Tag Archives: Moscow

The War Zone

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Wilhelm and I stood  in the corridor, the scenery afforded to us by the long windows was but a small compensation for the lack of insulation between the elements outside.  We shivered in our failure of hooded jackets and REI thermal shirts. I planned to personally slap the REI product developer in the face upon my return to the US, wondering if the company had bothered to test their cold weather products in actual cold climates.

Anka was busy typing her new screenplay while her husband and I stood there. Ekaterinburg six hours before had marked the entry into European Russia and away from Asian Russia. Despite the subzero temperatures I was ecstatic to be one train track closer to the West. Lanky pine trees replaced the naked birches, and the Ural Mountains, covered in forests and soggy black log cabins, stretched into the horizon. Visions flashed in my dreams of traipsing the mountains, which time had worn down to gentle hills, all the way south through the Caucuses down to the Caspian Sea. I had to remind myself that they awaited me  in a few weeks’ time, just as this journey bided its time for me for eight years years, readying itself to welcome me as a guest in a time when I didn’t even know the invitation existed.

Visions of the Transiberian Rail journey entered my consciousness a lifetime before, when I shared a beer with a Stanford University drop-out at a Krakow hostel and he mentioned he was headed to Beijing to teach English, and would take the train on the way. At the time, I wanted to drop everything and tag along. But I had school to finish in Spain, and then life was to unfold–military service, disability,  marriage, divorce, things like that. But finally, years later, the chance to take the journey came again. It’s how I found myself nearly five days into the six-day trek from Beijing to Moscow.

Wilhelm snorted in laughter, bringing me back to the present. “Look at this place,” he said, pointing to the razed artillery yards now coming into focus. Warehouses punctuated the endless forests, their windows blown out, leaving behind gaping holes and crumbling bricks. The tall watch towers, one right in front of us and the other in the distance, were both toppled over.

Cabins in the distance clung to rotten wood and corrugated steel, but were inconsequential compared to what was driving near the train. A bedazzled Hummer, equipped with multiple sets of blinding florescent headlights, platinum rims on the tires, and air-brushed designs on its hood, crawled at parade-route speed through the abandoned environs, like a UN aid truck with an identity crisis.

“Of course,” said Wilhelm, shaking his head. “Of course that would be here. This place looks like a war zone already. If not here, then where?”

I smiled, although at that point Lady Gaga could have emerged from the crumbling warehouse or one of the acrobats from Beijing could have triple-flipped across the charred landscape and it wouldn’t have surprised me. Seven weeks into this journey–the child prostitutes in Thailand, the shattered skulls and blood stains in Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng prison, the dysentery and soldier ghosts in Vietnam, the police state in their designer clothes in China, and the drug smugglers at the border in Mongolia—nothing surprised me anymore it seemed.

The rain intensified, splattering the smeared pane. I bid my neighbors goodnight and returned to my cabin. Another frigid night awaited but I needed whatever traces of slumber the cold would be willing to provide. Moscow would greet me in less than 24 hours and I had to rest, to focus. The past 5 days ensconced on the train, sheltered from the countryside but still so exposed, may have been an ill preparation for the awaiting city.

This part of the journey, the one I thought I would dislike the most due to its crowd of people, its lack of privacy, and the wrought boredom, had been nothing like that. It had instead been my favorite part. The train’s sparse population, and the quiet and isolation of traveling with so few people at the beginning had compounded a broken heart. That part of the story, if it’s even worth telling, is for a different time. But as the days passed and the Siberian sun stretched and inevitable introspection forced itself upon me, I knew I would be okay even if I was alone. I just wish I would have known it weeks before. Or years before.

But it was unfair to judge the past and those things I did not know then. Perhaps all I had to begin with–myself–was all I ever needed.

At that point, the brooding and epiphanies no longer mattered. The train’s hypnotic sway rocked me like a lullaby as I crawled into bed.  Four wool blankets piled on top of my body were my shield from the intrusive ice working its way through the berth windows. I closed my eyes as resignation, sorrow, contentment, and acceptance took their final waltz through me, and I remember thinking how well I would sleep that night.

Twenty Minutes to Moscow

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Finally, the time on my watch and on my iPhone’s intermittent reception correspond with the train schedule that was posted on the corridor’s wall–the one that had been mocking me since I left Beijing six days before: Moscow Time.

It’s funny how inconsequential time becomes when you’re on a train for so long.

The whole concept of “are we there yet?” does not apply, because you know damn well you are not. The vast plains that stretch before you, the forests’ stark shadows that play tricks with your mind, the tundra that haunts and chills you even as you sit safely in your train berth, and the myriad train depots acknowledged but for a minute, all indicate the thousands of miles left.

So you do not wait. All you do is exist, attempting to find meaning in the shifting environments and the stories of travelers encountered on the same journey. You bide time, finding that the only constant and only source of strength in the frozen tundra of uncertainty comes from within.  The time then passes so quickly once you’re at peace with this permanent state of journey.

That is, until the last hour of the trip. Any notion of reason, patience, and preoccupation is thrown to the wayside, another piece of trash on the train tracks, yet another bit of flushed excrement from the train toilet disappearing as the wheels race by.

Suddenly, time is torture.

The train crawls. The seconds stagger, a drawn-out dance around the outskirts of Moscow. The welcoming committee includes the graffiti murals and beige smoke stacks, and the crumbling brick warehouses with their barbed wire, nodding as you pass. Citizens–bare-chested paunchy men grilling for the bleach-blonde women by their side, outfitted in leather pants and five-inch stilettos–lounge at picnic sites near sparse grass embankments, a life-saving green compared to the thick dust and gray of lands and time zones past–perhaps only three days before yet a lifetime away now that you’ve come so far.

Twenty minutes left before the train pulls into the station. The past six days are a flash of memory, and now those last moments of the journey are the burdens too difficult to bear.

I am antsy. My stomach is a roller coaster on these otherwise smooth tracks, gently swaying past more and more concrete buildings and churches and crowds. The frigid frontier nights the past week across China, Mongolia, and Siberia, with the stern border guards and drug-sniffing cocker spaniels and glare of florescent lights, the possibility of urban legend of nocturnal bandits made reality, were never dangers.

But now, the grandmotherly comfort of my train berth, the normalcy of passing fields and chasing the sun that became my sanctuary, are leaving me as the K3 from Beijing pulls into Yaroslavisky Station. I have never been so scared.

Twenty minutes is now a lifetime.

 

Batteries Not Included

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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.