Samara Diaries, From Russia with Love

Western-bound

2008-09-24T05:44:00.001-07:00

At the end of September my summer idyll in Samara had come to an end. End to long summer days with the never-setting sun, to lazy beach bum eavesdropping on local profanities, to pretty flowcharts and bazaars, to decadent, decaying old streets. I stocked up on favorite newly discovered singers, old Russian movies and classic books, and flew back to Europe, hoping that these souvenirs would not be confiscated by customs who poked all around my suitcase last time I was leaving Russia and took particular interest in my English NGO materials, perhaps suspecting it as Western propaganda.

The reverse commute to Geneva was the exact opposite of my inward Samara journey. Just as the inward trip from Moscow had prepared us for the cultural adjustment to Russian norms, the outward journey slowly eased us back into the realm of Western standards. A brand-new, high-rising tour bus whisked us off to Sheremetovo’s international departures terminal, which was a megapolis of duty free shops where I stocked up on caviar, before settling the spacious waiting lounge near at the gate.

New Russians trickled in, covered head to toe in designer brands like moving endorsements of Fs, LVs, D&Gs and Diors among others. Some proudly toted LV pull-outs, their giant LV bags no doubt rolling towards the plane, somewhere in Sheremetevo’s sullied under-belly. I leafed through FT, discovering the new face of Louis Vuitton: Michael Gorbachev. Gorby reclined on the black leather seat of his limo, and thoughtfully gazed at what seemed like a piece of ghetto. His LV briefcase was a sleek splash of brown in this sharp black scene. No doubt a campaign for the fast growing Russian luxury market, the ad set an example of political sell-out: ex-president turn model. However, Gorby had stooped lower before: a mock article on the campaign noted that prior to qualifying for high-end designers he also advertised Pizza Hut. Unfortunately, Pizza Hut deprived us of the pleasure of watching him stuff in a mouthful of cheesy crust, shooting him military style in the midst of a bitter Moscow winter instead. The former president was in Pizza Hut with his granddaughter where he encountered heated debate: had he actually done good for the country? The naysayers accused him of economic and political chaos, while the optimists fervently defended their freedom of “going to the edge.” In the end, the edge of Pizza Hut toppings triumphed as the hypocrite naysayers hungrily chomped it down after all, and everyone joined in a unified parade chorus of “Hail Gorbachev!” From food chains to clothing lines, what else did Gorby’s future hold? Hair growth products for his signature bold patch?

A new Russian mother teetered toward the gate in Dior-buckled boots, dragging her daughter by the arm. Some plastic surgeon had worked major over-time on her face, either pulling the skin back too much, or overdosing the botox, for not a single muscle moved on her face. Her eyes bulged out frog-like under eyebrows that were jacked high up on her forehead. Unnaturally taught eyelids never blinked. Yet, she wasn’t old: from her hands and neck I gathered that the woman must have been in her mid to late thirties, when one would think that plastic surgery was unnecessary for most. She carefully set down her F-ed out spy bag and folded over it her sumptuous fox coat, which was apparently receiving its early fall preview. An equally new Russian friend in a sable coat joined her with a bag of duty free and a girl on her arm. The little girls, who both seemed about six, were happy to have had each others’ company at last, and quietly played near their mothers. One mother studiously observed the other girl’s coat, no doubt wondering where it was bought.
“Look at you!” she exclaimed to the little girl, “Isn’t it a charming coat!”
The coat was charming indeed, a blue suede with lace cut-outs on the collar and pink rose appliqués for buttons. The girl looked up at her mother’s friends and uttered one word, “Dioor,” boastfully stretching out the O in her high-pitched voice. A fleeting flinch passed over her mother’s face, as her so-called friend would now run and buy the same coat for her daughter and, moreover, boast that she was the one who had found it first.

From their conversation I gathered that these new Russians were about to become the new Swiss, as much of their chat revolved around passports and which of their friends had them and how. Yet these future new Swiss were already unhappy with Swiss laws, complaining about how ridiculously high the Swiss taxes were.
“These Swiss taxes are crazy,” said one mother, “Last year we paid two million francs just in taxes, imagine!”
“Well, at least we are better off than our friends,” consoled the other, “If we stayed here we would either be dead, or in jail.”
“Yes, you are right,” the mother agreed, “we left at the right time.”
Conversation switched to the most famous Russian inmate du jour, Khodorkovsky, where one of the mothers claimed to have had intimate knowledge of his accounts, “You know that Khodorkovsky for example, complete thief.”
“Why do you think so? I think he is innocent,” protested the other.
“So they say, you know it wasn’t even the Russians who busted him, it was the French. Apparently, his mistress lived in Paris and the French tax police busted her for laundering millions of dollars that he transferred to her accounts. They discovered a whole net of off-shore accounts and different holding companies in her name.”
“Well, all of our property and income is in my name, that doesn’t mean that it’s illegal. This way if Nikolia goes bankrupt, we’ll still have our personal assets as they belong to me. But I have to tell you, doing taxes for all these accounts is a headache! I even had to take a tax course in order to get through all that paperwork.”
“Hmm,” the other noted with a hint of displeasure, “All of Sergei’s accounts are to his mother. And I have to put up with that hag for three months every year when she comes to visit us and tries to run my house by her rules.”

The in-law complaints had suddenly ceased as the husbands joined them – big bulky men with pot-bellies. Despite their rather unfit state and somewhat old age of early to mid forties, the men also had designer fever. Or perhaps it was their wives who dressed them like this, picking out clothes to match their overly tight young faces and cut up bodies, a nip here and a tuck there, a little bit of liposuction, a little bit of implants, a nose job, some breast implants. The frog-eyed mother seemed to have forgotten the her Brazilian butt though, for her posterior remained unflatteringly flat. But back to the husbands, all Guccied out down to the sneakers, the husbands didn’t seem the brightest or well-educated of the lot, judging by their Russian. How these average people were paying millions of dollars in tax returns was a mystery.

A group of young girls settled on my right, bubbling with excitement over some accounting award they received in Switzerland. I gathered that they were receiving their award in Geneva, and then going to Lausanne for some sort of training or conference. One of the girls read aloud the conference brochure, “Devochki, it says here that for our ceremony we must “dress to impress.” But we are always dressed to impress! What is this “dress to impress” nonsense?”
The other three peered into the brochure, arching their eyebrows in similar confusion. After some thought-pondering silence one girl volunteered an answer, “Well, I think it means something cocktail party and short… like the little black dress.”
Having partially settled the “dress to impress” issue and moved on to the next one, “What are we going to say at this banquet?” asked one of them.
“Do we need to say anything?” another inquired.
“But of course! During Oscars all celebrities prepare speeches for their awards. We should have a speech too. We will be accounting celebrities!” The rest of her contingent weighed in silent agreement, and the party quieted down once again as each girl racked her mind for dress to impress outfits and Oscar speeches.

Swiss taxes and designer clothes, black cocktail dresses and Oscar speeches: such were the trials and tribulations of new Russian life. As this din thickened around me, I was beginning to miss the real Russia I had left behind with its colorful folk, vibrant jargon, and dual personalities in constant battle of conflicting emotions. The passion and humor of my fellow colleagues, clients, people on the streets infused the daily life struggle with soul, intensifying its moments, indeed bringing its rises to new exhilarating heights and falls to new excruciating lows. Somewhere deep inside, these brief glimpse encounters once again stirred up nostalgia for times passing and just a little lived.

Like Brothers Karamazov: my countrymen at Frunze bazaar

2008-09-24T05:43:00.001-07:00

The last field experience took me to Samara’s exploding Central Asia otherwise known as the Frunze bazaar, a rapidly growing clothes market on the outskirts of Samara named after the famous Kyrgyz communist. I accompanied Gulia, a Tatar in her mid-forties, on diligence of three bazaar businesses for a group loan, a common microfinance product. The loan was structured such that each member received an equivalent amount, and instead of disclosing a guarantor in the event of default, cross-guaranteed other members’ payments. The group we were checking comprised of two men and a woman, all with non-Russian names, like most applications we reviewed in loan committee.

Like an urban sprawl, Frunze bazaar crept over the neighborhood, and trader rows stretched through the underpass of a nearby bridge, which was where we headed for our first client. Trains roared above, shaking the bridge, while we walked down cool musty rows underneath. We stopped at the stall of a teen-age Russian girl, a lonely blue-eyed blonde in a sea of brown hair, slanted eyes and foreign to her tongues. She was in jeans, a fake Boss hoodie and rainbow colored socks. Her bored round eyes were sloppily shaped with thick blue eyeliner, heavy on the bottom lid, and fingers sheathed in gothic skull rings, nails painted metallic blue. All this punk child missed was a listlessly chewed and occasionally popped pink bubble-gum in her wide thin orifice. Then she wouldn’t have been all that different from the bored punk girls of my prep school days. I looked at the girl with slight amazement, and correctly concluded that this certainly was not our client. I wondered if she would be still selling things in the fall, when she should be going to school. Ararat, the stall’s owner, who hired this teen as a salesgirl, turned out a plump woman of mid-forties with sunny green eyes set deeply inside a soft worn face. Her brown hair was wrapped in a green floral kerchief and her Russian was heavily accented, although I couldn’t trace its origins. Ararat aroused suspicion among her Kyrgyz neighbors with our presence, who guardedly came within our ear shot, overhearing money talk. Suspicion that we were tax collectors and curiosity transpired on their serious faces as they paused by the stall, ears cocked to our chatter, then continued on as if they were just passing. Ararat keenly felt their observation and looked askance in response to the inquisitive stares. Crammed into her elevated stall, we were like a spectacle on a make-shift stage.

Ararat’s stall was a metal container that stored her goods overnight and functioned as point of sale during the day. Summer robes adorned the walls, arranged in a well chosen color palette of pleasing peach oranges, soft greens and pastel blues, catching the eye of passing womenfolk. One woman bought a robe from the sales girl while we were checking Ararat’s inventory - socks, underwear and blouses - some of which was on the table display, but most stored in checkered Chinese plastic bags behind a make-shift curtain in the back. Gulia expertly dug through these packets, scanned over the girl’s transaction ledger, and quizzed Ararat on her expenses. Once we were done with our inspection, Ararat took us to the next group member, a Kyrgyz from Bishkek who sold socks and shirts.

We were greeted by a much more relaxed and friendlier atmosphere at the man’s stall, perhaps because he was part of the Central Asian crowd, many of whom already knew who we were. The vendors were a chattering mix of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, all women except our client, who nevertheless got along well with all of them. Their children hung around outside, seizing any moment of diversion to jump into their parents’ shoes and make boisterous offers to passers-by. This stall row too had its solitary Russian, but she knew everyone well and occasionally used our client’s cell phone, which was passed around the stalls like a bazaar version of the village phone. Faltering, Ararat told us that she had lost her cell, and Azamat was the best way to get in touch with her too. While Gulia was checking his stall, I reveled in the cadence of Kyrgyz and Uzbek reaching my ears through fleeting scraps of chatter. The women around me were long narrow figures with tan earthy skins that scattered into freckles with laughter, sparkling black eyes, hawk noses, and underneath smiling lips, prominently figuring golden teeth – the Soviet hallmark of welfare. They all bustled around their stalls in the most businesslike manner dressed professionally in combinations of synthetic suits and flip-flops, hair somberly pulled back. Golden jewelry was a popular accessory, reminding me of grandmother’s emerald treasures considered inappropriately showy for modest Soviet citizens, which were hidden from potential thieves inside an old pickle jar in our preserves basement, carefully wrapped in 1970s issues of “Pravda”, and brought to light on rare occasions, their surreptitious unwrapping greeted with trepidation by my child self.

A tan black-haired Uzbek approached me, her golden teeth shining through curling lips, “Devochka, could you please give me your company flier?” Pointing at her stall she began her business pitch, “I’ve been trading shoes and clothes here, and would like to expand my business.” I answered that I was just observing and that Gulia, who was busily chatting with Azamat, had all the fliers. We switched to more casual topics and upon learning that I was part Kyrgyz, she immediately procured another compatriot from Bishkek, a tall Kyrgyz in an austere dress of swamp green against which her alabaster skin glimmered in its milky whiteness. Throughout our conversation, my people’s native accent caressed my ear with its harsh “As,” guttural “Rs” rolled off to the point of burring, and a slight “thS” lisp.

A gaunt Uzbek man wondered into this business-and-flip-flop clad female crowd. His synthetic sports pants had faded out of their original color, his t-shirt was riddled with holes, and his blue rubber flip-flops barely held together. With him the man dragged, and after some crying carried, a toddler girl covered in untreated chicken-pox welts. The girl’s formerly beige sweater was soiled brown at the elbows. The women chatted with him with a sympathetic air, and gave him some money before he continued on with his wondering. A gray-haired Russian pensioner with thick swollen ankles covered by knee-high wool socks, walked past us after the man, “Fresh, home-grown apples, girls! Fresh, home apples!” Not expecting any response she moved at a brisk pace, not bothered to stop, look at or interact with anyone, the face of despondence in this complacent crowd. Still, the old woman did not take to begging, and enterprised to make ends meet, although sadly, these pains only seemed to add to her swollen ankles.

Our third and last client was a man from Osh, the southern part of Kyrgyzstan. The man from Osh seemed much more entrepreneurial than all other traders previously observed at the bazaars. He moved to Samara last year with a couple of thousand dollars from his apartment sale that he used to buy a two floor container. A look through revealed a relatively spacious sitting area behind his display of high-margin metrosexual male clothes. While talking to us he incessantly bustled around, a small, pot-bellied figure in constant violent motion against various bolts, with ever-changing dynamic expressions and cunning hazel eyes. He presented us with a rudimentary accounting system, which I had not yet seen on any of my previous field trips. Awed by his enterprising manner I was imbued with respect for this businessman who just came to Russia, and had already established what seemed like a well-run business. The man sensed my admiration, and, briskly glancing at the time on his new cell-phone, offered to walk us back to the metro station. I calmly ignored the insinuation, which Gulia had also sensed and cut him off with a curt “I’ll walk them back myself.” On the way to the station Gulia had quickly burst my bubble over his rudimentary accounting system, telling me that everyone kept such ledgers in secret, and this man was probably more honest than entrepreneurial.

We ran into some of Gulia’s clients, three busty Kyrgyz Tatars in floral-printed summer robes, their hair up in kerchief chalmas. They gossiped over sunflower seeds on squat stools near their stall. “It’s great to see you Gulia, I have my family here, my aunt and in-law. And who are these people with you, are they your children?”
“No,” answered Gulia, “They are just here observing.”
“I’m from Bishkek,” I chimed in.
“That’s nice, we’re also from Kyrgyzstan,” the woman smiled.
“It’s been great coming here with Gulia, and finding my countrymen on every corner.”
“Oh yes we are everywhere, our Karamazov natures embracing the heights above and the abyss below, at the same time, wherever we go,” she sing-sang this brooding reference. At first I was astounded, but on second thought, Dostoevsky was obligatory reading for Soviet students in the old days of compulsory education. I wistfully wondered if these people’s children would have a similar zeal for the great Russian authors in our commercialized age of TV, computers and video games, when education was no longer compulsory, nor particularly helpful with much more practical matters than Dostoevsky at the bazaar.

Near the metro I stopped at a food market to stock up on vegetables, meandering through half-deserted rows and buying produce from two people in the end: an old pensioner and a Kyrgyz woman. The Kyrgyz’s produce was the freshest and the best, as well as most expertly presented under the stall’s shade in small neatly arranged mounds. After I picked my tomatoes, the woman told me, “Thank you devochka. Come again,” with a slight accent and smiled. I thanked her for the produce and smiled back, finally understanding the sensitive topic of Central Asian entrepreneurship among Russians.

Thinking of Bishkek bazaar experiences with grandmother I remembered a similar dynamic: foreigners dominated the stalls and we bought our food exclusively from foreign Russians, Uzbeks, Uighurs or Koreans. Immigration and entrepreneurship were certainly linked, as those ingenious enough to successfully make it to a less destitute place self-selected as more hard-working and entrepreneurial than the average citizen, both in Russia and their home countries. The non uprooted locals, on the other hand, faced much less pressure to get ahead, falling back on their extensive social networks and supplementary income from other family members. Learning about their businesses I was amazed by these people’s spirit and strength, by their ability to pick up and leave, come to another country with nothing, and build their lives anew not only for themselves, but for their families back home too.

The search for azimuth and attainment of truth

2008-09-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

Bored with my pretty little flowcharts I volunteered to officially observe, but de facto participate in a week of branch director training. Branch directors gathered from all over Russia for operations, finance and management workshops led by Jack, KBM’s traveling microfinance expert. Jack was a red-headed American, like Bill and Jake rugged by the region’s rugged terrain. Slightly older than the other two, Jack also had an affinity to the USSR through his Ukrainian ex-wife, which remained despite the gone wife, and now took him to all corners of the CIS from Russia to Azerbaijan. In all these different, yet somehow similar fraternal settings Jack ran packs of managers through interactive scenarios of corruption, bribery and other lousy office behaviors particular to our region. Jack kept us under key and lock in the curious Hotel Azimuth, aka the ex-National Hotel. Azimuth was the only hotel in Samara that offered free twenty-four hour WiFi access, which was its only high tech achievement in the past two decades. Otherwise, it retained the full blend of pompous grandeur of the Soviet era, derelict in half-hearted attempts at renovation.

Azimuth’s reception belittling its guests with its sky-high ceiling, under which all furniture and people looked like tiny dwarf toys. This vertically directed space felt so weird that I was sure a part of it got amputated in a jumbled renovation attempt. That amputated half was Azimuth’s restaurant, a matching scene of marigold walls and table-cloths. I inquired about training at the reception desk and was pointed to the elevator, which turned out quite a hazardous one as it loudly banged close on my arm to the warning of the man inside. It stopped on his floor and immediately descended back down, ignoring my vehement banging on my floor button. Occupied with the smarting arm, I gave up and took to the stairs, rubbing the bruise on the way like a wounded beast. The stairs turned out much safer and also fancier, with gilded wrought-iron flowers on the railings, and carpet rod rings on the steps that were once covered by a blinding red carpet. On the first landing the stairs opened onto a cloudy mirror in a decadent gilded frame, another pleasant surprise. I fancied old time Party members checking their medals, puffing out voluminous chests, and licking down a stray lock of hair in front of it before they floated down the red to orate to the proletariat.

Attempts to pry open the conference room where our training was to be held were in vain. The room was locked. Perhaps I wondered up the wrong floor? Fortunately, Askar appeared on the stairs as I was just about to start the trip back down, and assured me that we had the correct room number, adding that the room was locked at all times when Jack wasn’t there. We were early, and so perched on a window ledge nearby, waiting for Jack the keeper to creep up dangling his key ring. Jack arrived and we were let into a beautiful baroque room with elaborate ceiling borders, long narrow windows, white curtains, and ceiling holes once filled with chandeliers. A slender steel balcony opened onto Leningradskaya on the other end, where we took breaks to enjoy the prettiest and most renovated old street in Samara. A tiny residential air conditioning unit stuck out of one window, proving to be a superfluous accessory in training, as the hotel had no electricity, nor water. This was probably another renovation outcome as power and water were in abundance in the office and my apartment all the time. As usual, we cheerfully adjusted to these eccentricities and fanned ourselves with our modules.

The lack of electricity proved a blessing in disguise for me, as it rendered the window-less restaurant bathroom useless, and presented an excellent opportunity to check out the rooms. I asked one of the branch managers, Luda, if I could please use the bathroom in her room during a break, and off we went into Azimuth’s pitch black under-belly. We entered a dark musty hallway whose saving grace was a large open window at the end. Gusts of wind playfully blew out the white curtain, letting in sunlight which reflected off an old polished piano underneath. It must have entertained the Party elite in Azimuth’s glory days, who probably set their champagne and caviar on its polished top and strummed out some jazzy tunes to everyone’s laughter and forgetting. We turned into another pitch-black hallway and fumbled towards Luda’s room as other guests fumbled past us to their respective destinations. Eventually, we reached our azimuth, which was drenched in sunlight pouring in through its ceiling-high windows. The bathroom had a thick glass window of the type previously seen in Russian saunas. Room furnishings were austere: a low bed, small TV and a night-table, all of polished brown wood considered luxurious in Soviet times. Peeling floral wall-paper covered the walls, adding to the bright sunny feel of Soviet luxury, which gained a bohemian touch with the wear and tear of age.

One such amusing week later and were proud graduates, distinguished by training certificates. A parting celebration was in tow, which commenced with a tourist boat ride down the Volga. We hoarded a large wooden table on the lower deck and loaded it with beers and plastic packets of dried fish, a popular local beer snack. Samara’s historical landmarks passed by the greenish black shore, leading to the discovery of two other beaches in addition to our frequented one. Perhaps, its boast of the longest beach in Russia may have had some truth, although the title to the longest European beach was still a bit dubious. The beach strip ended in a somewhat surreal socialist realist concert square that paid tribute to scenes of Antiquity. A colossal concrete boat hulked over a colorful sea of bobbing heads. With its austere mast and looming concrete sail this Odysseus’ vessel had moored on the shores of Russia’s Circe, who used Vodka’s magical powers to enchant his sailors into swine-like revels.

Our little wooden ship turned back at the sight of this massive construction, and was soon washed back ashore at the boat terminal. We strolled down the river bank in search of our next libations amidst crowded cafes billowing out shashlyk smoke and a clashing cacophony of Tatar knife dances, soulful Russian ballads and mainstream pop. Overwhelmed by these smells, sounds and sights we escaped to an indoor club righteously named Truth of Life, something my grandmother would have found irresistible. Inside we were led up an elevated platform and inaugurated at the table of honor, which had its own personal stripper pole soon to be usurped from us by fearless round ladies. A vista of the entire club opened from our seat, a decadent velvet couch underneath a gilded Baroque mirror for the benefit of those with their backs to the clubbing scene, and perhaps for the stripper pole too. Soviet flags and slogans of Lenin’s wisdom graced the walls, while the portrait of “Dedushka” (grandpa) Lenin himself inaugurated the solitary air conditioner above us. Lenin calmly observed our gathering from his withering height.

Another homage to my grandmother was prominently displayed over the wooden dance stage in a red sign reading “Baba Luba = Horosho!” (Baba Luba = Good!). Common among Russian women, my grandmother’s name “Lubov” (Love) or “Luba,” evoked the open-hearted goodness of the Russian spirit. The word baba usually coined some round woman of a certain age and weight, with ginormous maternal breasts. As the core of life’s truth was plastered all over the club in testament to Baba Luba’s goodness, grandmother would have certainly been very proud of it. Our waiter courteously informed us that Baba Luba herself would soon give us some invaluable life lessons. In due time not one, but two Babas materialized on the dance floor. They were leggy girls with the usual weight of big Russian breasts and amazing posteriors not found on our beach. Clad all white short shorts, cropped jackets, and sandal stilettos, the Babas undulated their long flat bellies that were encircled by chunky brown belts at the hips. Zipped up to their necks, their jackets were a teasing sight, making us all wonder if they would be seductively unzipped during our lesson, but the Babas did not unzip their jackets or make use of our personal stripper pole. Instead they pranced around the stage, swaying posterior assets as the word Baba flashed on the backs of their jackets. A short, fat real baba rolled out between the two frauds like the folk Russian roll “kolobok,” and to everyone’s astonishment jumped into a gymnastics routine of splits and cartwheels. When she turned around, her white shirt flashed Luba on the back. Luba became center-stage as the babas surrounded her and used her strong frame for more stunts, adding to the humor of their dance.

Everyone was mesmerized by the impressionable babas, and Jake and I agreed Samara was much more promising for single guys than girls, being filled with many beautiful women and even many more ugly men. Out of the blue, Jake solemnly asked whether I was a lesbian, to which I responded with pity that, unfortunately for myself here in Samara, I was not. Only in America was aesthetic enjoyment confused with sexual interest, and Jake’s clueless question reminded me of an amusing New York date where my open voyeurism of other women was gravely diagnosed as a “Barnard” condition. This later served as great laughing occasion with girlfriends, as would soon be Jake’s forward question.

Just like the Americans, our Russian party also needed to loosen up with alcohol prior to dancing, the men especially and I had to wait for them to down a certain number of bottles of vodka before anyone set foot on the stage. While self-conscious Jake, Askar and I danced in jest, making up comical steps, our tiny soulful dancer was Luda, who kicked off her shoes and feverishly drummed her heels against the stage, eyes sparkling behind a mess of bleached blond hair all over her face, and a self-indulgent smile playing on her lips. Luda was the spark that finally ignited the hesitant folk. The music to which everyone was grooving blasted the same rap, pop and house tunes as in New York – different people shaking to the exact same rhythms in a clubization of the world. Russian pop ballads occasionally interrupted the Western flow, their flowing rhythm and smooth vocals presenting quite a challenge to my house and hip-hop used ear. The soulful songs were perfect for singing in a loud drunken chorus though, and, guessing the lyrics along the way, I cheerfully wailed with my compatriots on the very top of my lungs. When the DJ played slow Russian music some of our directors waltzed around in couples, which was apparently acceptable among them. Unused to such chivalrous traditions, I declined invitations, citing my slow dancing skills as much worse than my already suffering Russian dancing skills.

Our clubbing night ended uneventfully without brawls or drunken accidents aside from that of my brother trying to “grind some chicks.” His curious high school groove outraged the much older girls he tried to court hip-hop style, and after receiving an earful from them, my brother eagerly abandoned these techniques. With all his teenage awkwardness and fragility my little brother looked every bit a child next to these towering women. The girls laughed him off thinking that he was much younger than his eighteen years of age, and the truth of life came to end to solemn beats of smooth Russian rap.

Goriachie Novosti (Hot News)

2008-09-24T05:41:00.000-07:00

Bill’s ultimate crie du guerre against Russia’s political establishment during our dinner manifested in a passionate rant against the Russian media, “You won’t believe the amount of bias, anti-Americanism, and lies they show on Russian news, it’s an absolute sham. I don’t even watch it. Thankfully, we have CNN on our cable.” Unfortunately I didn’t have Fox or CNN to compare the American biases to the Russian ones, and in the end resorted to the dispassionate BBC for a balancing act to the grossly outlandish tales concocted by the Russian media in Bill’s view.

Much to my surprise, instead of the expected grotesque contrasts, I discovered a trend of convergence in local and international news. Both BBC and Vesti reported on the same international stories, sometimes even in the same sequence. Pavarotti’s death was the first story that I simultaneously observed on the two channels, which ran lengthy tributes to the departed tenor under similar headlines, but differed quite a bit in presentation and content. Vesti spun a Russia-tinted account of his life that sounded a bit sentimental to my un-trained ear, while BBC prepared a chronological factual brief none of which connected to the British public. The Russian correspondents constantly infused hard facts with their own analysis and opinion, spoon-feeding an interpretation of his life to the audience. Vesti’s attractive blonde correspondent in Modena dug deep into Pavarotti’s roots, narrating a humanizing rags-to-fame tale of his ascent to tenordom from humble working class roots. Vesti dabbled through Pavarotti’s repertoire, sprinkling it with his reflective quotes on the love of Russian opera. In one interview the great tenor even joked that Russian music was so close to his heart that he must have surely been a Russian composer in his previous life. A clip of his last concert, which took place in Moscow according to Vesti, concluded the tribute. Thus, while BBC presented a distant, factual account of Pavarotti’s life, Vesti came full circle to Russia by relating the Western tenor to its audience, and it was actually Vesti’s account that gave me a more comprehensive story, which was also much easier to retain through its various associations than BBC’s sparse factual package.

Yet even BBC dared beyond facts in another parallel story: Putin’s visit to Indonesia. In its geo-political analysis BBC concluded that Russia’s foray into the Far East surely meant to counter US influence in the region. Vesti had also spun this tale, albeit with an overwhelming emphasis on influence. An important fragment of Putin’s speech was aired in which he underlined his party’s electoral platform of the solid five year growth record that turned Russia into a powerful economy to be reckoned with by other nations. Fascinating footage of imported Russian tanks, Russian-built stadiums and tsunami relief followed, culminating in a fuzzy scene of Russian language classes where veiled girls sang Soviet war-time song “Katuisha.” Hearing “Katuisha” in Indonesia was certainly a new experience.

The theme of Russian influence abroad was omnipresent in local news, and continued in the coverage of Putin’s APEC attendance, this time focusing on the far-flung Russian brethren in Australia. While BBC solemnly reported on APEC meetings, Vesti ran features on anti-revolutionary “white” Russians. After they were defeated by the communist “reds,” the “whites” fled communism to China, but as the red “klin” (wedge) spread to Asia, were forced out to Australia’s capitalist haven. A Russian grandpa showed his religious relics and contemplated on the difficulties of cooking steamed dumpling ‘pilmeni’ in Australia’s heat. Apparently, Russian influence had benevolently spread to the Australians too, as self-taught Australian musicians jauntily jingled on balalaikas, and a Russian Orthodox convert claimed that despite his Irish descent, his soul was Russian – genuine and pure, filled with drama and passion just like the Russian music.

The biggest news during my Russia sojourn was the resignation of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. BBC reported that Putin replaced Fradkov with little-known Victor Zubkov, and once again suggested that this change was effected to ensure Putin’s unlimited power. Turning to Vesti, I was certain that these speculations would never be aired, but once again Vesti had factually confirmed BBC’s position by airing Fradkov’s resignation address to Putin. In it Fradkov openly admitted that his resignation was meant to pave way for the president’s unlimited power ahead of parliamentary elections. He was thereafter commended for all the positive changes Russia achieved under his leadership, changes that the government pushed through, as clarified by Putin in another pitch to his party platform. The new figure recommended by Putin, Victor Zubkov, was a gray face to the public, but enthusiastically praised by almost all opposition parties. The days approaching Zubkov’s election – rather confirmation – as Prime Minister were filled with stories of his merits, a rushed introduction to the public. After a week of publicity the Putin-recommended candidate quietly took over un-contested. These sudden yet smooth-sailing changes were like marionettes at play, yet the people around me didn’t seem to mind, falling back on the law, order and some degree of prosperity that Putin brought them during his reign.

Local election coverage focused almost entirely on the incumbent President, whose whereabouts and actions were tracked on a daily basis. When not meeting with heads of State, Putin was constantly on the move, checking up on his country’s progress. One day he criticized the local government in Kamchatka (Vesti mentioned that those responsible for this neglect had born “punishment”). The next day he held a video conference on education from a government-renovated school in Siberia, show-casing newly built facilities. The tireless president then visited a dairy farm modernized with government-borrowed money, and took a stroll through nearby federal settlements. All these travels were done in justification of Putin’s Committee on National Projects, which created pockets of government-funded well-being throughout Russia.

For its non-Putin election coverage Vesti occasionally mentioned the countdown to parliamentary elections, showed expansive voting quarters, and assured the viewers of strict adherence to international election norms. The local news also gave general background on opposition parties, including occasional coverage of opposition activities. However, even tScarce as it was, this marginal coverage of opposition activities did not in the least bit interest the people around me, especially after the dark, depressing Yeltsin years, remembered as dangerous by Aldo and my parents. Bill and Jake’s fervent debates on American elections affected polite indifference among my Russian co-workers, who looked upon this election obsession as a strange American peculiarity.

Another common theme threading through Russian news coverage was terrorism, and Vesti reported on “extermination” and “liquidation” of terrorist leaders almost every day, showing rag-clad Asiatic corpses near small piles of Kalashnikovs, or blurred naked corpses in the morgue with speckles of blood on hirsute limbs. After the capture of a major terrorist, Vesti aired footage of his attack on a children’s parade, as well as Putin’s threats of retribution: “Eto podonki u kotoryh net nichego sviatovo, no u nas est pravo k nim tak zhe otnestis” (These are scoundrels for whom nothing is sacred, but we also have the right to treat them in the same way). To me these lines stopped short of the graphic imagery used by another leader, “This act will not stand; we will find those who did it; we will smoke them out of their holes; we will get them running and we'll bring them to justice.”

The daily dose of stories on Russian military might usually counter-balanced this fear-inciting coverage of terrorism, and a Vesti field correspondent scoured the country’s army outposts, delving into the scale and grandeur of on-going army exercises. Massive ships, tanks, submarines, airplanes and helicopters engaged in battle action, while interviewed soldiers told us how proud they were to be a part of the Russian army. Even celebrities frequented army bases, the renown film director Nikita Mikhailkov explaining this fascination as “the rebirth of our self-respect, the importance of Russian navy and army not for war defense or attack, but as life-style and tradition.” The Army was cast as a rite of passage to manhood, not a dreaded duty from which mothers tried to keep their sons by bribing doctors for non-existent illness certificates. Still, little was in the news on improvements in soldiers’ onerous living conditions, or the eradication of wide-spread hazing resulting in serious injuries or even deaths. I wondered if this glorification of the Army had actually done anything to dissuade the prevalent aversive attitudes towards it, or if it was just a show of military might purely for the eyes of the beholders.

As for matters concerning anti-US bias, most Russian criticism, much like the rest of the world’s, was rather aimed at Bush and his policies. Bush’s APEC/OPEC and Australia/Austria blunders amused both Vesti and BBC audiences. Greenspan’s anti-Bush memoirs made it to the tops of Russian headlines, while coverage of the 911 commemoration featured bizarre footage of Bush puppets attacking the world. BBC’s commemoration also featured anti-war protests, albeit less arduously. 911 was my first week in the City, and to my freshman eyes, had cracked its inhabitants nut-shell, revealing their soft human meat underneath. Our post-tragedy days were filled with clothing drives, candlelight vigils and moments of silence in the coming together of communities not only in the city, but all over the world. There were certainly no knife-wielding Bush puppets. Sadly, the news had perverted and sullied these memories in its yearning for pushy sensationalism of the inciting and scandalous, and the resulting compartmentalization of 911 into a vast chronology was cheap. I wondered what Fox and CNN had to say on this subject, and if perhaps their account had vested more thought and memory of the actual event.

The most contentious point in US-Russian relations during my sojourn was the US-proposed missile defense base in Eastern Europe. Vesti supported its indignation with this brazen act of aggression with mathematics from an MIT professor who stated that the US proposed system was aimed directly at Russia and not at “the Iranian threat.” When the Americans rejected Russians’ proposal for a system closer to “the threat” in Azerbaijan, they set off a plethora musings over this security farce and its disastrous implications. Bush policies aside, Russia’s coverage of the US was actually quite neutral, abounding in stories such as Steve Fossett’s rescue and the return of Russian church bells from Harvard. Devout babushkas hailed America’s angel rescue of the bells from Bolsheviks as God’s intention. Seeing this neutral American coverage, I really wondered why Bill was so incited by it. Perhaps all the Bush-bashing had hurt his Texan pride after all, despite his liberal loyalties.

If not as much in foreign policy, then most certainly in news, the Russians were just as partial to the Jewish cause as the Americans. The post-Soviet Russian-Jewish Diaspora to Israel had raised keen interest in Israeli happenings. Israeli soldiers were injured by a Palestine rocket in one incident, while in another, Israeli authorities arrested a group of Israeli fascists. Parallel coverage of both stories appeared on BBC and Vesti. The Vesti features abounded in Russian-Jewish witnesses, doctors, law enforcement agents, and victims’ relatives who gave testimony in Russian, without translators. It turned out that some of the fascists were not very well integrated children of Russian-Jewish émigrés and the consensus, this time among non-Russian Israelites, was to strip them of Israeli citizenship. Thus, while BBC aired facts and casualty images, Vesti once again presented its audience with a personal account of their Russian brethren in Israel.

It was a bit difficult to adjust to the lyrical narration of Russian news after years of factual Western packages. Mother told me that in Soviet times, the news were also quite different, in fact packaged, stamped and delivered much like Western news today. However, with USSR’s fall, Russian news coverage was returning to its roots, reclaiming the richness and passion of the Russian language. The language of the news was morphing into the language of the people and their emotional state, searching for soul in all corners of earth, as far out as Israel, Indonesia or even Australia. That tendency to describe and tell a tale, to guide the audience by the hand to the desired conclusion was definitely at odds with the Western promotion of questioning individualist thought. The Socratic method clearly had no place in Russian news. Still, what others considered kitsch had actually made the Russian stories much more memorable than the factual spatter of the West.

Socialist realist experiences

2008-09-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

Half way through our stay Bill invited the four of us to either a welcome or a good-bye dinner, the exact occasion of which was quite difficult to ascertain given its tardiness or earliness. Perhaps he was cleverly combining the two. The dinner was to be held at a Russian restaurant named Volga, whose name gave away that it must have been somewhere by Volga river, as Bill clarified, near Samara square, which contained an important geographical and historical landmark – “the hood monument.” Bill promised that the restaurant itself would not be disappointing from the cultural point of view, containing many a humorous remnant of the not so distant Soviet past. Bill’s hood coinage proved rather confusing for Samara’s locals, who assured me that no such monument existed at the square. Nevertheless, after an hour of fraternal marshrutka traipsing through different parts of Samara, we finally arrived at the square. Much to my oblivion, Samara square paralleled Samarskaya street where I had wondered earlier with my camera, snapping away at old houses. My brother and I crossed Samarskaya into a tree-lined public garden whose massive oaks and weeping willows made a cool shade for gossiping grannies on benches. Their grand-children were peacefully napping nearby in occasionally rocked strollers. Landscaped bushes and flowerbeds broke the thicket of trees, while an iron-cast cherub fountain murmured the toddlers a lullaby. Bill’s promised remnants of the Soviet past apparently weren’t just inside the Volga restaurant, as we came upon a billboard reading: “Ostalos rodit sina.” (The only thing left is to birth a son). The phrase was splashed in bright orange on a wall of a satellite-studded apartment complex with a patchwork of glassed-in white, blue and rusty brown balconies in different states of disrepair. Was this some government-sponsored pro-generation effort or a private joke for an apartment mortgage proudly displayed on these drab walls? The phrase rang consonance with one of Bianca’s songs seen earlier on TV where she wailed to her dead lover that she could have birthed him a son. The chauvinism was a bit enraging here, as boys grew into raving alcoholics dependent on their mothers and wives and forced women to carry the work and family burden while wasting away in drunken stupor. The Barnard days and cynical corporate reality thereafter led to conclude that men were more trouble than anything else. As a matter of fact, they were completely unnecessary and one could do quite well without them. Why the local alcoholics were so important was incredibly baffling to my feminist self. Even in the popular 1980 Soviet hit “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears” the single mother heroine had wearily searched for love despite its disillusionment. When she tried to join a dating club, the poor woman stumbled upon year-long waiting lists to date pensioners. While I found the concept of a man deficit rather amusing, the movie had seriously proclaimed it as the Soviet Union’s greatest social ill. Judging by the couples around me, this ill perhaps still plagued Russia, while American-style feminism was just beginning to emerge in outrageously funny businesswoman sexploits of Cosmo and Vanity Fair. To quote a popular colloquial saying, “na besrybie i rak ryba” – when there is no catch, crab can also be catch. And so it was that these pitiful alcoholics became the women’s catch, while birthing sons retained some of its old cultural value in modern advertisements.

The sun-birthing slogan opened up to a panoramic view of the Volga and the open expanse of Samara Square. Flooded by blinding silver rays of the evening sun the river split around a forested island, then merged back into its southern course. Samara’s City Hall rose on one side of the square, while a pretty Russian church stood on the other. A solid fortress of gray marble slabs, the City Hall was an exact replica of Bishkek’s White House, apparently a common architectural style for Soviet administration premises. In the middle of the square the famous hood monument shot high up into the sky. A long thin obelisk of steel and granite at least twenty stories high, this was definitely the most phallic structure I had ever seen. On top of its dizzying height stood a socialist realist man of steel, fearlessly facing the earth’s abyss sans vertigo, his gaze fixed on the distant future ahead. The man was holding a V-shaped metal sheet, which could have also passed for a paper airplane, or Bill’s hood. The setting sun violently deflected off the obelisk, making a grandiose Soviet experience as its blazing steel ray punctured the soft falling sky.

The square was quite popular with teenagers since its smooth surface made perfect ground for sports like rollerblading, skate-boarding and fooling around on bikes, all these our favorite childhood activities on Bishkek Square. However, the modern crowd was starkly different from its Soviet predecessors – punk chain-laden teens in un-tied Adidas and Vans sneakers zoomed around on much sleeker and faster stunt instruments, ears clogged with i-pods. The teen-age spirit of je ne sais quoi was alive and well across generations, as the spunky crowd cut into another traditional activity taking place on Samara Square premises – communal weddings. Zooming youngsters occasionally intercepted the massive bride invasion streaming down to the square and descending upon the church and its neighboring grove, clamoring for scenic photos in the sun’s last warm rays. These en masse weddings strictly followed the village harvest traditions with their timing. With winter preparations well under way, the fall’s Indian summer was the official wedding season when the harvest had already been picked, jars of pickles and jams stocked on basement shelves, and high time had come to kick back and get hitched. Dressed in opulent white, the brides were accompanied by their somber suit-clad grooms who tangled in and stepped on long trains, bumped into puffy hoop skirts, and, perplexed, lifted their poofy statuettes off the ground in various poses. Photographers maneuvered between parties on ever so active a look-out for clear scenic views, and expertly angled their cameras away from nearby trash cans, warm champagne bottles and yellow plastic cups waiting on the ground for toasts. Couples lined all along the square’s edge, kissing, embracing, and playfully showing off wedding bouquets, parasols and other festive accessories. They seized the church, one pair arduously kissing on a step, another frozen in an arms-akimbo Kate-Leo embrace on top of a side pillar. When the toasts finally happened the newly-weds passionately chewed off each others lips, while everyone around them heartily chanted “Gorko! Gorko!” (Bitter! Bitter!) before downing bubbly warm champagne. Camera on-hand to capture this hearty communal entrance, I began snapping newly-wed merriment, catching the multiple brides together with details like trash, graffiti and the classic deliberations over champagne.

Having had our taste of communal merriment, we descended towards the Volga restaurant which was tucked away below the square in beach-park greenery, and turned out somewhat of a misnomer with no river view. I turned around for another look at the obelisk, and was welcomed by graffiti splattered all over the wall and staircase behind me: a perfect mix of socialist realism and punk. We met Bill’s wife Sveta (Light), a petite Russian brunette whose luminous name contradicted her timid manner, and son, Bob, who was fluent in both English and Russian and looked exactly like a little version of Bill. Bob was an adorable well-behaved toddler who quietly ate his food, occasionally demanding Sveta to clean his mouth and hands, and chattered in a lovely high voice. Once he finished eating Bob quickly got bored of our company and began to trail after the waitresses, observing them prepare other dinner tables. Restless like Bob, I took the occasion to slip away and explore the restaurant inside, to see for myself it had actually lived up to Bill’s promised Soviet remembrances.

Volga’s interior certainly did not disappoint in its Soviet penchants. I walked into a spacious room of gray marble walls akin to those of the City Hall, and looking very much like an extension of Samara square. The long narrow windows were dressed in raspberry velvet curtains that also matched a raspberry carpeted stage. The best thing about those marble walls though, were the Soviet posters, rather model behavior commandments for Soviet citizens. One poster prohibited frequent phone conversations: “Telefonnii boltun – posobnik fashistkogo shpiona” (Telephone chatter-box – fascist spy aide). Another gave detailed directions on cleaning floors in times of plague: a village baba was bent over on all fours cleaning the floor with the following directions writ below: “Sledite za chistotoi v chume, ezhednevno podmetaite pol, obryzgav ego vodoiu. Chashe chistiti doski pola nozhom. Ne nado plevat na pol” (Keep cleanliness during plague, sweep floors daily after sprinkling them with water. Often clean floor boards with a knife. It is not necessary to spit on the floor). However, in my favorite and most expressive slogan a sober Soviet citizen rejected a lunch-time glass of vodka with a red “NET!” The proper, yet decadent imagery of this poster had thwarted some common perceptions or perhaps misconceptions of proletariat lifestyle. Dressed in a crisp blue suit, striped blue-white shirt and red tie, the man was beginning his lunch with a fork and knife, while the rejected vodka glass was made of crystal. His somber appearance harkened back to the Breshnev era when both mother and grandmother fondly remembered eating caviar by spoonful. Perhaps this was a Breshnev poster, for times had certainly changed since. No matter how hard as I tried, I could not find a single silverware knife in my middle-class apartment, and had become accustomed to seeing neighborhood drunks cradling large three liter vodka jars, not crystal glasses. Anyone in such crisply ironed suits would have stuck out like a sore thumb in my neck of the woods. In fact, this model Soviet citizen was very much disconnected from the present-day reality of Russia’s working class.
The mock-Soviet parade continued in Volga’s entertaining menu, which humored the Soviet theme with creative dishes like “Profsoiuznii bortsch” (Trade union borsht), “Kurinaia pechen po MID-ovski” (Chicken liver a la Foreign Affairs Ministry), and my favorite, “Mechta tuneiadtsa” (Sleuth’s dream), stuffed cabbage leaves in cream, which I proceeded to order. My brother showed his usual erroneous judgment by ordering sushi, the most expensive and least reliable dish on the menu, and I hoped for his own sake that he wouldn’t get sick from it. After a long leisurely dinner where we became familiar with many of Bill’s views on Russia, microfinance and many other things, we decided to explore Samara and head over to the old city.

The old city by night turned out a stark contrast to the old city by day, its streets completely deserted except for our little group. Occasional street lamps and slanting cottage windows lit our way. From time to time suspicious-looking groups emerged from rickety fences whose doors were about to swing off the hinges, and dispersed. As if to make matters worse, my brother and Grant began to speak loudly to each other in English, while Almaz started taking out his oversized Samara map and fumbling with it under various street lamps. Taking a wild guess that the next road opening ahead was our tram street, I told our group to hasten their pace and prayed to find our way. We entered a neighborhood of abandoned apartment buildings with broken windows and boarded entrances.

My instinct turned out right, and we finally emerged onto a familiar street with a tram line and bus stop at the crossing. Some drunks were loudly arguing on the steps of their decadent wooden cottage – wrinkled, puffy faces of yellow bile and uncombed hair, leering and shaking fists underneath the street lamp. While I was asking a woman on the bus stop for directions, Almaz once again unfolded his cumbersome map and tried to locate us in one of its quadrants. His action interested everyone on the bus-stop and they stared at us as if we just fell from the sky. That infectious interest spread to the drunks, one of whom, thankfully a woman, crossed the street toward us. She came dangerously close, her awful smell of vodka, dirt and sweat hitting my nostrils, and bluntly stretched out her hand for money, arrogantly staring into my face. The woman took offense at my shrug, giving me an angry look, and stumbled over to others on the bus stop. I took this as our cue to leave and we started down the street, as Almaz had finally located us on his map.

At last we came to the main road with all our trams, buses and marshrutkas on the way home. More tipsy celebrants were standing near the bus stop. One group was quite self-absorbed however, and hence entertaining for us. A tall waif-like man with a white bandage encircling his head was leaning against his short, pot-bellied friend. The two buddies were absorbed in babbling, all the while tenderly holding and occasionally petting each others’ bottoms. On the other side of the short chap stood a chubby Russian baba in her mid-thirties, whom he held by the waist with his free arm. She wore a tight shirt that snugly hugged the love-handles drooping over her short thick waist, but more importantly, her large maternal breast. A tight skirt squished her fat posterior, drawing attention to a pair of Botero thighs. In sum, the woman looked like a pig on heels, and just needed a pearl choker and bouquet of scarlet roses for a completely decadent look. I wondered if she was aware of her partner’s friendly relations with the bandaged friend. Although Almaz and I were itching to snap a picture of this brotherly love for time immemorial, we figured that our camera flashes would blow any cover that they had left, and attract unnecessary attention to both them and us.

Week-end explorations: the beach and the smell of Sephora

2008-09-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

Two other KBM fellows, Almaz and Grant, and my brother Eddie joined me in my sojourn. Almaz turned out an Americanized Kyrgyz entering his senior year at Yale, and Grant a Texan Mormon who happily indulged in un-Mormon pleasures of drinking and smoking, thus quickly attaining his title of the Fallen Mormon. The two spent most their days at bazaars interviewing clients and made quite an entertaining team with the tall, thin chatter-box Almaz and serious, solid listener Grant. The four of us stuck together on week-ends, making up the Western summer contingent of our company.

The beach naturally became our first and thereafter most frequented leisure spot. We were told that we could get there on a yellow marshrutka, which would drop us off at an important landmark and final stop: McDonalds – these days all roads lead to the Big Mac. I looked out for the familiar M as we bumped through mysterious streets, crowded together with twelve other people. My favorite discovery in the marshrutka experience was the fraternizing physical proximity one attained with fellow passengers. There was enough room inside to accommodate all without mangling limbs, yet the low ceiling, curtained windows, and seats chaotically facing in all directions to optimize capacity made for a crammed feel, which everyone accepted with indifference. As we solemnly bumped down Samara’s pot-holed streets, popular Russian music blared through the radio speakers, caressing my ear with its rhythms. Our weekend travel was pleasant: an empty city whose inhabitants had either left for their dachas, or were still recuperating from last night’s libations.

We bought beer, took out our provisions of brie, salami, sushki and fruit, and indulged in a beach-side feast. Grant and Almaz were ecstatic at the brie imported into Russia with my brother, then incredulous at hearing that Camembert could also be found at the supermarket near our office. The beach around us was a sea of big well-shaped breasts in a quantity previously unseen. The lack of large fat deposits on these tall female bodies with long limbs pleased the eye, as did their natural voluptuous curves. However, although busty and thin, most Russian women looked out of shape, and I saw thin lose thighs, posteriors flattened by lack of exercise, and un-toned arms about to become flabby. Shapely teens undressed to reveal little pot-bellies and mounds of cellulite on their thighs. I wistfully thought of all the frustrated New Yorkers who strained over diets and work-outs just to reach these girls’ natural proportions.

The most popular beach trend around us was a thong bikini, which looked good on its wearers, but didn’t leave much to the imagination. A slender brunette showed off her smooth tan posterior in a raspberry thong while clinging to her mullet-haired boyfriend. Beautiful Georgian twins arrived in colorful g-strings, their butts rounder than J Lo’s, but alas, pock-marked with cellulite. A woman in her late twenties spread out her towel on our right, covered-up by modest bikini shorts. With her elongated torso, modest bust and fabulous posterior she was the only one in our vicinity with a smooth un-spoilt shape.

The men were also thin, and not impartial to bikinis and tight boy shorts, none of which looked attractive on their haggard frames. Still, watching high school boys at beach volley-ball was a refreshing sight. All bones and lean muscles with firm pectorals, perfect little six packs, sculpted backs and taut thighs, these boys in motion seemed pure form unadulterated by manhood. In several years their smooth teen chests would thicken and grow man hair, and firm little muscles dissolve in a layer of belly fat. Perhaps a vestige of the carefree days would remain, occasionally surprising in a flexing bicep or tiny abdominal curve at the hip.

Hearing these beach-bums speak to each other, we concluded that our Russian, even though slightly accented, was the most proper on the beach. Every other word pouring from everyone’s mouth was “suka” (bitch), “bliadt” (whore), and “nafiga” (the hell with). “Suka” and “bliat” enjoyed wide-spread universal usage in reference to everything, not just people, because a thing - be it an object, a story, or an idea – is of feminine gender. In practice, they were directed mostly at men during sand and water fights, loosing their gender and attaining a somewhat androgynous feel. “Nafiga,” on the other hand, enjoyed much more selective usage only when someone was upset with, didn’t care for, or questioned the point of something. On most occasions all three occurred together, falling on our ears like a deluge of obscenities.

In the evening Almaz invited us to play pool with his friend who coincidentally happened to be in Samara on business. Almaz’s friend, Kanybek, picked us up in a brand new Hyundai. A former Army officer in his mid forties, Kanybek was a rather unlikely friend for twenty year old Almaz. Initially Kanybek told me that he was in Samara to set up a branch for his company, a VIP meet-and-greet service in Russia and Central Asia. However, as they let down their guard and loosened tongues, we learned that Kanybek was sent to Russia by Almaz’s dad for his safety. Kanybek reminisced of his soldier life in various military hotspots like Afghanistan, Chechnya and Nagorno Karabakh. With his unusual features and light blue eyes he easily blended in with the locals, joking that both Russians and Central Asians took him for their own, but proudly adding that he was a full-blooded, not mixed Kyrgyz.

Having had our fill of horror tales from parents, who tried their best to dissuade us from this Russia trip, Almaz and I came to Samara expecting theft, kidnapping and murder at any minute, from any dead end, corner or alley. We were warned not to use local taxis, which allegedly robbed passengers even on the way from the airport, dumping them in more than one piece in forests and fields. Stories of violent robbers who tortured and killed for petty cash made me plead with KBM to find the fortified apartment with bullet-proof doors and thick bars on all windows. To look inconspicuous on the streets I filled my suitcase with worn-out high school and college clothes that were previously molding at the bottom of my closet. The hour long night drive from Samara’s airport was unsettling indeed, as were the street hoodlums. However, I made it to the city on my own without money, while American Grant, whose driver also couldn’t come to meet him, arrived in Samara in a local taxi. In fact, my tattered wardrobe and lack of make-up made me stand out like a sore thumb amidst Samara’s high-maintenance female crowd, but fortunately hadn’t aroused the kind of curiosity I feared. We concluded that our parents’ bogies over-exaggerated Russia’s security situation.

Our pool destination was the ‘Park Haus’ shopping mall, whose name looked just as awkward in Cyrillic as in this literal transcription. A typical mall conglomerate with a large empty parking lot, ‘Park Haus’ seemed just as out of place in Samara as its name. Stepping through its sliding doors we were met by the cool breeze of air conditioning. “Hmmm,” Almaz breathed in, “the smell of Sephora, I smell civilization.” The shopping galleries of ‘Park Haus’ were filled with high end New York and European boutiques like Diesel and Armani, while the top floor housed newly built bowling lanes, pool, game arcades, and a large multiplex playing the Simpsons movie.

After a few games of Russian billiards, which was much more difficult than American pool with its small pocket holes and large balls, we headed off for a bite to eat. Kanybek suggested the Russian Hunt restaurant near my apartment. I passed by the Russian Hunt on the way to work every day, and had always wondered if it made any money with that empty parking lot and one-story billboard prohibiting gatherings of less than three. These doubts were soon dispelled once cavalcades of center-fold hummers with tinted windows and spinning silver rims, and accompanying Mercedes sedans occasionally veered into the lot. Speculating that Russian Hunt was a local mafia hangout, I itched to explore its insides. Alas, as we pulled up, the parking lot disappointed by being completely hummer-less, and upon entering the restaurant, we realized that we were the only customers. The space inside aspired to that of a lavish hunting lodge with stuffed bears and deer peering from plastic foliage while game birds perched on fake tree branches along the walls. Although reasonable by Western standards, the menu was expensive by local ones, and consisted primarily of game meat. Hoping that the game in this deserted den was not too stale, I settled on a deer kebab and tried to find something suitable for Eddie. After some deliberation over his menu, Kanybek decided to leave under the pretext of craving simple food, so we single-filed outside. As we piled into the car, Kanybek told us, “This place is good for connoisseurs of game who know what to look for in their meat. Let’s look for something less complicated. And by the way, did you see their prices?” Happy not to have spent money on over-priced and possibly stale exotica, I agreed with him that the prices were indeed rather steep.

We liked the choices and prices at Bukhara, a less pretentious traditional joint operated by the same owners that offered popular Tatar and Central Asian dishes. The menu was a pleasing display of familiar foods like noodle “lagman” and “beshparmak,” and large dumpling manti. I vacillated over steamed “samsas” for starters, then settled on “beshparmak,” a thick flat noodle in lamb broth. My brother took the Tatar manti, large meat dumplings that grandmother often made back home. Once we had our steaming bowls of food, Almaz and Kanybek reminisced of village life in Kyrgyzstan. As a city child, I took Kyrgyz as a second language at school twice a week for forty-five minutes, less than English which was taught daily. I didn’t speak my language, had never been inside a yurt, drank fermented horse milk, kumys, or accepted the honorary sheep eye or ear at a village feast. Thus, Almaz’s village tales mesmerized me with their authenticity. These rituals were most certainly practiced by the extended Kyrgyz family in my grandparents’ ayil, yet they felt so foreign and out of reach that I romanticized them as exotic, never before heard or seen.

Dissident art, anyone?

2008-09-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

Having dabbled in some Russian avant-garde and non-conformists, and patchily followed news on recently censored art defaming institutions like the Church and Army, I was itching to explore first-hand the Russian dissidence in the visual arts. Hence my hunt for some dissident artists, the first unlikely stop for which was the Samara Regional Art Museum. Doubtful of finding anything dissident, I nevertheless decided to pursue it as the first point of reference, and tried to sniff out if any of the old lady curators would know a thing or two about Samara’s underground art tremors. The Regional Art Museum turned out an imposing institution with three-story Doric pillars, its exterior grandeur continuing indoors as I stepped into a polished marble hallway with arched Romanesque ceilings. I passed underneath a defunct metal detector and presented my bag to a security officer, who lazily rummaged in it with a stick. When I moved towards the X-ray scanner, he told me not to bother – it didn’t work. I concluded that all this airport security equipment must have been set out for special occasions. What if the President himself paid a sudden visit, completely unannounced? One must be always at their weapons. Unlike Moscow, Samara’s tourist attractions didn’t seem to have special rip-off prices for foreigners. If they had, the cashier didn’t consider me foreign enough to demand them, and I ended up paying the regular admission price of just over a dollar. Upon purchasing my ticket I encountered a bizarre commoditization of the museum experience where everything, although prohibited, was for sale. Photography was prohibited, but for fifteen rubles (about fifty cents) I could surely buy permission to photograph with flash. I bought the permission to photograph, which looked like a bureaucratic “vedomost” form on recycled gray paper, and diligently presented it to staff in every exhibit room. Alas, my efforts weren’t adequately visible as a passing tour guide demanded it in a haughty tone, “Young woman, do you have permission to photograph?!” Her inquiring voice rang through the gallery while her face tensed, ochre painted eyebrows arched in suspicious questioning and two ice blue eyes piercing me. I walked over and presented her with my permission, which she subjected to careful scrutiny, her tour group as witness, “You may go, you’re fine.” I rummaged about my bag for a safety pin and stuck the form to my shirt, turning into a complete doofus tourist.

The museum’s permanent collection began on the second floor where elderly staff, dressed in colorful summer robes, gossiped on shiny leather couches, occasionally glancing at rare visitors. I explored the exhibit in chronological order, beginning with stuffy 17th century artifacts and Russian gentry portraits, none from Samara. A plump woman with dyed hair cropped in short waves like my grandmother’s, informed me that Feodor Rokotov, the most famous and well-known portraitist of the 18th century, painted the dark immobile faces before me. Unimpressed with Rokotov’s opulence, I gravitated towards an unknown painting of a teen aristocrat tucked away in the corner. With its light color palette this portrait breathed freshness into the staid contemporary style, creating a fragile and awkward displacement of youth in the court setting. A bejeweled gray wig topped off by a delicate veil sat above the girl’s round face, which hadn’t lost its childhood plumpness. The court make-up of painted eyebrows, rouge cheeks and red lipstick was a somewhat grotesque contrast to her puffy eyelids and pouting lips. Heavy precious jewels weighed down her small juicy ear-lobes, while the too-large pearl choker constricted her stodgy neck that had yet to take on swan-like maiden contours. The girl’s slight frame of drooping shoulders and undeveloped chest were stuffed into a corseted blue dress with intricate white lacing and a large pink bow that unsuccessfully attempted to cover up its flatness. This flirty get-up reminded once again of her displacement into the grown-up world, endowing her with awkwardness and unease, which could also be felt in her gaze. She looked at me with her gray blue eyes, her mouth slightly pursed in reproach for this court mockery into which she was uncomfortably thrust. Her awkwardness was expressive, a refreshing breath of color amidst the dark opulent nobles around her.

In the early 19th century room I stumbled upon European pastorals painted by foreign artists, one of them named “Kiss” by Moller. The friendly staff lady explained that Moller was brought to the Emperor’s court, and marveled at the commercialization of art even in times of the “Kiss,” “This oeuvre here is painted by a very famous Italian artist who served in the imperial court. It was so popular among his patrons that Moller painted it over and over for different people. Now it hangs in many other museums!” The woman laughed, questioning the originality of art. Russian life was beginning to creep into these Western styles with Gagarin’s Portrait of Arnautovs becoming a perfect Russian play on the British genre of outdoors gentry portraits, where picturesque forests, houses and greyhounds were not artistic flimsy, but thought-through symbols of ownership and status. Gagarin’s patriarch was dressed in opulent furs, the first Russian status of wealth, and flanked by his wife in a red dress and massive agglomerations of jewelry akin to those earlier seen on some beach-side party girls. The wife’s nanny was also a part of the sitting, her sole function to hold up their son as Gagarin’s status symbols multiplied and the family heir became an integral part of the work, a precious human possession. A sprawling oak protectively spread over the family whose eyes lay on Arnautov’s servant. Back turned towards the spectator, the faceless servant pointed toward the source of their wealth, a wooden oil well dug out by village serfs, his only function to direct the viewer’s gaze. The servant also divided Arnautov’s space from that of the serfs, separating them from the clay servant hut on the other side. An infant boy stood on his mother’s lap on a mud step, stretching his arms toward his returning father. As the father lovingly bent over to pick him up, obedience and harmony permeated the serf clan – this owner had happy well-fed serfs. Through the Arnautovs, Gagarin made the British portrait style his own, creating a fascinating Russification of the West within the formal art medium.

The French Romantic Realist movement had also found its local adaptation in drab images of serfs with creases of worry and want in their expressionless faces and Repin’s dismal “Volga” scenes. However, the most arresting commoner study was another unknown of a dark Rembrandtesque woman. The woman’s navy headdress and shawl morphed into her black background, from which her face emerged a disparate paleness, drawing to its expression – an astonishingly modern rendition of the worried look seen on many a creased face on the street. The face formed a mask of habitual anger, showing full muscular plasticity frozen by constant exercise of the angry look. Arched brows squiggled into a side-ways S becoming its most prominent feature. At first glance it seems as though she curled them in anger, but a second look confirmed that they were permanently affixed in this position with the help of deep arching wrinkles. A flaring nose ran between two cold blue eyes that stared with indifferent equanimity. Yet another reminder of tempestuous flair, the nose was also stabilized by wrinkles on each side. The woman’s mouth was the only non-threatening feature of her face, but even here unease slithered into the tense stretching of her lips, which seemed forcibly turned upward at the corners in an attempt at likeability. A certain degree of self-consciousness revealed itself in this faint attempt at a smile, and her eyes no longer seemed severe. But harshness had been permanently stamped on her face by habit and time – a harshness I passed by many times on the streets, perhaps born with creases of worry for an alcoholic husband or son.

At last, painting technique liberated itself from precise draftsmanship through bold dramatic brushstrokes, bringing about the beginning of the color paradigm in art. Nikolai Ge’s evocative brush-work in “Tsar Boris and Tsaritsa Marfa” harkened back to Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus.” A smudge of crimson table cloth separated Boris from Marfa, from whom Boris recoiled with hatred and terror. The Tsar’s haunted face was thrown onto the canvas with powerful brushstrokes that delineated his raised eyebrows and continued carving out his ravaged features, chipping away at hollow cheeks. A Tatar with origins traced back to the Horde, Godunov served Russia’s first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, as an advisor, and married his sister Irina to Tsarevitch Feodor. Godunov allegedly murdered the Tsar after Ivan’s attempted rape of Irina, and proceeded to govern the state through Feodor’s council of regents. Legend has it that Godunov also ordered the murder of Ivan’s illegitimate heir, Tsarevitch Dmitry, to ensure his power. When Feodor died heir-less, the throne was offered to Feodor Romanov, the nephew of Tsar Ivan’s poisoned first wife, Anastasia Romanova. Feodor declined and was exiled into monastic life together with his wife, Ksenia. Tsaritsa Marfa in Ge’s painting was thus Ksenia Romanova clad in black monastic dress, whose son, Mikhail, would end the Times of Troubles as the first Romanov Tsar. Ge’s brooding painting set the mood for those struggles over the Russian throne, while mad dashes of color gave it dramatic feel, perhaps in reference to Mussogorsky’s Boris Godunov, a controversial opera contemporary to Ge’s time.

Ge’s dramatic buds of color bloomed into full-blown Russian-style impressionism as I moved toward 20th century Russian art. Russia’s most ubiquitous impressionist, Konstantin Korovin, had captured the full warmth of the hospitable spirit in “Hostess,” an effusive snapshot of a plump Georgian woman offering wine. Thwarting the traditional back/fore-ground relationship, the hostess was under the cool shade of her house, her back towards her sun-flooded rose garden. Her brick-red skirt playfully intermingled with the red roses of her blouse and the garden behind. A straw wine cooler nested between her legs. The woman was holding up a large glass cask with one hand, and offering her glass of wine in the other. The transparent glass morphed into green foliage, and burgundy wine flowered in her hand into a scarlet rose. As the hostess offered up her crimson flower, her soft round face parted in a genial smile, drawing us into the warm Georgian summer – a hearty invitation into her garden for a leisurely Georgian toast. The Georgians, of course, are famous for their craftily-spun toasts, weaving present day values and morals into old-age traditional tales. One of my favorite Soviet films “Kavkazkaya Plennitsa” (Prisoner of the Caucasus) opened with the Georgian-Soviet version of the Icarus tale on a bird’s fall from flying toward the sun and away from its flock, the dissident under-tone thinly disguised in the protagonist’s drunken tear of pity for the bird.

The museum’s permanent collection ended on this warm sunny note, leaving out Socialist Realism. A temporary avant-garde show tucked away in a long-forgotten wing was the closest resemblance to 20th century art. The old lady supervising the wing informed me that I was holding up her lunch hour. When I inquired if someone would replace her during the break, she answered that the museum was short-staffed and the wing must be locked when not under supervision. I promised that I would take just a few minutes and scurried through a long, creaky corridor lined with Popov’s sketches on new technologies of photography and film. Broken into flat geometrical shapes, Popov’s subjects dissolved into angular reflections of shadow and light, shattering into disjointed assemblages of light refractions and cinematic afterthoughts. Inside the wing, fragments of my past dabbling appeared in three tiny rooms: Lissitzky, Goncharova, and even one Malevich. The pre-suprematist Malevich was a cubist man in top-hat holding a rectangular object. An amalgam of blue, white and gray, the man’s ambivalent contours dissolved into shadow behind the triangular rays of a street lamp. A play on Picasso’s newspaper collages hid in the margins – “osti”, a scrap of “novosti” (news). Concerns with new media and flatness pervaded the exhibit, ranging from cubist explorations to geometric De Stijl experiments, while sand, gravel and ready-made objects had also found their way onto the canvas. Russian humor didn’t fail here either in colloquial jargon of “Ne vysovyvatsia!” (No Leaning Out!) on Menkov’s cubist “Tram #6,” a homely adaptation of cubism into post-Revolutionary mayhem from which the Soviet system was just starting to emerge.

Once again the most charming piece of work in this gallery was a wooden relief of a female nude, her creator unknown. Delicately hung from the ceiling by two metal wires, the roughly fashioned nude was small, yet her drooping belly and breasts, masculine arms, and thick neck were impregnated with heaviness, and the entire figure gravitated toward the ground. A red-painted metal shred weighed her down further, encircling the round abdomen, passing underneath the left breast, and running up the arm to cross a rough clavicle. Another shred dropped down her thigh, balancing on one foot like a metal kite and nailing her to the ground. As metal sheets boxed this drooping weight into relief, the supple female form transformed into a choppy demoiselle. The only feature unaffected by this heavy gravitational pull was her face, which tilted up as though awaiting deliverance. Set wide apart by a broad flattened nose, the woman’s eyes were two crescent-shaped chinks behind round cheeks. Musingly, they looked up at the sky, while thick “vareniki” (dumpling) lips set on a heavy jaw-line benevolently opened in half-smile. Had she received deliverance?.

Unfortunately, this avant-garde dialogue was the end of my quest for dissident art. Hoping for some clues to under-ground art circles from the museum staff, I asked the ladies if they knew any Samara artists not involved in Socialist Realism, but received negative answers paired with thick-painted eyebrows raised up in puzzlement, “No, we don’t have any famous Samara artists. Everything you find here comes from Moscow and St. Petersbourg. We don’t have any artists in Samara.” I found the latter quite hard to believe, concluding that perhaps the state museum wasn’t the best place to look for dissident art even if it had since accepted the avant-garde. I ventured into a temporary wielder exhibit in the basement that turned out a decorative mix of furniture, none of it appealing to Neizvestny’s powerful sculptures seen in New York. My colleagues were equally puzzled and told me that Samara was more known for its beach rather than art. Eventually, I fished out two artists selling washed out Volga landscapes on Leningradskaia, but they were so pickled in booze that I decided not to touch them. In throes of desperation, I cast about the internet, finding a web-gallery of local Samara art, and sent them a desperate plea, but received mute silence in response. Were there really no dissident artists in Samara, or were they just hidden far away in the underground, the links to which I, a newcomer, didn’t possess?

The secret of lending

2008-09-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

For my first field experience in microfinance, I set off to our newly christened branch on the metro. Samara’s was a rather unusual metro comprising of one line that linked the outskirts of town with its very outskirts, and the last three stations to the center were in eternal construction since USSR’s break-up. Building a metro from the outskirts in was kind of like building a house from the roof down, dysfunctional at best, so everyone took marshrutkas to Samara’s river-side downtown. Nevertheless, what was built of it replicated the grandeur of Moscow’s metro on a smaller scale. Laid out in polished granite, the metro was spacious and ventilated, with high ceilings. Quite unlike the New York subway, this metro neither smelled, nor abounded in rats and trash. The trains themselves were old, but well-maintained, with coarse leather seats, fading “No Leaning on Doors” orders, and even air-conditioning units on one side. Naturally, passengers avoided the air conditioning draft like death and sat underneath the units. After observing continuous flares over our office conditioner where those sitting under it demonstratively shuddered, coughed and blew their un-congested noses at each attempt to turn it on, I was now used to the Russian fear of drafts. It seemed to me that only Gorbachev could have come to love the “Winds of Change” after all. The stations whizzing past were all well-preserved remnants of socialist realism: faceless wrestlers, skiers and hockey players flexed their muscles in massive mosaics at the “Sport” station, futuristic rocket and space displays splashed over “Gagarin,” while elaborate chandeliers with sickle and hammer emblems graced the marble interior of “Victory.”

Emerging from the metro I saw some of Putin’s wisdom on a large United Russia bill-board, “… together we must make Russia united and strong…” V.V. Putin. A little further down, Putin’s celebrity cult graced yet another billboard. Alongside the lead singer of patriotic Russian band “Lube” and some pop diva on her cell, Putin advertised main-stream newspaper Komsomol Truth. As he held up the newspaper, his serious face melted in gleeful limpness, lips parting in what could be almost construed as a smile: “On the way to work, I always read the Komsomolka.” I marveled at the President’s chameleon presence in the public and private realms.

Silence reigned over the branch where traces of Friday’s christening had been swept away. Clients dropped in, filled out forms, shush-shushed with loan officers and left. Nadia, the loan officer I came to shadow, was a demure petite Russian with short blond hair, green eyes and neat version of the “ghetto booty.” Out of breath, our client whirled into the office tightly clutching her cell-phone, and began a flabbergasted account of her tardiness between the huffs, “Hello Nadia, I’m so sorry for being late. I got off on “Victory” thinking it was the right station and then realized I had to walk three long blocks to your office. I took this cell phone in case you called, but the only thing I know is to say, “Hello, hello!” on it. I don’t understand these buttons, and can’t see a thing on the screen without my glasses.”

Irina Mihalkova was a bustling Russian in her fifties clad in black rubber sandals, a loose brown skirt and well-ironed crochet top through which peered out her white bra. With business-like self-confidence she carried a brown leather brief-case considerably worn on the edges and puffing out with all sorts of papers, and the most favored Russian accessory, a plastic shopping bag,. Irina was quite rotund in circumference, and had streaks of white running through her wavy brown hair, which was neatly pulled back into a tight bun. Her genial expression radiated a lively mix of initiative and kindness.

A bit awkward with my presence, especially after Nadia’s introduction as coming from America, which I contradicted by saying that I was actually from Kyrgyzstan, Irina began to fidget. She was reapplying for a loan for her fruit and vegetable stands. Nadia guided Irina through the application line by line, and Irina kept asking if she was writing in the right spaces, was she allowed to continue onto a new line, and how should she record numerical data. All these unsure gestures betrayed a weariness of bureaucratic forms, and while I doubted that my company’s team-oriented, open-door mentality embraced Soviet-style customer service or lack thereof, years of murky bureaucracies ruled by furies akin to Lubov had engrained this paranoia deep inside Irina. Irina also discussed her business details in a hushed tone, leaning into Nadia and intermittently huffing in an attempt to disguise these secrets from the other clients.

Through the huffing and puffing I made out that Irina started trading fruit and vegetables in late eighties, and had expanded to three bazaar stands, which her son also joined after university. They operated the stands together, paying workers to sell vegetables at two bazaars, while Irina traded herself at the third: she didn’t trust the hired saleswomen and liked to deal with customers on her own. The real reason for her loan, however, was the evil in-law who had never worked a day in her life and unscrupulously demanded Irina’s earnings for her son’s household. Irina came for the loan in order to strike out on her own. Ever the doting mother, she was willing to give up the other stands to her ungrateful son, although I wondered if the pitiful story was concocted to lull us into the loan. The hushed in-law laments continued on the metro as we rode to her first bazaar stand, and petite Nadia had no choice but to lean into Irina’s large maternal breast to be able to hear her. When we arrived there I finally learned why Samara’s shops were filled with rotten produce. Irina, along with other traders, bought her produce en masse from a base outside of town, which apparently received vegetables from all over the former USSR. Another Soviet tradition, this senseless centralization resulted in over-ripe, bruised and rotten produce. Irina informed me that traders from as far as Moscow came to this base. Her vegetables, although well presented, looked pitiful. I touched a cucumber, soft as play dough.

Our trip to Irina’s second trading point close to the city center was by “marshrutka” minivan, which was as well-maintained as the metro with blue leather seats, no smell, and clean passengers. After my last visit to Kyrgyzstan I tried to avoid public transport in this part of the world due to its lack of basic hygiene and poor ventilation. Thus, I was very relieved to have discovered it vice versa here. The sound of sirens approached our van, an ambulance turning onto the road. Its driver expertly puffed down a cigarette while his tan hairy arms forcefully rotated the steering wheel. The quintessential Russian ambulance experience: smoke, sirens and traffic.

At the second trading stand Irina was well-known. “It’s so nice to see you boss, finally!” exclaimed the saleswoman. Other bazaar traders came around for a chat, forming a relaxed welcoming community. Nadia carried on with her check up while I observed the bazaar. This little market had a small pensioner row where wrinkled grannies in kerchiefs, weathered dresses and worn-down shoes boisterously praised their home-grown herbs. The customers were also pensioners, buying a few pieces of produce here and there. Two elderly ladies looked at Irina’s eggplants, “Poor eggplants, they look like they are ready to go to the grave before us.”

A tall thin rake of a man popped out from the roadside with boxes of soft cucumbers and plums, Irina’s son. Although it was already mid-afternoon, he was still carting the produce to the stalls. The son’s wrinkles, unshaved face and willowy frame made him look much older than could be expected of someone who had finished university not long ago. He anxiously bustled around the stall, “Who are these people?! What are they doing here! Why are they looking at my things? What’s their business looking at my books!?”
Irina took him aside, “I’ll tell you later why they are here.”
Nadia continued copying transaction ledgers. The son didn’t back down, “I am the owner of this business! I don’t let anyone examine anything without my permission!”
Irina corrected him, “You and I are the owners of this business, and I gave them my permission.”
This had momentarily quieted him, giving the other traders a chance to voice their indignation, “Barking like a dog already. Look at him, what a great boss, eh!”
At this the man approached me and angrily asked, “You, girl, who are you?”
I was so taken aback by this rudeness that my eyes morphed into a round O and mouth opened about to tell him that we were here to give Irina a loan, but hesitated over devolving the financial matter of our visit. Nadia came to my rescue just in time. The son posed the same angry question to her, which Nadia calmly answered, “I’m Nadia. And would you introduce yourself please?” Irina’s secret was intact.
“I am the owner of this business! I didn’t authorize any inspections here!”
When we finished our inspection Irina was calming down her son, all the while refusing to tell him why we were there. I felt bad for doubting her story, which seemed to have had some truth after all.

Secrecy continued at the third and final check point where Irina traded herself.
“Not trading today, how come?” asked one trader, greeting her with warmth.
“I have visiting relatives here,” Irina pointed to us, “I’m showing my hospitality to my guests.”
“I thought you were dressed too smartly today,” another trader chimed in.

Irina received a call from which she excused herself citing that it was her “banny den,” sauna day. The sauna is a blissful indulgence where Russians spend their entire day stark naked slapping each other with fragrant birch branches, sweating in a hot wooden chamber, and sipping on cognac afterward, before snoozing into a siesta. The best thing about Russian sauna in the winter is rolling around in snow between the intolerably hot sweating sessions, which was always thoroughly enjoyed by mother’s American girlfriends when we lived in Kazakhastan. Public saunas used to be quite popular in the Soviet Union and ranged from uni-sex to co-ed, although most frequented the same-sex establishments. Anyone with a sauna in their backyard became popular in the neighborhood, and we made frequent trips to our neighbors’ sauna. As Irina was having her sauna day at the bazaar, I couldn’t help noticing that everyone received a different story on her whereabouts. Secrecy was in the air. Lastly, we had to check Irina’s cash reserves, which she brought with her, not owning a bank account. At this point it began to look like we were dealing something not entirely legal. We found a shady corner near the bazaar entrance. Nadia and Irina turned their backs from the street and fumbled inside her plastic bag while I flanked them, keeping an eye on the neighboring vendor stalls. The plastic bag was Irina’s ruse against potential thieves and the brief-case just a set-up prop. Having counted Irina’s stash we quietly dispersed. Irina walked me to my bus stop. On the way she saw an ice-cream stand, and heartily offered to feed me ice-cream. I politely declined, thanking her for the kindness. Then she made sure to physically deliver me to my minivan, and shouted to the driver, “Please don’t forget to stop on Gagarina, she is a guest and doesn’t know the town well!”

Irina’s warm-hearted kindness and care for me as her guest were certainly touching, but even more amazing to me was all the secrecy around her loan, and most of all, the fashion of transporting her life savings in a plastic bag. A recent conversation with another loan officer, Alena came to mind, “These are the most difficult people. They won’t discuss their financial situation with anyone. They apply for a loan and I ask them “Why do you need this loan?” They say, “To expand my business.” Naturally I need to know about their business in order to estimate their payment capacity, but they refuse to tell me. They learned this new capitalist phrase, “confidential” and confuse it with “top secret.” Everything about their business is private, confidential, and secret! Getting anything out of these people is like pulling their golden teeth from them!” Thus, when it comes to money, no Russian would ever tell you honestly how much he makes. If you ever asked a Russian how his business is doing, he would say, “Business is running bit by bit, we manage,” especially if business was prospering. All monetary transactions are shrouded in secrecy even within families amidst cloudy stories like Irina’s. In similar ways, people don’t like to seem happy. When asked, “How are you?” very rarely would a Russian reply with “Great, ” and the preferred answers are typically “I’m ok,” or “Things are going slowly,” and finally, “Things could be better, you know everything is so expensive.” I wonder if the habit of hiding one’s affairs and even emotions is yet another chip on their shoulder left from the USSR’s fall.

Old city fairy tales

2008-09-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

On my first Saturday in Samara I armed myself with a camera and spent the day traipsing through the old town. The roads were flooded with traffic while pedestrians on the street met my camera eye with blasé indifference. I leisurely took my time spotting out contrasts of old and new: metallic pipes near decaying awnings, electric wires haphazardly strung through elegantly carved ceiling beams, satellite dishes nesting in façades of exposed concrete. The old city enticed me further and further in, morphing into a kaleidoscope of shifting fairy tales frozen in time by a magical spell.

Known as “kupecheskie doma” (merchant houses) the old city’s cottages were once built by wealthy merchants. They were usually two stories high, the first laid out in brick and the second an intricate lacework of wood, and some had elaborate awnings. One of these houses had lured me onto Samarskaya street with the eye-cutting contrast of its white number plaque beside a crumbling awning of leaf and petal carvings. Paint occasionally peeked through layers of soot, and peeled off in chips on the wooden door. A corrugated pipe ran down the wall whose bricks had parted into a fissure, while electric wires snaked through the elegant fern relief under the roof. Therein was my introduction to Samara’s old town, a sumptuous sight of abandoned beauty in perpetual disrepair. Keeping in pace with Russia’s rapid industrialization, which created a thriving working class in desperate need of adequate housing, Soviet architecture shifted away from the decorative toward the functional, focusing on practical materials like concrete and steel. Traditional woodwork that required much effort and skill, became too decadent and out-fashioned, and its craftsmen were reaching extinction as evidenced by the old city’s forlorn façades. Still, the malleable wood around me bloomed into a thousand lives as it transpired into elaborate flights of fancy into Russian folk.

Further down Samarskaya a small one-story house popped up amidst decaying mansions. It was surprisingly well-preserved, as if its wooden façade was frozen in an icy time capsule. Wooden icicles with prickly needle tips hung off its earth-brown windows, creating a cool winter feel. The sun’s rays broke through green foliage nearby and playfully jumped on the needles, trying to thaw them in vain, while the warm summer breeze blew cooler gusts around this frosty idyll. I crept up to the window, expecting to find Snegurochka on the other side.
“Ded Moroz” (Grandfather Frost) and his “vnuchka” (grand-daughter) “Snegurochka” were central figures in our kindergarten New Year celebrations with their gigantic sack of presents and photo sessions under the huge Christmas tree that we had decorated ourselves with much care and effort. Girls were snow-flakes in tutus, boys wore white bunny ears, and we all recited poetry, sang songs and performed carefully rehearsed dances to our parents’ applause. New Year’s Eve was the rare occasion when we went to bed without a peep and shut our eyes tight, hearts anxiously beating for presents that would magically appear under the Christmas tree in the morning, presumably dropped down the flaming pechka chimney by Ded Moroz and Snegurochka. Before this house, elaborate illustrations of Snegurochka’s North Pole abode were becoming more and more real. All our children’s books were, no doubt, illustrated by Russians, but we in Bishkek did not have the rich visual history of Russia’s old wooden towns. What had been purely exotic was now becoming familiar, and finally feeling up-close what I had so long admired from a distance, I was beginning to fall in love with the city’s wooden decay.

My next fairy tale cottage resembled the setting of “Alenkii Tsvetochek” (The Crimson Flower), a Russian version of Beauty and the Beast. While the two tales share some imagery – the enchanted flower, beast, and compassionate daughter, their plot and underlying morals are quite different. “Alenkii Tsvetochek’s” father was a widowed merchant with three daughters who asked him for impossible presents like a crimson flower only seen in a dream. The father found the flower on an enchanted island inhabited by a beast who allowed him to take it in exchange for his daughter, or die. Upon learning of her father’s bargain, the youngest daughter, Nastenka, secretly left to the enchanted island where she lived under the gentle protection of an invisible host. When she accidentally saw the beast, she was terrified of his appearance, breaking his heart. The disconsolate beast sent Nastenka home, bidding her that if she didn’t return by a certain hour he would die of his broken heart. Nastenka brought many exotic gifts for her sisters, who, as typical in Russian folklore, became jealous of her and turned back all clocks to keep her past the bidden hour. Thus, the beast fell prey to conniving female jealousy. When Nastenka discovered the ruse and returned to the island, it was her sorrow for loosing a friend, not romantic love declarations, that broke the spell.

With its lavish floral carvings the house before me could have easily belonged to Nastenka’s father. Framed by massive posts with tortuous plants that curled into off-shoots and snaked around exotic shells, the second floor had three long windows facing the street, made just for the three sisters. Carved plants ran wild underneath each window and slithered up the sides, taming into clovers at the feet of burgeoning “petushki” (iris) and “kolokolchiki” (bell-flower) bouquets. These beautiful and distinctly Russian floral motifs whisked me back to the magical scenes “na staroi Russi” (in the old Russia), when crimson-lipped “baryshnias” (wealthy maidens) in flowing sarafans and gilded headdresses wistfully waited at these windows, waiving their embroidered hand-kerchiefs like “Alenkii Tsvetochek’s” sisters and dreaming of a handsome “molodets” (young man).

As I marched down the street with my digital apparatus the carvings multiplied to wiggly worms, toothy triangles, Celtic plants and crosses, all in the gloomy reality of the present. One house with clover window carvings had a black gaping hole near the roof. Its corner window slanted in a crooked diagonal while the entrance awning was replaced by a rough cement roof. Another house resembled the hanging gardens of Babylon as its floral motifs cascaded over the windows in supple branches. Its white paint had completely peeled off, brown construction paper was pasted over the windows, and a sullied gray rag hung in one of the gardens’ corners. The neighboring house was swallowed by ads, the first story submerged under hand-written sale notes while garish promotions of European clothes were plastered over the second floor. Still, its old charm prevailed in triangular wall borders, arched windows and serpentine posts. A part of the wall slanted to the side, forming a wooden quilt of the vertical post, diagonal side and perpendicular frame, un-spoilt by commercialization thus far. Another beautiful cottage was completely boarded up, in the process of being demolished. Perhaps this mansion belonged to old Russian gentry, as it mixed European architecture into its traditional style. Folk carvings were diluted by Classical columns and minimalist geometrical shapes. A European dome gracefully rose into a spire above the second story, adorned by an old Russian attic window. Plants curled up the spire’s base, while bundles of icicles dropped from the windows onto minimalist rectangular shutters. What used to be a petal-carved window sill hung sideways on one nail. Wooden planks peeled off the walls, jutting out against the smooth granite of a nearby nomenclature building. The house had lost its foundation, and its entire structure careened to the right, the roof spire an oblique diagonal to the vertical granite building behind. Slowly but surely, the elegant dome gave way to present day modernization, and it was just a matter of months before a glitzy high-rise construction would be erected in its place. Change announced itself in these wobbly structures keeling over from time and neglect, and, sadly, their fairy tales would not much last longer.

As I approached Samara’s center, the old city’s European-influenced wooden mansions morphed into late 19th century edifices of stone. One surreal construction of moths, snakes and grimacing bearded men sprawled over an entire block. Fat, scaly snakes arched into Ss on the balconies, while on the walls, miniature bearded men opened their mouths in different contortions: one to speak, another in laughter, this in surprise, that in mockery, in fear here, pure rage there. Massive pillars rose up to the roof, culminating in stone damsels. Wires haphazardly tumbled over the maidens’ oval faces, which cast severe reproaching glances for this obstruction of sight. Slender bull skulls lined the window posts, curling their horns. The window frames, filled with amorphous Venetian glass, intertwined like tree branches. Giant furry moths spread out their wings over some of them. The entrance to this leering edifice was cached away in a secret corner, its rusted awning of slender iron ferns guarded by a smiling elephant head a chopped off hobbit. The elephant looked at me sideways, eyes askance in mysterious mirth: welcome to Pan’s Labyrinth.

My old city wonderings continued amidst a mischievous play between subversive and surreptitious as I stumbled on old treasures in secret courtyards. A decrepit ark between two slanting houses led to an enormous Dutch mansion whose round tower, side apses and wooden beams were completely out of place in Samara. Lines of laundry dried outside, while shrunken grannies bemoaned the calamities of daily life on a bench in the front, oblivious to their surrounding riches. Another treasure of red sandstone was tucked away between old steel garages. Long white curtains swayed in the wind against earthy red walls, a pair of muddy boots was drying on one sill, while a cat lazily observed me from another, gently swinging its paw. The cat scrunched its eyes, arched, and, bored with my photographic activities, disappeared inside, taking the earthy red beauty for granted just like the gossiping grannies.

The state of disrepair in the city center was just as rampant as on Samarskaya Street, but on a much grander scale, offering grandiose decay of the Baroque. Two antique glories held torches in place of decorative columns on a façade, one of them beheaded – a steel rod in place of her ripped out face. These ramshackle Victories were ensnared in a net of satellite dishes, while the ornate iron balconies below were missing floors. Satellite wires crawled over the walls and snaked through the windows, a perfect Borat scene – iis ok-ei have hole in floor, iis a sexitiime with remote control satellite dish! Another building remained in a perpetual state of undress with its exposed cement structure, metal netting and protruding nail spires, eternally in renovation. Its windows jutted out of the walls like skeleton bones, and had the lavish frames of Baroque paintings, but with a thick coating of soot in place of gilded paint. Promises of renovation glimmered in the new light brown frame of one, where a fat white cat also reposed on the sill, bearing silent witnesses.

In the city center I stumbled upon Tolstoy’s country estate, a clump of wooden cottages with peeling paint and an excavated hole in the yard. After tying some rags around my shoes so as not to dirty the floors, I stepped into the exhibit to discover that it was Alexei Tolstoy, Leo’s offspring and the first Head of USSR’s Writers’ Union, who grew up in this house. The exhibit began in a dimly-lit room filled with musty wood scents and old clothes. Traditional embroideries, a samovar, “lapti” (village sandals made from birch bark) and pottery pieces mingled with Tolstoy’s photographs of Samara. A photo of ragged villagers was labeled “Bednost” (Poverty) in Old Russian letters. Tolstoy’s childhood living quarters on the second floor were a tiny apartment with long windows and high ceilings, restored circa 1901. Filled with original and replica furniture, it abounded in western remnants shunned in the USSR until glasnost. Antique French dolls, a Zimmerman piano, Tolstoy’s first camera – Kodak, and a Remington type-writer were just some of the preserved western brands, a remnant of Russia’s pre-Revolution proximity to Europe. As I was her only visitor, the curator narrated detailed accounts of his belongings, pointing out minute details on clocks and dishes, spinning a tale about a silk parasol in one room, a teacup with Turgenev’s court insignia in another. I learned that the museum had only been established in 1983, prior to which it was – as unimaginable as it may seem – a communal flat. The only surviving member of Aleksei’s childhood able to help the restoration was their adopted daughter who was flown into Samara all the way from Georgia. Tolstoy’s Samara was full of neat houses with freshly painted walls, their beautiful elaborate windows set in white frames. His most widely known work is the translation of Pinocchio, making one wonder why a writer with such legacy and the highest Soviet literary honor, immersed himself in translation, craft of the dissidents. Was Pinocchio perhaps Tolstoy’s escape from socialist realism?

“Office Shower” and other hospitalities

2008-09-24T05:34:00.002-07:00

Office work was an inundating task of making pretty flowcharts, supplemented by observation, my raison d’être in Samara. With unlimited freedom to dig into all operating departments I attended a slew of meetings and ventured out into the field with loan officers. My first chance to observe came in a supervisor meeting invite from Samara’s branch manager Askar. When everyone settled around the long conference table in Askar’s room, the first thing that struck me was that all supervisors but one were soft-spoken women in their thirties and forties. Vladimir, the sole male supervisor in their midst, was a tan blond youth with blue eyes, high cheekbones and fine features underneath taught skin. His skeletal fragility gave Vladimir this youthful teen-age look, but a wedding band on a thin long phalange placed him somewhere into mid-twenties. We covered loan officer productivity quotas, which seemed an alarming vestige of Soviet-style management to my capitalist self. Askar explained that the quotas were mutually agreed upon by everyone through American-style consensus. Still, the fundamental problem of quota inefficiencies persisted, resulting in loan officers stowing away excess applications for the future as exceeding the monthly quota did not reward them a higher bonus.

The supervisors’ biggest complaint, however, was against headquarters’ stinginess of supplies. “We keep ordering and ordering supplies,” lamented Tamara, a ghostly petite Tatar in her forties with bleached locks permanently black at the roots and ochre eye-liner contouring her slightly slanted eyes. “The headquarters gave us five pens last month, five pens for three people for an entire month. We have no toilet paper, no tea to offer clients. We bring our own pens, tea, sugar, toilet paper, everything.” Was this a way to achieve profitability pressures, or just another vestige of the Soviet past? Naturally it wasn’t new to our co-workers who took matters into their own hands and even bought their own tea treats for the clients. At the headquarters too, notebooks and pens were in deficit. On one occasion I even had the honor of personally signing for a marker and making the solemn promise of returning it after use. All this logging and pledging and signing in thick black ledgers was just so very intriguing! What if I dared to break my vow and made off with that green little marker to Europe (as I inadvertently had, forgetting it inside my back-pack)? Would there be an Interpol-initiated cross-border pursuit? Would I forever go down in annals of Samara history under the following lurid headline: “Knifing thief from America makes off with Company Property!”?

At the end of the week we gathered for a symbolic celebration of a field office inauguration. No official inauguration was held as the office was fully operational during renovation. The office was in another run-down area of Samara, strategically located near the Frunze bazaar where many of our clients ran their small businesses. Its facade was the only freshly painted patch on the drab residential building in which it resided, grabbing attention with its jovial yellow hue. It was also the only patch not covered by graffiti, which worried Bill, who received prompt assurances from marketing director Volodia that the paint was washable.

Inside the office was modern and personable, like a private-banking branch, but for a vastly different clientele: small-time clothes and produce traders. A round gray counter welcomed visitors, with open loan officer cubicles on the side and the supervisor’s glass office behind. The branch supervisor, Natasha, observed that the glass not only reassured clients of strict office supervision, but fostered an open door policy for them too, “You know our people always head straight for the manager’s office. No, they don’t want to talk to the loan officer. They don’t want to listen to the receptionist. They demand the manager and march straight past the reception desk to my door. So the door is always open!” I loved her good-natured humor at this stale legacy. As much as the people had been afraid of the Soviet bureaucracy, they never shied away from junior subordinates like Natasha’s loan officers. The popular thing to do when faced with a green technocrat was to indignantly shake one’s fist in their face at their presumed incompetence and angrily demand the supervisor, and only after the apparition of the grand supervisor had presented itself, did the bureaucratic cowering begin. The only person who didn’t cower before the establishment was my grandmother. What made my grandmother’s outrage and indignation surpass any supervisor rank, was her never-ending quest for justice and truth. By the time that I was born grandmother retired from university. Of course, one never completely retired in those days and she occasionally read evening lectures, but the fact that she was officially retired gave her the new status of a vulnerable pensioner, which she proudly wore on her sleeve. I could tell that she very much loved this status as it gave her that opportunity to confront all the un-fairness that she saw in life and speak of it loudly and freely.

Grandmother had always carried her own scales everywhere she went. Be it in a shop or at Sunday bazaar, everything had to be weighed on them, as according to her, “People have become so soul-less, so dishonest that they even rob pensioners of their last pension!” God forbid there was a difference between her and the vendor’s scales, the wild torrent of indignation unleashed. “Where is you conscience, young woman?” she would demand loudly, causing everyone around us to turn their heads. “Cheating an old pensioner out of her last pension! Ai-ai-ai!” Disconsolately grandma would shake her head at this awful injustice. “Look at the scales, you’ve cheated me by almost half a kilo!” At this point the vendor always went red in the face from all the un-desired attention, while grandmother demonstratively stuck her hands into her sides and issued the ultimatum, “I’d like to see you supervisor, young woman!” If we were inside a shop, the supervisor was promptly procured to calm the storm by adding the missing weight to our batch. However if a bazaar vendor dared defend her scales, grandma made a big demonstration of not buying the produce and even took the pain of going to the administrator to make herself heard. If any rude person dared to insult her in these justice-seeking missions, grandmother would proudly retort, “I am speaking the truth!” Much to my mother’s protest, grandmother even volunteered as a shop inspector to satisfy this never-ending quest for truth. Then she would appear in the shop doorway like the grand inquisitor. The supervisor would always come out to welcome her, and fib by her side as grandmother checked the produce and scales. On those occasions the scales never lied, while fresh produce usually hidden for vendors’ friends in the back graced the front shelves.

But back to our office party where I just discovered that attitudes of indignation toward junior ranks existed to this very day. Everyone’s eyes were on the new reception accessory – a water cooler with fancy-looking buttons. A female shriek issued from the kitchen, “Aaaahh, look at this, you have two coolers! What is this?! Shouldn’t you only have one per office?!”
Natasha laughed back, “I know, isn’t it shocking that they still haven’t confiscated the old one?”
“Your entire office is made up of such pretty young girls,” I complimented Natasha, noticing that the office staff comprised of six young women and one lonely man..
Natasha took me into confidence, lowering her voice, “I’ll tell you why our office is all made up of girls. These men have major problems with a female boss. I was interviewing a young man the other day, clean suit, nice bag. I told him the loan officer responsibilities, and he asked me, “Will I need to fulfill your requests?” I told him, “No, you will need to fulfill your responsibilities as stated in the job description and I will monitor that you fulfill them correctly.” Needless to say, I ended the interview at that. Our men just aren’t ready for a female boss.” So much for the macho Russian. The party was much the livelier with women anyway. Besides, the majority of KBM’s clients were women, and the sociable girls in Natasha’s office were certainly more skilled in handling both sexes as men found them pretty while women were more apt to open up.

The first bottle of champagne that Vladimir opened slipped right through his fingers. He caught it just before it smashed on the floor, but half had already gushed out in a playful fountain, spraying us with its sweet sticky contents. The women scattered, squealing with laughter.
“Oopa! Horosho my obmili offis!” (How well we have bathed the office!) exclaimed Natasha, referring to the celebratory Russian tradition of ‘obmyvania,’ the closest Western equivalent of which would be a shower. Naturally, the Russian shower took place with good old vodochka, and for special occasions like ours, champagne.
Thereafter, we engaged in the second crucial component of any shower ceremony – the making of lengthy toasts. Of course, no one can say as lengthy a toast as the Georgians, who have been famous for their toast-making skill since the Soviet times, but the Russians came pretty close, adorning their felicitations with colorful anecdotes. At the end even I had to make a toast, which due to my lack of toast-making experience came out short and choppy, the shortest toast in their history, “To hospitality!”
Everyone paused expecting more, but that’s all they got. Puzzled, they said politely, “That’s a nice toast,” and we drank bottoms up.

On the way back home Askar suggested to see the beach in the center of town. Eager for my first trip into the city proper I dropped off my backpack at home and we drove into the center. Like most Russian cities the Samara before me was lost in a sea of parks and tree-lined streets, its washed-out apartment buildings peering through the tree-tops. Every apartment complex had the Russian “dvor,” a massive interior yard with benches, playgrounds and a make-shift football field or basketball court. Multiple communal activities were taking place within as children gathered on playgrounds and grannies gossiped on benches during the day, while carousing youths littered beer bottles and cigarette butts after dark. Bathed in burgeoning greenery the yards created a pleasant past-time for their inhabitants. Together Samara’s streets, parks and apartment yards formed a softer organic version of metropolitan space that was vastly different from New York’s steel and glass sheath. The city’s horizontal vegetative orientation hid it completely: the steel metropolis ceased to exist.

As we approached the center, ugly steel and glass shopping conglomerates popped up among vanishing greenery, then disappeared into the old city. Sadly, the old city was no charming European town, but a crumbling old Russian city of the 19th and early 20th century, which had not been maintained due to Soviet popularity of apartment blocks. Ornate wooden houses with elaborate window and door carvings slanted in all directions, about to keel over. Many houses were boarded up, their tradition and history rotting away in plain sight, while some had already been torn down. I promised to revisit these dilapidated buildings before they were bulldozed away.

We were dropped off on the much talked about Samara beach by the Volga – as I mentioned before, “the largest beach in Europe.” A typical Soviet resort park of flower-beds and firs occupied the space between Volga and the road. Joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and strollers engaged in their various activities on the asphalt strips between trees, beyond which lay a long narrow beach full of vacationers, and the calm river. The other shore was fully submerged in green forestry, not quite my expectation of the drab industrial Volga only seen in Repin’s depressing serf sketches before. Looking out at this picturesque strip of beach greenery with its little bars and restaurants, I forgot all about the decaying old city behind.

Askar suggested a bite to eat at one of the out-door café tents. We examined the menu, to my surprise a mix of Russian and Central Asian food. Young townies socialized under the tent, the men casually dressed in jeans and netted wife-beaters, surrounded by visions of cool beauty in sweat-proof evening make-up, heels, and heaps of trinkets that garnished their voluptuous chests. The girls’ un-toned, but beautifully shaped proportional bodies were tightly bound in little dresses, stretch jeans and low-cut tanks. A tall blonde stood out in a smoke-blue backless mini-dress, heavy make-up and a ton of metal trinkets enchaining her long neck. Her silver studded stilettos added to the height, while the slightly flat posterior had firming potential. She sauntered through the café with a saucy mix of clumsiness and languor. MTV blared on a projector to the rhythm of mismatched songs blasting from side speakers. The DJ was a tall attractive brunette simply, but elegantly dressed in a jean mini and white tank clinched around the hips by a chunky belt. A refreshing contrast of natural, less doll-like beauty, she occasionally sang Russian chanson in a husky voice.

‘Malinki’ (Raspberries), Jeanna Friske’s seductive hit remix with Discoteka Avaria, blasted through the loudspeakers. The blonde gathered some less attractive females and drifted toward the dance floor where she began to swing her numerous assets to Jeanna’s playful voice, “Malinki, malinki… brunetki i blondinki… Serezhki i Marinki…” (Raspberries, raspberries, blondes and brunettes, Sergeis and Marinas) and Diskoteka Avaria’s rap “zdes hodiat devushki malinovye gubki” (here strut girls with raspberry lips). Everyone was hypnotized. After a few songs our raspberry slunk back to her table and planted a sloppy kiss on what must have been her boyfriend, a skinny fellow half her height with criminally cropped hair and one of those netted synthetic wife-beaters. I gathered there must have been a shortage of men in Samara.

A swarm of flower vendors gathered around us with roses, which I found quite annoying, especially after Askar insisted on buying one for me. I found this rather bizarre and sheepishly hoped that he did it to make the vendors go away. To be on the safe side I resorted to my usual defense when faced with unwanted attentions, and became very interested in his family life. Askar told me that his wife gave up her prestigious job in Kyrgyzstan to be with him and take care of their two children. Relieved that he was married, I enthusiastically exhausted the family subject to its last drop, and continuously harped on his luck with such an intelligent and surely beautiful wife. My previous experience of repelling married bankers whose rings did not deter them from chasing other skirts was becoming quite handy, and throughout the dinner I sent out friendly platonic vibes. By now I was quite an expert in platonic relations, having been ordered to sit next to one or another boss at cheesy bank dinners and dragged out to some god-awful clubs after, where my buddies and I would impatiently wait for the wife curfew before real fun began. Altough my platonic distance had indeed slipped with a few junior analysts, it always worked seamlessly on the married and elderly, just as it was during our dinner.

This dinner also dragged out and Askar kept ordering rounds of beer, which I declined after the first unfinished half-liter. I politely waited for him to finish so that we could leave: it was already ten. Despite my proposal to share the bill, Askar insisted on getting it as part of my “welcome.” I thanked him, awkwardly picked up the irritating flower, and carried it upside down. Its petals began to fall behind me, leaving a trail. Askar suggested that we check out the beach, which I began to protest, but he insisted that since I was already at the river, I had to see it. Some high school girls ran into the water in the on-coming dusk in bras and panties, one of them in a thong. The girls were fresh, fleshy and sportive. The one in the thong had a fabulous posterior, the sight of which Askar was thoroughly enjoying. He asked me, “Perhaps, you’d like to bathe in the river?”
At this my friendly platonic vibes had immediately cooled, “No, I don’t have a swim-suit.”
“It’s alright; these girls are just in their underwear. It’s dark so no one will see.”
The vibes now turned to seething outrage while I tried to keep outward composure, “I think it’s about time I went home. Do you know what marshrutka I can take in my direction?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.” Askar responded.

I wondered if I would ever be rid of him as he insisted on dropping me home in a taxi despite the fact that my home was in the opposite direction from his. After some bargaining with one of the drivers, Askar agreed on a price and we set toward my apartment in what I hoped was an uncomfortable silence for him. As we pulled into the yard I hastily thanked him for the welcome and hopped out, coming face to face with a group of youngsters smoking outside. It clearly was none of their business to be outside my entrance, which didn’t have any benches, and I diagnosed their presence as highly suspicious. Hoping that they wouldn’t follow me inside, I muttered a muffled “Excuse me” in Russian and shuffled toward the door as fast as I could. They turned aside just enough to make room for me to slide through, and I scuttled upstairs. Thankfully, the taxi kept the group in the spotlight, flashing its lights into the entrance before backing out of the yard.

The next day, mother called me to check up. I described my week’s adventures, and mentioned dinner with a local co-worker, naturally keeping away some details, but mother was immediately concerned, “Men over there do not invite you to a dinner unless they have a sleazy intention. They think it natural for you to sleep with them if you accept. You’re not in America, darling.”
“Oh, I did find some of his behavior to be quite weird, but I thought that maybe it was some cultural hospitality I didn’t get.”
“You are lucky he wasn’t physical. Typically, if you refuse, they’ll take it as a flirt and paw you with their hands.”
He never got around to offering, but regardless, I had absolutely no desire to be pawed by anyone. I took serious note of this and decided to hang out only with American fellows when they arrived, or in a large group where everyone paid for themselves.

Street life

2008-09-24T05:34:00.001-07:00

The next and thereafter following mornings I began with the homely ritual of my favorite childhood breakfast: Russian cottage cheese with milk and a bit of sugar, and tea with black bread and “smetana,” the Russian version of sour cream. The cheese’s sweet grainy texture melted on the tongue, awakening my palate to crisp Bishkek mornings when mother used to make it for breakfast. Teeth sank into the black “Borodinsky” bread, which, legend says, was baked for Russian soldiers by a general’s patriotic wife prior to the epic battle that also became Napoleon’s costly turning point in the Russian campaign. The bread was soft and moist, with a clean taste of coriander that pleasantly soured from liquid “smetana”. My lazy sachet-dipping was surely an affront to Russia’s brewed tea tradition, and the glazed blue teapot stood idle on top of the fridge covered by the cushy hoop-skirt of a blue-eyed tea doll. Her long black lashes pulled down one eyelid, reminding me of our rosy-cheeked tea doll secretly named Marina. The doll wistfully looked down on me with her open eye, bemoaning her forced repose. Russian-labeled black Ahmad tea turned out foamy and strong, incomparable to the English-labeled flat Lipton we had in the office. My stomach’s first crave assuaged, I pulled on my backpack, and much like in old school days, but this time weighed down by a laptop instead of textbooks, set off for the office.

As experienced by many a traveler, the very first exhilarating dive into a culture arrives with that simple action of stepping onto the street. For in every foreign place this is the very first encounter, one could say the very first breath, of the new and exotic culture. The streets of every new city, be it Bombay, Moscow or New York, offer unique peculiar experiences in their whirlpool of ordinary life, forming a colorful parade of culture, habits and attitudes. It was always sad to visit countries where one had to drive through streets filled with more cars than people, longing for that initial pleasure of mingling with the crowd and experiencing first-hand its jostle, tumble and pull. Judging by the manic whizzing of cars outside, Samara’s streets sounded safer than its roads, and I stepped out of my apartment, open to the unknown and unexpected. The very first thing that struck my eye was that people didn’t look at each other. The ground was a focal point for many, while others found invisible points of focus straight ahead. Any meandering glances were shooed off by the making of stone-cold faces. In fact, the only wondering glances were the inquiring, calculating stares of street hoodlums, to which of course I was immediately subjected being new on the block. “Why are you here? Where did you come from? I haven’t seen you in this neighborhood before,” hissed their pointed stares. Although uninvited, these glances were the most obvious. Not only did they follow me with their eyes, but sometimes the hoodlums were be so brazen as to turn their head, turn around completely, or worse, walk ahead, then turn back. Here, I tried to fit into the crowd by wearing a frown, and attentively watched single or groups of young men nearby. I quickly designed different walking tactics. If they were ahead of me and turned around, I purposefully fell back and strolled. If they were approaching from the back, I slowed down and waited for them to pass, and if they were sitting on the street curb I ceased all curious observations and arranged my face into the glass-eyed frown of a stone-woman. All these stratagems weren’t of much help in the end however, as I quickly forgot them and looked at the people around me anyway.

Who were these hoodlums that had immediately attracted my cautious attention? A couple of sly observations led to conclude that they must have been unemployed Russian youths: failing boys or young men who seemed as though they didn’t have much to do. Their hair was cut in a military buzz, but it didn’t make them look clean. They could usually be picked out of the crowd by their dirty synthetic pants, t-shirts and worn-out rubber flip flops in which they shuffled about the streets, shooting well-aimed streams of spit left and right. They often lurked in the streets, following passers-by with long sideways glances or sat in the apartment backyards, playing card games. In Kyrgyzstan they were called “myrks”, pronounced with the harsh Russian “y,” a racist connotation against the Kyrgyz. Phonetically, the word was quite deserving of its meaning, originating in the back of one’s throat as if to imitate the hoodlums’ repulsive spitting.

On the opposite end of the suspicious hoodlum spectrum, were of course, the beautiful Russian women, ethereal possessors of hourglass figures on never-ending legs, tightly bound in sparkling armor of clingy outfits and make-up. When I first came to Moscow in early 2000s I felt like a shrub in a birch forest, looking up leggy statues of alabaster skin, aquiline features and naturally blond long hair. Moscow had certainly put my operating principle that others’ beauty makes one more beautiful to test, and Samara had also clouded my consciousness at times. Although gorgeous bodies with pimply, mediocre faces were a common sight, I often discovered unusual Caucasian features mixed with Central Asia and Tatar manifest in combinations of slanted blue eyes and raven hair on milky white skin, wide Asian cheekbones and aquiline noses, or full pouting lips and black Georgian eyes set in a frame of wild curls.

The women around me were always at their weapons – manicured, in heels, never without makeup, and regardless of her beauty, every Russian woman that was not yet a pensioner was an exhibitionist, donning the tightest, shiniest and most revealing outfits. Gold and silver studs, brooches, lingerie linings and stitches were a common sparkly sight on clothes. Jeans, decorated with lurid brand logos and floral patterns, clung as tightly to thighs as a second skin. Four inch stilettos were the minimum, and gold or silver evening sandals just as good for the day, their wearers expertly teetering through dust, puddles and mud like scantily clad Cinderellas. Head to toe animal prints were another popular indulgence: Lubov donned a fake D&G snow mountain cat outfit at least once a week, while beautiful cheetahs and tigers hungrily prowled the streets. However, the loudest trend of all, which didn’t in the least bit phase the local women, although it could have been construed as highly inappropriate by some in the West, was see through clothing with minimal undergarment coverage. In the office and on the street, sheer bras under see-through crochet and chiffon blouses generously offered up cleavage, nipples and sometimes love-handles. As this colorful parade whirled past me, leaving behind whiffs of perfume, lipstick and rouge, it seemed that every Russian woman was off to a fabulous party. My lack of make-up, hoodies and the school-girl back-pack had confused many women my age, who called me “devochka” (girl) when lost and looking for directions from their stiletto heights.

On weekends Samara’s local crowds slightly differed in composition, as week-day hoodlums were replaced by drunken working men. Popular drinking activities began as early as Friday afternoons, when I would see groups of men leisurely standing around with bottles of beer, and blew out to epopee proportions throughout the course of the weekend. The standard Russian beer bottle began at half a liter and in various increments progressed to an emptied out three by Saturday morning. Men in crumpled work clothes from the day before stumbled through the streets on Saturday afternoons, swinging empty three liter bottles in their hands. Perhaps the thought of a waiting family had suddenly dawned upon them with the new day, for they vengefully torpedoed their torsos, furiously attempting a straight line, but veered left and right, and nearly nose-dove into the ground whenever a pot-hole, step or dent materialized on their tortuous path. Before they were stricken by such purposeful thoughts however, these men swaggered about the streets, bothering women and sometimes other men with generously frightful drinking invitations. Thus, keeping sizeable distance from the unpredictable street drunkards became another street challenge on my week-end exploits.

Alcoholism also seemed to be a trend in my apartment building where I often heard older women scolding their sons about vodka habits. A silver-haired granny living upstairs quote often shook her bony finger at the unruly son on the landing, “Enough money and time to stuff your face with vodka, but not enough to repair the leaking sink, eh!” During my first week-end in town the upstairs neighbors hosted a Russian drinking party. Traditional drinking music blasted jolly accordion and balalaika rhythms while carousing merry-makers shook the floor with stomping and filled the air with piercing shrieks “Aiiiii! Aiiiii! Ia!” The party began late Saturday morning and ended mid-afternoon, when most celebrants fell into a siesta. An unfortunate party-girl locked herself out of the building and spent the rest of the afternoon banging on the door, wailing loudly in a hoarse voice, “Kind people! Let me in! Let me in please!” Her party contingent was non-responsive, while the rest of outraged neighbors had nothing but spite for her earlier merriment. She eventually gave up and fell into deep slumber at the front door. I wasn’t sure if I should have let her in either.

Oil martinis, or the Russification of the West

2008-09-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

At last, the day’s work was done, and that blissful time of satisfying my TV junkie cravings was nigh. Having entered Western pop-culture through the highly informative channel of MTV, I was most soothingly pacified by music videos and their ethereal parades of sexy appearances flashing to familiar sounds, pleasantly titillating the appetite with impossibly beautiful bodies. Lazy zapping around the Russian black box led to the discovery of hip hop, the new wave in Russian entertainment, which captured the full range of western styles from mob rap, to pimp videos, R&B and glitzy pop remixes, and dominated all music channels. Once again, that ethereal parade of sexy appearances began flashing before my eyes, at the same time offering uproarious entertainment in their clever assimilations of the West, previously unknown to my junkie eye.

The Russian rap scene as channeled through my screen, was a contentious battle between gangsters and pimps, Tim Big Family claiming the ultimate gangster title with his callous boasts and monotonous beats. In the hit ‘Mani, mani’ Tim boasted about how cool, slick and clever he was – his only message was that having “mani” was good. The entertainment value lay in the video, which offered poignant social critiques between traditional gangster shots. Gangsta-style, Tim rapped through the video on swaying TV screens occasionally crashed by diamond-encrusted bling signs. One TV screen even served to replace the human head on a dancing body in a rather unsubtle pun on TV’s alarming influence on our minds. A cardboard target of Tim with various guns then popped up amidst Lichtenstein’s beach blondes. Bullets rained in the foreground and Tim rapped “It’s nice when all a girl needs is money.” This critique of Russian materialism reminded of one émigré’s complaints back in New York. “I would date Russian girls, I know so many of them, hot and smart, but so materialistic! Addicted to clothes! I would go absolutely insane with someone like that,” my friend griped over beer. And here I was in Russia, seeing these cross-Atlantic grumblings in Lichtenstein’s blondes, which were much classier than the grotesque over-weight women flashing designer labels in Western rap videos. However, Tim’s most clever critique was political, showing a screaming oil worker unloading his gun into the mouth of an unusually hooked-nosed Uncle Sam who was reaching for an oil pipe. Upon exiting the back of Uncle Sam’s head the bullet turned into a missile that burst open the pipe and sent forth an oil fountain gushing into a half-filled martini glass. In it I was expecting some frisky frolicking Beyonce or Jessica Simpson Russian-style look-a-like, but the oil martini offered up a smug lounging Tim instead with a phallic Kalashnikov between his knees. The video’s political spin continued with a caricature of Khodorkovsky behind bars and graffiti “Freedom to Oligarchs” splashed across the wall below his cell. Tim’s blasé monologue boasted that life was completely different once you already had “mani,” concluding with the wisdom of an oligarch child, who no longer got by hook and crook like his parents, but openly rode the oil windfall from Uncle Sam’s Middle Eastern forays. With his sharp social commentary Tim had certainly surpassed the traditional callousness of gangster rap.

The exemplary pimp representative battling Tim for the scene was Timoti, an overly brown Tatar – courtesy of lighting, touch-up and over-done bronzer – who donned a short curly beard and pointy Latino mustache. In ‘Dance with me’ Timoti surrounded himself with a hooded posse of tan Kyrgyz, Tatars and Tajiks in dark baggy clothes. To enhance their presumed blackness everything happened in the dark. Timoti callously admired a skanky blonde in a fuzzy snow-flake stripper outfit, stuffed some dollar currency in her already busting bra, and rapped what must have been complimenting insults in her direction. At the end of the song the Western designer logos and bling were broken up by a traditional “ushanka” fur hat, the pimp’s Russification well under way if only on a grotesque superficial level. The hat’s ear pieces naughtily dangled with Timoti’s gesticulations, a reminder that the pimp therein was still Russian at heart.

The soulful theme of love, popular in traditional Russian chanson, had apparently found its way into rap too, and infused the thuggish music style with passion as monetary machinations often went hand in hand with unrequited loves and broken hearts. ‘Leave’ was one such song where the artist lamented his broken heart as his ex-girlfriend emptied out their apartment with the help of a little mobster posse. Here I discovered that not just our microfinance clients, but also the rap gangsters were under-banked in Russia: the ex folded over a piece of gray bedroom carpet and gathered a whole suitcase of $100 notes. In ‘The Cry of Spring,’ Basta, a blond Eminem look-a-like with exceptional mastery of classical piano, bemoaned his unrequited love for a down-cast blonde with a jet-setting lover. Although together, the post-modern couple were still apart as the man got busy with his sleek laptop while the girl wistfully gazed out the window. When he finally sought out the comfort of her soft accepting body, a nostalgic love scene ensued, interrupted by Basta’s rhymes and washed out images of rain, puddles and the Kremlin wall. The next morning the man awakened to the sound of his beloved machine and jet-set away, leaving his lover to play over the night’s memories in her mind. Only at the very end, when she stopped by the entrance mirror to check her make-up, did I realize that the love scene was a mere business transaction. The girl picked up some hundred dollar notes, rustled them with her red manicured nails to double check the amount, and walked out of the room. Basta’s tender lyrics, piano interludes and somber nostalgic imagery gave a sad human touch to this transaction between two lonely people in need of different, but also similar comforts.

However, the craftiest Russification of the West in pop was Bianca – the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of R&B of the Russian People.’ Her corporeal beauty thwarted the world of glitzy split-second appearances, creating a strong physical presence. In no rush, Bianca offered up her waste-long chocolate curls, green almond eyes, shapely red mouth and petite hourglass figure of perfectly round breasts and behind pinched by a thin waist. Although her name sounded like the Russian equivalent of Beyonce’s, quite unlike Beyonce, Bianca looked beautiful from all angles and none of her videos had the manic zooming and heavy editing so typical in Western pop. Her voice wailed like a slightly more pleasant version of Beyonce’s. At this the Western similarities, which put the real Beyonce to shame, stopped. Bianca’s R&B was infused with folk guitar and accordion interludes, and her visual imagery brimmed over the top with Russian folk, following the hearty tradition of “horoshego dolzhno byt mnogo,” where the more of a good thing one has the better. In ‘About Summer’ Bianca’s posse of muzhiks playing accordions and balalaikas flew on a steaming village “pechka” (stove) to a beach-side “isbushka na kurriih noshkah” (a folklore witch hut on hen’s legs) named “Little House by the Sea.” With a single pop of her pink bubble gum she bewitched the guards outside and spell-bound the house, turning herself into a gypsy effortlessly popping her breasts and shimmied her jewelry-laden pelvis at a samovar-laden feast. The lyrical ‘Unhappy Love’ was another marriage of folk and pop, where Bianca wailed around her dead lover in floral Gypsy skirts and shawls, and belly-danced barefoot, a silver anklet sparkling on her elegant narrow foot. Bianca’s unbelievable beauty, traditional music and magical fables made her R&B distinctly Russian – the R&B of the Russian People indeed!

While musicians like Bianca endowed their work with traditional Russian elements, others went even further to superimpose Soviet themes upon the West. In their jaunty video ‘Karl Marx Stadt’ Megapolis posed the question: What if the Soviets won the Cold War? The video began in London with a “subotnik” boy meets girl scene – “subotniks” were mandatory Saturday cleaning duty for all Soviet citizens. By the time we began school they were reserved only for students to tidy school territory, or rather fool around with sticks and brooms in the school yard, which, despite our mischief, became miraculously clean at the day’s end. Summer trips to pick harvest in state farm “kolkhozes” no longer existed either, and I deeply envied my parents’ kolkhoz shenanigans, which seemed so tempting with their singing, bonfires and tents. Of course, mother’s memories of these trips were less romantic, especially after an emergency hospital stint from working extra hours to fulfill her quota and falling into a ditch while carrying tomato pails to collection points. At the end of her labor trials she was deemed a weak working citizen, and cleverly got around the harvest rule by forming a traveling band to cheer on the strong mighty workers with tent-side evening camp-fire songs.

But back to the London communist: he pulled out a small lily of the valley bouquet the likes of which we had drawn in elementary school to congratulate our parents with May Day. The girl shyly accepted it with lowered eyes and flushed cheeks – a spitting image of socialist realist innocence, and the happy-go-lucky couple went off to discover the world. In Japan “Fish is Bread,” while Soviet army feed-stock, tinned stewed meat “tushenka,” became food staple in Jamaica. The African sun set upon indigenous dances in front of a pile of red-mud Marx and Lenin heads, while Mexico’s Teotihuacán pyramid was a monument to repatriated Trotsky. The couple wed in the mighty capital, Moscow, where they queued up at the marriage registry, and their union was stamped as 117 on the bride’s palm, and off they left to conquer the Wild Wild West. The frontier husband filled his five-year plan in a “kolkhoz” at the foot of the Grand Canyon, while his pregnant wife stayed at the ranch, happily petting her swollen belly and sipping boiled water from a white metal teapot similar to the one in my apartment. The family’s May Day parades took place in New York where the powerful communist of USSR’s Mosfilm film symbol joined sickle with a hesitant Liberty’s flame, hot air balloons of popular fruit stew “Compot” traversed New York skies in place of Coca Cola, and a blow-up Marx sailed up Fifth Avenue past the Flatiron building. A red theater curtain dropped on this idyll and out rolled a handicapped Marx in a creaky wheel-chair, thanking the audience for watching his splendid show. Instead of applause, dear old Marx received the boot, landing under the blaring Samsung and Mercedes ads of present-day Moscow with a beggar’s tin cup in his hand. Passers-by threw in some kopeks – the ultimate rejection of past Soviet ambitions and a reminder of where Marx’s dreamy ideology led us in real life: disabled, begging pensioners.

Occasionally this thought-provoking musical entertainment was interrupted by snippets of modern slang contained in intermittently aired ring-tone ads. These expressive vulgarities that I could even order to ring on my phone by punching in a bunch of numbers, demystified many a baffling phrase heard earlier in the office. The least nuanced such ring-tone lauded Russians’ eternal battle with the white devil of vodka: “If you don’t pick up the phone, I will tell everyone that you’re an alcoholic,” jeered a mock child voice. Another one, sung in a low Caucasian accent, impersonated a band of hooligans: “Nafiga nam belye kaifushki na kavkaze tozhe prut chudo kalatushki.” From “belie” – white dissidents who left during the revolution – I inferred the following meaning: we don’t need their white pleasures, we in the Caucuses have magic things for beating up people. The meanings of “kaifushki” and “kalatushki” could also only be inferred from their roots – “kaif” meaning pleasure and “kalatit” meaning to beat someone. However, the slang expression “nafiga” was ubiquitous both on the street and in the office, meaning not giving a shit in its declarative, and “why the hell?” in the interrogative form. The origin of this versatile phrase was completely unrelated to its multifarious incarnations, its root being “figa” – a closed fist with the thumb between index and middle fingers, signifying that the “figa” recipient would not get whatever it is that they desire. The ubiquitous “figa” is also the root of another indispensable slang phrase: “offigenno,” meaning cool. “Offigenno” was the main refrain of a mock rap song by stand-up comedian Pavel Volia, “Vse bydet offigenno. Vperedi bolshie peremeni. Neprimenno vse bydet offigenno. Ia smotrel na internete” (Everything will be cool. Big changes are ahead. No doubt, everything will be cool. I checked it out on the internet). Even slang was brimming with satire, first on Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s promises of sweeping changes prior to their troubled reigns, then on the popular new Internet media, a key information source despite all its fraudulent promises and infamy of Russian hackers. I marveled at this richness of social commentary in Russian humor, which went beyond the superficial and material even in the seemingly shallow advertising media.

However, the most imaginative and amusing slang that I also heard earlier in the office evoked the image of a sausage. Losing her patience, one of the young accountants had broken the room’s reigning silence with the following screech, “Blin, chiass menia kak zakolbasit!” (Crêpe, I’m gonna wiggle crazy like a sausage!). The importance of “kolbasit” in modern day slang was solemnly relayed to me in the following ring-tone ad: “Bochka bas kolbasit solii kolbaser po poias golii” (Barrel goes crazy and the sausage-man is half naked). “Kolbasitsia” was the slang expression du jour for being driven insane and had a double meaning: to wiggle about like a sausage trying to bust out of its skin, or to hang together like a bunch of sausages. A stretch of imagination could make this into a cruel and unusual punishment whereupon the victims were wrapped straight-jacket in a gargantuan sausage skin; the sausage smell permeated their entire body and faculties; and wiggling about was the only way out of this predicament until they gave up and just hung together. This was by far my favorite new slang phrase. I vowed to use it and ruminated on some food concoction to add in place of the commonplace “blin” (crêpe).

Justice must be given however, to the reverse Russification simultaneously taking place in Russian pop. Some artists sang in English, with or without heavy accents, or took on English names, while English words bastardized the Russian language both on and off-screen. The Russian Eurovision winners Serebro (Silver) were all the rage that summer – their winning song was played in English on all music channels. Another ubiquitous English-singing pop star, Dima Bilan, had a noticeable accent. The Bentley Sisters, Tim Big Family and Timoti, although singing primarily in Russian, chose to brand themselves with English names. Western words polluted the Russian language: band was translated as “banda”, the most common original meaning of which was a gathering of criminals, hits as “hiti” and MTV celebrity news as “news blok.” My boisterous co-workers heartily bellowed “O-kei” instead of the Russian equivalents “horosho” or “ladno”. In the food shop the phrase price list was translated directly as “prais list.” Slowly but sure bastardized versions of English crept into, their bland “O-keis” encroaching upon the country’s rich and boundless tongue.

Despite its bastard name, MTV’s “news blok” kept in line with its Russian character. Although concerning itself with Western stars just as much as with the Russian ones, “News blok” reported completely different content and perspective. News focused exclusively on who bought what, for how much, and what kinds of expensive possessions that Russian and Western celebrities were toting on their precious persons. Russian stars happily paraded their luxuries and eagerly volunteered prices to the clamoring press. When not reporting on celebrity purchases, the “blok” coverage enthusiastically trashed
Western celebrity bodies. Russian celebrity polls advised JLO to lose at least three kilos from her famous posterior, and lauded the fleshy Beoynce as a meaty cow. Indeed, next to Russia’s slim voluptuous divas, American celebrities appeared chunky and short, or overly heavy and wide-boned. Stripped of their make-up and cleverly concealing clothes JLO and Beyonce would look quite ordinary, while the leggy Russians could knock the wind out of any audience even in their hair-rollers.

Good morning Samara!

2008-09-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

A loud, high-pitched trill cut the air with increasing frequency – the phone. After some fumbling over the bed-stand, I finally stopped it by growling into the receiver in a raspy voice, “Heelloo,” and immediately covered my mouth, wishing to swallow it. Too late. “Dobroe utro. Vy prosily vas rasbudit v sem chasov.” (Good morning. You asked for a wake up call at seven o’clock.) My Russian faculties jerked wide awake by this calamity of English thought, I thanked the attendant in Russian, jammed down the receiver and collapsed, only to jerk up again and dial the company’s number. A flat male voice filled the ear-piece, “This is company KBM.” Thereafter, my ears were drowned in a deluge of the most sincere apologies, first from the man, then from HR manager, Irina: they were under the impression that I was arriving tomorrow.

To change the green, or “bucks” as they called them here with much bravado, I dragged my feet to the station’s Sberbank kiosk where a frail pensioner with a floral kerchief on her head patiently huddled over the counter, her bony fingers rustling along a thin pocket-book wrapped with a plastic bag. After she had received her pension, this “babulia” (grandma) profusely thanked the cashier whom she tenderly called “dochenka” (daughter) and crawled away on her old swollen legs. I stepped up to the counter. The cashier requested my passport together with the money and closely examined the bills, holding them up to the ceiling bulb and turning over multiple times while I anxiously tapped my foot on the floor for what seemed like an eternity. Beginning to fear that she would detain me on some ludicrous fraud suspicions I tried to calm myself with the improbability of drawing fraudulent money from a Swiss bank and racked my rumpled memory for times it may have been left unattended. Up to the cot nap it was stashed inside a velvet sachet and safely pinned to the inner belt of my jeans by my caring mother, where it rubbed against my hip bone as a constant reminder. To my relief the cashier acquiesced and retreated the dollars into her desk. I made a note to find a non-state owned banking venue with slightly more sophisticated fraud detection equipment.

The driver arrived just in time as I settled my hotel bill. His name was Fedia, and he was extremely fat, resembling a round balloon in his blue striped t-shirt. Fedia gazed at me absent-mindedly through blue googly orbs of a child. He had somewhat of an aerial presence. Had he worn suspenders and a propeller on his back, Fedia could have floated off into thin air like Lindgren’s mischievous Karlsson, one of my favorite cartoon heroes who led his quiet Swedish friend into all sorts of naughty adventures. Although a cross-generational hit in the USSR enjoyed by mother and I alike when we were children, Karlsson was banned from the US until the 1960s for fear of inciting children against their parents. Apparently USSR wasn’t the place where good-natured mischief was taken for dangerous provocation.

Karlssonesque Fedia had been working for KBM for two years, prior to which, as he proudly stated, he was the personal driver of an American VP at Yukos. Excited to have met someone tied to what we saw in the West as Russia’s business martyr, I bombarded him with questions, trying to sniff out any insider knowledge on Yukos management. Alas, all my prying attempts were in vain: Fedia didn’t delve into the details and heartily assured me of Yukos’ pre-expropriation greatness. After Khodorkovsky was thrown in jail Fedia was let go along with many others, and found his current job at KBM. We moved on to the subject of micro-lending, which I mentioned was very successful in Kyrgyzstan. Fedia retorted that all Samara’s bazaars were full of Kyrgyz and Tajiks these days, and took pouty offense at this conversation attempt, adding that the level of Russian entrepreneurship was quite different from Kyrgyz. Apparently my innocent remark had opened up a sensitive subject on Central Asian migrants here. We left the conversation at that and I gazed out onto the dusty Samara streets. Deep down though, I was itching to get to the bottom of these entrepreneurial differences as Fedia called them, and would soon learn all about them through my field experiences.

As we drove into my apartment block I noticed that all building entrances in the yard were fortified by heavy bar-coded doors. A fetid odor of dust, sweat and cat excrement permeated my entrance. I sincerely hoped that it didn’t seep into the apartment. The apartment itself was a fortress with three massive locks on two entrance doors, and bars on all windows as well as the balcony entrance, which was also secured by two serious locks. Fortunately, the apartment smelled and appeared clean. Its walls were covered in popular beige wall-paper, and synthetic carpets were spread over wood-patterned linoleum floors – the hallmark of those who couldn’t afford Persians on parquet. A beige faux Persian proudly graced the living/bedroom, while the kitchen floor was gobbled up in a synthetic orange distortion of Art Deco. Returning to these motifs called forth bitter-sweet yearnings of my play-mates’ apartments back in the Soviet days. Beige must have been the most practical of wall-papers for nearly all my friends had it with dizzying floral variations, while their linoleum patterns, identical to the ones of my new abode, were excellent for in-door hop-scotch. It was not uncommon to hang the heavy popular Persians on walls, and many of my now New Kazakh friends had beige Persian backgrounds in their black and white facebook kid photos. Our apartment, of course, was the one that didn’t conform to others, fault of what I took for my mothers’ strange tastes at the time. Her minimalist eye eschewed wall-paper for boring off-white paint, and above all insisted on floors of wood, foregoing the funky linoleum patterns. The Persians were her only point of surrender, as she had no choice but to spread them so as not to offend grandma who went to great pains of bribery and deceit in procuring real ones for her wedding. If not exactly stepping back into my Bishkek home, this was certainly like coming to live with one of my long-time playmates, whose colorful homes had often mesmerized my child self.

Just like in my hotel, the apartment’s living/bedroom was organized around a vast empty space that was encircled by a beige “stenka” (wall) construction of a cupboard/bookcase unit and a mirrored wardrobe. Strawberry motif glasses flanked empty crystal vases on upper cupboard tiers while books on sex and success mixed with miniature Russian Vogues on lower shelves. Violent thrillers filled the nearby TV stand. I asked Fedia if the owner had recently lived here, but he told me that the apartment has been rented to foreigners for some time, prompting some fuzzy musings on whether these things were placed here by my host, who gently anticipated what Russians viewed as key drivers of American culture – sex, violence and success. Of course these popular American conceptions were big taboo in Soviet times, where violence was swept under the rug while success was against the communist norm. Sexual intercourse, or “polovoi act,” was literally translated as a “floor” act, and sexology replaced by sexopathology in the USSR. In the first televised US-USSR cultural exchange during glasnost, the Soviet representative proudly asserted that we didn’t have sex in USSR, we only had love. The flagrant rebellion against this kitsch marriage of love and sex in the promiscuous characters of my favorite dissident author, Milan Kundera, was now beginning to make sense. I was finally beginning to understand his infidels’ freedom, and moreover, the warning against this dangerous association perhaps to blame for early marriages and divorces among mother’s peers. Perhaps the contemporary interest in sex, violence and success was a way of casting off the veil of communist past for a fresher, freer and more honest take on reality even if it was through the pre-conceived norms of the West.

Fedia broke off this dreamy reverie by reminding me that it was time to head to the office and meet my new colleagues. Also on the outskirts of Samara, the office was close to our clients most of whom traded in small goods and produce. We dipped off one dusty road onto another and turned into a long, narrow yard. Our fresh white building gleamed amidst soot-covered houses with peeling paint, rotting windows and lines of laundry drying in over-grown grassy yards. The massive ministry-style cabinet doors on the first floor suggested that it must have belonged to the nomenclature. All doors were closed and upholstered in sound-muffling black leather, no doubt requiring Herculean strength to pry open. Two (out of six) electric bulbs shed light upon this solemn hall, forming an electric halo around Lenin’s head at the opposite end. The marble bust of our great leader regally rested between two fire extinguishers, becoming the biggest light source in the hall. His smooth round forehead deflected rays all the way to the entrance, touching us with its luminous boldness. KBM’s second floor premises were filled with bustling handymen putting on the last touches of renovation. The office was a cheerful contrast of glass doors and pastel walls – the American open door, team-work struggle against Soviet bureaucracy evident in its open spaces, soft colors and glass, if not open, doors.

Bill, the soft-spoken Texan CEO, welcomed me with a profanity-laced apology about the driver “fuck-up” and introduced his second in command, Jake, another mid-Westerner from Arizona. Raising children with Russian wives, Bill and Jake had sunk their roots in Samara and only traveled to the US for Christmas, briefly trading biting Russian winters for the south-Western dry heat. As their wives were not in any hurry to chase their dream in America, the two rough cowboys were out taming Russia’s Wild Wild East instead. They seemed to quite like Detroit Russian-style. My next introduction was to CFO Valerii, a withering workaholic whose slight, hunched-over frame summoned up a fleeting memory of my uncle Vania. The memory flitted on the surface since I was never close to my uncle due to raging wars between grandma and his wife, as a consequence of which neither she nor we were to set foot in each others’ houses. Our day in uncle Vania weary life was Saturday, when he came over with my cousin Misha and silently putted around our fruit and vegetable garden while Misha and I trailed him with mischief on our minds. But back to Valerii – he gravely assured me that those responsible for my driver arrangements would be “punished,” and it took much effort and pleading to dissuade this grand inquisitor from punishing anyone for the mix-up.

An empty barren desk was waiting for me in the accounting department, a large room with six foot ceilings presided over by Valerii. I breathed in the space, a relief from New York’s crusty gray cubicles. Air and sunlight poured in through large open windows, a welcome change from tepid air-conditioning and non-flinching neon lights. Park Avenue’s steel and glass sheath had given way to Rebellion Road’s sumptuous greenery. No longer was I an office rat feverishly spinning the wheel of spreadsheets under a neon bulb, but a field mouse maddeningly dashing about bazaars by daylight!

Valerii’s second in command, Lubov (Love), and six other accountants were sitting at various desks and entering information into non-functioning databases. IT people shuffled in and out to look at their computers. A rather energetic woman, Lubov raced to the IT department, then to Bill with a shrill litany on working conditions, “Our database is not working again! My subordinates can’t do anything until ten o’clock and then it goes off and on throughout the day! How can we work like this?! What kinds of conditions are these for working?!”

Lubov’s laments aside, the only perceptible sounds in the room were those of fingers drumming on key boards and a faint medley of Marilyn Manson, Metallica and Russian folk pouring from Valerii’s laptop. From time to time people whispered about accounting issues over the phone. When Lubov returned, one of the girls, Valia, was helping another with her computer, thus prompting another torrent of fury, “Valia, what are you doing?! Why are you helping her?! Are you being paid to help other people here?! Go back to your desk and do your work! Helping others is not allowed in our establishment!” Valia patiently withered through the outbreak. Perhaps realizing that reproaching friendly Valia was hurting her already suffering standing in others’ eyes, Lubov cooed in softer tones, “Valechka, we have to stop all this socializing and being nice to people. We must concentrate on doing our, not others’, work.”

Lubov was the full-bodied apparition of Soviet authoritarianism in her mid-forties. Her thin brows furrowed, thread lips pursed and button-hole nose perpetually flaring outrage, she was primarily occupied with checking on others, screaming into the phone and making unquestionable rules. After Valia, Lubov had directed her offensive on HR manager Irina, using the slip-up with my arrival as a special occasion, “Irina, I’ve had it with your incompetence! How many times do I need to tell you, Bill needs this visa?! He needs it today! He needs it now!” She banged the phone against the receiver, picked it up, and proceeded to two more such conversations. When she finally put the phone down Valerii dared to relay Bill’s criticism of her work, prompting a screeching retreat, “Otsepis!” – a strange rendition of “Leave me alone” literally translated as “Unchain yourself from me”. Valerii reminded Lubov that he was her supervisor, but she continued to beat retreat, “Otsepis! Otsepis ot menia!”

While I more or less dropped my jaw at Lubov’s dramatic antics, none of the people around me paid the least attention to them, not even raising their eyes at her tantrums. I later learned that those fortunate enough not to work in her department dismissed Lubov’s shouting and gesticulations with good-natured humor. I stepped out to make some tea in the kitchen and happened to overhear some office supervisors gossiping with local branch director, Askar.
“Who made this rule?” asked Askar.
“Lubov,” responded the supervisor, “When I emailed her asking if it wasn’t perhaps possible to speed up the process, she responded with “I told you it takes TWO DAYS!” ”
Another supervisor smiled and said, “How do you know, maybe she meant it like this, “I told you it takes two days.” ”
“No, the two days were all capitalized letters.” Everyone laughed.

Still, the line between love and hate was but a hair-thin thread for Lubov, whose temper made wide pendulum swings between the two extremes. One moment she ominously hailed insults and threats, the next she smiled and cooed beaming like the sun after a storm. Once she had unleashed her wrath Lubov didn’t seem to hold her anger against others. She may have even felt ashamed about her public outbursts, for after up-braiding Valia she brought us all chocolates from the kitchen and took to clucking over her “sweet” young accountants like a hen over her brood. Valia became ill in the afternoon and Lubov sent her home with medicine, calling her tenderly “my little one” and wishing the best of recovery. Her compassionate tenderness became infectious, and Lubov’s caresses seemed to be compensating for the insults. With this mix of anger and compassion Lubov was but a conflicting jumble of emotions and guilt, ready to ignite at any moment into their most extreme and pure forms.

My dazed study of office relations was suddenly halted by Bill, who invited me to lunch together with Jake and Valerii. Both fluent in Russian, Bill and Jake chatted with Valerii in heavy but understandable accents, and Bill sprinkled his Russian with traditional phrases like “Bo-ozhe moi” (My God), sighing in the middle like an old Russian man. As soon as they were in each others’ company, the two wholesome Americans united in solidarity on what must have been their favorite topic – the US presidential race. Valerii and I feigned interest in their heated debate on the merits of Hilary versus Obama. We drove to some Russian restaurant where I picked on traditional Russian soup “borsht” and Central Asian kebab “shashlyk” while listening to their US-Russia comparisons. As Russian MTV blared American rap and R&B on a plasma screen in front of our table, I couldn’t help but steal glances at familiar clips, but found surprises even there. Jake signed to one of the songs and told me that it was performed by a Tatar in the style of legendary American pimp, Snoop Dogg. Leggy Russian beauties barely covered by skimpy minis that looked more like belts than skirts on their hips, were dancing around a silver convertible, while an afroed Algerian-looking man rapped away in what my woozy self identified as Russian. This Russian Snoop wanna-be turned out more manly and muscular than his original, whose long haggard frame and luscious locks had an uncanny drag feel.

In the evening I set about to explore the nearby supermarket “1 Kopeika” (1 Cent), looking forward to local non-plastic vegetables very much missed since moving out of Central Asia. “Dlia zhitelei rodnogo goroda!” (For dwellers of our native town!): proudly announced a large banner hanging above the entrance, its fraternizing “zhiteli” (dwellers) and familial cadence of “rodnoi” (of same roots) making me feel like its dusty citizen. But when the doors slid open, my hopeful sentimentalities gave way to a bleak reality of dirty neon-lit aisles filled with rummaged sale bins. The meat and poultry section looked like a time capsule of ice-age meats and packets of frozen peas, while the carelessly thrown dairy products busted out of their packaging on the shelves. All vegetables, even onions and potatoes that typically lasted a long time, had a soft rubbery texture, and tomatoes exuded a vile sour smell, oozing liquid. A former boss’ concern harkened back. After I had devolved to him my noble quest of banking to the poor and the romantic search for dissident art in Russia, he furrowed his brow and asked, “But, what will you eat there?”
I returned his worry with puzzlement, “I’m sure that they have food there just like anywhere else. We never had problems with food in Kyrgyzstan.”
He then mused on his early nineties student exchange in Russia, “It was terrible, all the shops we went to were completely empty, not a single vegetable, not even an apple, could you find on the shelves. I don’t think I had any vegetables during my stay. I ate chicken liver for breakfast.” Back in his glass office, I had laughed off these food horror tales as a mere bogy of the tourist mind, and heartily assured him that I certainly wouldn’t starve or eat chicken liver for breakfast. After my super-market experience I realized that his worry wasn’t completely unfounded. Still, times had changed, and Samara as I saw it had long passed its post-Soviet deficits and depressions. Produce aside, the market was busting with other goods and there was no dearth of grains, oils and pastas, or of countless varieties of chips, sodas and other Western snacks.

Back in my fortress I instinctively rolled up the carpets and breathed in the free empty space. An all-fours mop inspection revealed clandestine spider-webs whose inhabitants scurried away from my powerful thuds. Blue Tilex spray dispelled a fine film of dust on the walls of the bathroom, which as typical of Russian apartments, didn’t have a sink – just a bathtub and a toilet, making me resign to washing hands and brushing teeth over the tub. The cleaning exercise unearthed traces of globalization even in this working class BRIC haven. Made in China was imprinted on everything from dish towels to the Russian Neva water boiler, which bore an English “Made in Rose Factory, Guangdong China” label next to the Neva logo. Evidently, Russia’s main industry players had also benefited from China just as much as the small-time consumers on Sunday bazaar.

In transit: “Everything is locked, Russian-style!”

2008-07-18T04:47:00.000-07:00

The flight to Moscow was a pleasant surprise of civil Aeroflot service and fresh-smelling, designer-clad passengers. Their relaxed faces emanated indolent comfort – a welcome change in Russian spirit. As we buckled our seatbelts the flight attendants politely advised us not to drink our alcohol on the plane. This I thought was a rather cruel disservice to my neighbors who were quietly nestling bottles inside their breast pockets, and for the entire flight were existentially suspended over earth without butylochka’s consoling comfort. Upon landing the flight attendants handed out migration cards typed in both Russian and English with large “Given Free of Charge” watermarks writ only in Russian. I wondered if this was a bribe prevention measure, but with no English translation for obvious bribe target tourists, it must have served as clarification for those Russians who automatically assumed than nothing was free unless stated otherwise. Perhaps it thwarted suspicious babushkas from thrusting rubles into flight attendants’ hands, “But, dochenka, this paper doesn’t say that it’s free anywhere! How much does it cost? Please, take my rubles!” I surreptitiously snuck an extra into my hoodie.

At Sheremetevo we paced the glass labyrinth that encircled the entire circumference of our arrivals terminal. One of the few passengers traveling past Moscow, I paced the labyrinth at least four times and was referred to five different transit desks before finding the one for Samara. Here I was quite shocked by the courteousness of transit personnel, who didn’t bark at me like they had some years back, and addressed me in English. When I responded in slightly accented Russian, their fresh buttery faces melted into flusters and smiles. The passport controller approved my passport expressly, and even gave me advice on how to register in Samara – a pretty young blonde, she didn’t seem affected by the suspicious Soviet mentality of elder officers, who had on previous occasions poured over my passport as though it was counterfeit. The Blondie directed me to an escalator, at the bottom of which I discovered a glass customs door labeled Green Line. I gave the door a push – it was locked. A linear formation of a luggage scanner, four chairs, and a locked exit door nested under the escalator – my waiting nook. The machine was off and wires haphazardly dangled from the ceiling, coiling toward a lonely archaic camera which was honed in on the scanner. I wondered if the bathroom nearby was locked like everything else. Surprisingly it wasn’t.

The first to arrive in this nook, I settled into a chair and with much pleasure began the observation of others’ puzzlement upon descent. Initially, all passengers engaged in a short-lived struggle with the Green Line door. Looking for a way out, they finally turned around, only to be confounded by the wiry agglomerate of the scanner. The camera’s scrutinizing eye prompted them to hurriedly dump their luggage on the belt, but realizing that that no one was there to scan it, they hauled it off, heaving tired relief. Resigning to this nook, the passengers craned out their necks in search of unoccupied chairs in the back – the chairs were occupied. The general look was one of raised eyebrows and muttering under the breath “This is it?” Indeed, it was – the adjustment to the Russian reality, or rather negation of orderly Western rationality for less logical, but surely fraternizing spaces. The Russians, of course, treated our close companionship with humor. A round dame in tight stretch jeans bounced toward the bathroom on her four-inch stilettos, lighting up in a good-natured laugh, “Kak po rossiiski vse zaperto!” (Everything is locked, Russian style!).

The rest of our transit consisted of being herded to and locked in a variety of small spaces: the bus, a security area, a waiting corridor, an outdoor corral, and outside the old Tupolev. Each step of the way severe personnel inconspicuously dressed in lay clothes, but armed with walkie-talkies, awaited command center clearance. We finally boarded the Tupolev, which looked exotically antique next to the Boeing, but felt quite sturdy at take-off. The Tupolev was like a bigger version of the dirty, ill-smelling private jet I once used on a road show back in the glamorous banking days, which also had the laziest flight attendant. The Tupolev’s flight attendants were exceptionally polite on the other hand, and even went to extra lengths in procuring ice for my juice, while the Russians down my row raised their eyebrows at the insensible idea of mixing drinks with ice cubes, the first of my many slip-ups. A dim yellow bulb faintly flickered on behind snapping Soviet commands: “Ne kurit!” (Don’t smoke!) “Zastegnut remni!” (Fasten seatbelts!) – a change of tone after the Boeing’s verbose entreaties of “Please fasten your seatbelts while seated.” Drab gray carpeting lined the walls while checkered gray curtains dressed the windows. Tiny cracks in my window’s interior frame became a make-shift air conditioner, growing mossy with frost and oozing out a light cooling draft under my rib. Nevertheless, the dim lighting, rusted seatbelts and worn-out gray made for a certain nostalgia of times past, but never lived.

The Tupolev was taking us to Samara, a car manufacturing center in the south, also known as the “Detroit of Russia.” I wondered if this Western comparison was meant for foreigners, but the only Americans on our Russian-filled plane were a group of high school volunteers. The obvious alternative thereafter, was an overseas comparison for Russians – in Samara, the American dream could be lived just as well Russian-style. In fact, Samara comparisons didn’t just stop with America, but also took Europe as a measuring stick, boasting the longest European beach, largest square and deepest World War II bunker. Learning about these landmarks from my future Samara colleagues, I began to question the foreign news coverage that trumpeted Russians as Western wannabes as a gross under-estimate of their history conditioned desire to surpass, not merely measure up to, the West.

00:53: the flight landed and we hustled off to arrivals. Having received multiple assurances that I would be met by a driver, I emerged from the terminal eagerly searching for the welcoming sight of my name on a plaque and compulsively weaved through the tiny arrivals crowd. The crowd encircled a fenced-off cage, the luggage carousel, which could only be entered after thorough inspection of one’s passport, ticket and luggage tag by a platinum blonde in uniform and killer spike stilettos. As the carousel began to move it occurred to me that my driver would not come after all, and all I had were some futile assurances – no emergency number, nor address. Survival instincts kicked in and I began to gravitate towards the lonely Americans in gray “Service” T-shirts. I meandered over to one of their leaders, a muscular hulk of man with blue eyes bulging out of his large head, “Hi, I noticed that you were speaking English earlier. I’m Adele, also arriving from the States.”
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” bellowed the man, engulfing my thin hand in his enormous one, “I’m Bob from Virginia and we’re doing some church volunteering at a religious camp near Samara.”

“How interesting, I didn’t know that Samara was popular for its religious activity.”

“Yeah, this is the second year we’re coming here. Some of these kids have volunteered in other countries too, those two over there have lived abroad as missionaries like me and my wife.”

“Bob, I am so sorry to impose myself on you, it’s just that you are the only ones speaking English. My organization assured me that they would send a driver to pick me up, but didn’t give any emergency phone number or address. I still haven’t seen any driver with my name plaque out there and the taxi drivers look so scary. I don’t have a clue as to where I could spend the night. Maybe if I could come with you and check in at whatever hotel you are staying, I would really appreciate it.”

“Don’t worry,” Bob reassuringly patted my shoulder, “our translators are coming. They’ll have information on where we’re staying tonight. You can spend the night with us if you wish. Don’t be scared, we won’t leave you alone. Did you say you were from New York? Gina is also from there,” he pointed at a tall blonde girl who was hauling her bag from the carousel.

“Thank you so much Bob,” I breathed out in relief, “this makes me feel so much better about the whole night-time adventure.” Seeing that Bob’s eyes were anxiously darting around the carousel for bags, I moved over to Gina.

When Bob’s Russian translators arrived, they measured me up suspiciously, “We need to see some documents, a business card at minimum to know what she’s doing here,” they issued their ultimatum to one of the American girls who was somewhat fluent in Russian. Assuming that I didn’t speak Russian, the girl turned to me and translated the sugar-coated version of this demand, “They want to know if you have a business card, or some phone numbers you could call, or perhaps an address… so they can get in touch with your company.”

Of course none of these things happened to be in my possession as I had just quit one job and haven’t yet started another. It was pure luck that the translators assumed I didn’t speak Russian. Had I admitted to it, I would have been left alone for sure – at least so nagged the gut feeling inside. I continued with the English charade, “Oh I have an office number and address,” I took out a piece of paper with the company’s official phone number and address, “do you know where this office is?”

One of the translators glanced at the paper and shook his head, “This is not Samara center, too far, give me the phone number.” He took away my paper and started to dial the number on his cell. After a few minutes he shook his head again, “Not good – answering machine.”

“Yes, they are only there during work hours,” I chimed in, “They promised that they would send a driver to pick me up. I asked many times for the driver’s number, or at least an address where he was dropping me off, but they wouldn’t give it to me. Now, I’m stuck here with no driver and no clue where to go. Could I please come with you and check in at whatever hotel you all are staying tonight as well? I just need a place to stay for the night until I can call them in the morning.”

“We’re not staying in hotel,” the man replied, “stay here, I’ll be back.” After more sideways glances and another chat with Bob the translators finally capitulated and returned with a proposal for me, “Because we are staying in an apartment, you can’t stay with us – there is no space,” the much friendlier girl translator explained, “we can take you to a hotel on the way near the train station.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to inconvenience your large group. It would be much better if you could just drop me off at a hotel on the way. I really appreciate it. As long as it’s a safe hotel that you recommend, I don’t mind the rest. It doesn’t have to be nice.”

“We’ll take you to the hotel at the train station. It’s expensive, but I think it’s safe,” replied the girl. At this we gathered our trunks and rolled them to a “marshrutka” public minivan that was waiting for us outside. I doubted that any public transport at all went to the Samara airport in the midst of the night, and the marshrutka must have been arranged by the translators. We piled in and set off into the Samara night. In our casual chatter I discovered that the two teen missionaries with us once lived in Kyrgyzstan. I perked up, excited to chat about Bishkek, then caught myself just in time, “Oh, that’s so interesting, did you live in the capital?” Still, it came out overly enthusiastic.

“Where are you from, Adele?” asked Bob, perhaps sensing my cover-up.

“Oh, my parents work for the UN, so I’ve been pretty much everywhere, Pakistan, Kenya, now they are in Switzerland, so that’s my home for the moment.”

“Yes, but what nationality are you?” Bob was becoming impatient, “What kind of passport do you have?” Here I had to pause for had I revealed it to them right then and there, my trunk and I might have been left on the side of the road. “Oh, I’m French-Japanese. My father is French and my mom – Japanese,” I sheepishly lied, hoping that these wholesome Americans neither spoke French nor ventured into the Far East on their missions. Still, it didn’t sound convincing. “They live in Switzerland now, and like it very much, because we can all speak French there in Geneva,” I added, incredibly grateful for the night which hid my blushing shame.

“So you’re fluent in French,” exclaimed the translator, “One of my friends is studying French in Switzerland.” As conversation resumed, my nationality trials were put to rest. Eventually, our exhaustion got the better of us and we grew quiet. Outside, the air cooled down after a storm, and our warm humid breath blurred up the windows. Dark forests and fields stretched all around as we solemnly bumped over pot-holes for what seemed like hours. I imagined riding in a shabby taxi with no idea of a safe place to go, and was ever so thankful for the Americans.

At last we arrived at my hotel. I jumped out of the van with my suitcase and profusely thanked Bob for not leaving me to the mercy of criminal-looking taxi drivers. The Samara train station stood out a towering glass conglomerate against the sky, and was much cleaner and emptier than the crowded, dirty stations of New York. My hotel entrance was stowed away somewhere inside its bowels, and as we naturally got lost on the way, I tried very hard not to read the direction signs above my head. Anticipating registration with my clearly Kyrgyz passport, I attempted to get rid of the translator, but, alas, she insisted on accompanying me to the concierge.

“Does anyone here speak English?” she asked the over-weight attendant who was bent over some dish towel embroidery, which very much resembled the towels I once embroidered with grandma for her death preparations. Grandma had been preparing for her death ever since I was born, embroidering and crocheting little decorative piles for what she claimed should be her proper burial. These death preparations must have been spurred by her fear that we, in our Soviet and thereafter Western laity, no longer knew the proper way to bury people, and I suspected that she had the entire ritual carefully recorded somewhere for the black day. However, as she continued thriving gloriously in excellent health, grandma’s death preparations found their way into life, and our entire extended family dried their dishes with those death towels of hers, which she eventually gave away as presents. The hotel attendant however, did not look like she was preparing for her black day and instead of answering, shook her head no, much to my grief.

“They don’t speak English here, I’ll help you check in,” said the girl.

“All payment must be made upfront at registration,” the attendant retorted, further aggravating the situation. While the girl was translating what I already knew, it had dawned on me that I didn’t have any rubles.

“Oh, no, I forgot to exchange money in Moscow,” I told her, “but I have dollars. How much is it in dollars? Can I leave her a dollar deposit and then pay in rubles tomorrow morning as soon as the exchange office opens?”

The attendant was rather displeased with my translated proposal, but after some haggling they did agree on the dollar deposit after all. The attendant demanded my passport together with the deposit, and once more the feared moment had come. Nervously fiddling with it inside my bag, I began to concoct a series of long-winded assurances, “Well, I think I have it under control from here on. It’s just giving in my papers and shouldn’t be too much of a worry,” looking at the clock on the wall, “Gosh, it’s already three o’clock! I don’t want to hold you up any longer. Thank you so much for all your help, I don’t know what I would have done without you.” I clapped my hands together and hid behind a grimace of upward-stretched lips picked up on my previous job from a certain banker.

The translator hesitated at this litany of excuses, her lucid blue eyes re-filling with questioning mistrust, but after an awkward silence finally left. I silently counted to three to make sure she was gone, and quietly handed over the passport. We switched to Russian in hushed tones. Mother had later suggested that the girl was expecting a tip for going out of her way to take me to the hotel, but I liked to believe that she was just being a good Samaritan, my first welcome to the city’s people.

The attendant and I embarked on a short-lived voyage to my room, where she led me through various mazes of musty carpeted hallways. “You know, this hotel is very expensive,” she harped on, testing my reaction.

“Of course!” I exclaimed, “A hundred dollars a night, that’s ridiculous! My organization was supposed to send a driver to take me to my apartment, but apparently they forgot. And on top of it, refused to give me his phone number, or even some address. By the way, are taxis safe to take here at night?”

“Oh, yes, taxis are pretty safe, but also ve-ery expensive,” said the attendant.

“How nice of Americans to give me a free ride in their van. I’m so glad they were on my flight, I really had no clue where to go until their translators suggested your hotel. But don’t worry, I’m not paying for my organization’s mistake.”

At this she opened my door and wished me goodnight. I rolled my trunk into a long empty entrance area which led to a vacuous space in the middle – the room. Russian-style, all furniture was stacked against the walls, while the bed was a squeaky steel cot in the corner. I noticed a mini-bar under the desk, which suddenly awakened my thirst, but turned out completely empty. As the shabby door lock didn’t seem trust-worthy, I propped myself on the cot and attempted consciousness in a half sitting position. Empty trains arrived and departed to methodic announcements of a woman’s voice over the loudspeaker. The cuckoo clock on the wall monotonously ticked away time, yet another distraction from losing consciousness, but my battle to stay awake was snow-balling down hill as bouts of dozing stretched longer and my body grew numb to clocks and trains.

On How this All Came About

2008-07-18T04:16:00.000-07:00

“Children, we are leaving to Pakistan,” mother informed us, “you will be going to an international school and speaking English there. Are you excited?!” Still in that tender age of unquestioning acceptance for everything mother said, we were wildly excited indeed. “We will live together with Umit, whom you are to call Dad,” she added. My little brother dissolved in a smile at the prospect of a new father. We had only met Umit twice before, so this sudden leap to intimacy was hard for me to swallow. A big bulging lump rolled up my dried-out throat while mustering up the courage for “Dad,” through which my voice squeaked like a mouse. Soon enough the lump went away, and Dad became a habit explained only when curious people inquired about my different last name.

Mother’s quiet elopement proved all those naysayers wrong, who opposed her divorce and fight for our custody on grounds that no one would marry her with that tail of two kids. No one knew about this marriage. My grandmother, who disapproved of the first one, and perhaps with reason, didn’t learn about it until months later. Perhaps there was a wedding, but we weren’t in it. Of course we didn’t tell anyone where we were going. For friends and family alike Mother concocted a story about moving to Moscow. And thus it was that we were plucked out of our Bishkek habitat and transported to the dusty jungles of Islamabad. While my playmates back in Bishkek witnessed the slow toppling of communism, our quiet Soviet life was suddenly turned upside-down by full-blown colonialism. An ever-changing parade of cooks, drivers and maids bustled through our new enormous house as mother hired and fired them in succession. The most impressive feature of this grandiose edifice, were its stairs previously seen only in popular Indian soaps, when mom and grandma sobbed into their kerchiefs at the sentimental sight of some sappy heroine rolling down beautiful marble steps to Bollywood’s cacophonous trills.

“To learn proper English, you must read this,” mother gave me a thick tome of Pride and Prejudice. Soon enough I discovered I wasn’t the only sixth-grader reading Austen as quite a few of my new Pakistani and Iranian friends were learning “proper” English through her social intrigues. The un-cool, nerdy Americans had also followed suit, noses deep in dog-eared copies of Emma on the bus, while overly developed, pimply cool girls snoozed in the back with cool boys. The next four years whirled by in a succession of UN days, cultural fairs and embassy compounds. Hungrily feasting on MTV and VH1, I forgot all about Russian, offending our visiting grandma who disapprovingly shook her head every time she shuffled past my room in her wooly slippers, “Look at you, such Americans you became now, always speaking English with each other. When was the last time you read anything in your own language? Your brother doesn’t read, or even speak Russian anymore.”

And so it was that the family’s colonial life continued in Kazakhstan and Kenya while I was sent to boarding school in the States. A sunny two hour drive through blazing foliage of Indian summer and I was in front of my dorm at Northfield Mount Hermon School, NMH, my nurturing, character-building cradle of independence – cleaning being the first, and thereafter most serious autonomous rite. Thankfully, grandma’s resisted tutelage of daily floor-washing exercises in Bishkek had not been entirely forgotten, and even though my long French nails were chipped to pieces after the first routine, the smell of fresh wood that I had mopped all by myself without sans maid, was wonderfully rewarding. Of course the trade-off – family separation – took time to muster, the first year a teary blur of home yearning that pressed against my breast with a ticklish nag – what Kafka called “tears that cannot be wept” in a pining letter to his wife. But the tears subsided and the pressing was muted as life churned and new relationships formed.

Soon enough NMH’s rural idyll gave way to the urban intoxication of New York, where I arrived a tough Barnard fresh-woman who no longer pined for home or puked out mixes of drugs, cigarettes and booze. The great Big Apple was pure exhilaration of museums, theaters and morning bar-top boogies in grungy Columbia bars. A drug bust in our favorite such establishment prompted the grudging upgrade to a downtown lounge with a catwalk for the exhibitionists, but soon enough all these amusements began to fade in the reclusion of investment banking. All the rough and tumble of New York nights with its bar and club queues, hour-long restaurant waits and rude taxi drivers simply overwhelmed my nerves, already worn-out from days of rude screaming bankers. Meeting the sunrise with a post-work cigarette atop the “2 Gold” banker dorm was the only respite – a tiny pleasure of inhaling the adulterous city that never slept twice in its fragile moment of slumber. Back in the office after many such sunrises it finally dawned that my poorer student days were happier, and perhaps it didn’t take money to be rich. An existential dilemma at that, what next?

June 30th: the heavy chains of investment banking were finally shed, my miserable corporate existence ceased, and life began. In a tongue-and-cheek cliché the world was my oyster and I leisurely sloshed inside its shell, sliding along sinewy mollusk muscles. The new quest - banker to the poor; the new passion - an old affair with art history.
I stuffed my trunks and left my job, my boss and my city for microfinance in Russia, hoping to discover some dissident artists and maybe even a part of my soul on the way.