It was time to leave Russia. Three weeks of avoiding eye contact with scowling babushkas, deciphering Cyrillic script, and desperately trying to keep warm despite the country’s reticent spring and lingering white nights had made me weary.  The driver pulled the groaning Peugeot into the departure lane of Saint Petersburg Airport, swiftly and unsmilingly unloading my luggage before placing my hand in his calloused one to shake it, then hopping back in the car and sputtering away.  

All majestic imperial beauty of the city’s cobblestones streets and cobalt waterways disappeared at the airport, its looming Soviet structures easily convincing passengers that they would be better off travelling overland. Sighing, I dragged the bulging purple suitcase across the crumbling concrete sidewalk and through the smudged glass automatic doors. They creaked and heaved, closing prematurely around my suitcase with a sadistic “Eeeeeeeee!” I pulled the violet behemoth’s handle, my food wedged between the bottom of the suitcase and groaning door.

It loomed two meters in front of me and I sighed in resignation—the fortified x-ray luggage machines and the uniformed inspectors, standing like the riot police lining Red Square’s parameters the week prior in Moscow. I remember the abject surprise of seeing so many guards and soldiers flooding the public squares and lush city gardens during the city’s Victory Day celebrations as I crisscrossed the gravel and grass, my jaw dropping as pedestrians into the park waited for their turn through the pop-up metal detectors and mobile linen screens for random full-body searches.  Moscow’s force protection measures were steroidal. Tanks rolled through blocked-off grand boulevards and metro exits were randomly sealed off to “protect” people during the parades—never mind that passengers exiting the trains were unaware of the closures, leaving me, along with hundreds of my closest friends, trapped kilometers below the city with only Lenin’s mosaic countenance to keep us company.

I had expected such antics in Moscow, but in Saint Petersburg—the achingly beautiful ghost of the city, with its museums and canals and plazas and cathedrals—was a salve for the capital’s authoritarian burns. But the last of the salve had been wiped from its jar, and security was back in place in Saint Petersburg. I knew the drill from a thousand times before—I would stand politely as guards poked and prodded at my luggage’s innocuous contents. The more cooperative I was, the sooner I could check in, obtain boarding passes, and nurse one last chilled vodka before the flight to Kiev. It would only be a matter of minutes.

There was no line as I lifted the suitcase to the rubber belt, beginning its journey through the curtain of rubber slits. I walked through the metal detector, attempting to look as non-threatening and white and Western and unworthy of profiling as possible. I got it. Russia was not a tolerant bastion of multicultural diversity, as my friend Dimanche and his boyfriend Sasha back in the capital constantly reminded me. But I had been lucky. In the weeks across Russia, my Aryan features were my immunity in a deeply suspicious land.

 As the giant guard in drab olive waved me through with his brow furrowed, I turned to grab my suitcase, mentally already at the vodka bar. But as I reached for the luggage, two other guards on the other side of the belt, at the end of the x-ray machine, reached it before I could, poking at it, frowning, muttering to one another in Russian. The shorter one—he must have been only 6’2”—looked at me, pointing his massive hand covered in blue latex towards my suitcase. I assumed that he wanted to know if it was mine and I nodded.

They put the suitcase through the machine again, and the belt halted. “Pila? Battery?” By this point, a third guard had sidled up to my right, his aqua eyes narrowing.  “Ah! Pazhalsta!” I breathed in relief. All they wanted were the damn batteries from my suitcase! Of course! The two across from me stood back, their thick arms folded as I unzipped the suitcase, riffling through the impeccably packed and sealed shirts and pants. I pulled out the Ziploc bag of Energizers, handing them over. The three of them grunted, moving the suitcase once more to the opening of the machine. It seemed a bit of overkill for three hulks to crowd over one rickety x-ray machine. This number didn’t even include the robot of an agent hunched in his stool, scrutinizing the exposed contents of the luggage as they slid across the belt like the exposed negative of a photograph.  Nor did it include the agent waving people through the metal detector.

Actually, since my luggage had been stopped, nobody was being waved through. And the once empty airport, in what could have only been minutes, had become crowded; crowded enough to now have a line of scowling passengers in their mink coats and black leather jackets and leopard-print suitcases, all anxious to go through the line and on their way to their Odessa playgrounds.  And I was causing the hold-up. It didn’t matter that they were the children of Soviet bureaucracy and probably entered this world while their parents were waiting in a line. The audible hisses were more than enough to know that I wasn’t making any friends.

The transparent bag of AAs and AAAs—mostly AAAs—crinkled in the agent’s fist. I held my breath as the suitcase continued its eternal journey through the ½ meter receptacle, attempting to give myself a motivational pep talk.  “The batteries are out! No worries, Martha!” Solace was found in the memory of a similar hold-up two-months prior, when I had started this whole adventure. At that time, I was connecting through Seoul from L.A. en-route to Bangkok. There, I remember polite efficient dolls of women in their impeccable beige and red uniforms expertly combing through arrivals’ luggage, checking for suspicious items. They had discovered, at the time, two heavy bags of batteries, swiftly placing them in a small basket before pushing the suitcase through a second time. I was cleared within 30 seconds, my bags of batteries handed back to me with a courtesy bow. Surely, I thought, it would be the same with this inspection and I would be on my way. Any second now.

Still hunched over his stool, the agent viewing the x-ray shook his shiny bald head, a deeper frown on his mechanical face. That’s when the paranoia set in—that feeling when you know you’ve done nothing wrong, but the suspicion nevertheless infiltrates the conscience.  I wracked my brain for answers. “What is going on? What bullshit souvenir could possible be mistaken for a freakin’ explosive? Is my wine opener getting confiscated? Shit. Am I getting detained here? I don’t speak Russian. And I know they’ll take away my iPhone, and that’s the only place I have the embassy’s number…shit…I don’t even have the local consulate number…”

Groans and Russian cursing floated from the other side of the machine, and I was certain the unmoving queue was easily a mile long by that point. My heart started to pound and a trickle of sweat in the frigid May afternoon descended from my temple. “We open. Okay.” It was a statement more than anything else as the four agents pulled the suitcase from the x-ray cubby, pulling it towards the end of the belt.

Oh shit. Then I remembered.

 “Um, excuse me, is there a lady agent? I talk to female, yes?”

 “What? No understand.” The behemoth to my side shooed me to distance himself as he snapped the latex gloved around his hamhock hands.

 “Um…lady product. Batteries in the lady product.” The flush of red crawled through my face.

 “No understand lady product.” By this time, the agents were hunched over the bulging suitcase, coaxing open the jammed zipper, hurriedly closed before its second trip through the machine. Once the zipper acquiesced, they dug in like children at Christmas. But instead of shredded wrapping paper and glistening bows flying across the living room, it was my dirty socks and matroyshka dolls and granny panties, once nicely folded and sealed in vacuum-tight bags, now soaring through the screening space and landing on the stained linoleum.

It’s funny when you know something out of your control is about to happen but you are helpless to stop it. I stood before the free-for-all in front of me that was all about me, but could not intervene. As they tore through my things, I remember thinking back to a car accident, when I fish-tailed on the snow as a college freshman, and as the end of my parents’ trusty Ford Taurus slowly careened into the metal barrier, I took a breath, bracing myself. The seconds became hours waiting for that inevitable impact. While I was no longer in the velvet upholstered driver’s seat of Teddy the Taurus, I again was paralyzed in a moving diorama.

By this time, the crowd was craning their bejeweled necks. The twitters of impatience evolved into murmurs of curiosity.

“Please, oh god, oh god, don’t lift it. Up. Do. Not. Lift. It. Up.”

It was nestled in one of my shoes at the bottom of the case, safely ensconced in its satin gray pouch. I tried once more to reason with them.

“Um, lady agent?” My voice grew weak with resignation. “Private?” I whispered, wanting desperately for the dirty linoleum to cave in and swallow me. “Adult toy?”

It was too late.

A collective “Whoooah!!!” or its Russian equivalent arose from the four. I buried my head in my hands as they gently untied the pouch’s drawstring.  One gingerly pulled the pouch down as another pulled it out—bubble gum pink and curved perfectly with the floating butterfly at its base. Unpeeling his gloves, the one closest to me reached across the belt, grabbing it, pushing the “on” switch.

“Oh!!!” One exclaimed, running his fingers over its curves and bumps. Another excitedly grabbed it, clicking the “On” switch at its base multiple times. I had never heard such squeals of joy coming from grown men before. For an eternity they pressed the button with its adjustable speeds and intensities. I could do nothing but stand there, shaking my head.

 “Ah!!!!”

I looked up to see the one who could have dwarfed Dolph Lundren resting the whirring vibrator against his chiseled cheek. They must have sensed my disapproval.

“No boyfriend?”

I stood there, glaring.

Within seconds, the disheveled clothes and belongings thrown about were picked up, folded, and sealed back in their respective bags. The article of interest was placed back in its velvet purse, batteries removed.  The suitcase did not go through the x-ray a third time. Instead, after zipping it closed, one of the agents rolled it towards me, securing a bright orange “Fragile” sticker on the front. Giant Dolph slowly took my hand, placing the Ziplock bag and its dwindling batteries in it.

“Thank you, Miss. Have a wonderful flight.” The words were eloquent for an inspector claiming to not understand English.

I turned to look back before heading to the check-in, my face drained of all color and my ears burning. For all I know, what seemed like an eternity to me, may have only happened in two or three minutes. Before I knew it, the line started moving again, as if the giant “Pause” button that had slowed down the time during the inspection once again hit “Play.”  The line of passengers was breezing through the detectors, their luggage waved through without hesitation or suspicion. It was business as usual and almost like the exposé had never even happened. I shook my head, wondering if it even had.

The agents must have noticed I was watching and they broke with their inspection of the passengers for an ephemeral moment. The four of us locked eyes as the passengers hurried past. One smiled. One nodded his buzz-cut head. One winked. One with his latex blue gloves on waved.  Somehow, I managed to sheepishly wave back before walking away.