Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  Dima and I lived in several different places in Moscow. They all run together in my head, because they were almost all the same. The entranceways stank of urine. They had one room with a sofa that turned into a bed at night and a television set. Dima was addicted to old Soviet war movies, which was about all that ever seemed to be on. The kitchen was tiny with a small linoleum table with plastic chairs. The furniture was always the same because all the shops sold one standard-issue. Most apartments looked alike, with one style fitting all. There was one design for sofa beds made all over the Soviet Union, one design for chairs, one design for curtains, and one design for plates. Everyone had the same coffee table. To break the monotony, some Soviets would stick on the wall anything Western they could find, an out-of-date calendar or a poster advertising Pepsi. The bathrooms were divided: there would be a tiny closet-sized toilet, often without a seat, and ripped-up pieces of Pravda instead of toilet paper; next door there was a plain washbasin and a cracked, stained bathtub.

  Sometimes it was so cold outside I went stir-crazy, unable to leave the apartment all day. Russian friends were always trying to introduce me to winter virtues such as ice-skating and walks in the snow. They found it invigorating, but I didn’t. My feet and nose were always frozen and took hours to defrost after each foray outdoors.

  Nobody in Moscow ever seemed to be at work. The streets were full of people devoted to scavenging the shops for supplies. Often one office worker would hit the streets and bring back booty to his or her coworkers. Shopping had to be a full-time preoccupation involving cunning, perseverance, and community spirit or Soviets would have starved.

  I had no willing babushka or officemates as a network of people to pick up whatever they stumbled across during the day. I learned to shop without preconceived notions. I’d go as a blank slate and not expect to find eggs, butter, or milk—just be pleasantly surprised by whatever vaguely edible foodstuff I did stumble upon. I got used to Soviet life, to the wretched bathrooms and to the cold, to the secrecy and the fear. But I never could get past the food situation. I was always hungry.

  Yet the friendship, generosity, and depth I found among Russians made up for everything the country lacked in creature comforts. When your mind is hardened by deprivation, undistracted by the temptations of a consumer society, you can spend more time with loftier thoughts. Russians shrugged off the daily hardships of life. Instead they would set the table with whatever they had, and drink vodka, recite poetry to each other, and sing late into the night. To me, they looked like gentle spirits trapped in gruff exteriors. Russia was like a narcotic for me, a place where suffering was revered as a high art form. Russians seemed to have cornered the market in tormented souls. My mother had taught me to worry about everyone else’s problems and not dwell on my own, always reminding me that someone else had it worse. “Think of the soldiers in the trenches,” she always said. I took her advice to heart. Here was a whole country that had it worse. There was no room for worry about my own wounds.

  The simplest things in Russia often seemed intense, such an emotional roller coaster. Every friendship with a foreigner was fraught with danger, yet Russians were hungry for contact with the West. Many would take great risks to know me and learn from me about the world outside. I was their conduit to Western music, books, and a forbidden way of life. Many were desperate to know the lyrics of songs by the Beatles, or glance through a fashion magazine for a peek at Western life.

  I would often meet Russian friends at a busy metro stop to keep from being noticed, and then we’d wander the chilly streets or drink knee-numbing port wine in the parks. We would discuss Solzhenitsyn and other banned works that I had read and they had not. I would often call them from a phone-box and never from my home phone, since I assumed it must be bugged. Outsiders like me could relay information contrary to the daily dose of disinformation fed by the government.

  Even though I was married and living with Dima, few Soviets would risk having me in their homes. Those who did often had treasures to show me. Artists with a lifetime’s worth of work hidden away in a closet or under a bed because it was not politically acceptable would sometimes make me the first audience to whom they could show their work, since showing another Soviet was a risk. The system bred distrust. Everyone was so worried about being bugged that it meant the KGB had less bugging to do.

  Dima and I had a tumultuous time. It turned out there was another woman, a pretty blond harpist called Natasha. Dima was infatuated with her long before he met me. I gradually learned that she too was determined to get out of Russia and was shopping around for a Western husband. So she was never going to marry Dima. He insisted the relationship was over but I always wondered if they were secretly plotting to marry two suckers, use the marriages to get out of Russia, and then hook up together in the West. Sometimes he would go out at night and tell me I could not go with him. “It would be bad for them to have an American there,” he would say. Naive as I was, I did not argue with that, worried that I might get someone in trouble just by turning up. So I never knew whether he was really going to see Natasha, or someone else. My suspicions were aggravated by Dima’s lack of interest in me when we got into bed most nights.

  When people in the United States asked if I was married, I would say, “Sort of. I was a cold-war bride,” not sure if my marriage was a product of politics, or a victim of it.

  My marriage felt like a sham. But that was the model that was familiar to me; that was what my parents’ marriage had felt like. It felt uncomfortable, but it was a discomfort to which I was accustomed.

  Over the years I would come back to Russia in various incarnations. I worked as a tour guide, bringing American doctors and lawyers on educational exchanges. I worked for U.S. television and magazine bureaus as a translator and interpreter of Soviet life, especially valuable because I straddled two worlds by living among the Russians. They were lonely years. I didn’t feel as if I lived in one place or the other. My friend Lori came to Russia and met Dima and my Russian friends. Her knowledge of that part of my life bound us forever. She was the only one of my American friends who understood Russia’s lure for me. For a while it infected her too, and she visited several times. As for Dima, since the Soviets were stingy with visas, I had to find all kinds of ways to keep returning to see him. He may not have been much of a real husband to me, but he was an extraordinary guide into the Soviet psyche, which looked so impenetrable from the outside.

  An American in Moscow

  I got my start in television in part because I was such a lousy housekeeper, a failing I inherited from my mother. Back in America and in between visas, I cleaned houses to earn money to pay for graduate school at Columbia University in New York. One employer, who worked at NBC News, was so eager to get me out of her bathrooms, she offered me a job as her assistant at NBC News in New York covering the elections in 1982. It was menial work, but once I got back to Moscow it opened doors for me.

  I started working in Moscow’s NBC bureau whenever I came back to see Dima, staying a few months each time. Because I spoke Russian, I could go out on the street with the camera crews and try to interview ordinary Soviets. Most of them were too afraid to talk to us, but a few would. Sometimes we would stand in the cold in Pushkin Square asking person after person to answer a simple question about their lives, but they would move past us hurriedly, hoping nobody noticed the brief contact they had with the foreign media.

  My job also opened a new realm of conflict with Dima. He was always trying to get me to help myself to supplies from the NBC office. There were cupboards full of imported cleaning fluids, paper towels, canned foods, peanut butter, and coffee. He could not understand why I was so reluctant to take whatever wasn’t locked up. Any self-respecting Soviet worker would consider it a duty to rip off his place of employment for whatever he could find, even though they would give the shirt off their back or their last ruble to a comrade. When everything is owned by the state, no one takes responsibility for anything. It was hard to expla
in to Dima why I was unwilling to steal from my Western employer. In Russia, it was expected. I did end up “borrowing” an occasional roll of soft, American toilet paper from the office, but Dima was always disappointed in me.

  In the early 1980s, journalists and diplomats still lived in walled-off compounds shielded from real Soviet life. Foreigners shopped at comparatively well stocked food shops, whose windows were hidden behind thick black curtains so as not to invite the envy of ordinary Russians, who were not allowed in. These stores were benignly called beriozkas, or “little white birch tree,” and foreign currency was required. Russian rubles weren’t good enough for the delicacies sold there. Among the treats were Hungarian chickens and Finnish biscuits, genuine gourmet items in the Soviet Union, where no chicken in a store was ever edible. Occasionally I would slink off to one of the “special” shops with my stash of dollars because I could not resist a luxury like a bag of peanuts or a decent chocolate bar. I would invariably get caught by a curious babushka on the metro. Dazzled by the fancy packaging, she would interrogate me as to where I found such goodies, usually resulting in an embarrassed exchange when she realized I was privileged enough to shop where she could not. I hated those moments. I wanted her to know that the borscht she lovingly made for her family was much better than whatever packaged junk food I had succumbed to. Dima discouraged such weakness: he didn’t like to see hard currency, which was like gold, wasted on mere food. He could put anything in his stomach and assumed I should too. Dima preferred we spent what few dollars we had on much more essential items, like his wardrobe.

  As Dima could not get to the West, I was expected to bring the West to him. He easily tapped into my guilt about my good fortune to have been born in the land of plenty. Many Soviets did. It was sometimes hard to find the dividing line between opportunism and reliance on friends to do favors. Within minutes of meeting a Westerner, Soviets would size you up for your willingness to transport goods across forbidden borders. Everybody always wanted something—for you to sneak out a manuscript full of venom about the Soviet state or letters to relatives in Israel, or bring back a pair of Jordache jeans or a ski jacket or whatever. I often agreed because I felt I was so lucky to have been born in the West, thinking that the least I could do was risk being sent to the gulag to help veritable strangers. It made crossing any border terrifying, because I was always carrying something I should not have. To this day I get nervous on the customs line, even when I’m not carrying contraband. Russians never offered to pay me for any of the things I was asked to bring. They seemed to assume that all Westerners were loaded with cash and had bottomless suitcases. People with so little often have a huge sense of entitlement when faced with the sudden possibility of so much. But it was not all one-sided: in exchange, I would get a friend for life.

  In those days, Russia was essentially a barter society. If a shipment of umbrellas came in, shopkeepers would squirrel away most of them to sell to their friends, leaving nothing for the general public. If you worked in a food shop, anything edible that showed up was hidden from ordinary shoppers and saved for your friends. A dentist would hoard the limited anesthetic for his acquaintances, charging a hefty fee and leaving those not in the know to rely on a few shots of vodka before having a tooth pulled. I once traded three pairs of high heels, a down jacket, and a pair of blue jeans to get a drunk workman to come and retile our bathroom and replace the cracked wooden toilet seat that splintered my bottom. When I was asked for a favor, I usually had trouble saying no, even if I risked trouble. People would ask me to bring them the strangest things, from prosthetic body parts to dog-grooming products to birth-control pills. Western condoms were a favorite item, since Soviet ones, called galoshes, tended to have holes. I brought telephone answering machines, bras, books, music, anything with Western print on it. In most Soviet homes there was usually a shrine to Western capitalism somewhere to be found, usually a faded Western container such as a plastic Coke cup, washed and rewashed until the print had come off of it, or an airline calendar poster. Cheap packaging, which a Westerner wouldn’t think twice about tossing out, was treasured by Soviets, symbols of the forbidden. Soviets saved plastic bags from the West with ads in English printed on them. Marlboro was a favorite. English-language T-shirts were worn threadbare. Anything to transport them even for a moment from their usual world of shoddy goods. I would also bring suitcase loads of the latest fashion items or camera equipment to boost Dima’s budding career as a fashion photographer in the most unfashionable capital in the world. My efforts weren’t always appreciated.

  “These aren’t the right Timberlands,” Dima said once, rejecting the shoes I had carried all the way from America. “I asked you for the ones with black stitching.” My husband, the fashion guru, also memorized the styles he saw in the glossy magazines I lugged over.

  No matter how much of a burden all the requests became, my sense of guilt for having more always prevailed. Especially when I looked at the lives of Soviet women. On one hand, the constitution granted women full equality earlier than their sisters in the West. Indeed, Soviets prided themselves on their courageous women pilots, glorious female truck drivers, and the first woman cosmonaut. But usually the women were burdened with two jobs, at work and at home. They were expected to pull their weight in the workforce, and were often given the most miserable jobs like shoveling snow or heavy lifting in factories, and they were expected to fulfill the traditional women’s role in the home, shopping, cooking, and cleaning.

  I once asked a Soviet woman what feminism meant to her. “The problem is we have no kitchen aids,” she said. “We’d have no problem with the sexes if we had washing machines and dishwashers.” Getting a man to help with the dishes was not an option. I had trained Dima to do them occasionally as a lark, but he would race out of the kitchen if a neighbor or friend came over, making sure never to be caught in the act. It would have been a stain on his manhood if anyone knew I had him doing women’s work. The situation between the sexes often seemed archaic. After dinner I was usually left alone at the table talking with men while Soviet women went into the kitchen to clean up and talk among themselves. Communism brought a veneer of equality when it suited, but sexual roles seemed rooted in a medieval chauvinism.

  Perhaps the worst indignities endured by Soviet women revolved around their sexuality. Contraception was scarce, and sex education was taboo. It was easier to get an abortion than a condom. The women I knew averaged six to eight abortions in a lifetime. Some had as many as thirty, sometimes resulting in sterility, infection, or death. Giving birth could also be brutal, dehumanized by a gruff, assembly-line approach. A few women delivered in the same room at the same time on cold metal tables with no anesthetic. Men were shut out. Gripped by an ancient superstition, society forbade men even to enter the birth houses. Most women held their newborns up to the window to show a husband who stood waiting outside, no matter how cold or how much snow was on the ground. Today in Russia there are a few progressive maternity wards that allow men inside, but for many it is still forbidden for men to be anywhere around the mysteries of childbirth.

  Dima was an extremely talented photographer, funny and bright but petulant and needy. He was as incapable of love as I was in those days. I was in emotional limbo, tied to this man and this country. I often felt as though I were traipsing back and forth between two worlds at war with each other. I suppose I felt much as my father had, driving from his mother’s home to ours, between the two enemy camps. My father’s mother differed from my reserved Northern Irish mother about as much as a Muscovite from your average New Jersey resident. In some way, I too was following in my mother’s footsteps by marrying young and moving to another country. I lost myself in an alien culture much as she must have by coming to America in the 1960s.

  My marriage was not at all about suffering, even if that was Russia’s favorite national pastime. Dima and I often had a good time. Laughing at Lenin was a favorite sport, and Brezhnev was a good target too. It was hard to know who
was really running the country back in the early 1980s, but they would trot out a corpselike version of Brezhnev to wave stiffly on top of Lenin’s mausoleum on state occasions. Dima did a great impersonation of that ritual. We spent a lot of time in a vodka-induced haze, doing elaborate black-market deals. We would sell off items of my clothing for next week’s grocery money, surreptitiously handing over a pair of Levi’s in a back alley as if it were a pound of cocaine. A pack of Marlboros perched at the edge of our table for the waiter to slip into his pocket would cover the cost of dinner in one of Moscow’s finest eating establishments, a meal survivable only if one washed it down with vast quantities of vodka. We lived in a constant survival mode.

  Dima took me to all his special, secret places rarely accessible to foreign visitors. It was an insider’s tour of the part of the Russian soul that the Soviets had not managed to squash. He introduced me to Novo Devichi Cemetery in the center of Moscow, a veritable Who’s Who of deceased Soviet society. Anybody who was anybody, but did not rate highly enough in the hierarchy to be buried in the Kremlin wall, is buried in this cemetery. Famous writers like Chekhov, Gógol, and Mayakovski were also moved in to enhance the stature of the place. There is a proliferation of headstones bearing the date of 1937, a big year for Stalin’s purges. Resting nearby are Stalin’s henchmen, responsible for carrying out those purges. My friend Lev, now a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, loved to show me around the gravestones. It makes sense that he, as a man who now makes his living penetrating human facades, had loved one of the only sanctuaries for historical truth in Moscow. Soviet leaders had been inventing and rewriting history for decades. They ripped people out of history books. Stalin removed all his enemies from the textbooks, Khrushchev wrote out Stalin, then Brezhnev did the same to Khrushchev. But in the cemetery, the past could not be buried. People who officially no longer existed in the history books could still be found here. Perhaps that is why it was off-limits to the general public until Gorbachev came to power. Dima had a well-known partisan grandfather buried there, so he had special clearance to visit the cemetery. It was one of my favorite spots in Moscow. Having done away with the afterlife, the Soviets were generous in glorifying the mortal world. Giant granite statues depicting the socialist contribution of the deceased stood in place of a religious symbol or plain gravestone. Famous cosmonauts were memorialized by towering spaceships. A famous communications expert was etched in stone with a phone to his ear. A well-known obstetrician was constructed with a baby in his arms. Some of the statues are so garish, I sometimes wondered if the immortalized were writhing in embarrassment below ground.