The Russian Word for Snow

by Janis Cooke Newman

  "Let's just go."

  Ken held up a finger to get the attention of a waiter who'd just brought a second bubbling bowl to the heavyset couple. He shouted, "Schyot/" (bill!) at another, who kept his face turned away from us.

  "How much do you think all this was?" Ken asked.

  "I don't think we should pay for it at all," I whispered, making it sound like I was telling him a secret.

  A waiter stuck his head out the double doors, and Ken yelled, "Schyot!" at him.

  The waiter pulled his head back without making eye contact, and a man talking into a cell phone at the next table put a finger in his free ear.

  I stood up.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I'm leaving."

  Ken looked at the door the waiter had disappeared behind, then grabbed his camera bag and followed me.

  When we reached the podium, our waiter shot out of the double doors waving a small piece of paper at us. We couldn't read anything written on the bill, and there appeared to be more items than we'd ordered, but we paid it anyway—throwing thousand-ruble notes at the man who did not seem to want to touch our money.

  Outside on the street, I squinted my eyes against the too-bright sun. I could see no shade, no trees—only concrete sidewalk, windowless stone buildings and streets wide enough to land an airplane on. The air was hot and smelled of exhaust from the cars that raced past us, sunlight glinting off their metal hoods.

  "Where is this place we're going?" Ken asked.

  I took out the map folded to the Central House of Artists.

  "It's here," I pointed, "near Gorky Park."

  On the map, the park appeared as an uneven green rectangle, the only green thing for miles.

  We started walking to the corner, a distance that in any other city would have been broken into several blocks. The wide sidewalk was empty. No Russians with their ubiquitous plastic shopping bags hurried past us. Ken and I were the only living things on this street south of the Moskva River, and we were surrounded by concrete and metal and the white-hot sky.

  "According to this, there are two museums in that building," Ken said, looking at the map. "Which one are we going to?"

  "I don't know."

  He stopped walking and looked at me.

  "I didn't know there were two museums."

  At the Central House of Artists, a woman with a bosom like a shelf sat behind thick glass. In the guidebook, the admission to the museum was listed as $6, but the sign above the woman's head put the foreigners' price closer to $10.

  "Maybe we should see if this is right museum before we go in," I said.

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  Ken walked up to the glass. "Soviet political posters?" he asked the woman.

  "Nyet Soviet," she told him. "Nyet." And she pointed to the admission sign, as if to prove her point.

  "Where did you read about this exhibit?" Ken asked me.

  "In the Moscow Times."

  "Did you bring the paper?"

  "I left it at the hotel."

  Ken pulled the phrase book out of his pocket with a little more force than was necessary and flipped through it. The woman with the large bosom sat patiently behind her glass. There was nobody else waiting to get into the museum.

  "Plakat?" Ken asked, using the Russian word for poster.

  The woman shrugged and shook her head, but it was unclear whether she didn't understand what he was saying, didn't have the posters, or just hadn't heard him.

  "Plakat?" Ken shouted into the glass, leaving a circle of steam near where his mouth had been.

  The woman pointed to the door, and I thought she might be asking us to leave because Ken had shouted at her. But then she bent her wrist, and I realized that she was telling us to go around the building.

  "I think the posters are in the other museum," I told Ken.

  I went out the door before he could say anything else about the newspaper.

  We walked along the long stone building in the hot sun. At every corner, we'd turn, expecting to see an entrance, only to find another blank wall. There was a scratchy place at the back of my throat, and no matter how hard I swallowed, I couldn't make it go away.

  Two women sat behind the glass at the museum in the back; a tall, thin one in a suit and a short, fat one in a cotton house-dress. They were seated side by side, staring straight ahead, waiting to sell admission tickets to an empty lobby.

  "Soviet plakat?" Ken asked the two women.

  They looked at each other as if deciding whether it was advisable to answer him.

  "Posters?" he said in English.

  "Da, da," said the fatter woman, reaching for our admission money.

  It was hot in the museum, and dark—most of the fluorescent fixtures above our heads had either burned out or hadn't been turned on. Ken and I were the only people in the marble hall, but I had the unsettling feeling that we were not alone. All along the walls and up a curving staircase, period clothing— floor-length silk gowns, men's suits with embroidered vests— stood at attention, as if invisible people still inhabited them.

  "Are these supposed to be costumes?" Ken asked me. "Clothing of the czars?" But none of the signs were in English, so I couldn't answer him.

  We climbed the curved staircase, brushing past silk and velvet worn by phantoms. My throat was dry and sandpapery, and I kept looking around the folds of the skirts for a water fountain.

  We could find no Soviet political posters on the second floor, only more of the eerie clothing.

  "I don't know why you didn't bring the newspaper," Ken said.

  "Shut up about the damn newspaper!"

  I walked back to the top of the stairs. "It's too hot in here, and I want to go."

  "What about the posters?" he grumbled. He was standing in front of a military uniform, and it seemed as if the bodiless soldier was annoyed with me as well.

  "I don't care about the posters," I told them both. "I'm hot and I'm leaving."

  Ken walked down the steps in front of me, shaking his head. "We come all this way to see the Soviet posters," he complained to a gown with a deep decolletage.

  Outside the museum, we stood under harsh sun in an open courtyard. Around us lay statues of former Soviet leaders who

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  had been removed from their pedestals around the city and dumped here after the last coup.

  "Where to now?" Ken asked me.

  "I thought we might go to Gorky Park."

  "What's there?"

  "Happy Russians."

  He looked skeptical.

  "And there's a roller coaster."

  Ken refolded the map, and we started walking. The white sky pressed down on me, and the wind was hot and evil-smelling. My eyes burned and I had an oily grit on my skin that scratched my face when I rubbed at it. I thought I could see the main entrance to the park up ahead, large gates that arched over the street. But no matter how long we walked, we never seemed to get any closer.

  I stopped on the broad, hot sidewalk. "I want to go back to the hotel."

  "You what?" Ken had been walking with the map held out in front of him, angling it to match the streets that surrounded us.

  "My throat hurts."

  "But I thought we were going to Gorky Park."

  "I want to go back to the hotel."

  "What about the roller coaster?"

  "You go if you want to."

  Ken folded the map with a little slap and shoved it in his camera bag. "Where's the nearest Metro stop?"

  "How the hell should I know? You have the map."

  He yanked the map back out of the camera bag and handed it to me. There was a small rip across Gorky Park, as if indicating this was yet another place in Moscow that was under construction.

  "We want Oktyabrskaya," I said. "Which way is that?"

  Ken took back the map and flipped it around. "That way." He pointed with the folded edge.

  It was rush hour. Crowds of people swarmed the Metro statio
n; men and women, but mostly women, carrying large shopping bags from which branches of dill and pickling cucumbers protruded.

  "This was bad timing," Ken mumbled, and I assumed he was blaming me for placing us in the middle of this swirling mass. But he took my hand and held it, making sure I wouldn't get away from him in the crush.

  The crowd pushed us along with the force of water, while we tried to read the Cyrillic signs. More than once, we had to double back, looking for a turn we'd missed.

  When we found the right platform, Ken and I forced ourselves into a northbound train. Russian people stood too close to me, their bags of groceries and polyester clothing and flesh making contact with my skin. I pressed myself against the metal pole, and my hip touched the belly of man who smelled of vodka and sweat.

  I wanted to push these people away, shove them against the seats and sides of the train so they wouldn't be able to touch me. Instead I gripped the pole, using it to hold up the backpack in which I'd hidden my guidebook so I wouldn't look like a tourist.

  Across from me, a woman sat with a small boy. The boy must have been six or seven years old, and he had a way of looking into the middle distance that made me think of Alex and the other children at the orphanage. His mother reminded me of the orphanage children as well. She seemed to be staring at something that existed just beyond her son's head, and there was a stillness about her that made me think of someone in a coma.

  The train lurched, and the woman lifted a hand to touch her son's cheek. With a start, I saw that the back of the woman's hand was completely covered with dark hair, like the fur on the paw of a monkey or a chimpanzee.

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  The boy did not react to the touch of this hairy hand. He merely blinked his eyes slowly and continued to stare into the middle distance.

  At the next stop, the man who smelled of vodka and sweat was replaced by a student with a sparse blond mustache who opened a book so close to my face, I could see the Cyrillic letters covering the page: K's and C's and backwards R's that looked as if they would scratch and tear at my throat if I tried to pronounce them.

  And all the while, the woman with the hairy hand stroked the boy's smooth cheek, a repetitive motion that neither of them seemed to be aware of—and I could not stop watching.

  When we got off at Okhotny Ryad, a large man in a ripped windbreaker threw his arm around Ken's shoulders. "My friend!' he shouted, walking along with us. "My friend!"

  I hoped the man was only drunk. There was something reckless about him that might have otherwise been craziness. People getting off the train walked wide around the three of us, at last giving me the space I'd been craving. I ran a little ahead of Ken, pulling on his hand.

  "My friend!" the man repeated, slapping Ken's shoulder. "My friend!" I began to suspect it was the only English he knew.

  "Yeah, yeah," Ken told him with a thin smile. "Your friend."

  At the steps, the man did not want to let go of Ken's shoulder. He pushed into people, forcing them to make room so that he could walk at Ken's side. I lost my grip on Ken's hand.

  "Drunk," said a voice behind my head. And I turned to see if it was someone who might help us, but I couldn't tell who in the crowd had spoken.

  At the top of the stairs, Ken took the large man's hand off his shoulder. "Good-bye," he said.

  "Good-bye, my friend." The man put his hand back on Ken's shoulder.

  "Good-bye," Ken repeated, removing the hand once again.

  And this time, when the man tried to replace it, Ken shouted, "Nyet!" startling him so that he almost fell down the stairs.

  "Come on," I said, pulling Ken away from the man who seemed intent on following us.

  We got onto the escalator, pushing past people who were waiting to be taken up into the light, putting their bodies between us and the large man who was shouting, "My friend! My friend!" over their heads.

  At the top of the escalator, two elderly women thrust small bouquets into our faces—wilted wildflowers that were mostly weeds.

  "I want to drink something," I said. And Ken and I went into Patio Pizza, into cool air that smelled of garlic and cigarette smoke.

  "Vodka," I told the man behind the bar. "Very cold, without ice."

  "The same," said Ken.

  We drank the vodka out of tall shot glasses. Its syrupy chill coated the sharpness in my throat.

  "I want another one," I told Ken, using the bottom of my glass to make wet circles on the bar.

  "These two just cost us twenty-eight dollars." He held the bill in the air, balancing it on his palm.

  "That's impossible."

  "Fourteen dollars apiece." He dipped his hand as though demonstrating the weightiness of the amount.

  "We can buy a whole bottle at a street kiosk for ten dollars."

  "Let's do that." He covered the bill with ruble notes. "Let's buy a whole bottle and drink it tonight."

  The kiosk outside the Intourist was out of vodka.

  "That's impossible," I told Ken. Vodka was the one thing nobody in Moscow ever ran out of. But the man behind the Plexiglas window shook his head each time Ken asked, "Vodka? Wodka?" alternating between the V and the W sound, as if the proper pronunciation would conjure up a bottle.

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  "There's another kiosk up near Pushkinskaya Plaza," Ken said.

  "I can't walk that far."

  "I'll go. You wait in the room." And he disappeared into the crowd on Tverskaya Street.

  At the door to the Intourist, a man with broad shoulders stepped in front of me. All I could see were the purple buttons on his shiny shirt.

  "Hotel card!" he barked.

  I reached into my backpack for the small paper card that proved I was a guest. A tampon fell out and rolled across the floor. I bent to pick it up, and the man snapped his fingers, impatient for the card that was in my hand. When I gave it to him, he held it close to his nose, sniffing it. Then he turned it over, though I was certain there wasn't anything written on the other side.

  The man gave the card back and did not step aside. I had to walk around his large bulk to get into the hotel.

  Our room smelled of ammonia and pine. I found a bottle of water in the half refrigerator and drank it standing by the window. The sky over the Kremlin was dirty white, and I could hear the throbbing of the big machines carving out the shopping mall beneath Red Square. I took off my shoes, clogs that had left black dye across the tops of my feet, and lay back on the scratchy cushions of the couch. There wasn't enough room for me to stretch out, and I rested my head on the edge of the corner table.

  Ken and I had tried to love Russia for Alex's sake. Each afternoon, we headed out with the pages of our guidebook folded over to mark the sights we thought we should see. Every night, I planned the outing for the next day.

  "Let's walk along the Boulevard Ring," I'd suggest. "The guidebook calls it leafy and pleasant. It says that people go there to play musical instruments."

  And the next afternoon, we walked the entire curved length

  of the Boulevard Ring. "How nice and shady it is here," we told each other. "Isn't the man with the violin wonderful?" Never once did we mention that the Boulevard Ring was nothing more than a narrow strip of weeds and dirt squeezed between two automobile-choked highways, or that the man with the violin was accompanied by six filthy children with unwashed palms.

  We'd made it a point to go out every day, telling each other that we needed to see Russia. And we prided ourselves on not being like the other families we'd heard about—families who hid in their translators' apartments, coming out only to eat at Pizza Hut or the McDonald's at Pushkinskaya Plaza.

  I heard a door slam somewhere down the hall, and sat up. Ken had been gone a long time, and I imagined that the man from the Metro had found him, the man who'd called him "my friend," and wouldn't let go of his shoulder. I'd been alone in foreign cities before, but I didn't think I could be alone in this one.

  I went to the win
dow and pressed my forehead against the glass, looking down on the bobbing heads of the people walking along Manezhnaya Ploshad below. Ken had gone in the opposite direction, but I continued to study this street, thinking I might be able to tell from the way people were moving here whether there was trouble around the corner.

  I was still at the window when Ken came back.

  "Where were you?"

  "I had to go up past McDonald's." He was holding a bottle filled with bright yellow liquid.

  "What's that?"

  "Limonaya."

  "Limonaya isn't yellow."

  He put the bottle near my face and pointed to a lopsided lemon that had been drawn on the label. "It's got lemons in it."

  "Lemon-flavored vodka is clear," I told him.

  "And the last time you had lemon vodka was . . . ?"

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  He turned his back to me and opened the small refrigerator, banging the flat of his hand on the side of the metal freezer.

  "Stop smacking that thing."

  "I'm trying to get the ice out."

  "Don't bother, I'm not having any."

  He yanked out a plastic ice tray and twisted the ends as if he were strangling it.

  "I'm going out to get some real vodka." I put on my shoes and grabbed my backpack, knocking a lampshade askew so the bare bulb shone on me like a spotlight. Yanking open the door, I stood between the room and the hall that smelled of old cigarettes. "I can't believe you're gone for half an hour and you couldn't even—"

  "It was fifteen minutes."

  "A simple bottle of vodka—how could you screw that up?"

  He threw two misshapen ice cubes into a glass. "I thought you would like limonaya."

  "That's not limonaya."

  "What does it say on the bottle?" He jabbed at the label with his finger.

  "Limonaya isn't yellow."

  "It . . . has . . . lemons . . . in . . . it."

  "It's supposed to be clear."

  "How can it be clear if it has lemons in it?"

  "That is so stupid."

  "Oh, I'm stupid?"