Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  Another of my favorite haunts was the beer bars. They were usually down some filthy stairway, stank of urine, and attracted the low end of Russian society. I would go in and hunt down a dirty glass beer mug, take it over to the communal sink, and wash it out before placing it under a beer-dispensing machine. Then I would pop in my twenty kopeks and the beer machine would spit out some foul-tasting warm liquid that Russians called beer, with which they would wash down some salty dried fish innards as they stood slumped over sticky counters, standing in puddles of the spilled so-called beer. Had George Orwell visited this joint before writing 1984? Despite the decidedly grubby surroundings, I loved them because I was always amazed at the level of conversation at those places. I would often end up discussing Tolstoy or Lermontov with some drunken bus driver.

  I was also fascinated by the gas-water machines, a variation on the beer dispenser. In order to quench the thirst of the masses, the great Soviet state erected drinking machines on the streets in place of cafés or kiosks. One filthy chipped glass would be attached to this contraption. First you would turn the glass upside down and rinse it out with a few splashes of water to wash away the germs. You would insert your three kopecks and some yellowish colored gas-water would spurt out. It must have been an acquired taste that, despite my numerous attempts, I never developed. It made me think sometimes that the Russians must be a super-race, given the things they could consume and still survive.

  As long as I did not delve below the surface of our relationship, it was exhilarating. Dima could make me laugh and laugh, when he was in the mood to poke fun at his country. Absurdity was in constant supply. Once I came across a line of people waiting for nothing. It was inside GUM, the cavernous department store on Red Square. Dima explained that at the same time each day, an ice-cream vendor turned up. People were just staking their place in line. I dubbed them lines of anticipation. Laughter was often the best defense in coping with the inanity and degradation of daily Soviet life.

  Even with his irreverence for the Soviet state, Dima was sometimes touchy about me mocking it. One line he could not let me cross was Pavlik Morozev. I could make fun of Grandfather Lenin, as schoolchildren were taught to refer to him, but criticism of the little-boy hero, revered by Soviets, disturbed Dima. Pavlik was a Stalin-era invention. During Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Russian peasantry, millions starved. Pavlik is revered for having turned in his kulak parents to the authorities because they hoarded a small amount of grain to feed him. The parents were executed. The son was lionized. Throughout the Soviet Union, schools and streets were named for him, statues were erected to honor him—the boy who betrayed his own parents for wanting to feed him. I did not understand Dima’s attachment to this scoundrel. It was a sign of our cultural incompatibility. Maybe the esteem in which Pavlik was held was a good barometer for the health of the Communist Party. I knew the Soviet state was unraveling when I saw a small newspaper article in Literaturnaya Gazetta, soon after Gorbachev came to power, questioning Pavlik’s stature. Things were changing, even though Pavlik represented a mind-set that did not die out with the Soviets. In today’s democratic Russia, officials desperate to collect taxes resurrected that Stalin-era technique, urging children at one point to report their parents to the police for not paying their taxes.

  Being a foreigner at a time when they were few and far between meant an automatic entrée into Moscow society. In the elite, artistic circles, it was fashionable for young Soviets to flirt with danger and have foreign friends, so I was kind of glamorous, simply by virtue of my passport. I had never felt like that before. My frizzy hair and lack of mainstream thinking always rendered me uncool when I was growing up in New Jersey. In grade school, I worried about sitting alone on the gym floor because I might be the last girl picked for the team. I dreaded lunch hour and the possibility nobody would want to sit with me in the cafeteria. Now I was hobnobbing with Bolshoi ballerinas, artists, and film stars who lived a privileged life in this so-called classless society. I often hung out at the Dom Kino House of Film, a private club for Moscow’s luminaries in the movie world, where Soviet actors and actresses could dine on special stocks of food unavailable to the masses. They would carefully inspect one another’s clothing labels, and were all glamorously decked out in the latest black-market fashions from the West. Ultimately just about anything was available in Moscow to anyone with money and the right connections.

  To keep me humble, Dima and I always went home to our squalid apartment block, which resembled a barracks in the outskirts of town. We lived in one of those dreary five-story Brezhnev-era apartment buildings that all looked the same. A filmmaker even made a movie about a Moscow man who got drunk and ended up in Leningrad: after sobering up, he headed off to the same apartment block on the same street in Leningrad and never noticed that he was not at home in Moscow. In all Soviet cities, the streets were named the same, after Lenin, Marx, or some other socialist hero. The shabby buildings are identical, cut from the same design.

  For a while we lived with Dima’s grandmother in a two-room apartment, which tested the limits of whatever feelings Dima and I had for each other. Lybov Osipova was in her eighties and a true product of the Soviet state. A well-known doctor in her day, she had the distinction of being involved in Lenin’s embalming, the pickling process the Soviets came up with to keep him from rotting while lying on display in Red Square for the last seventy years. It was offensive to this hero of the Soviet state to have a decadent American living under her roof.

  “Dima, that capitalist wife of yours is showering every day so she can use up all the water,” Lybov Osipova would say. “She’s trying to weaken the Soviet state.”

  I would stumble into the kitchen in the morning, usually in a fragile state from excess drinking the evening before, to find her burning some gruel for her breakfast. I read Henry Miller to lighten my day. When Dima was home, we would laugh together. When he left me alone with my babushka-in-law, she would pretend I did not exist or did not understand anything. She would shuffle into our room, where the phone was, to call her cronies and complain about me as if I could not understand a word.

  “She’s always taking taxis, as if our metro, the finest in the world, isn’t good enough for her,” she whispered loudly into the receiver. Hanging around on the bench outside with the other disapproving grannies was her favorite pastime. She pretended she did not know me as I trudged back from the shops with whatever groceries I had managed to scrounge.

  In the United States I entertained my friends with tales of good and evil from this distant world. In those days, Americans were fascinated by anyone who had been to Moscow, although their interest usually lasted only five minutes. After they were satisfied that their lives were indeed much better than those of their Soviet counterparts, their eyes would glaze over, especially when I would talk of the good things I discovered there. That did not fit easily into the picture.

  Yet amid the bleakness in Russia, there was a lot of good. Russians without the distractions of shopping malls and the pressures of capitalist society had time for one another. Russian hospitality was boundless. No matter how surly Soviets looked on the street, inside their homes among trusted friends they poured out their hearts and souls to one another. Tongues always loosened with a little vodka. There was a stark dividing line between the inside and outside lives of Soviets: keeping quiet outside your trusted circle was a matter of survival; opening up to those inside your trusted circle, speaking soul to soul, as Russians like to say, was also essential for survival.

  When I was there, I felt cut off from the world I left behind in America, I may have been in the heart of the evil empire, yet I had never felt so seen and understood anywhere in my life. Soviets were so anxious to know what the world outside was like that they listened intently to everything I said.

  It was difficult to put a call through to the United States, so I was out of touch for months. My family were not big letter writers so I did not hear from them often. Then one da
y I got a letter from my younger sister, Francesca.

  Dear Siobhan,

  I have something really important to tell you, the most important thing I have ever had to say. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

  I hope you understand.

  Love, Francesca

  The whole letter was blacked out as if censored. When we opened it on the metro I heard Dima’s deep intake of breath. He was terrified the KGB had censored damaging comments from my naive sister. I immediately recognized Francesca’s peculiar brand of humor.

  I vacillated between loving and hating the Soviet Union. Living almost as an ordinary Soviet gave me a rare chance to glimpse life from inside another people’s skin. But I felt like an impostor: not because I was an American living as a Soviet, but because I was living in a marriage that never felt real to me. Eventually I could not stand being in limbo anymore. I got sick of the snow. I felt like an alien in my own country when I realized I knew how to get around Moscow better than New York. I was more comfortable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.

  Dima had been refused exit papers by the Soviets seven times. At each U.S./Soviet summit, the handful of unresolved divided-spouses’ cases involving American citizens married to Russians came up along with the nuclear arms treaties.

  By 1986, Gorbachev was in charge. While at my job at NBC, I met Teddy Turner, who was working at another American news network, Cable News Network. He was the son of Ted Turner, who had founded the all-news channel just six years earlier. Teddy, who was working in Moscow as a sound technician, told me his father was planning to organize the Goodwill Games in Moscow. Ted, whom I got to know later, was disgusted with the way the Olympics and other international sports events had been constantly hijacked by politics instead of being used as a way to bridge political differences, so he decided to organize his own Olympics and exclude nobody. Instead he would hold them in the country that was often the one being barred: the Soviet Union. Allowing the Goodwill Games to take place at all was a sign that the Soviet Union was changing under Gorbachev’s stewardship.

  I liked the idea and was hired to help set up the games. It meant doing things that were unheard of in that country before Gorbachev had begun his process of glasnost, or openness. We arranged to bring in Xerox machines. It took weeks of negotiating and paperwork to allow such a dangerous capitalist tool into the country, but the Soviets finally relented. We arranged to have hundreds of frozen pizzas flown in, again with massive paperwork and permission slips to get them through customs. Ted Turner brought in hordes of people from Atlanta to put on this Western-style sports extravaganza. Many of them had never left the state of Georgia, let alone come to the heart of communism. In my mind, it marked a turning point. Gorbachev had allowed a trickle, but an avalanche would pour in over the coming years. For me personally, it was also a turning point. With the country opening up, I knew it was only a matter of time now before Dima would get his exit papers and leave Russia.

  When a relationship with him was becoming a real possibility, and he was going to be able to live in the same country as me, I wanted out of it. The deficiencies in our marriage were magnified when Russia was no longer part of the bargain.

  My work at the Goodwill Games won me a job offer in Atlanta with CNN. I decided to end my marriage to Dima, in spirit anyway.

  “I’ll stay married to you until you get out,” I told Dima, once I had decided to take the CNN job. “But I need to take my life out of this holding pattern.”

  Dima and I were about to exchange each other’s worlds. He was going to finally get his coveted America and I was going to get more Russia than I ever bargained for. Part of me was afraid to brave Russia without him. He had always been my guide. Now I would have a new ticket to Russia through CNN. But not before a detour to Atlanta.

  Life on the Plantation

  With everything I owned in the back of a used car, I drove south from New Jersey to start a new life in Atlanta. It was September 1986 and I was twenty-six. For the first time in my life, I had a real job with medical benefits and a pension plan. It was not exactly glamorous television work: I was going to be a tape logger. It was an entry-level job at CNN, a network that was still largely unknown, even in America. I was thrilled.

  In 1986, CNN was still small, operating out of the site of an old Southern plantation, with a garden pockmarked by giant satellite dishes. The newsroom was in a basement, and at night the professional wrestling matches held on the main floor above us created a deafening thud every few seconds. Space was so scarce, with not nearly enough desks to go around, that many staff members were apportioned the edge of a desk. We had twenty-four hours of airtime to fill every day, and we had to do it with minimal resources, a small number of foreign bureaus, and a large number of inexperienced journalists. Such a fledgling operation felt like a family. I was at home in the quirky chaos and the constant crises. Just getting a simple story from a correspondent edited and properly broadcast on the air often seemed like a huge achievement. Many things could go wrong, and they often did.

  I started at what might have been the worst job in the entire network, the overnight shift as a tape logger, labeling a huge pile of tapes. As soon as I had labeled some, more stacks were dumped on top, making me feel as though I were permanently trapped in the myth of Sisyphus. But it was what I wanted, a regular life and a regular job. Looking back, I realize that it was anything but normal, and that it didn’t free me from my previously jumbled life. Instead, CNN provided me with a journey right into the heart of chaos.

  The operation was run on such a shoestring that the pay was miserly. My salary was $9,000 a year. At times I had to sell the Soviet paraphernalia I had collected just to eat. A propaganda poster of Lenin might fetch as much as five dollars at a novelty shop in Little Five Points, the arty part of Atlanta. The lapel pins of Lenin as a youth went for a dollar each. Those often paid for my groceries. Atlanta seemed like a consumer’s paradise to me after having lived in and out of the Soviet Union for almost six years. The supermarkets alone made my mouth water, they were so well stocked. I found that a trip to the bank or to the dry cleaners was a pleasant outing after the hulking heaviness of Russia. In Atlanta the sun shone most of the year; in Moscow I’d go months without a glimpse of its rays. Now I wore sandals instead of trudging through miles of snow, slush, and mud, my feet weighted down by fur-lined rubber boots in a futile attempt to fend off the cold.

  One of the other great joys of being back in the United States was being able to talk every day to my best friend, Lori. After wandering the world, including several visits to me in Russia, she settled down and married a man from the Italian island of Sardinia. Even though they eventually moved to Texas, her life retained a foreign flavor, what with a constant flow of Sardinian relatives camping out at their home for months on end. They built three Italian restaurants and are raising two children. I am the partially Jewish godmother to her partially Jewish son. Lori was a stabilizing force in my life, a wise witness to whatever was happening to me, giving especially good counsel in the love department. She always helped connect me to normal American life. She was the only person who could get me to purge my closet of unwanted clothes, or finally rid myself of unwanted men. I learned to accept her advice, always.

  “What are we going to do with that husband of yours when he gets here?” she asked, referring to my problems as ours, the way she always did. I had been trying not to think about Dima and what would happen when he got out of Russia.

  Once I got used to life in America, I realized that I had not gotten Russia out of my system. I often felt nostalgic about the hard days, foraging for food, living deeply with Russian friends, and drinking vats of vodka. Sometimes I even missed the seedy apartments Dima and I had shared. I missed the mournful evenings when his friends came over and we downed a bottle of cognac while he played the guitar as we talked late into the night.

  After
almost seven years of rejection, in 1987, about a year after I started working in Atlanta, Dima got his long-sought visa to the United States. Though we had decided the marriage was over, when he got out he had no place else to come but to me. We tried living together for a while but it didn’t work: he was so dependent on me and I could barely handle myself in my new life. He had no trouble becoming Westernized, but it made his interests change. Instead of discussing art or philosophy or life, as we had so often in Russia, he wanted to discuss ways to improve his credit, where I was little help, unable to get a credit card myself.

  The first time he walked through a supermarket, he was in awe, amazed that an entire aisle could be devoted to dog food. Food was so plentiful, I pointed out to him, that they even sold diet dog food. As a consumer, he soon became picky and demanding, snapping at a less-than-efficient waitress or cursing when the market was out of his favorite brand of toothpaste. It made me wonder, Can the Russian soul survive only in tough soil? Does it wither when transplanted? After a few months, Dima moved out and went to stay with my mother in New Jersey to try to launch a photography career in New York. But despite surviving Moscow all those years, Dima found life in New Jersey to be rough and he couldn’t stand my mother’s dogs. Lori took him in. She had been prophetic when she called him “our” problem. He arrived just before Lori moved from New York to Texas. Dima took over her apartment and telephone, displaying a huge sense of entitlement typical of many Russians, acting as though everything that was Lori’s, was his. Despite her patience, she had limits: she sent Dima back to Atlanta, where he moved into an apartment down the street from me. I helped him get photography jobs so that he could set up a life for himself in America. He took to it well. Being a talented photographer helped, but that was only part of it. Dima was a restless soul, the kind of person who was held back by the unreasonable restrictions on ordinary life in the Soviet Union and who flourished in the West. He has since had a great career as a photographer, and now travels in and out of Russia freely. Once he got a green card, allowing him to work in the USA, we divorced. Technically we had been married eight years, most of the time living on separate continents.