Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  I attended the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. Our dormitory in Moscow had been built for the judges for the 1980 Olympic Games, held in August just before our arrival. This building was supposedly better constructed than most others, designed to impress the Olympic judges who were coming from around the world. But the countries the Soviets most wanted to dazzle, with their fancy sports facilities, newly built swimming pools, and hightech skating rinks, boycotted the games because of the war in Afghanistan.

  The Soviets still employed the czarist Potemkin-village approach of creating a facade of well-being and bounty for visiting dignitaries, while hiding a far grimmer reality behind a wall. During the Olympics, the authorities kicked out all prostitutes and indigents and spruced up Moscow. Insulted that the United States didn’t show up, they had to make do with showing off to a motley group of American language students. Before we had even unpacked our bags, we were dragged off to the Olympic village to admire this great achievement in Soviet sports venues. One of my first images of the country was that bleak, scruffy-looking empty stadium. They wanted us to admire it. “This is bigger than any stadiums you have in the United States,” our tour guide announced with pride. I asked questions eagerly, despite my lack of interest in sports. I felt sorry for the Russians, and hoped that my enthusiastic interest would make them feel better.

  The new building we were living in was supposed to impress us, but the walls of our dormitory were already crumbling. I shared a tiny room with two other American girls. The Vietnamese students, who lived down the hall, always looked cold and miserable, bundled up in parkas they never seemed to take off. Our dormitory was situated on the outskirts of Moscow, and we assumed that the authorities preferred to keep us contained. The harder the commute into central Moscow, the less we might stray into ordinary Soviets’ lives. I was determined not to be caged and went into the city all the time.

  One day I arrived at Slava’s to find Dima alone, and badly upset. An acquaintance had told him that Slava was gay. It had been evident to me, from the way he doted on men and surrounded himself with attractive male models. I had assumed that everyone else who visited Slava’s place knew too, but it was never discussed. At that time, although homosexuality officially didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, it was cause for imprisonment. Most Russians had little awareness of it; they believed official propaganda that homosexuality was one of those decadent capitalist diseases that afflicted only the West. Dima was mortified to learn the truth about Slava, whom he considered an adopted father. To make matters worse, Dima discovered that many friends assumed he was living at Slava’s as a lover, when in fact he was Slava’s protégé. Dima’s own parents had divorced when he was five and he didn’t feel wanted by his mother or father. Both had remarried. Slava had a real son who showed little interest in his fashion world. Slava saw Dima’s potential as a photographer and had taken him in, looked after him, cultivated his talent, and treated him with a love and respect Dima had never felt from his parents. Dima was so hungry for that kind of attention that he had never looked closely at the rest of Slava’s life.

  Now in a panic, Dima confided his fear in me, the outsider. It was too embarrassing, and too politically sensitive, to talk about with his Russian friends. It drew us closer, and our strange romance began. Dima’s first impulse might have been that he needed me to save him from his shame about Slava. He might have considered my main asset to be my coveted blue passport. I could not see clearly. I had such a crush on him, I was ready to accept any connection I could make with him. It felt good to be so needed, and in my twenty-one-year-old wisdom, I calculated that Dima would be tied to me so tightly that he would never leave me. But it didn’t really work. We spent one night together on his foldout bed. He seemed distracted, just going through the motions, and it made me feel unwanted. I often felt insecure next to all the beautiful Russian models and actresses Dima knew, dressed in their black-market fashions. I wore layers of clothes for warmth, and intentionally erred on the dowdy side, sensitive to the way that other Russians might feel bad if I had better things than they. As a result, I often felt like a poor relative.

  A couple of weeks after Dima’s revelation, he pulled me into the dingy corridor of the House of Fashion, where we had gone for a glitzy fashion show of Slava’s latest designs, clothes that no Soviets could afford.

  “I think we should get married,” Dima blurted out in Russian.

  I didn’t understand at first. My Russian wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t feel like a real proposal. It was not the romantic setting I had always imagined for the moment of my engagement. But Dima was insistent, and his meaning became clear.

  “It’s the only way we will know if we can have anything together,” he went on. “Otherwise you will leave and we won’t ever know.”

  I don’t know if I was more smitten by Dima or by Russia. There was also an element of guilt, and my sense of responsibility. I knew that once a Westerner entered a Soviet’s life it was changed irrevocably, since the authorities saw Soviets who openly met with foreigners as tarnished goods, betrayers of the motherland. I felt a swirl of emotions. I said yes. It was an even swap. He would get America. I would get Russia.

  Cold-war Bride

  When Dima and I turned up at the dingy gray office where Soviet couples went to register for a wedding date, we were told there was a three-month waiting period. It was typical enough of Soviet bureaucracy, but we panicked. My student term was coming to an end in six weeks, and I would be forced to leave, since it was virtually impossible to extend a visa. Dima quickly came up with a plan. He did not want to let his ticket out of the country slip through his fingers so easily.

  “If we tell them you are pregnant, they’ll give us an earlier date,” Dima said.

  “Great idea, Dima. Only problem is, I’m not.”

  Russians are great improvisers. “No problem,” Dima said. “I know somebody who is.”

  • • •

  I made an appointment at the British embassy clinic to get a document proving I was pregnant. Dima met me on a street corner in the frigid winter air at the appointed time, and he handed me my fake urine sample, which was sloshing around in the bottom of a vodka bottle.

  “Whose is it?” I asked. I was curious about the murky color, often a sign of venereal disease.

  “No problem, she is a seven-months-pregnant hooker,” Dima said, proud of his find. “It only cost me fifteen rubles.”

  No problem, I thought, unless the doctor discovers I have syphilis as well as enough vodka in my urine to supply a Russian battalion. I hoped the hooker had at least finished the vodka before peeing into the bottle. Dima wasn’t allowed into the embassy grounds so I waited alone in the reception area. It gave me a moment to wonder why I was doing this. I was afraid if I didn’t go through with it, I would lose him. But was that such a bad outcome? And what if the doctor realized it was a hoax?

  The doctor did not notice anything amiss with my bootlegged urine, and we got the stamped document that the Soviets required. Nothing was ever done in the Soviet Union without an official-looking stamp and copies made in triplicate with messy carbon paper. In those days, Xerox machines were banned, seen by the authorities as a pernicious tool to disseminate underground information, or samizdat, as the Russians called contraband material printed at home. Yet the bureaucrat at the marriage registry, apparently seeing it as her task to defend Soviet males from Western corrupters, would not accept the document. No explanation. No exceptions. We had to wait the three months. Not even a pile of bribes, in the form of Ralph Lauren cologne, Belgian chocolates, and a Fendi scarf, persuaded her to relent.

  Defeated, I went back to New Jersey. It was strange to be home. I had finished college and didn’t know what to do with myself. I missed Russia. I found it hard to explain to any of my friends or family what it had been like there, living in a bizarre kind of poverty with all the romance of brooding Russia. It was so far away, so removed from the United States. I spent days lying on my mother’s s
ofa watching TV shows. General Hospital and The Dating Game, it seemed, helped me reconnect with my country.

  I eventually got a job in a restaurant, where I met Lori, who became my best friend. I was a waitress; she was the manager. Having trouble with authority, at first I didn’t pay much attention to her, since she was technically my boss, but it soon became clear to me that she had earned her status because she had a certain innate wisdom beyond her years. She too was half-Jewish and half-Protestant. Lori was a fellow traveler and easily mingled in other cultures.

  We quickly became close. She was fascinated with Russia and wanted to come see the place for herself. She listened sympathetically to my endless fretting about Dima. I could not decide what to do. I changed my mind a hundred times. One day I would be convinced I could not live without him, that I had to go back and save him. The next day I would think going back meant becoming entangled in a green-card marriage with a man who was not really in love with me. I felt stuck, neither option giving me any comfort or relief. After a couple of months and many counseling sessions from Lori, I came to my senses. “Men are complicated enough; why make it any harder by marrying someone from a different planet?” she said.

  The day before my planned departure I got up the courage to call Moscow.

  “Dima, I’ve decided not to come.”

  At first there was silence. Then came a reply made more haunting by the static of thousands of miles of cable under the Atlantic Ocean.

  “But then I must put a gun to my head,” he said.

  I thought he was serious. I was not familiar yet with the melodramatic nature of Russians like Dima—who, I discovered later, often threatened suicide just to get his mother to do his ironing or to get a friend to pick up a restaurant tab.

  I found myself on the next Finnair flight to Moscow via Helsinki, one of the few routes into the Soviet Union in those days, since direct flights between the United States and Moscow did not yet exist. A Finnish woman seated next to me asked why I was heading to Moscow. “I’m getting married,” I told her. But I half felt as if I were lying.

  Sometimes we sleepwalk through events in our lives, only to understand how they fit into our particular cosmic weave much later. Some people use alcohol or drugs to dull their pain. I used love. I sometimes wondered if I married Dima because he was the first Russian male I met who was sober enough to walk down the aisle.

  It wasn’t exactly an aisle. Dima and I were married at the Central Palace of Marriages in Moscow. A small, round, scowling woman, with a big pendant emblazoned with Lenin’s likeness nestled in her heaving cleavage, performed the ceremony. I had to borrow a dress from another American student, as there was nothing in any store in Moscow that I would consider wearing. I did not make any of the normal bridelike preparations, nothing old, nothing blue, just a desperate attempt to get rid of my hangover. I woke up that morning with swollen eyes from a night of drinking. The floor lady, or derzhurnaya, whose job it was to hand out keys so she could spy on the Cosmos Hotel’s guests, gave me tea bags to put under my eyes, promising that the tannin would bring down the swelling. Russians are masters at fixing all maladies brought on by alcohol, and have endless sympathy for hangovers. The same floor lady who fussed over me that day would have happily ratted on me for having a Soviet citizen in my room, since they weren’t allowed in hotels for foreigners. To get inside, they had to endure the humiliation of standing outside in the cold to get a propysk, or pass, though entering their name on a list—sure to be turned over to the KGB—was something few Russians wanted to do.

  Dima’s adopted father, Slava, turned up at the appointed time on that snowy March morning, bringing a few of his friends. One of the American girls I knew who was still studying in Moscow came. Otherwise I had nobody there of my own. Just before we went into the large red hall for the ceremony, we were offered music for an additional four rubles. For twelve rubles, we could get the event recorded on eight-millimeter film. I splurged on both. I wanted to do the traditional thing Soviet couples do and place flowers on Lenin’s tomb after the ceremony. Dima would not have it. At our hastily thrown-together wedding party afterward, we ate tinned peas and gelatinized fish and drank lots of vodka. There was no cake. The ten or so guests beat their fists on the table as they chanted, “Gorky!” which means “bitter,” perhaps an apt emotion to evoke at the start of a marriage, given the high divorce rate among Soviets. It is a tradition that signals the newlyweds to kiss. Dima was reluctant, continuing instead to tell a joke to an elegant redhead seated on his other side. I had to hold back my tears: I felt so alone. It was not how I had pictured my wedding day. I barely knew him. He did not seem to love me, yet he vaguely reminded me of my father. When I asked myself why I was there, I just felt blank and stuck. I knew I was being stupid and destructive, but I felt compelled to carry on. The vodka helped.

  Now I had a handsome foreign husband who could not leave Moscow. Despite the marriage, the authorities wouldn’t give him exit papers. The obstacle was that his mother worked in a military installation, and that theoretically put Dima too close to state secrets that might be passed to me. It was a minor detail that Dima had overlooked in his scheme to get out of Russia. But he would not give up hope. Every six months he would apply to leave the country. He was refused again and again. It left him in a kind of legal limbo. The mere act of applying to leave the Soviet Union made him persona non grata with the authorities. He could not get a job officially, and was pegged as a target of suspicion. Many of his friends wanted nothing to do with him, worried that his stigma as a refusenik would rub off on them.

  Yet each time Dima got a refusal, I was secretly relieved. Once he got his exit permit, I would lose Russia. At the time, foreign spouses were granted visas for only three months, so I would visit for short periods of time. Despite the hardships of living there, I was completely hooked on Moscow. Our relationship, imperfect as it was, gave me an incredible opportunity to live life from the perspective of a Soviet citizen, deprivations and all.

  As a student I had relied on the dorm cafeteria in order not to starve. Now, on my own, eating and shopping were the first survival skills I had to master. They were difficult tasks in a country where food shops tended to be empty or left with a paltry selection of unappetizing choices. There was usually little more than tins with something resembling cat food, or rancid tomato sauce, or slabs of coagulated grease and gristle with a speck of meat, known as kolbasi. The shops did not bother trying to entice customers with catchy names. The milk store was called Milk, the meat store, Meat, the vegetable store, Vegetables. In fact, those names were themselves deceptive, since there was rarely anything in the vegetable store that was even remotely green, just a few sprouting potatoes and a rotting carrot or two. The milk store never seemed to have any milk, either, just a lump of rubber that was passed off as cheese. I could never remember to bring my own bag. Packaging was a luxury Soviets did not bother with, and forgetting to bring your own invariably provoked the wrath of the beefy saleswomen, who were quick to berate me. The few eggs and potatoes I could find in a store would usually end up stuffed in my pockets.

  I used to tell Dima we should start a diet clinic in Moscow, a cinch since there was not one appetizing thing to eat in the entire country. “Think of the fortune we’d make,” I told him. “ ‘Come to Moscow, guaranteed to lose ten pounds in a week.’ ” Russians just didn’t understand how to market their country properly, I thought. But my husband was not amused. He could not imagine the idea of a place where marketing is designed to tempt consumers into buying because there is so much choice available. He was sure I was exaggerating about the bounty of supermarkets back home. He got frustrated with my descriptions of life in the United States.

  “Sometimes I think you are a KGB plant and you make up all these stories of this luxurious life in the West as one more way to torment us,” he said to me once. “The West probably doesn’t even exist. They just train you at some camp outside of Moscow.” It was hard to tell if he was jok
ing.

  When I did muster up the stomach to hit the shops, there was the fear of being trampled by the babushkas, who were perhaps the best secret weapon in Russia. Their average height was about five feet, three inches—so was their width, and they had physical power and aggression a hundred times their body size. They would charge off to the shops early in the morning, a stampeding herd of woolly coats and furry hats. Bundled up in multiple layers of clothing, they were insulated from the cold and also from each other. In Moscow’s dilapidated public-transport system, they were constantly sardined into subway cars or trams. Their bulky attire might afford them a few inches of breathing room. Moscow’s sidewalks were packed with people swarming to and from the metro. In contrast, its wide avenues were deserted. Few people had private cars, so the roads were traffic-free.

  As many as two million people would pour into Moscow from the outskirts each day to try to buy milk or butter, which were unavailable a mere fifty miles outside the capital. Those lucky enough to have permits to live in Moscow also seemed to spend their days scouring the shops for food. A permit to live in Moscow was so desirable, it was commonly the basis of a marriage. Living space was in such deficit that couples sometimes shared their tiny apartments even after divorce. Many Soviets were still living in communalkas, or communal apartments, where several families shared a kitchen and bathroom.

  A divorced policeman once told me he had to share one room in a communalka with his ex-wife. They divided the tiny room with a blanket not thick enough to smother the noises of his ex-wife’s love-making with her new boyfriend. Life in the communalka was a prime source of satire for Soviet playwrights and filmmakers. For the average citizen, it was a glaring example of the indignity of the system. Privacy is such an alien concept, there is not even a word for it in the Russian language. When Dima and I registered for our marriage, we were handed a shabbily printed pamphlet telling us what to expect on our wedding night. Privacy is so elusive that the first piece of advice on the brochure was to be alone with each other—easy task for the average Soviet couple.