage of the road from Moscow to Iaroslavl was that there were notably beautiful cities in intervals of exactly one day’s bike ride: Sergiev Posad, Pereslavl Zaleskii, Rostov Velikii.
Having settled on and for Iaroslavl, my plan was to wake up early, have a large breakfast, walk to the metro and go to a shopping center where I knew automotive parts and hardware were sold in order to buy some bungee cords to strap my tent down to my luggage rack, then head back home, load the bike up, and ride all the way to Sergiev Posad, a town most famous for its monastery and located one day’s ride from my apartment.
Instead I woke up early, and decided to go back to sleep for another hour. Instead of a large breakfast, I had three cups of coffee with milk. Finally, in my typical ad-hoc fashion, I left the house four hours later than planned, and spent a further three hours in the enraging crossfire of Russian business practices and my own chronic ill-preparedness, with blame of course falling squarely on the Russians:
(In the hardware store.) "Hey, I'm looking for those rubber cords with hooks on the end."
"We don't have them."
"Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"Not exactly."
“Then how can you say you don’t have them?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, how can you say you don’t have something in stock if you don’t even know what I’m asking for?”
Silence.
"The last guy told me they’re called 'spiders'. Do you know what I am talking about?"
"We don't have them, and they're not called spiders. Do they look like spiders? They're called octopuses."
“Do they look like octopuses?”
“No, but that’s what we call them.”
With each store, the conversation got a little longer, with me asking first for little nets, or octopuses, or spiders, or centipedes, or whatever they told me they were called, and since none of those provided a visual match with bungee cords and I felt these salespeople were independently choosing to make an ass of me in nearly identical ways, I chose a lengthy circumlocution explaining that I needed to strap my tent to my luggage rack. What I really needed was the word 'stretchy'. But I have a poor working memory, and this was the afternoon, the time of day when I tend to lose myself in reflections on the future. Together with my poor working memory, this led me to curse myself for forgetting my dictionary, even though I had in fact brought it, which of course enraged me. Later it turned out that it didn't even contain that key word.
I finally got my bungees, but it was already two o'clock and I reflected that it may just be best to start the next day. My metabolism, which in the absence of clear, externally-imposed tasks puts me like clockwork at 130pm into hypoglycemic shock -or much, much earlier if I have not slept- which then interacts with a sometimes gloomy outlook, has always been at odds with the afternoon. Absolutely key chores I deem menial, ie, which are incompatible with my laughable feelings of wounded grandeur, get taken care of starting at the moment when it's almost too late. I have a genial sense of when that moment has arrived, but hate hurrying, which means I act slowly, prolonging the problem. On days when I am not working, one single bottle of beer helps me the through the afternoons. It works its magic on the metabolic much more than on the psychic plane, which, coupled with my fundamental mistrust of myself regarding ‘vices’, prevents me from becoming an alcoholic. But just barely, I fear. What is alcoholism, anyway? It's something slippery. Every drunk says that. But that I'm repeating an alcoholic’s denial of his alcoholism doesn't mean I am an alcoholic. If alcoholism is slippery, then so is the discussion about it. The occasional belief that I might be becoming an alcoholic is just my own personal problem. One of them. What a lot of claptrap, one bottle of beer, some alcoholic! Get over yourself.
That’s what the afternoon is like for me.
I just have to wait it out. The evening is different. Things always look different better by 6pm. It’s clockwork. Getting on the bike helps sometimes, too.
I went home, strapped the tent to the bikerack, and got on the road. It was around then that I decided that instead of riding through boring Moscow suburbs and dacha colonies to Sergiev Posad, I would just take the bike on the train, and thus spare myself the trouble of navigating through the suburbs of Moscow. I headed off in the general direction of the train station, enlivened now by a sense of mission, always taking large roads running in that direction, and occasionally making corrections by asking passersby. I also picked up three crepes, ate one of them, and saved two for the train trip. I got the tickets, got on the train, and got moving.
I hated the city, but had been there for almost three years, and there were people I knew I would miss. I was planning to leave for good in just over two weeks, and as the train pulled away and the struggling ice cream and magazine resalesmen did their hawking, I rode backwards on the hard bench, watching almost in tears as the city I so hated rumbled past building by building. An old man with deeply wrinkled skin and puckered lips came in and began playing, "Vladimirskii Tsentral", a song about prison life. Then two solid young men with a new microphone and speakerbox came in, and began playing the same song, only louder. They stopped, argued some, and the young men won. The old man slinked away, and the young men made their performance instead, and collected some spending money from the passengers. I wondered about whether the old guy would get enough money.

At one point, a rich mauve 14-year old entered the wagon with a one-liter can of sugary alco-energy swill, leaned up against the nearest open window, and stuck his head out, swiveling his head it seemed always too late to watch the telephone poles scroll past, from time to time taking prolonged, well-spaced gulps from the can. With each draught, some of it ended up dribbling down his chin, and he placed his elbow on his lips, dragging his forearm across his face all the way to the back of his hand in a slack, steady, open-mouth, tongue-out motion. Bydlo. Whom would he make his wife? Maybe the 17-year old woman with the gleaming plastic high heels, up to the ass legseam pantyhose, six-inch long disco-ball shirt and huge menthol eyes? There were someones out there for him, that was for sure. In that milieu, she might even prefer him to me.
We rumbled on for about two hours this way, and arrived at 3:30. I had been to the tourist part of the town before- a walled teal monastery with golden towers, gardens, and a spring inside- but it was my goal to get to the next town by dark, so I pumped the tires up, rode right past the monastery, and got moving at a pace I knew could sustain for hours without stopping. You subtract more from your day's distance covered by getting off the bike for ten minutes than by cutting speed for three hours.
Almost as soon as the monastery was gone, there were grey concrete 12-story highrises everywhere, which soon however dwindled down to straight countryside. Even though Sergiev Posad has only 50,000 residents, on the edge of town the road was fully six lanes wide and had not too long ago been resurfaced, as if to say, “welcome to the wider world.” The shoulders were smooth and scattered with fine gravel, making for easy riding.
The obligatory edge of town concrete shells of collective farm buildings petered out, and I entered territory that I had no judgment or words for yet, and while I churned the pedals, I began grasping for islands of understandability to build on. First a freshly-painted off-white and lime Saab bus, still labelled MosTrans, rolled past almost silently. Its condition, quiet operation, and country of origin made me feel more at home than I wanted to. There were a few of the dark yolk-colored minibuses, expensive and mid-range Western imports, and a few Russian Jigulis and Ladas. On the roadside, pines and birches predominated. They were tall enough to restrict my view of the countryside, which gave the feeling of riding along a narrow strip of reality. The street signs were in pristine condition -the supports still with the milky sheen of new aluminum extrusions- and in a shade of cheerful blue which would neatly complement the green of their American counterparts. The distant names indicated on them - Murmansk 1133 Vologda 384- told me that that strip of reality was long. There were intricately carved wooden window frames and energy-saver windows on the dachas. In front of the rows of dachas were narrow-gauge heating gas pipelines painted a cheerful yellow which ran a foot above the ground and then bent abruptly 90 degrees up to make a pathway for the new cars parked underneath. There was very little trash. A squat stucco spire with a red star and a list of those fallen for the homeland commemorated the war. The only thing creating a sense of distance was a dusty road leading down to a lake. The road went further on terminating at some ways off in a low, solid picket of pine that occupied the height of the arc at the bottom of a thumbnail and stretched across my entire field of vision. I wanted to go there, partly because I was afraid of who might be back there, partly because the place evoked indefinition and distance, but I had a goal, and it lay elsewhere. Around four o’clock, I settled on a sentence to sum up what I’d seen so far: I had the feeling that I was travelling in a genteel, superficially Russified version of the U.S. Upper South. I said it with a bit of derision, not for the South, not for Russia, but for what my trip was so far.


I got back on the bike, headed across the street to a small restaurant, had some lunch and was on my way again soon. 5 o’clock. The same items repeated themselves in the roadscape and in my mind- tin spire, ten-minute descents with views onto daunting-looking hills which always turned out to not tax me much, enshrined photos of traffic victims- unsmiling faces surrounded by ribbons and bouquets in various states of decomposition. 6 o’clock. A stop to drink some kvas- a miraculous drink for cycling- and eat an apple. Almost-satisfaction in slight hunger. Cotton t-shirt drenched in cool sweat, an incentive to not stop moving. 7 o’clock. A simple Orthodox church spire that once formed a chapel, permanent makeshift roadside cafes with vinyl floral tablecloth and Pepsi-brand fridges outside. Occasional pain in the joint between my right leg and hip. On one side of the street, a vertical-fronted Volvo truck with German plates and shattered but intact windshield, and superficial damage to the hood. Doors swinging open in the back, no goods in the trailer. On the other, in a ditch, an affordable family car compressed to two thirds its original length. Babyseat in the back. Dozens of spent miniature fire extinguishers all around. Time to move on. Don't imagine these people. Don't imagine whether the baby was asleep or awake. Don't imagine the credit they took out on the car. Don't imagine how their lives were just taking off. Don't imagine the people they knew. Don't imagine the funeral. Don't share the desolation of people you don't know. Kickstart your metabolism. Move on. 8pm. A barely-bridge passing over a silent petro-iridescent bog irrigated by the sewerpipe of another generic roadside cafe. Time for some calories.
I was still hoping to make it all the way to the next town, which was still 8km distant. I sat down outside at the picnic table and ordered some eggs, dark bread, a half-liter of homemade kvas, mashed potatoes. 60 rubles- two dollars.
Presently a from stamped and tubular industrial stock canted-wheel dark teal motorcycle-sidecar combo probably incapable of open-road speed rattled past, a shirtless, buzz-cut slackjaw with long black pants and imported combat boots behind the bar. Foreset jaw, open mouth. Bydlo. The motorcycle disappeared and reappeared with two more males in the sidecar. They all got out, acknowledged me, went in to the café, and about a minute later came back out with a liter and a half of vodka and several oranges. They sat down with me, slammed the bottle on the table, opened it, produced disposable plastic cups, and one of the three began pouring all of us drinks. Thinking back to the Nazi in the subway, the stabbing potential of the screwdrivers in my backpack slid to mind. For months I had been hoping for something that would justify my counterattacking, but did not react one way or the other to these particular goons who’d still done nothing threatening. I felt I should be afraid, but wasn’t. It was still light outside, and it was implicit that people who’d never lacquered their base-level biological-ness with anything more than clothes would be unlikely to attack me before nightfall and without having found fault. And neither of those things had happened yet. They invited me to drink with them, and I answered with my standard refusal-compliment: you are Russian, you have different, stronger blood. I am just an American. I am not as strong as you. They insisted, but my compliment defused the situation.


The original motorcyclist pulled an orange out of the plastic bag, and began tearing off the skin. The citrus juice from the skin began running down his hands, producing tracks of cleanliness. Soon we were joined by another man, this one apparently in his late thirties. I felt he was different because he was wearing a shirt. He had glasses and long yellowed eighties rockstar style hair, and a feminine paunch. He had a caring face, and occasionally stared at me over his lentil-shaped bifocals. I looked him over, which he may have liked, but I was looking for indications of character, and not a hot bod. I like women, and only women. The only thing I found was tattoos on his left wrist, and I wondered whether they bespoke jail time.
One of the bydlo asked me how my time in the U.S. Army was, and I explained that we don’t have mandatory service. He asked about my debt to the homeland, and why I had not paid it- there is a notion in Russia that every male owes a debt to his country which must be paid by military service. This idea somehow motivates people to defend a state which has done nothing but steal from its people, and do it for a dollar a month.
I said I owed my debt to the homeland to a bank in Missouri, whereby I was referring, mainly for my own benefit, to my college loans. They of course did not understand, and again insisted I drink. I repeated my compliment, and the yellow-haired man took the attention off me, saying that Americans are different, that they don’t drink, and that he could drink in my stead, but “only one shot, got it?” He took the shot, pulled a napkin out of the holder, and wrote on it in English, “Don’t care, I’ll help.” I didn’t feel there was any level of danger yet, but spoke a little with him. He said his name was Boris, and that he was an ‘economist’, which in Russia refers usually not to an economic theoretician but a bank clerk. He spoke English haltingly but with a good accent, although I needed to speak very slowly and simply for him to follow.
I was paying more attention to Boris than the bydlo to which he clearly did not belong, but I did notice that there was a rotating cast of rednecks at the table. I wasn’t sure if this was because they had taken interest in me and word was circulating about me and my gear, or whether this was just their evening meeting place. I do remember one very short, completely silent fellow with a thick molten-looking scar under one eye and a resolutely sour expression on his face who stayed for only a few minutes, plus a short, tan, wiry fellow who gave me conflicting signals: no shirt, but thin lips firmly pressed together as if to stifle a broad smile, joyous eyes, and greasy but well-kempt hair. His name was Vasiliy, and he turned out to be a friend of Boris. They were both involved in a resort construction project up the road where they invited me to spend the night. The idea tempted me, but I was resolute about not getting in a car for the whole trip. Boris emphasized that these people were dangerous. They had already asked me how much cash I had with me, and what my big necklace with the word OLYMPUS on it (my camera) meant. (Initially surprised that such creatures could read Roman letters, I told them that it was in memory of my participation in the Olympic games. They believed me.) At one point I began to pull out my camera to take a picture of the whole crew, but Boris said in a firm voice, STOP. With that I understood he was trying to protect me, which was not a guarantee of his own motives, but at least a good sign. Finally Boris invited the bydlo to an evening of swimming in a nearby lake, where we were to join them with free vodka in no more than thirty minutes. Pleased with the invitation, they piled onto the motorcycle and clattered away, at which point me, Boris and Vasilij stood up from the table and filed across the street out of sight.
Boris informed me that he and Vasilij were in the construction business and involved in the repair of a schoolhouse where I was going to sleep. Two or three minutes later we were standing on a glade bordered by a two-story Khruschev-era apartment block, a barn and finally the schoolhouse where I was to sleep. The three of us entered and they showed me the place they slept, a narrow room labeled “Teachers’” and equipped with a Belorussian fridge and an up-to-date internet connection. Boris told me he was from the Moscow suburbs, where he owned a two-room flat he rented out while sleeping at his worksites, a practice which saved him a ton of money.
While Vasilij surfed the net, checking out V Kontakte, Russian facebook, me and Boris discussed the Second World War, and whether Americans thought they’d won it, whether the topic is interesting or not. This is a perennial question for Russians when they talk to Americans. They resent us for falsely nominating ourselves as the destroyers of the Third Reich, and if they are ready to listen, I will point out that the stereotypical Russian view is more correct than the stereotypical American one, but that they should take note of several caveats: no one wanted a Soviet occupation, the US fought Japan, which may have prevented a Japanese takeover of Russia’s sparsely populated Far East, The USSR divided Poland between itself and Nazi Germany…


Vasilij, who was from Astrakhan, had served in the Russian army, where he tracked and caught caviar poachers in the Caspian Sea region. Boris had served from the end of Soviet times up until 1999, when after 10 years in the army he finally felt that something was being offered on the job market. I spotted some non-alcoholic beers in the fridge, which further gave me a sense that I was among civilized people, although I myself took a real one. Once, Boris asked me if I liked boys or girls better and I replied with a solid, girls, only girls. The question itself worried me, but I did not feel they were dangerous.
Boris and Vasilij finally asked me whether I’d like a tour of the premises they were repairing, and I accepted. We took a walk around the first floor- colorful frescoes of cosmonauts, walls freshly repainted, some sagging ceilings, but that was they were here for, to fix the place up. We headed up into the roof of the building to take a look around the rafters, where in places there was a meter of accumulated bird shit- no one had cleaned up there since the school had been built 90 years earlier. They had had to shovel the shit out wearing masks because some of it was old and had turned into dust.
We went back downstairs, and Boris offered me a filthy and utterly spent mattress which he lay on the floor for me in the next room. It was almost too filthy to sleep on, and the center of it had no supporting elements whatsoever. I slid into my sleeping bag, made a pillow out of my jacket and backpack, and had a predictably terrible night’s sleep.
The next day I woke up at around 7.30, and was eager to get moving after such a wretched night. Boris offered me some very sugary black tea and dusty, crumbly cookies which got my blood sugar back up, and we walked out of the school and back to the café where we had first met the night before. It was 9am.

I was still pretty beat, even after four cups of tea, so I got more coffee and a huge amount of noodles and eggs. In spite of the previous night’s non-alcoholic beer, Boris ordered a shot of vodka. I told him that the night before when I had first seen him, I noticed he had a tattoo on his left wrist, and asked him what that meant. He said it indicated his blood type for army doctors. I asked him about tattoos in general, and what they meant. He said that in the 90’s tattoos meant that a person had been in prison, but that now they were often just a fashion statement. “So how do you judge someone’s character? How do you know whether to trust someone?”
“There’s no way to do that. In our country, you either have been in jail, or put people in jail. You know there’s conviction quotas? If you’re a cop and haven’t convicted enough people, you have a problem. They’ll handcuff you, and then take some drugs from the vault and put them in your pocket.”
Boris continued ordering more shots of vodka, the sun was shining and I wanted to learn as much as I could from him, even if what he told me was not to be taken as solid information.
“If it comes to a fight with people like the bydlo we saw last night, will running help? I mean, can people like those guys ran fast, can they run in a straight line when drunk?”
“Running is probably the best thing you can do. They know only threats and violence. They get drunk every day. They start drinking in bed, and before noon they’ve already put away more than a bottle. When you saw them last night, each was probably on his fourth bottle. They drink until they’re up to their eyes in drink, and start insulting each other. A fight starts when one of them asks if his friends respect him. He keeps asking until someone tells him to fuck off, at which point they start hitting each other in the face.”
Russians like to exaggerate, and while the idea of daily fistfights was not too much for me, the idea of each of them putting away four bottles seemed a little much.
Vasilij, who had been taking in the morning sun and silently smiling the entire time, chimed in and said that once, during a family party, he heard the sounds of his sister being beaten by her husband coming from an adjacent room, whereupon he took an axe and blunted the husband in the head with the obuh.
“Obuh?”
He made an axe blade with his hands and showed the tip, saying the word for “blade”, and then showed the back of the blade. Obuh. He commented that he was a small guy and can’t win a fight, so he breaks the rules if he’s threatened and hits people in the head with something heavy. He said it’s not conventional, and it surprises every time. Then he extended his arm as far as it would go, saying that’s how big the puddle of blood on the floor was. His brother-in-law didn’t move for six hours, and Vasilij thought he’d killed him, but afterwards he got up and never beat his wife again.
Boris had just finished his fourth shot of vodka and ordered half-liter bottle of beer, which he called a stop sign.
The conversation wore on for several more hours. We talked about the Tajik construction workers, the equivalent of our Mexicans, employed on Moscow skyscraper projects destined to house the richest companies. “Stupid people, good for three things. Breaking, carrying, building.” Having seen a lot of bad people in Russia and maintaining a strong suspicion of all new acquaintances, and also having never once conversed with a Tadjik, I was not in a position to judge him for his beliefs. However, I always find it interesting whether a person believes Tajiks/ Mexicans/ Africans/ African Americans/ Russians are born dumb/ dirty/ violent/ alcoholic. If they do, and are not susceptible to arguments to the contrary, I break off contact, because I tend to adopt the mentality of those around me. The answer he gave was not very direct, which indicated that he had not really thought about it, which I concluded meant he wasn’t the sort of person I hoped he wasn’t.
I told him it was really time to run, we exchanged numbers, and I was off. I had around 80km to cover that day, and it was already noon. My next stop was Pereslavl-Zaleskii, only 8km off. Boris had warned me that there was a traffic police station just before the town and that I could get shaken down, and indeed just before the fork in the road that takes you into or around town stood a white tower-capped building paneled with freshly-painted white aluminum sheets. The surfacing of the road up to that point was solidly First World, but in front of that building, the pavement was smooth as glass. All this worried me a bit, but a guy on a bicycle is not the best bet for a bribe collector, and I coasted past trouble-free.
There were quite a few places to see in town, and I felt a checklist-like obligation to see at least a few of them. First I managed to stop by a women’s monastery on the edge of town, which was made up of a few semi-paved streets perpendicular to the main road and lined for a few hundred meters with three-story apartment blocks in tan brick a few shades darker than the sandy soil they stood on. As I moved on, the town turned out to be made up mainly of older wooden houses, most of them freshly painted. In the center of town there were at least three different churches worth visiting, plus a museum, but only managed to stop at one before hitting the road again.
It was already about one, and I was worried about the fact that I had about 80km to ride that day, and had barely even started moving. Still, I resisted the idea of going faster, and kept in a low gear. The road leading out of town this time had fewer high trees and was a bit more scenic, with an enormous shark-colored lake with a dirt path leading down to it on my left, and distant silver onion domes peeking out through the green waist-high grass. Now on the open road, I had time to just begin chewing over Vasilij’s story. This was the end of my third year in Moscow, and I had heard of numerous situations where violence would have been justified, myself had witnessed at least five of them, including one in which inflicting a serious injury would have been the most reasonable solution. That last incident occurred when the leader of a gang of neo-Nazis dragged a drunk girl off the subway train to rape her, and I had been too stunned to act. For that reason, I experienced a measure of visceral satisfaction and vicarious redemption in Vasilij’s actions . I felt the wind in my hair, and that squinting, not-happy smile- somebody else’s smile- always elicited by that genre of story forming on my face.
The temperature was in the high 80’s, and I had neglected to bring sunscreen, but it was too late to rectify that, so I just had to compensate as best as possible by stopping more often for water, which I tried not to do in front of the roadside memorials to traffic victims, which always put me in a grim mood. The road was flatter but narrower, which meant I frequently got pushed onto the rough shoulder by passing semis.
Around an hour into the trip, there was a monument to the famous T-34 tank, with a real tank mounted on a sloped concrete pedestal and a plaque below. The T-34 was put into production shortly before Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, and being superior to any German tank of the war, it became the bane of the Wehrmacht, playing a pivotal role in every major battle. One can rightly say that without the T-34, the USSR would have suffered even greater losses, possibly even unsustainable ones. The USSR in fact suffered losses 100 times higher than those of the US. In small towns you can find monuments to the fallen, sometimes with five men of the same extinguished line listed all together, occupying a gravely disproportionate area of the plaque. Sixty years later, even young women know the T-34 by name. Below the monument lay fresh wreaths and small envelopes presumably containing personal letters honoring the designer, whose birthplace was just down the road, where a museum stands in his honor.


Very shortly afterwards I was surprised to see a long, open flea-market booth on my side of the road burgeoning from top to bottom to overflow with hundreds of huge stuffed animals watched over by a pair of middle-aged women ready to make a sale. At first I passed them up slowly, then turned around, rode back, stopped, paused, and asked them why they had so many. They told me that part of their pay was in the form of stuffed animals from the factory they worked in. They seemed to be in good spirits.


The next town was still surprisingly well to do, with the same freshly built dachas, aluminum-framed windows, and cheerful yellow gaslines. Parked outside of one of them was a station wagon Jiguli, a notoriously unreliable piece of machinery, production of which continues thanks solely to heavy Russian government subsidies. This particular car however had been relieved via buzzsaw of its roof and all windows except the windshield. In addition, its doors had been soldered shut and the welds cleanly sanded off, with the whole thing painted lime green.

The next stretch of road was unaccountably desolate, marked only by sand and scrub, and once, a triad of deep brown concrete three-story blocks of flats favored not even with a bus stop. Next to them were a few open faced tents, scaffolds neatly draped with military canvas. Inside were older men eking out a living selling surplus army uniforms and potatoes from the garden. There was nothing to say about their wares, so they remained silent. Traffic was light. A not atypical way to scrape by in rural Russia.
A few more hours drifted by, the landscape soon melded first into a cool birch forest, then a fertile plain and finally the edge of urban territory. Ahead I could see a sizeable marshy lake and a low skyline formed by several churches and monasteries, and a white kremlin. It was around 7, and I made it just in time to get inside and have a view of the lake from an observation platform inside the kremlin walls. Afterwards, I filled up my water bottles with spring water and started searching for accommodation. The city is something of a tourist attraction, so hotels turned out to be expensive. It was getting dark, and I considered the possibility of riding into the countryside versus the possible danger of sleeping in the city. I asked a stout mauve middle-aged woman in a yellow and black tiger print dress and her rickety thin girlfriend where I could pitch my tent, and they told me immediately to come with them so they could help me.

We were right next to the second monastery in town, which itself is located directly on the lakeside and surrounded by a high mound which we mounted to find ourselves among a few simple, somewhat shaky-looking unpainted two-story wooden homes. Beyond them was a small, weedy yard and the sandy path that ringed the lake. They allowed me to pitch my tent there, and invited me to a few drinks. The three of us sat down on a few tree stumps by the lake, and were soon joined by another ruddy-mauve man named Viktor, who turned out to be the husband of the rickety thin woman. They were quite nice people, and offered me barbecue and vodka. I turned down the barbecue because I am veg, and wasn’t too keen with my sunburn on vodka, but felt I had to accept something, and soon we were taking shots together, me always taking one for their two. The atmosphere was pretty pleasant, with the day’s heat fading, and me not having any obligations for the next few days allowed me to completely relax, something I was able to do maybe a total of twice during my entire three years in Moscow. Unfortunately I had no food to soak up the alcohol with, but Viktor’s wife cooked me a large pot of green beans with spices, and I felt quite at home. Viktor’s earned his keep on commission gotten convincing foreign tourists to go on boat tours of the lake. I couldn’t see how this got him and his wife through the winter.
Viktor wanted to get more drinks from the convenience store before it closed, so we went together, and on the way past the monastery he showed me his precise favorite spot to stand and view the towers. When we got to the convenience store, most of whose inventory was alcohol, I reasoned that since Viktor and his friends had helped me out, and since Viktor was acting a bit needy, I graciously bought a bottle of vodka for him.
We came back and started drinking again. I needed something beyond the beans to get me sober, so Viktor brought me a giant plastic bucket of very garlicky homemade pickles with huge mustard leaves floating in the brine. The pickles helped, but Viktor insisted that I swill the brine and eat the leaves like a real Russian. My reasoning was somewhat impaired, so I obliged and found the taste not so disagreeable as to preclude repeated experiments, which led to a more clear-headed state of mind. I asked Viktor and his wife how they got through the winter, and they said they did odd jobs, gave tours to a few Russian tourists, and lived from saved produce and money- a year-to-year existence waiting for the grossly insufficient pension to kick in. They complained about their quality of life, and reminisced about the Soviet Union, where everything was provided for them and other countries did what Russians told them to do.
Soon it was midnight and time to go to bed, so Viktor and me and his wife entered the house, where they lived on the second floor in a single room. The vestibule was little better than a barn, but inside, the single room was not too small, and they had a new TV with DVD player, new mobile phones, some throw rugs on a plastic roll coated floor, a narrow, tired bed, and an old, uncomfortable couch where they invited me to sleep. I can sleep on the cold hard floor, or in a field where the rocks can be felt through the tent floor, or in a public toilet, but I am constitutionally incapable of sleeping on sloped surfaces. Plus, in spite of the amount they had imbibed and the fact it was 1am, they were ready for more drinking and blaring Russian pop music. I declined and went back to my tent outside, hoping there’d be no ticks.
The next morning, Viktor invited me in for breakfast, some hard-boiled eggs and sugared biscuits washed down with coffee and vodka, which I did not take. The conversation soon turned to how much money I earned in Moscow. I said I didn’t like talking about money, but it was clear from the wounded, longing looks on their faces that they considered that the previous night’s invitation, which I had considered to be something like an act of spontaneous friendship, was a service to be paid for. Granted, these were relatively poor people, this was a tourist town and I’d been given a tour, but 20 dollars –not including the fact I’d subsidized what I later understood was their alcoholism- for four shots of vodka, some beans, and the privilege of sleeping in my tent in the tick-infested grass did not seem like a fair trade. If you have a hard life partly because you’re an alcoholic, then how does my giving you money for booze make your life better? This was not the first time I had asked this question.

Viktor took me back down to the lake, where a friend of his was waiting for me at the dock with a small motorboat. We zoomed off into the center of the lake, and the morning air was still cool and refreshing. We got to see several varieties of local birds cruising low over the reeds, and get an interesting view of some of the small islands in the middle of the lake, which the captain said were sinking. He pointed out the remains of a relaxation area for tourists that he said had been closed because of Gorbachev and all the disastrous changes he made. I asked him what people did back in those days in town, and he said the main employer was a chocolate factory which got closed almost immediately after the USSR went down the tubes. I asked why the factory closed, and he said Nestle came in and bought the whole factory and every connected with it for almost nothing, and then promptly closed it down. I asked if it was to shut out possible competition and he said yes. After the factory closed, there were hard times and people moved away, or lived off the land, or just drank themselves to death.
When we got back, Viktor was waiting at the dock with the same longing expression, and I peeled off 350 rubles, 14 dollars, and we parted ways.
I was planning on making it to Iaroslavl that day, but my skin was peeling off from sunburn and the sun was shining hot as ever, so I just toured the town a bit, finally heading home on the train later that day.