MonkeySexton

The Subject

2010-03-09T23:10:00.000-08:00

Part of the attraction of ESL as a profession is that it makes few demands on its practitioners. One corollary is that while the contracts stipulate a formal dress code, the reality is jeans and a collared shirt.
The Subject made several appearances in my peripheral field of vision in the summer of 2007, always wearing a slightly baggy grey suit, well-ironed shirt, monochrome tie, and large, slim-lensed eighties gold-rimmed glasses. His rear-facing, faintly wavy, Moses-silver shock's retreat, which took the form of two spikes reaching halfway to his pate, had been stopped, probably for good. His weight was at a robust, achieving minimum, and he was forever entering my field of vision in definitive strides, or sometimes lingering in it, measuredly leafing through papers which along with his books he carried in a cardboard accordion inside his ancient briefcase. He had a noble, burnished forehead, a wrenched Roman nose, and a recessive chin. I put his age at a distinguished 48. He seemed too serious.
"That's a nice suit."
He opened his mouth all the way, slowly, and unfurled his tongue, arching it over his lower teeth, his eyes become indignant behind his glasses, and said in a heavy Scottish accent, "Do you believe in your own word?"
I was just being jocular, and sensed an ambush. "Well, yes."
"You signed an employment contract. Did you read it?"
"Well, yes..."
"Wearing a suit is one of the promises you made, you twat", he said triumphantly, tilted his head to one side, and walked out of the room.
After my anger subsided, I vowed to apologize to this man, who had misunderstood me completely.

Claptrap 3

2010-03-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

I had slept quite badly, so I went in the kitchen with my bleeding foot, boiled some water and made some extra strong tea, got my dictionary and insurance certificate and then limped out the door. Claptrap had already fallen back asleep and didn't say goodbye. I had no idea where to find a hospital, so I went out to the street and started asking passersby; one of them told me to dial 112, which I did and the operator told me where to catch a bus. My foot was starting to ache some and the tea made me calm, I was resigned to the pain, which would get worse, and I started to look forward to the bus ride, the new words, seeing what Russian hospitals were all about, and above all, a bad story.
The bus drove down a sidestreet parallel to the main road and leading to Andrei and Julia's apartment, then to a large stand of birches, and a hospital hat looked like it had been whitewashed goldenrod. The receptionist sent me to an office where I registered, but they had never seen my type of certificate before, and did not know where I was registered because my landlord had refused to give me the proper documentation in order to not pay taxes. I sat down in the hallway and waited, and when it was my turn they asked me what happened, gave me a tetanus shot, dumped alcohol on my foot, and then aggressively and thoroughly swabbed out the inside of the wound; the elderly nurse smirked when I yelled. I guess Russians don't yell when they're in pain. I was not officially registered anywhere and had signed nothing, which meant they were treating me for free, so I gave her 100 rubles, which she declined.
I called my students to let them know what was happening, rescheduled the classes that could be, and started a tally of the ones I had to miss, and how much this was costing me. Apart from sink, I came immediately to a figure of 4000 rubles; plus, every two days I would have to get my foot rebandanged, which would mean missing more classes.
I taught my afternoon classes, and at the end of the day got in a taxi and got my foot rebandaged at another hospital, which again asked where I was registered. I explained everything and they just did their job and refused payment. When I got home Claptrap was absent, which was a relief. The entire day I had had no desire to speak to him.

Who is Claptrap? Part 2

2010-03-08T00:04:00.000-08:00

April 2008
I am living alone in a two-room apartment. I earn enough money to pay the entire rent myself, but I have 20,000 dollars in college loans, and paying for two rooms is a waste of money. I need to find a reliable roommate, but among my circle of acquaintances only Charlemagne is looking for a flat. My landlady, who is trying to pay her daughter's way through university, is greedy and honest. She is acquainted with the British owner of a language school I worked at previously, so she knows what an English teacher in Moscow gets paid, and charges a correspondingly high rent. She knows that I cannot pay the rent alone indefinitely, that I trust no one and don't want to move, and that if she finds another foreigner to pay for the empty room, she will have a steady stream of income.
June 2008
I decide to go to walk the length of the Pyrenees, but don't want to lose the apartment, so someone needs to rent at the very least one of the rooms. Charlemagne is getting threatening letters of two types: one is from Home Credit Bank, is addressed to the absentee landlady, and threatens to repossess her apartment if she does not make her payments; the other type is from the landlady and threatens Charlemagne with expulsion if he does not pay for imaginary damage he has caused- scratched floor, water damage, broken pipes... So I invite Charlemagne to live in the flat while I am hiking the Pyrenees- he pays the rent and I do not lose the apartment while I am living my dream. Afterwards, Charles is to leave and find another place to stay.
August 2008
I come back from France, and find out that Charlemagne never moved in to the Soviet-style apartment, because "I am not a russianigger, and can have nothing less than European decor." He never had any intention of informing me of this. It is by the grace of God that my landlord and landlady have not decided to simply throw me out. I need to find a roommate. I begin searching by posting ads in expat sites; the only taker is a Canadian omnisexual who has orgies once per week. "Don't worry, after three or four hours, we're all worn out, and I make them leave."
Claptrap has finally broken up with his girlfriend, and is looking for a place to live. He is the only taker. I ask him several questions:
"Do you drink?"
"I like to have a good time."
"Will it be a problem? Because if it is, I will throw you out."
"Don't worry, I can keep it under control."
"Do you smoke?"
"Yes."
"Ok, fine, can you do it outside or on the balcony?"
"Yeah, it's no big deal."
"Are you loud?"
"Not particularly. I don't like loud music or anything like that."
"I know you get prostitutes sometimes. You can do that and it's fine with me as long as it you do it away from the apartment."
"Yeah, that's pretty dangerous bringing them home, it's not really my style."
"You have to understand that if you bring them home I will throw you out."
"Of course, we'll shake on it."
"Ok. The rules are clear then. Let's shake."
"Deal."

Claptrap's First Sunday at the Flat
Tamara spent Saturday night at my place, and the next day at around 10 we wake up to the sound of blaring country music. Claptrap is in the kitchen, sitting on the windowsill on the fourth floor with all four panes facing outwards. Liter cans of Tuborg Green, and 33cl of American Busweiser, are lined up on the sink. His state does not bely drunkenness, though- he is exuberant, ranting about freedom, and debt, how he needs to get back home to Michigan and do some huntin' 'n' fishin', he is screaming yee-haw, ninja cowboy. I tell him he should go to sleep, and in an ecstasy he tells me we are going to win in Iraq, after all, and that Cousin Bubba sells spring retrofits to make the M60s fully automatic.
The M60 is a US-produced machinegun which is a direct descendant of the Wehrmacht's MG42, which is in service to this day with the Bundeswehr, often with the swastika crossed out; its rechristenment as MG3 is a figleaf from behind which the outloud nickname Hitler Saw crimsonly juts. The American M60 is small enough to be carried by one man, but powerful enough to be mounted to the open doors of transport helicopters landing in the jungle.
Tamara is visibly confused but amused by this behavior, as Claptrap is acting like a complete child. Periods when I try to impart reason to beings not susceptible to it are an unhappy refrain in my life, and a naive desire to grasp and resculpt this particular black hole in a shape corresponding to a hologram of myself begins to accrete.

Incident One: Early October 2008
I spent a week working hard at making my students speak better English, eating between classes at the 45 Seconds Crepe Shop, racing into the school to keep in touch with my parents, and earning good money. Then, after that week was over, I did the laundry and the dishes, cleaned my room, went with Tamara to the park. Then a new week started, and on Tuesday I come home from work and go to sleep. At midnight, around one hour after going to sleep, I hear the door to the stairwell being unlocked from outside, then cautious footsteps, and the clinking of a multitude of glass bottles. The door closes and locks, the footsteps lead past my room and then into his. I hear a hiss as one of the bottles opens. Twenty minutes later, I hear another hiss, and twenty minutes later another one, and so on. I fall into an uneasy sleep. At around 2am, I hear the heavy thud of a man falling to the floor, shattering plates, then abject anthropoid moans. I am cheap and never do anything that costs me money, so I laugh a bit thinking about how we will pay for this.
Around 4am I hear a stentorian shattering originating from the bathroom, followed by a prolonged groan evoking dull pain. I again go back to sleep.
At 645am, I wake up and go to brush my teeth and take a shower. I open the door and see the ceramic sink lying shattered on the floor; there are shards everywhere. I feel an anger well up inside me, but I have to make it to my first class so I decided to have the discussion later. I take off my clothes, take a quick shower, get dressed, and as I am walking out in bare feet, I step with the full weight of my body on the jagged edge of porcelain, which slices through the thick skin on the outside of the ball of my foot next to the right big toe. A large quantity of blood exits my foot, and I run into the kitchen to find a paper towel to stop the bleeding. The kitchen is littered with juice cartons and around a dozen empty bottles of beer. I can't find anything to stop the bleeding, so I take a t-shirt and mop the blood up; there is a considerable amount of blood on the floor.
The rage overtakes me and I limp and stride, limp and stride, limp and stride, and then surge righteously through the chocolate-colored French doors to Claptrap's room. I scream at him to get dressed and get the fuck out of the apartment. He is laying in bed on his side as if he were crouching and shielding himself from the rain with a thick blanket, from beneath which he mutters aloud that I should get out of his house. I scream again, and directly to my right on the couch next to me I see someone stirring from beneath another blanket. It is Dana, an American teacher from central Michigan. She has passed out as well; I look around the room and see several more beer bottles on the table in the middle of the room. I keep screaming at him, this time in German, which he takes as proof that we have something in common. I go to my room and take an old shoe, completely loosen the laces and put my foot in, find the keys, and walk outside.

Who is Claptrap?

2010-03-05T03:02:00.000-08:00

I'd aleady known of Claptrap as the guy who'd been beaten up and had his computer stolen outside The Real McCoy, a bar and dance club where a Jewish friend of mine had been offered manual sex by a fascist, when I first met him in person in February 2008 at an early afternoon teacher training session at the school agency we both worked at.
Memory 1
He had short black hair that was beginning to thin a bit, a solid, compact paunch, active black eyes in a childish face with a perfectly diagonal knick on the forehead, and an alert posture. He's standing in the newly remodelled low-ceiling auditorium, which still had a little plaster dust on the floor, holding a half-liter can of beer, and engaging his own worry more than anyone else about how he'd saved hundreds of dollars by buying 30 dress shirts with his credit card after his flight home to New Mexico that Christmas. I was having a beer, too and we casually exchanged numbers.
Memory 2
I'm walking up a cobblestoned street, it's refreshingly cool, the sun is back out, and a gust has driven the diesel fumes away. It's the mid-afternoon lull in classes when I normally swing into the 45 Seconds Crepeshop and put away two crepes with cheese, pickles, and mushrooms in cream sauce before hurrying down to the school to read my emails. Claptrap is calling and telling me about how the woman in the pornographic magazine he bought is down with V.D., which segues into a talk about boundless opportunities, how we should open a chain of schools starting in Vladivostok, how he spent 200 dollars on sunglasses, how we wants to become the Russian importer of dried New Mexico hot peppers. It feels intractable, so I tell him it's time to eat, and instead of saying goodbye he keeps talking, so I just tell him I am in a hurry, hang up and go in to eat.
Memory 3
Claptrap has offered to help me do my taxes. The preconditions for him helping me are that I bring a couple drinks and that I come to his place- he lives in the northeast of Moscow, whereas I live in the northwest. It's April 13th around 7pm. He arrives at the exit to the station in a taxi, and we spend 25 minutes plodding through traffic to get to his high-rise, which has a priveleged view onto a railway depot scrapyard. I have a bag with two bottles of beer and one bottle of mead, which he isn't familiar with. We go out on the balcony and he starts to smoke, and opens the first beer. Although he's American, he insists on speaking German with me, introducing himself and telling me about the MBA he'd received in Germany. He tries the mead, likes it quite a bit and we share it. He complains about his girlfriend, who refuses to have sex with him after coming home late from a job she is too dedicated to, and about the salary at the school we work at. Claptrap has an MBA, so he deserves more. He goes to the refrigerator, pulls out a clear soft bag full of dried red peppers, and begins telling me again about the opportunity of selling them in Russia. He opens the fridge again and opens a bottle of dry red wine, he takes around twice as much as me, and as the night goes on, we still have done no taxes and again Claptrap is complaining about how someone who has an MBA should be getting paid more by the school. Another bottle of wine is opened, and I call it quits, although I am already pretty drunk.
Claptrap continues, and begins telling me about his 80,000 dollars in debt. He says that the MBA never paid off, and that he was in debt repayment. I told him he needed to slow down a little bit, drink less, keep plugging away and in a few years the debts would be gone. He asks why he'd gotten the MBA at all then if he was not going to found a business. I am in the same situation, so I sympathize with him. Still he keeps drinking, and I start again, too, and soon we are both quite drunk, I tell him he needs to go on a long walk to clear his head, and he asks me for the 10,000 dollars he needs to do it. We agree to embark on a bicycle tour of Siberia that very summer. In a moment of drunken, wounded soul-baring, he tells me Jesus Christ is his personal Lord and Saviour. His voice tells me that this fact has made him the subject of some mockery, especially in secular Germany. He drifts back to his low salary and tells me that the school we work at can suck his dick. He repeats the phrase, asking if I understand, and tells me that his girlfriend can do the same, and that the banks can do it, too. He stops short of asking me. His eyes are now a fine pink and the distance between them seems to have shrunk, which with his ajar mouth makes his nose look thinner, and makes his face aroused, angry, intent, and idiotic; in the haze I understand that his religion will keep him away from me. It is now well past 1am when the last transport leaves, and we have done no taxes. I go to sleep on the floor at a solid distance from him.
A few hours later, the sun wakes me up. Dual headaches are stemming backwards from my eyesockets, and the sun goes right through my eyelids. Claptrap is X-shaped belly up and snoring like a sow. I don't feel like he will be getting up anytime soon, so I go for breakfast, but the fridge is empty. After a few hours, I wake him up and tell him we need to do my taxes. We turn his laptop on, and he tells me it replaced the 3500 dollar one stolen from him outside the Real McCoy. He tells me he needs to leave in forty minutes to teach a class and earn 100 dollars, but I remind him that he invited me to help me file my taxes online. Because we both live outside the US and earn less than 87,500 dollars, we are both exempt from US taxes, so the process is straightforward and soon we are finished. I am a wreck, but he seems absolutely fine and goes outside on the balcony to have a smoke. He shows me his cobalt-blue Marlboro ashtray, telling me it cost 20 dollars, theatrically/ accidentally drops it, and says he is sure it will not break. No one screams, and when I look down below I don't see anyone.
I get my things together and Claptrap takes me downstairs in the elevator. It's now late morning and the day seems like it will be gray but warm. He explains how to get back to the metro. I remember the previous evening's 25-minute ride, but I am a skinflint and reason that part of the duration resulted from the traffic jam. I am shocked to find Claptrap lives 13 minutes from the metro.
Memory 4
It's high spring and I am pissing away a free hour in the net. When the hour is up, I leave and begin making the deceptively long walk to the metro. I hear a bling from my phone- Claptrap has written that he received a bill for use of his tax program. I owe him 1000 rubles. I tell him it was his mistake, and that I will pay 500.
Over the course of several weeks he presses me lightly on the issue and finally I pay.

Nightmare in Water #2

2009-12-13T05:59:00.001-08:00

March 2008
I am crouching in a wooden dinghy in the trough of a titanium swell awash with 1000-ruble bills and islands of bloodclots. I don't know how to stand. The sky is pre-tornado green. I peer over the edge of the boat and grasp at the cold bills, throwing them hastily on the floor. I don't see any MVD's, but the thought that they may arrive makes me tension my gut, girding my intestines upwards, lessening the pressure they exert on my pelvis. The bottom left corner of my heart is being touched by a minty thumb that massages circles on it, and this makes me pull my shoulderblades back and together. The left one moves down farther to squeeze the thumb out.
The money is cold and some of it is bloody.
...
I am on land, face to face with my friend Joern. He has an angular face that he says dogs don't like. He's one of the people I trust most. We're face to face, shoulders pushed forward to shield the bills from view. I'm counting them, they're the color of fir needles. They show a four-sided pyramidal tower with a view over a vast plain. We count the bills together- 24,000 rubles, 1000 dollars. We get to the last bill, it's worth 5000 rubles and is sherbet orange on subtly, uniformly rough cream paper. The picture is in motion- conquistadors in tin hats are herding a crowd of Incas before them, driving them over a cliff with their blunderbusses, brilliant cerulean and seafoam plumes are leaping out of the engraved agonized. The womens breasts are swinging, and they and their children are screaming. Joern grasps the bill like he wants to take it, but looks at me with the same serious look dogs hate and which makes me know he's listening, and tells me, you're rich, do you understand, you're rich now, do you understand, you're rich. I can see he wants it, and he sees me seeing him, but we are friends.

2009-11-12T12:39:00.000-08:00

When looking into a past self and exploring its motives, it's possible to become that self. Forward's the way to look.

Poor guy

2009-11-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

I was sitting at Kitai-Gorod, or Chinatown, metro station on a granite wall sucking the heat out of my ass and thighs. Tamara was there, too, sitting on my lap, and my arms were around her to keep warm. Kitai-Gorod has four exits, two at the top and two at the bottom of a wide cobblestone walkway boarded by bushes and oaks shading especially at night homosexuals and straight swingers ("naturals"). We were at the top, next to an octagonal chapel topped with a pagoda roof and cross with crooked footrest. It was dusk, but foot traffic was heavy and it was cold, so we thought we'd be alone together in the crowd.
I heard a high voice in front of us and looked up- there was an 18 year old boy in a US-style sweatshirt with low-relief ribbed elastic collar and a capital Q printed on it. He had a pale sleepless head like that of a gray space alien heads, gray eyes, a mullet and thin lips he was continually licking. The first thing he asked was, "Oooo, which of you is better?" Tamara turned her head back to show me how she was giggling, and I replied by burying my head behind her arm, as if to shield myself from the cold.
If you want to call a Russian guy a fag, you use the word "pedik", which comes from the word for pedophile. I look younger than I am, especially in Russia, where I look like a baby against the background of the wrecked and wrinkled; me cuddling my head into the back of Tamara's armpit was probably the unwisest thing I could have done, and soon several people were eying us.
The boy in front of us asked what we were looking for tonight, at which Tamara turned back and smiled at me in disbelief we were both willing to be amused by; he liked everyone and everything and was trying to enjoy life with as many different people as possible. I am principally curious about all facts, even trivia, and all sensations not brought about by "vice", but not all acts, and the curiosity definitely does not seep down into my fundament. Since I didn't want to raise any expectations, I just asked how much of a hemorrhoid (Russians call a pain in the ass a hemorrhoid) it was to be gay in Russia.
To our right a sallow, balding, dark-haired, ponytailed, blotchy-sallow bystander in markedly crooked gold-rimmed glasses approached us. His expression changed from a mortified skulk to one that seemed cautiously eager to . It looked like his head had been broken in two on a diagonal axis running below below his eyes. He said that he had been attacked a few years ago by skinheads. They fractured his skull, and he spent two weeks in a coma, and then I don't remember how much more time in the hospital bed, during which time he lost his job.
He came back. The need for love percolates all the way down to the very fundament in some men.
Tamara asked exactly what he was doing there, and the mulleted boy answered that he was there for oral sex.
"You're shaming me." Tamara looked back. I nestled into her armpit, trying to do it in the least sexy way possible.

Nice head

2009-11-10T10:20:00.001-08:00

Tamara says she has a black person's skull. I think she is referring to the length of her head. When viewing her head from the side, her parietal and occipital lobes aspire. I only notice a skull if it is grossly deformed, incongruous in volume, or hairless. Her hair is fine, down to her nape, on the light side of chestnut, and not just one color. Sometimes it's in a ponytail, sometimes not. Sometimes it smells like vanilla, sometimes like mustard. One's a compliment, one's a joke, both are true. She has a narrow mouth and high cheekbones set intriguingly far apart, and spotted tarragon and cinnamon flecked eyes that I saw kindness in only after a year. Free women have a dresscode derived from collective male suicide. Decent teens wear jeans. So does Tamara. I am not sure how old she is. That's nice. So is her thin vinyl raincoat that's the color of the top stripe of the sky when the bottom stripe is dark, and that has thick, corroded but smooth buttons, crudely cast tin buttons and a belt that I am allowed to tie and untie.

Swansong

2009-10-31T04:22:00.000-07:00

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.

welcome, Konstantin

2009-08-04T03:33:00.000-07:00

I would like to introduce everyone to my newest reader, Konstantin, who has helped me many times and always listened to what I had to say, even when it was not pleasant. People like Konstantin have made living here tolerable. There are quite a few people like him, and that fact is represented poorly in this blog, which served often as a psychological steam valve.

Update 3

2009-07-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

Soon Valentine was coming into my flat every day, and finally sent me an SMS telling me that before "you leave my room, clean the floors and windows, and bring everything into order. I want it to look like your soul was never in my room." He announced he would be moving in the next Wednesday. I consulted with Ivan, my friend the real estate agent, who assured me that he could have Valentine roughed up by the agency's security service, which was supposed to bring him into line.
Me and Ivan agreed that the best course of action was to install new locks, then inform Valentine of the decision afterwards.
That Saturday, I removed my lock from the door and left the apartment in a driving rain and walked to the nearby open-air market, where I was unfortunately unable to source a proper lock. So I went to another nearby open-air market several subway stops away from my home, and after much searching in vain for an exact match, I settled on buying a close match, and drilling holes in the mounting plates so that the holes in the lock and the holes in the door lined up right.
I hurried home soaking wet, unsure whether Valentine had dropped by in my absence. I got home, and much to my relief the modified lock fit. I put on dry clothes, put the key in the lock and turned halfway back so he could not come in even in the impossible event he had the right key- a decision with consequences, as we'll see later.
While I was dozing, Valentine called, waking me up; I of course did not asnwer. You never gain a fucking thing from talking to a drunk. I in any case had to leave because there was a possibility that Valentine would come and begin banging on the door, something he had done more than once.
I tried calling friends, but no one was around. So I went out and began making discretionary purchases in the form of expensive pizzas, which I ate slowly, and Martinis, which I drank very slowly in order to ease the contradiction of drinking to reduce stress. I decided to live in that very same moment, and concentrate intensely on the taste of the pizza, and the taste of the martini.
I tried calling Ivan, the real estate agent, but his phone was off; presumably he had been out partying and was sleeping. I sent him an SMS with Valentine's number and let him know the mission had been accomplished.
A day passed. The weather got better. No answer from Ivan. Another day passed, and Ivan was not answering his phone, and soon it was Tuesday. I had not slept well in over three weeks.
It was Tuesday evening, the day before I was to leave, and all my other options for permanent living arrangements had fallen through. I was laying in bed that evening at around 8 trying to catch a wink when I heard a scraping noise originating from across the room; I immediately understood it originated from the lock, and that Valentine was trying to enter. A number of fantasies about murdering the old mraz entered my head. It was never him I was afraid of, it was always about me being unable to hold back as soon as I started punishing him, and thus ending up in prison. I felt that this inability to control my fantasies was a weakness of mine, and that I should be able to master myself, and simply deliver one teaching blow to an area of his body not prone to bruising, or that he was not prone to showing if it had suffered a bruise.
As I was entering these reflections, he called me on the telephone from the other side of the door; I immediately switched off the phone. Thirty seconds later I heard him walking outside on the roof. He had exited the building through the bathroom window, and since I lived on the top floor, he was able to walk around on the roof and peer through the windows. I found myself in the ridiculous and humiliating position of hiding in my own room from an old man I knew I could easily defeat with one blow.
more later.

Update pt2

2009-06-30T04:19:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Kiev where I spent a few days on vacation.
Which means I can continue my story...
The first time Valentine showed up in my apartment drunk, I knew that I was going to have to move. But I was surprised by how quickly things deteriorated. I came home on Tuesday at around noon after teaching my morning student, and when I opened the front door, a cool, irregular draft was blowing from the direction of my room, where the windows were closed when I had left. I knew someone was in my room, and felt it was Valentine. I wasn't sure, so I went in the kitchen and got a large knife, crept past the hallway into my room, and put the knife in my pocket so it could not be seen, feeling I probably would not need to use it. Keep in mind that Valentine is around 58, but also that I might have less fighting experience than him, and that it may not be him in my room.
When I went in, he was calmly sitting at the desk making notes; the drawers were opened and upon later inspection I understood they had been rifled through. He also had stolen 1000R, around 30 dollars. I asked him what he was doing there and he replied that he had a right to see what happens on his property. I asked him to leave, and he asked me why my sheets were wrinkled, and why there was clothing on the floor. Admittedly, I run a pretty loose ship, but as long as there are no eggshells or decaying foodstuffs around, I consider myself to be within my rights.
As an additional justification for his presence, he noted that his property- shelves containing several hundred volumes of 1990's spy novels (-Devastated and Dead-, -Blood on the Pavement-, -Hell Labyrinth-), as well as obsolete programming books and unusably worn out sporting goods- were all here, and that he could come pick them up. Since there was enough property in the room I had paid for to amount to at least thirty backpackloads, this amounted to a declaration of his right to "visit" me at any time.
I again asked him to leave, and he refused, and began listing reasons I should feel sorry for him.
"My wife left me."
"She left you because you are a drunk, and not the other way around."
"What's it to you?"
"It's the 18000R I paid you."
"I just had a cancer test." (Head jutted forward, waiting for sympathy's arrival.)
"Brain cancer? When are you scheduled to leave us?"
Silence. One mark of the long-term drunk is that even grave insults glance off the armor of experience. One thing Claptrap and the other drunks I have had varying levels of contact with is, is that there is a long graveward spiral with these people. It starts with the first incidents of drunkenness, the first broken flower vase, and then progresses to the ignominious crawl up the front lawn to waiting wife and kids, then to the broken neck, the broken wedding, maybe the car crash, maybe the grave outright. The ones who don't die earn all kinds of insults.
And the human being is the animal that gets used to anything. The drunk hears insults of varying intensity from people of varying degrees of acquaintance, and gets used to them, which means he can get even drunker. Maybe he is even anticipating the next level of humiliation. Every insult- all of which are true- means he is more and more covered in scales. Soon it takes a truly novel insult to even register.
Soon he is used not only to insults from a to z, but is used to the phenomenon of the novelty itself. A similar phenomenon, albeit a morally neutral one, exists in the development of societies. The technology that surprised us a decade ago is utterly stale now, and what we expect is not that things stay the same, or even a certain rate of development, what we are used to is the emotion of surprise, and it does not surprise us. This is called being jaded.
Valentine was jaded, but he in addition was borzoi, which is like impudence, cubed. An example of being borzoi is someone deliberately stepping on your toe, and then asking why you stepped on his toe, and issuing morally indignant threats about what you will do if you ever step on his toe again, while you are grabbing your toe in pain.
Look how much time I spent just explaining that one word. It is novel, and to my knowledge unique to Russian. (My knowledge is limited to a miniscule percent of the number of languages existing worldwide.) In any language there are novel words for ideas expressible in other languages only by circumlocution and explanation.
Soon Valentine was arriving every other day, telling me I was a drunk, complaining he had been fighting with his wife and asking whether he could sleep in my room for the night, rooting through my things, and calling me at all hours.
When I asked the neighbor living in the next room what to do, he said Valentine was borzoi, and that the previous renters had moved out, because he has stolen cash from them, and was constantly coming to their flat to collect -his stuff-. When the other renters left, Valentine moved in and ushel za poi. If someone ushel za poi, that means roughly that he has gone on an extended drinking bout during which work is not possible, and which may last anywhere from one week to one life. It literally means that he went away behind the poi, where poi means drinking. The whole expression gives me the feeling that the person physically left and went behind some physical object called a poi.
My flatmate told me that after Valentine had chased out those renters, he lived in my room behind the poi, finding fault with everyone and everything, acting completely borzoi, and finally had to beaten, in spite of his age. After Valentine had suffered a precise non-bruising punch in the chest, he cried and had to be calmed down by his son, who happened to be in the police. My flatmate advised me to toughen up and do the same.
I was sure I could clobber Valentine, but I was not sure whether I would be able to stop. Having met enough borzoi people in the last few years, and by nature being unused to such experiences, I had a store of rage that I was loath to release.
Again it is time to run...

Update

2009-06-23T04:02:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I last posted. That's not because nothing has happened, rather, because what shocked and disgusted me before now only evokes a chagrined smile. I was recently pushed out of my flat (I say -pushed- instead of thrown not because it was less than being thrown out, but because this time I dealt some therapeutic bitch slaps, although in the end it was me who turned out to be the dupe, on a number of levels.) The total bill for rip-offs this year is around 1000 dollars. One of my main reasons, if not THE main reason, is the cash: subtract the amount which has been separated from you from your annual income to arrive at your total income, then compare it to your after-tax US income. The result: you get paid better here. You are paying your university debts faster than you would be able to at home. You are simultaneously learning a foreign language. Of course, there are non-monetary costs- low trust and high disgust.
A quick run-down: I was living in NW Moscow in a good but overpriced flat until October, when Claptrap, my alcoholic, iconically debt-addicted US-heartland roommate's behavior became unbearably destructive. At the same moment I understood who and what Claptrap was, the world understood what the US was. While my living arrangement was turning to shit, people were talking about runs on the banks and massive unemployment, so I deemed it prudent to move to a more affordable room in SE Moscow.
I had already lived in my "new" place once before, when I first came to Moscow in 2006. The first time I lived there, I got thrown out by the supposedly imminent return, which in fact never materialised, of the gentlehearted landlady's unloved greasebucket ex-husband, which was the first link in a chain reaction of stolen deposits, scum-wafer landlords, and sundry whoremonger or homosexual ex-pat roommates.
I did not learn from history, and it repeated itself: the ex-husband wanted to come back, and his discovery of my existence might cause intra- and inter-family violence, so I had to go.
An acquaintance named Ivan, a real estate agent, offered to find a flat for me, and even give me a decent discount on the agent's fees. Since the beginning of the Great Recession, or what Russians call the Crisis, real estate prices have been falling, and what previously would have been unthinkably expensive locations have fallen back within the reach of ESL types like me. 600 bucks for a flat two minutes from the subway, three stops from the Kremlin. I jumped on the offer.
The landlord was a gentle, thoughtful, age-tonsured fellow with sunken eyes and a grape-sized wart thriving on his spotted pate. His name was Valentine. In the first month, he collected the rent and left me in peace. On the first day of the second month, he showed up several hours early without announcement not to collect rent, but to announce to me in an absolutely even tone that he was drunk because his wife had thrown him out.
Drunks always reason backwards: my wife beats me, and I am drinking because of it. I damaged my spinal cord by jumping headfirst into 3 feet of water, and now I am drinking because the accident makes me sad. Some guys beat me up and stole my computer, and I am drinking because my head hurts. I am drinking because I fell out of the bathtub and shattered the sink and feel bad about about it. Why aren't we friends?
When Valentine told me he was drunk, a slug's trail of tasted buds starting behind my uvula and terminating just above me entry sphincter appeared, and started telling my brain, "SOUR, SOUR, SOUR...". I knew from my experience with drunk, dying old Claptrap that Valentine's confession meant I was going to have to move soon...
Soon Valentine was coming into my room, stealing cash from me (I was of course smart enough to remove most of the money), looking through drawers, all while I was not at home.
Without getting into details, I requested the help of the agent, who had called himself my friend and acted accordingly. The plan was for me to change the locks on the doors, call the agent back. Then the agent was supposed to call Valentine. I changed the locks myself one rainy Saturday, and texted the agent right away with the landlord's number. Valentine had told me I was to be out by Wednesday, ie, the agent had days to make the call.
He never called- because I had sent the wrong number. It would have taken nothing to call me and get the right number.
On Tuesday, the landlord showed up while I was trying to sleep, and tried to open the door. No go, because of the new lock. Instead he walked out of the hall and into the bathroom, and climbed out the bathroom window onto the roof- I lived on the uppermost floor, so he could walk around on the roof, peering into the windows.
Must run. More later.

Contra-Indication

2009-03-01T02:26:00.001-08:00

Don't come here.

Reverse Psychology

2009-03-01T01:55:00.000-08:00

My students are usually very good people. I should have mentioned them in my list of things to like. I am glad to thank them here, separately.
Sometimes they talk about their problems with me. Far more often, though, I talk about mine. They try to help me. Then they pay me.
It's undeniable that I like my job.

Yes, But I Do Have an Outline

2009-03-01T01:16:00.000-08:00

Sleep evades me because I chase too many things. I may have lost my best friend here.
Earplugs isolate me from all external noise, making the internal noise of my heart and lungs so loud that I can blame myself instead of Moscow for my wakefulness.
Calm music used to help, until I understood the calm was in the music, and not in me.
At times I like Moscow. Those times come only when I live my life without describing it. There are periods of calm when I describe nothing. Those times disappear when an experience or encounter is so revealing of the broader picture of this place that the thing in itself kicks my cash crutch out from under me, compelling me to describe what I am living. The crutch makes it hard to leave this place. I am earning well. But when I leave, I feel like someone has pulled a splinter from my wound.
Those periods of calm coincide with periods in which I tell myself that we can know the whole picture only empirically, by knowing all 142 million Russian denizens. Talking about the big picture is nonsense because you can't know the big picture. When you say "big picture" it's just that, a picture you're painting, and a big one at that
Russians often say to me, "You're meeting the wrong people", and I used to think it was just a line. I am meeting the wrong people because of the place I live, where they are in the majority.
A few weeks ago, I demoded a longtime acquaintance to an outlying ally. I told him what I saw in the metro, and he said she deserved it. Strong cues to the effect that this was not a joke went unnoticed, and he continued to blame her.
A woman locked in an apartment and raped for three days. The police don't respond.
An immigrant beaten to death in the subway by 6 Nazis. The police don't respond.
A woman is gang-raped by six men, and no one goes to the police.
These aren't my lives. I am always at at least one degree of separation from them.
This is not my habit, not my own environment. It's somebody else's. But it does effect me, and not just through me hearing about it.
What I used to call turmoil, I now call habit, environment.

What's to Like?

2009-02-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

It will clear my head some, and explain to you in the process, to explain in the form os a list what I like and dislike about Moscow.
WHAT I LIKE:
-My friends: Tamara, Alexei the Second, Ivan, Roman, A. Samsonov, a few expats
-Vulgar conversations with attractive females
-Vulgar conversations period
-Learning disgusting words
-Binge loathing
-Watching TWO METERS of vomit hang from a guy's mouth leaning over the balcony at the train station
The satisfaction of having an imperfect, but real, conversation in a very difficult language
-Learning something new every day
-Learning as much from my students as they learn from me, which means I get paid for learning
-Beautiful women (this plus however, is so ridden with caveats that I am almost not sure if it belongs on the "plus" part of the list)
-The fact that if someone asks me what kind of movies I like, and I mention Total Recall or Terminator, I am not exposed to a rant about low-brow American movies (I am comparing Russia here to France)
-Good stories (which come from bad times, as a rule, which means this item will reappear in another form in the list of negatives)
-Vokrug Sveta magazine, and Russkaia Jizn' magazine
-Listening to people affecting West European political views, their noses in the air and telling me how much better things are here, then me telling them that we both know that this a nation comprised largely of whores, liars, cheats, murderers, thieves, and alcoholics, and that we both know it (the downside is that people who have done nothing to me get hurt)
WHAT I DON'T LIKE
-Mistrust of women
1 Whores trying to drug you and leave you knocked out on the floor of your own now empty apartment
2 The high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases
3 Women hoping to get pregnant wihtout telling me of their plan
4 Women who think me of me as a cash machine
5 Women who think I should take them out of the country
6 Women who will give you great sex, then start demanding cash, revealing themselves to be whores
7 All of that mistrust culminating in bouts of impotence which leave you wondering if you are physically ill
-Mistrust of landlords
1 Stolen deposit
2 Summary expulsion from the premises
3 Casuistry: Discussions with the landlord about how you destroyed the flat, while sitting with him in person in the very flat you supposedly destroyed and which is in precisely the same condition as it was when you arrived
-Mistrust of cops
-Substance-less food
-The smell of alcoholics in the morning
-Gopniki/ Bydlo (There is no real translation for those words, riffraff doesn't quite catch it, I always find myself saying "living shit" or "people deserving a post-birth abortion")
-Doctors who've been paid badly for so long they don't care about your health or anyone else's
-Living the lie that there is much good about this place apart from its books, which I can in any case read at home
-(I can't believe this has occurred to me so late!) Sleazebucket expats: drunks, runaway debtors, possible bail jumpers, whoremongers some of whom are married with kids
-People who laugh when you tell them about how you saw the prelude to a rape
-Wondering if you are aging faster
-The enslavement of the handicapped in the subway

On Being at Cross-Purposes With Oneself

2009-02-21T03:23:00.000-08:00

I have just understood that my two fundamental goals in being here are incompatible with one another within any kind of acceptable time frame, and that one of them is incompatible with my job.
My two goals are: reach conversational proficiency and a high level of comprehension of written and spoken Russian; obtaining enough money to ride aroudn the world by bicycle in three very long legs, the first starting in Tierra del Fuego and ending in Alaska, the second starting in eastern Russia and ending in Portugal, and the final one from northern Africa to Capetown.
A third goal, paying my remaining 20,000 dollars of university loans, hinders my realization of the first one by forcing me to work more, subtracting from the time available to study Russian.
What do I need to accomplish the first goal?
1 Work less- work occupies a huge amount of my time
2 Study more Russian
Point 1 interferes with my bike trip, because if I work less, I will earn less money and never have the amount of capital required for such a venture. It also means I will stay in debt longer.
I could just work my ass off for 6 months, and pay all of my debts within that time frame, but since I want to leave for the bike trip in December, that leaves 4 months or less to reach the level I want in Russian.
Since what I want to do is basically undoable, I allow myself to believe that by reaching the highest level of certification you can get in Russian, the Test of Russian as a Foreign Language, Level 4, I will have mastered Russian to the point I can say I was damn good at it, and then file it away in my eternal Swiss account of knowledge and experience. But Russian, because of its complexity and alien-ness, is the kind of thing that requires constant practice and determination, is precisely the type of thing that you cannot file away. The document I get after passing the test I can have hanging on the wall till the end of my days, but the knowledge it is supposed to stand for will fade. And the test itself, while difficult, is really an exercise in grammatical navel gazing which merely implies -and does nothing more than imply- a high level of correctness and communicative ability in Russian.
I either need to stay here and plod on for two or three more years, dedicating myself completely and wholeheartedly to mastering it, or go on my bike trip. Each goal excludes, or at least seriously delays the other goal, and all other goals I have.
This is the heart of my problem: I am good at enough things, and attracted by enough of those, that all of them holds serious sway over my imagination. I know I am sharp enough, and have enough time to master, at least two of the following disciplines to an extent:
-journalism
-travel writing
-language learning (the sheer number of languages in the world, combined with my interest in everything, condemns me to a life of constant learning), including polishing my French to a high luster
-language teaching
-study of the human memory
-a thorough study of US history, or a study of world history focusing on a single theme
In addition, I am attracted especially by things I am not sure I am capable of mastering. There is something very gray and sad about people who try only things they know they will succeed at. That I suppose is why I started studying Russian. It's hard. Some other things that attract me because of their difficulty:
-bicycle trials riding
-rafting
-drawing
-mathematics
-the game Go
-Hindi
-a tonal language
-various alphabets of exotic languages
Attempting even a couple of those things in a serious way will require several years of my time.
This city, with its constant offering of heaps of cash, is actually a distraction. That explains why I am distracted, which explains why I have difficulty sleeping, which explains why my blood pressure is sometimes too high, which may explain why I have very low interest in women while living in a city of some of the most beautiful and available women in the world.
It's like I am heaping up some vast stock of cash, experience, and knowledge to impress some unknown (female) person, but since I am never satisfied with my levels of cash, experience or knowledge, I will never stop stockpiling and will never have the time to impress anyone.
I feel my blood pressure rising as I write this.
Today I am heading on the train to Kazan, the capital of Russian Tatary, where I will stay for two days, probably attempting to see every damned thing in the city in the space of two days.
French and German are languages that one can master within a certain reasonable time frame, and then not lose them within a short time frame. France and Germany are countries that one can, in the space of a very short amount of time, exhaustively travel, and then check off one's list.
Russian is not a language, and Russia is not a place, one can check off one's List of Things to Know.
Two years ago, I walked through France, starting in Normandy, making my way down to Toulouse, and finishing in Marseille, over a period of about 70 days. Every millimeter I advanced on on my path was due to my own muscles. Those were really the best times I ever had. I remember the satisfaction I felt after passing the territory covered by one detailed regional map created by the Institut Geographique National, where one kilometer is represented by one centimeter. On a flat, even road, in good weather and in good shape, you can cover one kilometer in ten minutes. You progress across a meaningful part of the globe is visible after ten minutes. In one hard day you can walk a hand's breadth of territory. Knowing every bourg and "-ac"-suffixed nowhere in particular town, some of them quaint, some of them less so, on just one of the 74 40x120 centimeter maps, would consitute an empire of the mind. And the only way to really know in a serious, intimate way all those bourgs and acs is walk from one to the next. Each map could take a year. It doesn't take an empire of the mind to do the math.
I still have some of those maps, and show them to students so they can practice talking about imaginary situations in the past: what would you have done... It's a consistent favorite among my students. That trip is now almost three years in the past, and the paper is now worn though in many places from being folded open and closed so many times. My reverence for the creases and fine tears indicating important towns of only 300 people whose names are wearing off the map because of my pointing at them, piques the student's interest, which in turn piques mine even more, leading me to scrutinize the map more closely, and again reflect on how unfathomable the whole picture is, and to ask myself what I am doing in a place I at heart like only to dislike.
I think I need to go on my bike trip. Or back to France.

Gravity

2008-11-17T06:49:00.001-08:00

Until two nights ago, which is when the incident I am about to describe took place, I had settled on a more positive view of this place, its people, and myself. I even was ready to concede that maybe Russians as a whole were superior to the expats who come here for a (hopefully) consequence-free rollercoaster ride of booze, whores, and easy money. I reasoned that Russians' dysfunction was at least explainable, a function of the bad times they had gone through, whereas the misbehavior of expats was just that.
I stand corrected, ashamed, and disgusted.
Two nights ago I was riding in the subway from the northwest of Moscow where I previously lived, to the southeast of Moscow, where I will be living for the next several months.
I entered the train at station Oktiabrskoe Pole, which is about four stations from the last stop. There were several free seats, and I took one, as is my habit, on the edge of the long bench, in order to not have to sit between people. There were no particularly interesting people in the train, apart from a fellow standing in the doorway next to me. He was thin and slightly jaundiced but strong, in his early twenties, and clothed in a long, narrow black leather jacket that hung in a shallow triangle down to his below his knees, a dark brown leather vest laced close to his body in the front and accompanied by a cobalt tie, and a pre-Revolution style leather cap with a short bill and embroidered leather band.
I took little note of him, although his clothing definitely separated him from the crowd. There was also a girl sitting either drugged or passed out, in any case nearly incapacitated, on the end of the another bench. She was wearing a very short, fuzzy hot pink skirt and blouse, and black nylons. Her hair had been died a not overly garish orange and her head was lolling about a bit.
At the next station, several young drunks entered. I was unsure what association they had with one another, but one of them, a heavyset fellow with old, deep, but not long razor knicks that could not logically have been self-inflicted, and wearing a puffy black plastic jacket and smurf-style black knit cap, greeted everyone in the wagon with a proud "Heil Hitler!". I felt an immediate disgust, which triggered the interest of the jaundiced fellow, who it turned out, was of the type who takes a keen interest in absolutely everything.
The Nazi, who bore more than a passing resemblance to a tyrannical music teacher whose lessons I suffered through in middle school, soon began serially hitting on every woman in sight. In Russia, one mark of sleaze is to approach a woman by saying, "slysh", which is the informal command form of "hear". It's about as low as snapping your fingers to get a woman's attention, then pointing proudly at your erection. The final result of his attempts was a bench devoid of women, apart from the incapacitated one in pink. He soon approached her, and sensing her incapacity to leave, got nice and close to her and began groping her. She pushed him away, but only half-heartedly. Understanding this as permission, he continued to chat her up.
He finally put his hands under her armpits and tested to see if she could stand on her own two feet. It turned out that she could, and soon enough he was edging her into the corner, leaning in close, kissing her cheeks, and leaning in very close to whisper God knows what in her ear.
Still incapable of reacting with a decisive no, and possibly hoping to appease the Nazi, she returned his hugs and laughed vapidly, but refused to be kissed on the lips. At one point the train stopped so that I could hear their conversation, and he was demanding that she go out drinking with them. She said she was getting out in one station, and seemed to have come to her senses somewhat.
By this time we had gone past my station, the Nazi was leaning in close, hips slowly rocking against her. I wondered if there was anything I could do, and stood up. The attentive jaundiced fellow, who turned out to have a type of bad breath I have never encountered, asked me in an official-sounding tone what had happened, and I explained as best I could.
He told me nothing could be done. "The police don't care, and we have no connection to them. We have no weapons, and cannot fight him." We both begain keenly observing as the tears streamed down her meticulously-made up face. On his face was painted arousal so tainted by malice that the latter stood in the foreground, shocking absolutely no one but me. We rode one more station. She tried to get away and he shook her hard, leaned in and whispered something in her ear. At the next station he took her arm and pulled her out. I went with them.
The jaundiced fellow followed and warned me not to intervene, saying that there "was no conflict". I interpreted his words, I think correctly, in a (faulty) legal sense: no one had been attacked. I reflected on the sum of cash in my pocket- I had to take my savings, which I had removed from the bank on word of a run-to-be, to my new place, and the cops are known for stealing. As we stood facing each other on the platform with our backs to the tracks, we looked at the two of them walking arm in arm towards the escalators, and he asked me what I was feeling at the moment. Struggling, I said that I was surrounded by shit. He agreed, saying he had grown up here, and that he from time to time associates with such people, to understand their ways. I said that when you touch such people, you begin to become like them. He did not disagree, and commented that "our society is constructed this way, and nothing can be done." By now, the Nazi and his prey were 100 meters away, and when the jaundiced fellow looked at me I could feel that he was prepared to do anything. He was an observer, and ready to participate to go along with whatever action I took. He was staring intently at my face, and I felt an absolute powerlessness and revulsion. I commented that I felt like vomiting, which he answered with a stare containing a practiced, highly exaggerated sense of detached curiosity.
Had we run ahead and summoned the police, we may have convinced them. Not all of them are bad, not by a long shot. We might have unexpectedly knocked him down the sharp-edged escalators, hopefully causing serious injury.
I did not, so we did not. The next train arrived. It was not my business. I got in, and the jaundiced fellow, for whom I felt a species of respect, continued staring at me. I nodded to him, and he, ever with the same expression, nodded back. Soon his face was obscured by a sign at head level, but I felt he was still looking at me.
Afterwards, I felt an incredible nausea about myself, the Nazi, the inaction of everyone around which I got caught up in. I like to think of myself as an individualist who thinks and does as he wishes and gets caught up neither in groupthink nor groupsloth. It turns out I was wrong.
I thought about capital punishment, pulling the trigger with pride. The guillotine. Cruel smile, fire ants and honey. Blunt club, too light to do the job right. Firing squad. Looking into his eyes as I end his life with not a quark of compunction. Feeling disgust for the fact that I felt no disgust at my own barbarity. All these thoughts of revenge are always in inverse proportion to one's perceived power to act, and come after one has wasted the opportunity to yank the spiral straight.
To repeat the jaundiced fellow's question, what am I feeling in this moment? That my best words describe the worst moments, and wondering what that means.

Claptrap

2008-11-17T05:36:00.001-08:00

I haven't written in over a month. That's in large part due to my now ex-roommate whom I will refer to as Claptrap, thereby continuing my tradition of protecting the guilty with pseudonyms, and at the same time naming his twin predilections for endless drunken rambling, and V.D.
I first met Claptrap many months ago at a school function. I noted that as soon as the official portion of the meeting was over and we were free to drink, Claptrap took a can before anyone else, and stopped after everyone else. That was in April, tax season for Americans, and he graciously offered the use of his computerized tax program, inviting me to his residence, shared by his now ex-girlfriend. In order to compensate Claptrap for his help, I compensated him with a few bottles of medovuha. I don't think the behavior of drunks is really worth reporting on, but let me summarize by saying that I had the distinct feeling that Claptrap had homosexual tendencies which fortunately he never tried to act on, perhaps because he is a born-again Christian.
Afterwards, I did not associate with Claptrap because he just talks too much, even when sober. He occasionally would call me on the telephone, though, letting me know the cost of oral sex (from a woman), or complaining that the women in his Russian smut mags were all down with V.D., or to let me know how to avoid paying taxes.
Many months later, after returning from a trip in France, I was living alone in a two-room flat, and needed a second person to pay the rent. Because the other choice was a long-term friend of a very typical expat- a runaway debtor- I chose the devil I knew.
He was soon blessing my life with 36-hour non-stop bouts of alcoholism set to the tune of Alan Jackson and Waylon Jennings; at the end of the day, he could be found passed out on the fourth-floor windowsill, with the window open. Once he got so drunk he knocked over the bathroom sink, shattering it. I even severely cut my foot on the porcelain fragments laying on the floor, resulting in a trip to the hospital. His alcoholism, round-the-clock garrulousness, deep voice and globe-spanning circle of acquaintances led him to frequently talk at all hours.
He also brought home two women he supposed were whores, one of whom was 17 years old. Prostitution is very common in Russia, and the fact that people do that doesn't bother me except on a very abstract level. Prostitution in Russia is frequently connected to other types of crime, especially robbery. The scam works like this: the woman decides she wants you to be her client, and possibly slips something in your drink, then goes home with you, possibly with an armed, muscular male following close behind. You go into your apartment with her and begin to amuse one another- until Igor or Vladimir arrives with a baseball bat, knife, or gun, ties or beats you and leaves you on the floor for dead while rifling through your belongings to find cash, passports, credit cards, or jewelry. Electronics are also fair game for theft.
So when Claptrap brought home his jewel of a woman a few weeks ago, I was prepared for the worst, and took all the sharpest knives out of the kitchen and slept with them under the pillow. When they were porking, I could have easily imagined from her voice that he was making love to a chainsmoking chicken- had I not earlier seen him with a sag-eyed hawk-nosed whore 45 before her time. Afterwards, Claptrap revealed to me that he had not even used a condom, and fully expected me to sympathise with him when he complained that he might be HIV-positive.
Anyways, I threw him out a few days ago. When he was still drunk, ashamed and depressed, I wheedled 200 dollars of compensation out of him, and used the money to pay half a month's rent at another place on the other side of town.
Who knows how long I will be able to live at the new place before that arrangement blows up, too?

Found!

2008-10-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

I have to add something about Charlemagne. In a previous post, I exonerated Charlemagne of breaking his promise to move into my flat while I was gone, a decision which put me in danger of returning home homeless. I excused him because I learned that the landlord and landlady had planned to put a Canadian guy in the second room without him being aware of it.
But on the weekend, I learned from one of Charlemagne´s colleagues that the Canadian story was a ruse- his real reason for ripping me off was that he didn´t like the Soviet furniture. I therefore re-impute to him the sleaze I had de-imputed, and de-impute the sleaze I had re-imputed to my landlord and landlady who, it seems, are people of unimpeachable honesty.

Bike Ride

2008-10-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

I finally did it. This Friday I decided I was going to go "behind the MKAD". ("MKAD" is the name of the multi-lane circular highway that goes all the way around the periphery of moscow, and defines its border; people consider that "Moscow is not Russia", and by that logic, the MKAD is the border between Moscow and Russia.) When I made my decision I was banking on the possibility of borrowing a bike from a friend. I had already ridden the bike a few times before, and although it was a bit small, it worked okay and I was hoping to save some cash. However, said acquaintance did not answer the phone or even repsond, so the next day I decided to just bite the bullet and get a machine that fits me.
So I woke up on Saturday around 930, and was really desperate to finally catch up on sleep, but as I had thrown away numerous possibilities in the past to do this, and understood that the weather was going to be fantastic probably for the last time this year, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, got my pump and spare tubes together, and went to the bike market in NE Moscow, got a great deal on the bike, had some free stuff thrown in, and in addition chatted in Russian (such as I could) about vintage mountain bikes. Given that the idea of buying a 400 dollar bike new would have been a bit crazy to most people even five years ago, and that buying a 3000 dollar bike 15 years ago when the economy was still in shambles would have been impossible, it was a rather nice moment. HAving made my purchase, I got on the subway and went to the very last station, Marino, in the SE corner of Moscow. I had not brought very much to eat with me, apart from a jar of peanut butter, but was hoping to find all the necessities on the road. (Once you leave Moscow, you run immediately into colonies of dachas, and that means there must be places to buy food.)
Traffic was light and soon I was on my way out of the city. It was about 230 by the time I finally got going. I had been on this part of the road at least twice before, but the knowledge that this time I would be going farther, and not coming back before nightfall, put me in a slightly different mood. After crossing the bridge that goes over the MKAD, I came to the first fork in the road- left: oil shipping station, right: my route into the country. A little cemetery on a low ridge, and flowers mingled with trash on the wall below, and then not far after a little church across from a stagnant-looking but clean-smelling lake with a spring next to it. I tanked up on water, bought a huge sack of miniature pears for two dollars from an old lady next to the lake, and got on my way. I knew that it would be some way before I passed into terra incognita, but resolved to keep a moderate pace as I had not been on a real bike ride in over a year. The first obstacle was a small swamp I had to cross on foot, carrying the bike over my shoulder and trying to step as gingerly as possible on the stones and random boards placed there for the crossing so as not to sink in up to knees. I ended up with shoes full of goo and oil, but soon enough was back underway.
It was starting to get dark by this point, and so I started asking people where I could find a safe place to put my tent. An older woman selling home-made jam and pickles on the side of the road commented after selling me some apples that there were dangerous people, and that even deep in the forest I would find evidence of the crude habitations of immigrant workers who were liable to cut my throat. She added that even the locals could be pretty slimy, and that my best bet for accomodation would a vacation center just off the main drag. That vacation center happened to be the outermost point in my previous trip, and so sleeping there without advancing past my previous zone of exploration was out of the question. According to her, the next towns had nothing to offer but dangerous immigrant workers and dubious locals, and so I would be best served by going no farther.
As I rode along the main highway, I looked into the woods and could see no signs of any habitation whatsoever. I had another four hours before it was absolutely dark, but given Russian driving habits, more specifically passing habits, ie, aggressive doubling, I considered it prudent to stop somewhat earlier and therefore shifted a couple gears higher and made an effort to cover some ground. At one point a friend called and invited me to the sauna, but I refused.
I went through a small town of maybe 3000 people, and saw a sign labelled "Russia Starts Here"; appropriately enough the surfacing on the road took a turn for the worse. Looking around and seeing the prosperous-looking newly constructed dachas all around, I understood that really I was in a safe place, in spite of all the nonsense my Russian students had foisted on me over the past two years: They will cut your throat. Outside of Moscow, you are in a different country, and are no longer safe. Please, don't go.... Admittedly, I was only about ten miles outside of Moscow, but the southeast part of Moscow dwindles into countryside very rapidly, maybe only three miles outside of the city. Buses took on and let off mixed groups of immigrant workers and Russians, and once, while pausing to photograph a very typical Soviet war memorial, I exchanged nods with a very Caucasian (ie, Armenian/ Georgian/ Azeri/ Chechen) -looking worker who detected my foreignness. I also caught sight of some mixed groups of kids playing together- Russians and some immigrant workers whose nationality I could not identify. Riding on, I passed a huge stone quarry and considered ensuring my safety for the night by pitching my tent there in guaranteed isolation.
Instead, I pressed on, keeping on the sandy verge of the road as night was just beginning to fall. I came upon a large, newly-built church. In Russia, the Kremlin, apart from its scale, is not a unique building- across Russia, there are many churches built within the surrounded by walls. I encountered some Uzbek immigrant workers in their mid-30's shoveling wet cement on the church premises and asked them where I could pitch my tent, and if the people in this area were dangerous. They said no, except for the Russians, who get drunk and carouse on Saturday nights. They asked where I was from and when I told them, they just couldn't believe it. Seeing that these guys couldn't really help me, though, I left, and one of the workers, who introduced himself as an Armenian, ran after me, saying that I could sleep in his place for the night if I couldn't find anyplace else.
That is exactly the kind of offer that one seeks when travelling alone: the person who doesn't aggressively invite you immediately creates trust. He complained that he and his colleagues were building the church for pennies and were treated badly by the locals. I didn't know if he was referring to immigrant construction workers in general or his group specifically, and unfortunately it did not occur to me to ask. He said that although he was Armenian, he had graduated from a Russian school in Tblisi, and lamented that life in the USSR was much better, as people lived in harmony. Continuing on this note, he said that the new generation of kids doesn't understand that there were once fifteen republics which all worked together instead of competing with one another, and that "some people"- here he slid his hand over his head to show that he was talking about skinheads- you just have to avoid, and that under Stalin, they would all just have been lined up and shot.
I pointed out to him that he must earn enough by his standards to justify staying, because otherwise he'd have already left. He agreed, but said that no Russian would do his work- digging ditches, burying the dead, putting up walls- for the money he gets, and that whoever does not understand that does not understand the issue at all. I asked him if he stayed in the winter and he said no, he goes home, which does imply a certain level of purchasing power. I asked him why Moscow, and he said because it is close, but that if it were impossible here, where he would go. He said, "wherever the work is. If not here, then Europe. If not Europe, then Australia. If not Australia then America."
I was tempted to just stay, and did not feel he was dangerous, but my normal search algorithm demands that I ask a number of people where I can put up my tent and then take the best offer, and failing that, pitch my tent, or in the worst case, move on. And so I rode back down the hill to the spring where a number of people were loading their refilled 10-liter plastic bottles into waiting cars, and asked an older man where I could pitch my tent. He said he'd drive slowly and show me to a small field where I could place my tent. He drove back past the church, got out and pointed down to a somewhat scrubby-looking field. I asked what he thought of the immigrants' offer and he replied that you should never trust "black" people (this is how Russians refer to immigrant workers)- "we have our black people, and you have yours, that is life. At the bottom of the next hill there is spring, you can drink the water."
I rode down and around the bend discovered some swingsets where two young teenage girls were playing, sat down and had some peanut butter and bread I had bought earlier. Soon their parents came by, and as a few raindrops were falling here and there, invited me to dinner- mashed potatoes and some meat I didn't have the heart to refuse, plus some home-grown cabbage. The husband was bus driver, and I asked him how he related to his passengers from other countries. He said something I didn't understand, and explained, saying they were dogs, not people, and then somewhat perplexingly asked if it was true that all Americans and Brits are left-handed. I said no and asked him what he meant by saying that they were dogs and he answered by saying that they get hungry when there is no work, and attack people. I commented that the hungry often act that way, regardless of where they are from. He then asked how much money I earn, and I low-balled it quite a bit. The wife didn't have a lot to say, but I could see these people were nice enough to invite a complete stranger into their home for dinner. Since they seemed to have lost interest in me and were not ready to invite me to sleep their, I wished them well and rode back up to the church to find the people who had invited me.
They had already left, so I asked the priest who happened to be walking to his car. He immediately, calmly and authoritatively replied that they would be fired for inviting me. I explained, not untruthfully, that when they invited the sky was cloudy. He disagreed and asked if I was the same cyclist who had stopped by a month earlier, and continued interrogating me a bit and warned me that these people need to be periodically punished, because they tend to get drunk when enforcement becomes lax.
Giving up, I went down to the playground and pitched my tent on the sandy soil which was ideal for sleeping on. I had a very cold night because my sleeping bag was too thin, and wound up putting my jacket and jeans on instead of using them as a pillow, and also used a loaf of cheap bread in a plastic bag as a pillow.
The next day I rode back by more or less the same route and along the way met the same old woman who had sold me the apples, and told her that the immigrant workers she had warned me had invited me to sleep in their home, and that they seemed like completely normal people. She agreed and said just a bit pointedly that she had not said all of them were bad, and that it just depends on who you meet.
Overall I would say the feeling of danger was completely underwhelming, and some of the places I rode past with some trepidation a year ago evoked no emotion whatsoever.

You Can't Tread Sleaze Forever

2008-09-24T00:41:00.001-07:00

Right now I am asking myself what I am doing here. I am here ostensibly to learn Russian, but what do I want to do that for? I suppose partly to tread sleaze for a couple years, and partly because the languages I learned before- French and German- are if anything waning in importance, leaving me with skills that will be of virtually no use by the time I get to middle age. So in the name of prudence I have chosen Russian, which, alas is anything but a safe bet. Everything in Russia is a bit of a wild card, and the language is no exception. Will this prove to be useful? Who knows. Am I learning quickly? Yes, but not quickly enough, because at this pace I could stay for a decade and still not speak at the level I'd like to reach.
The only way to get to that level would be to live like a Russian: swap my job of English for that of entry-level sales guy in a multinational company and consequently cut my pay in half; move outside of city limits and see my commute time triple; double my work hours. I just can't sustain the level of masochism that requires for the amount of time needed.
Before, I could assuage my doubts with the thought that I was treading sleaze to find out what it was like, but now I feel relatively safe, and while I am savoring the respite, few things are as uncomfortable for me as comfort is. I want to do something dangerous, something where I wake up in the morning and sincerely wonder if I'll end up in a Russian slammer for a couple days.
Nothing puts me ill at ease more than comfort, and I am definitely comfortable now. Nothing really interesting has happened in quite awhile, hence the largely retroseptic quality of this blog. Next time I will delev back into some revolting moments I have experiences here. Some people have complained that I have got nothing good to say about this place, but please Russians, understand that that's just because I am much better at writing about ugly moments than beautiful ones. I guess that's the mark of a hack.

Novaia Zemlia

2008-09-19T03:09:00.001-07:00

I suggest that everyone see Novaia Zemlia. Even if you don't understand the dialog, which I didn't, you really should download it. It is a b-film prison drama smart enough to know that its masquerade as an earnest look into step-by-step behind bars dehumanization is just an excuse for axe fights without armor and on-screen people-eating is just that, a masquerade.
The plot is like this: a group of Russian prisoners is secretly sent by the UN to colonize an Arctic island, and when they land with hands still in shackles they are provided with just enough food, water and tools (i.e., axes) to last them three months. In addition, numbered keys matching the prisoners' handcuff numbers are left in a heap on the beach; the prisoners precipitate towards the keys, and the first ones to find their match rush back to the crates full of axes and begin slaughtering the ones still in shackles. One of the prisoners just walks off, deciding to subsist alone in the woods rather than subsist among degenerates.
He is soon joined by another prison, but after trying to live off sea slime in the dead of winter, they come crawling back to the prison colony together and wind up falling asleep in a heap of still-warm ashes. One of them is awakened by prisoners carrying a dead guy on a spit towards the fire, but the two get caught and dragged back to camp.
They discover that the prisoners, instead of creating a new society on the island, had simply continued living in prison fashion, right down to the inflatable sex dolls. The prisoners create an institution to resolve their food shortage: the rank and file live crammed together in a barracks, and during the afternoon walk, a lackey announces that the last one inside the barracks gets eaten.

Passing on the Chalice of Slime to the Chinese

2008-09-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

People were displeased by my last posting. That is understandable- most of the drivel I wrote about the US was so rote, so typical, so obvious and un-subtle that you'd expect it from a Frenchman. My mom for one pointed out the pollution caused by the Chinese- she noted rivers frothing with poison, maroon-colored stagnant pools, and to her list of horrors I'd like to add vast heaps of carcinogenic white powder, the byproduct of solar panel manufacturing; whole cities forced to wear face masks to be able to breathe; whole regions made desitute by earthquake-causing dam-building efforts. But let's not forget that the US and Western Europe are buying pollution-intensive goods made in China.
Russians also like to smirk at the US and its pollution, but what they often don't realize is that Russia is PAYED TO POLLUTE. Russia signed the Kyoto Protocol, and this means that they have to reduce the countries emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels. That's fortunate for Russia, because in 1990 Soviet heavy industry was still intact and polluted far more than current Russian industry. That means Russia has the right to INCREASE its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, and until the Russians manage to pull that off, they actually get a credit for being below 1990 CO2emissions.
Russians also like to talk about how the US uses so much gas, and pollutes with it, and at the same time want to be loved for providing the oil and gas that we use to pollute. In other words, they want it both ways: get rich selling us pollutants, and complain that we pollute with them.
I did promise to talk about teabag, and will get around to that, but let me say for now that I have two nice new students, 11-year old twin girls who already speak English reasonably well. They are a bit far from the center, which means I have to travel a lot to get to their place, but they are just so nice that I forget about the distance and time and talk about the swings and monkey bars with them. I am lucky to have such a job, although in the long run I am not developing any additional skills directly related to my work.
In other news, I am now taking Spanish classes. I took Spanish for four years in high school, and feel that it is such a low-hanging plum that I'd be a fool not to pluck it. And besides, the other languages I know are at best a craps shoot in terms of money-making utility. I don't feel I am making much progress in Spanish, but I guess that is typical of me: take two classes and bemoan that I haven't progressed yet.

Caveats

2008-09-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I promised to introduce you to Teabag, but for now I feel obliged to go back on my word. Some Russians reading the blog feel I am not being objective, and indeed from the very beginning I have felt that to be true. I also know that there is a certain smugness that people feel towards Russia, and that smugness is now co-mingled with fear and even hate now that Russia is doing better. If that describes you, and you are American, I have a bucket of slime to pour on your head towards the end of this entry. If you read everything except the bucket of slime, then you are a coward. Sorry, those are the facts.
Here are some more facts: since I came to Russia two years ago, I have managed to pay a good portion of my debts, more than I would have been able to pay in the US; by the time I leave I will likely have good command of two more foreign languages, namely Russian and Spanish; I will have experienced more in two or three years than I would likely experience in two decades in the US; while I have been thrown out of my flat numerous times, I have lived in Russian friends' houses free of charge equally as often.
Americans' and West Europeans' stereotype of Russia is as follows: slovenly drunk males staggering down the street, or maybe laying down on it; radiant, desperate women dying to leave the country, hopefully with a sober man; laws which are not laws; contracts which are not contracts; vast, derelict factories; cops who take bribes and are aligned with organized crime.
Although I don't know about the cops, the rest is true. My experience here has not undone my stereotypes, but rather embellished them. But it is far from the whole story.
Russians' stereotype of Americans is as follows: ignorant, slovenly, overweight women inexplicably paired with good-looking men; people who believe that America singlehandendly won the Second World War; terrible food; corrupt corporations that push the US into wars simply to enrich shareholders; Jews who run the whole damn thing.
I am with them on all but the last point. But really, in the future, every time you read this and smirk at The Drunk Russian Bullies, don't forget that we come from a country that routinely goes to war for no reason, don't forget that the US is arguably the world's biggest polluter, don't forget that a good portion of US voters don't know the furst thing about geogaphy or history; don't forget about those great tubs waddling down the streets; don't forget that we consume more of the world's natural resources than any other country and give almost nothing back. We are a country which has turned into a pig.

Introducing Teabag

2008-09-01T01:10:00.000-07:00

The last post was more of an effort to keep friends and family up to date, and less intended as a source of entertainment.
My next post will introduce you to Teabag, an Epgyptian whom I have named in honor of the eponymous sexual act. For now, though, I must lunch.

Still Searching for People of Unimpeachable Honesty

2008-09-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

A few posts ago I mentioned that my landlord and landlady were people of unimpeachable honesty. I retract those words, and also retract some of the scorn I reserved for Charlemagne, who had agreed to live in my flat for two months during my vacation and then pulled out of the deal unannounced, which could have resulted in me being left homeless without notice.
What happened instead is that my 2-room apartment was completely vacant when I returned. How did it turn out that way? Charlemagne was planning on living in that flat alone, which would have been fair considering I paid half the rent, and he agreed to pay the other half. Instead, the landlord and landlady decided to try to get more cash out of the situation by inviting a second person to live in the flat, i.e., they wanted to collect money from three people instead of two.
They invited a Canadian to live there, who may or not have been the omni-sexual whoremonger who had been interested in my spare several months before. Charlemagne, upon learning that he was going to be living with a stranger, decided not to move in. And then the Canadian evaporated a well, leaving the landlord and landlady with almost no money for that month.
They never told me that. And because they lost the extra money, they want me to pay my rent tomorrow instead of on the 11th, their way of getting 8 days rent back. I could fight them over this, but I am tired of fighting people over shit like this.
Why do I have this obsession with finding people of unimpeachable honesty? Because they are so rare. I want to find one and then be able to say, -I had mostly bad experiences every time money or living arrangements were involved, but you know, I met this one person, and he shattered all the myths. He never lied to me once. And so I can say that it's not all bad over there-. But so far it just isn't so. Because it just doesn't pay to be honest here.

In any case I have a new roommate moving in, and now that I think about who I have taken I am more than a bit worried. The guy is a bit of a motormouth, but what I am really worried about is that he loves listening to blaring country music, especially on Sunday afternoons. Yesterday was Sunday, and I really just treasured the silence and the fact that for once I could sleep all day and do exactly NOTHING in complete silence. If that kind of day disappears from my life, things will get really unpleasant for me very soon. When I am here in Moscow, I often complain about Russian pop music, which generally is pretty toxic, but then I return home and find myself waiting in line at Wal-Mart or the post office, and listening to country. In those moments I think to myself: give me my Russian pop back.

What is a Nazi, Pt. 2

2008-08-26T01:17:00.001-07:00

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)

2008-08-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-25T02:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-21T03:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

So- I am now in Marseille, meeting old friends and picking up some boots for my walk. Presumably Charlemagne has moved into my flat by now. He will relieve me only for two months, after which time he will, I hope, leave without a fuss, having paid most of my rent in my absence, thereby saving my flat for me, which besides possessing the rare quality of being owned by honest people, is in a choice location, ten minutes from two different metro lines.
The move, or in fact flight, to my flat is a good one for Charlemagne, too. His landlord has been ripping him off for months, claiming he scratched the floor, and forcing him to pay 9000r- around 400us- and then adding that the people in the flat below had water damage, and that it was Charlemagnes fault for not turning off the leaky faucet. Price: 800us. During such situations, the corrupt landlady hangs up her phone every time Charlemagne calls. Meanwhile, late payment notices of an increasingly threatening tone which are addressed to the landlady are arriving by post at the flat; she is in debt, although by an amount she could pay in several months if she just took the 800 bux she gets every month for rent. In other words, she has a cash cow in the form of the apartment, and instead of using it to pay her debts, she uses it to subsidise them.
A few weeks ago, I asked Charle,agne if he wanted to meet at the subway and walk to my place and check it out. From the tone of his voice on the phone alone, I knew that he was going to take it, nonetheless we had to go through the formality of looking through the place and making sure it was up to standards.
We met near the subway station SOKOL, about 8 minutes from my house, at around two pm on a rainy Wednesday. The rain, which apart from being unpleasant cleanses the air of pollutants from traffic and construction, had been pouring for a few days. Charlemagne was standing outside near Leningradskii Shosse, a multi-lane monstrosity which leads all the way from downtown Moscow to St Petersburg. As is the case around the clock and in all weather, the street, which is being widened, was lined with hitch-hiking beauties. Charlemagne was oblivious to them when I first caught a glimpse of him. Although he had only been standing, he was already out of breath and asked for a brief pause. After we had walked another 50 meters, he had to stop again, this time for several minutes. He was panting unevenly, there were unhealthy spots and large, cool beads of sweat on his balding scalp, and he was complaining about his schedule, which entails waking up at 4am every day and getting home late after having worked all day.
Charlemagne is one of the few teachers to sign a full-time contract two years in a row. Basically, most teachers arrive in Moscowl working on a full-time contract, and then discover what a raw deal it is, and that it is possible to work fewer hours as a freelancer, build your own schedule and thereby eliminate all classes located too far from the metro, and best of all, get double the pay. I have told Charlemagne many times in the past of dead-easy opportunities to get new private students from an agency offering well over double the pay of a full-time employer, but he not only is a person who does not listen, he is someone who rarely ever even perceives the other person in the conversation, seeing him more than anything as a swill-funnel for his white gay supremacist, hetereophobic bleatings. Charlemagne could have solved his schedule problem months ago with my suggestions, but because he does not listen, he has continued to be used as a tool of self-enrichment for his employer. His employer sends him to opposite ends of the city at all hours, and Charlemagne, exceptionally, never whimpers the least complaint.
It took us a full forty minutes to walk to my house. Part of that was due to a heavy duffel bag full of books he was carrying, which he refused to give to me until I feigned curiosity about its weight and then didnt give it back. But it was mainly from over exertion paired with over eating and undersleeping. He was so tired when we arrived that he I had to help him up the steps, something of a magnanimous act in light of a previous spat dating back to when I lived in his spare room in November. We also had to call the landlord and landlady, who were waiting inside, several times to let them know we were still coming.
When we finally arrived, he had to drink his sweet tea, after which he immediately began victimising the landlord and landlady with his Georgia country boy-inflected, fluent 500 word Russian. When Charlemagne begins speaking he almost immediately makes himself into a burden- he says what he needs to say very quickly and then proceeds to repeat it in various ways multiple times, speaking at top speed and bearing no interruptions.
Finally I was able to take the landlord aside and explain to him that as long as he listened, Charlemagne would continue speaking, and suggested he invent an urgent meeting, which he did almost immediately.
After they left, Charlemagne said it was time for his vitamins, and instead got out and downed a heavy sack of cookies dusted with confectioners sugar; he followed up with some prescription medicine from an orange bottle.
I let him go back to the subway alone.

Is Charlemagne dying?

2008-07-05T04:22:00.000-07:00

I have a wad of cash now from living badly and working a lot, and have been debating how to reward myself after a long, hard winter, and finally decided, after much waffling, to head to the Pyrenees, walk across them for two months, and then come back to Frowntown until at least Christmas.
That decision puts me in an awkward position vis-a-vis my apartment. Should I leave it, or should I continue paying rent so that I have a place to live when I come back? The question, in th context of the Moscow real estate market, is far more complicated than it sounds. Both choices entail serious risks.
Let me explain how one finds a flat upon arriving in Moscow for the first time. You call a real estate agency which has lists of all the flats up for rent inside the city, and in outlying suburbs. They send out an agent to help you find a place that fits your requirements. You pay the agent for one month's rent as commission, and you pay the first month of rent immediately; then you also of course pay one month, or sometimes two months of deposit to your new landlord. There is a very high probability -exceeding 60 percent in my circle of ex-pat acquaintances- that you are going to get ripped off. In rare cases, the agency, knowing that you speak little or no Russian (which is not true of me), have work permits of dubious value, and that the courts will do nothing to help you, will simply take the commission from and give the flat to another person, and get another month's commission from them. More commonly, you live in the flat and the landlord throws you out on a few days' notice, and steals the one month of deposit. He is also very likely to extort cash large sums from you, threatening to change the locks if you do not pay. Or he may purport damage to the premises: a broken doorknob, a burst pipe, a shelf that is crooked. In a city where most flats are many decades old, things are likely to break, and landlords use this as a way to extract money from the renters.
But the most common tactic is to simply throw the tenant out on two days' notice and steal the deposit, then try to get another foreigner to live in the flat for several months until he is confident in the honesty of the owner. That's exactly when you get thrown out again. The average living arrangement in my experience is around 4 months.
For these reasons, I have been trying to get someone I know to live in my flat during my absence, and pay part of the rent.
Enter Charlemagne. Charlemagne is a colleague of mine that housed me (at market prices) for two weeks after being thrown out of my flat and getting the deposit stolen from the landlord last November. He is a middle-aged homosexual, lonely, long-winded and overweight in equal measures. Although he daily faces a 75-minute commute in crowded buses and subway wagons, wakes up at 4am, and does not return home until 10pm, he is a highly energetic character, walking and riding all over town all day. He purports that the subway cars are jam-packed every day with fags and player-hating Soviet babushkas who envy them; according to Charlemagne, everyone wants to sleep with him, and he is a social and sexual omnivore and dynamo who takes only the choicest mates.
The truth is much more mundane.
Russia is a very homophobic country. I think there are a lot of very repressed, ashamed homosxuals who have never touched a person of their own sex, apart from themselves. Charlemagne, on the other hand, is completely uninhibited, and speaks of his multi-hour kissing parties. I suppose he is able to grab one of these repressed middle-aged men, begin making out with him and make him his own very soon afterwards. I must suppose that his companion, having for the very first time been touched by a man, becomes quite aroused; however, he soon afterwards understands that he can do what he wants with who he wants to do it with, and does not need a multi-hundred pound windbag for companionship.
As a result, Charlemagne's only reliable companion is, or was, his elderly cat, for whom he set out 21 bowls of different types of cat food. However, the cat, which apparently had been suffering from age-induced diarrhea and low blood pressure for many months, soon died, and Charlemagne, dissatisfied with Moscow's pet cemeteries, put the cat in the freezer.
In addition to these eccentricities, he also possesses an unlikely high energy level for a person of his breadth, a fact reflected in his routine of a 10 hour work day often including long walks in freezing rain.
I am unable to continue now on this note because of time constraints, but I will complete this thread in the next 36 hours.

In Your Eye Cont'd

2008-06-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

A couple days back I had an interesting episode. I was walking towards my friend Anya's apartment, just one station south of where I live. This area of Moscow, in the northwest, a couple stations outside of the center, is dominated by Leningradskii Shosse, an enormous multi-lane highway that leads right up to the center of Moscow in one direction, and all the way up to St. Petersburg in the other direction. Nonetheless, this neighborhood is quite green once you get away from the main road, and most of the buildings are older 5-floor apartment buildings in tan brick, a big difference from the newer highrises in the outermost areas of Moscow.
On the way to Anya's house you pass by The Square of Ernst Thalmann, dedicated to a pre-war German Communist who in the fight againstthe Nazisdisastrously decided not to cooperate with the more moderate socialists, labeling his own potential allies the real fascists. There is a big statue of him in cast iron, and next door is a new 2-story shopping center. As you get farther from Leningradskii Shosse, the noise of traffic dies down and you feel you are in a quiet neighborhood.
I was walking down a narrow street boarded on the left by an 8ft cast concrete wall, and on the right by a low apartment building. When I was a child I used to sometimes leaf through National Geographic, and would sometimes encounter pictures of Soviet citizens. My image from that time of a resident of the USSR was that of an old man, quite small but not unhealthy, very thick horn-rimmed glasses, gold teeth, and simple, slightly dirty clothes. I spotted just such an old man standing on the other side of the road. He looked very Soviet, and I must have seemed very interesting to him because he stared at me as I walked past, in a completely unthreatening, curious way. As I continued walking, I turned my head to look at him longer, and was about to regret his disappearance from my field of vision when he unexpectedly called out in Russian "English language, yes?" in a friendly way.
Baffled as to how he knew, and glad to have been presented with an excuse to talk to him, I crossed the street and we began to talk. He asked if I was studying English, and I said no, I am an English teacher. He pointed around him and said that "here there is no civilization". This is a statement I have heard in the past from a few self-loathing Russians of various generations. A 21 year old student working in a big international oil firm once told me, "There is no civilization here. People like to call this civilization, but it isn't." On another occasion, while marvelling at what I mistakenly thought was My First Dead Bum Laying On The Street, I stopped some passersby and asked them what I should make of the situation and they said that "This is not civilization. There is no civilization here."
Back to our old man, though. He continued his speech, commenting that many come from the West to give Russians their civilization, and that Westerners want to acquire civilization because they don't have any. At first I was keenly aware of the limits of my Russian and struggled to keep track of what he was saying, but when I gathered that there was nothing of value in it all, i relaxed a bit and asked how he knew I was American. He pointed at me and sharply reminded me that I had told him I was American; he then added that in America the Chinese had built our railroads, and that these days the Mexicans build our houses. His mind maybe was disintegrating, but this was well-read and informed fellow. At this point three taller scruffy young men with bleached blonde hair and wearing cheap white track suits sauntered past, each of them carrying liter cans of cheap, sweet swill. One of them called out something to the old man, who in turn suggested that he go and sober up. My worry that one of them would return was confirmed as one of them looked back and swaggered up to the much smaller old man, and, addressing him informally while looking down at him, demanded his glasses.
I knew what to do, and knew it was a bad idea. The last time I made somebody piss blood was the third grade and I wound up getting pounded by the other kids. I reflected that I probably wouldn't hit the mark, and by way of justification for my inaction considered that it wasn't my business.
In the midst of these reflections I saw the old man pull a can out of his pocket and shove the can in the street tough's face. Before I knew what was happening, the can gasped a stripe of copper onto the kid's. The old man shot several times while the kid turned and ran, his left eye completely full of mace. He collapsed in the middle of the street, and the old man began savagely kicking the kid in the back. A Soviet shitbox pulled up and the horn gave a jarringly cheery honk; this is Moscow and everyone is always hurrying, there is no time for anything and everyone is permanently in everyone else's way. The car rolled past lickety split, and then the old man sat down on the kid and shot his eyeball full of mace again.
People were yelling, "Father, that's enough!"" What's happening? Why is he doing that?" While I was explaining the situation the old man said he was gonna get out his pistol and start shooting. I have lived here almost two years, and just knew that wasn't going to happen, and it didn't- the old guy just walked down the street like Charlie Chaplain, yelling again and again about his pistol. I considered approaching him and asking him out to lunch, but was afraid he was not in a state to distinguish between friend and foe.
I had retreated some, and to get to Anya's I had to walk past the kid laying on the ground, and instead attempted a detour which resulted in me getting slightly lost. Finally I retraced my steps and about 30 minutes later walked past the kid, who was sitting on a low concrete pillar in a corner, his face completely welted and swollen and unrecognizable apart from the remains of copper ink of the mace. I wonder if he understood that he had gotten what he deserved.

In Your Eye

2008-06-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

This blog is about my life in Moscow. I do what most Anglophones living in Moscow do: I teach English at various businesses around the city, zooming around in the often garlicky subway.
The blog will be partly retrospective in nature, because I have already been here for awhile, and also because I am still unsure how long I will stay here.
I have enountered many problems here, from sexually frustrated secretaries, to rapacious landlords, to repugnant ex-left-fascist-cum-businessbitch school directors to the general din and haze of Russia's (arguably) first city.
I have recently come to the conclusion that many of my problems are not due to The Russians writ large, but instead to my monkey, who lives way back in Ohio and who has been trying for almost two years now to force my return home by way of manipulating the minds and bodies of Russians and sundry middle-aged foreigners of all sexes, causing them to rip me off, insult me, come on to me, throw me out of my apartment, stagger into my room at three am asking for their left sock, and generally being a pain in the ass.
The belief that my monkey, of whom I will in nearest future post an action photo, is at the root of my problems, and not The Russians or Russia or some miasma seeping from the Russian soil, is comforting for two unrelated reasons:
1 It is easier on the mind to blame one monkey than the people of the place you yourself have chosen to live
2 It means my monkey still loves me and wants me to come home after so many years of absence
2bis There is such a thing as unconditional love