You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  CABBIE: Tell me, what kind of car do you drive?

  ME: Honda Civic.

  CABBIE: You have automatic transmission or manual?

  ME: Manual.

  CABBIE: Tsk. Manual is not so good. It is very capricious?

  ME: Sometimes.

  (Then there is another long pause during which one’s attention is called to the motor grinding away like a fork stuck in an Insinkerator. The morning mist is burning up in the first rays of sunlight and pale gray outlines of concrete buildings begin to emerge on the horizon, like illustrations from Dante’s Purgatory.)

  CABBIE: Alina?

  ME: Yes, Vanya?

  CABBIE: Can I ask you something?

  (Pause.)

  ME: Sure.

  (Pause.)

  CABBIE: If there is such a thing as God, why must we endure such suffering … ?

  And so it will go until we arrive in Akademgorodok, where the cabbie will insist on calling his wife to get Bulat’s phone number so that when you get back to New York you can tell him that Vanya wishes him success with his studies and promises that his wife, Raisa, will make his favorite holodetz—a frightening kind of jellied meatloaf, the key ingredient of which is commonly cow’s feet—when he comes home for the holidays.

  With the cab ride behind me, I will stand at the threshold to the Golden Valley Hotel, confronting my final hurdle. Zolotaya Dolina does not look anything like a golden valley. It is a typical Soviet-era hotel, and as such it more closely resembles an egg carton. I approach the front desk full of apprehension. Since the room quality at Golden Valley varies so drastically, the registration process tends to involve a certain degree of negotiation. Once I went to sleep in a room on the third floor and woke up thinking I was on a ski slope. An Arctic wind had made its way across a thousand miles of tundra to find a happy outlet here, in the gap below my windowsill. I had opened the door to my room only to duck down immediately when I discovered real Siberian birds flapping down the length of the entire hallway, cawing ravenously. So now I approach the reception desk with a cut-the-shit look on my face. “Don’t even think of putting me on the floor with the birds,” my eyes say, “I want to wake up with the ends of my hair fried to a crisp. I want to feel like I am falling asleep under a tanning lamp. I want heat. And plenty of it. Because if one thing’s for sure, Comrades, it’s that I didn’t come to Siberia for the weather.”

  But why did I keep coming back to Siberia? I had no family connection to Siberia and, when I first traveled there, no friends to speak of. The Ukrainian city of Kharkov, where I was born and where my father’s family still lives, lies nearly two thousand miles west of Novosibirsk. My parents, and everyone else I knew, wondered why, if I wanted to experience Russia, I didn’t just start with Moscow or St. Petersburg, the cosmopolitan city home to my mother’s side of the family. It was as though I was passing up New York City or San Francisco in favor of an extended stay on Three Mile Island. The first time I traveled to Siberia, where the nonprofit I worked for ran a teaching program, could have been passed off as a mere professional obligation. But that would have been a roundabout lie. I’d accepted the job to begin with only because of its peculiar regional focus. Besides, that explanation would have withered under the scrutiny of my subsequent trips, which at last count numbered about a dozen. I have spent, all told, about a year living in Siberia. And when I wasn’t working or traveling in Siberia, I was thinking about Siberia. I was listening to bootlegs of the Siberian punk singer Yanka Dyagileva or researching the Skoptsy, a castrati sect once banished to the far reaches of Yakutia.

  I still don’t have a single compelling reason for what first intrigued me about the place, only nebulous justifications and unsatisfying excuses. First there was the notion that Siberia was kind of like Russia, only with training wheels. A good place for beginners. The only taste of Russia I’d ever had was my own family, and that small dose in itself was already overwhelming. I feared I just couldn’t handle the big cities of western Russia. What if everyone in St. Petersburg was like my mother and spoke in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE TIME? Then there was my admittedly unhealthy fascination with Siberia’s weirdness, its monumental scale and inhuman temperatures, its Evenk reindeer hunters, Tuvan throat singers, and Altai shamans—all things that sounded considerably more interesting than an eight-hour stroll through the Kremlin, quality time with Lenin’s petrified corpse notwithstanding. But more than anything, I bought into this mythic idea that Siberia was where you went to experience the real Russia. From the first time I crossed the Urals, I remained convinced that it was only here, among the descendants of Cossack warriors, political prisoners, and religious dissenters, in these gray and cosseted cities, that I would become one with the True Slavic Soul; I would come to terms with the country my family had fled and deconstruct my own personal issues regarding cultural identity and displacement. Or perhaps I would do none of these things. Perhaps I would just fill my backpack with birch tchotchkes and endure some endless train rides. Regardless of what I did, my parents had me convinced that my first trip to any part of Russia, however real or fake, would also be my last. Like most Western immigrants who came of age in the Soviet Union, they were terrified by news reports from the New Russia, all those stories of mafia shootouts and pyramid scams and nuclear warheads being sold for a dollar on eBay. It was a murderous chaos that had nothing to do with the repressed and stagnant country they remembered, a place where problems officially did not exist.

  “These people have become complete moral degenerates!” my parents bleated. “They will do anything for money. They will kill you for an egg sandwich and send your remains home in a ziplock bag. So when you are cold and dead, and your kidneys are up for sale in the back of some newspaper in Cherepovets, do not blame us. Remember: we warned you about that godforsaken hole.”

  Then one day, while I was in college, my roommate’s good friend from high school was murdered while on a language exchange program in Moscow. This event only confirmed what my parents had already expended vast amounts of spittle trying to explain. It would take another decade for me to gather up my courage and travel to Russia. Even then, one could scarcely say I threw caution to the wind; my first day in Chita City was spent staring hungrily out the window, wondering whether I should risk calling a taxi to ferry me safely to the tiny grocery store across the street. But after several days spent alone in a dorm room, deep in the drafty confines of the Chita Pedagogical Institute, with nothing but the sounds of mice and cockroaches playing badminton in my kitchen cabinets to keep me company, I realized that life in Siberia was not a real-world version of Grand Theft Auto. I could stop hugging the sides of buildings whenever I stepped outside, because if anything was going to kill me, it was my very own predilection for a particular sort of Siberian smoked cheese composed of about 90 percent saturated fat and 10 percent salt. No, my problem with Siberia was not a surplus of excitement but its polar opposite, the age-old dilemma of how to fill all of that time and space, two things that Siberia had always offered both tourists and prisoners alike in great abundance.

  I felt this most intensely during my longest stay in Siberia, a five-month stretch during which I worked for a large foundation based in the city of Novosibirsk. My research assignment actually involved a great deal of travel, but for that first month, I lived in the city and worked at the main office. I was still too scared to wander far beyond my comfort zone, so my orbit was limited to the spheres of home and office, trips to the market, and a daily quest for coffee that did not emerge, granulated, from a dusty packet. My self-imposed isolation came to an end only once I left Novosibirsk for Tomsk and my field research began.

  I remember it was my first day off, and I had taken what tourists in warmer climes like to call “the chicken bus” to Kolarovo, a tiny village where one of the rare eighteenth-century Orthodox churches to have survived the Soviet wrecking ball still stood. When I arrived I found that Kolarovo did not disappoint, with its wooden cottages sinking quietly into the da
rk earth and its picturesque church keeping watch from a lonely atoll like a Palekh miniature come to life. After visiting the church I decided to hike down to a lake I’d spotted in the valley below and was soon walking along the shore, basking in the sight of all that open land and the boundless, incredible Siberianness of it all. But half an hour later the spell was broken. I was bored, itchy, and feeling the pangs of a caffeine-deprivation headache coming on. Moreover, dusk was falling and I was starting to worry about the bus situation. I hadn’t bothered to examine the schedule too closely, figuring that sooner or later a marshrutka would putter by. Now, standing by the road and squinting into the darkening distance, I began to doubt this was true.

  That’s when I noticed two men clambering up the untended path from the lake, swatting the weeds out of their path and cursing as they made their way toward me. When they drew closer I could see that one of them was dressed in jeans and a collared shirt, the other in a dirty Adidas tracksuit.

  “Privet!” the cleaner of the two called out. He was still huffing when he stopped in front of me. “We were down at the lake and saw you standing by the side of the road for some time now. Just wondering if you might be lost … ?” The man in jeans introduced himself as Pasha and his friend as Sasha, grimacing a little at the unfortunate rhyme. They had been fishing, Pasha explained, and grilling shashlik down by the shore when they’d spotted me. I told them I had come from Tomsk and was just wondering about the next bus back, whereupon Pasha confirmed my fears—the last bus had been the one that brought me to Kolarovo.

  “Well, you’re in luck!” Pasha exclaimed. “I live in Tomsk and can drive you home after dropping Sasha off at his mother’s house. My car is only just down the road …”

  I thought for a moment. There was a part of me that doubted getting into a car with two random men I met by the side of a lake in rural Siberia was such a genius move. Then again, neither was spending the night on the streets of Kolarovo, which were mostly made of dirt. I agreed to come along, and when we reached the car, I was happy to see that the trunk really was filled with fishing gear. But we had been motoring down the lane for only a short time when my qualms surfaced again. I began to notice some other things—specifically things about Sasha, who had settled in the backseat directly behind me. The first was, he stank. The reek of alcohol coming off him was so strong that he may have officially qualified as a solvent. Then, when Sasha leaned forward to paw at Pasha’s shoulder, I noticed something else: the blurry tattoos between the knuckles of his left hand—never a good sign in Russia.

  “Pasha? Pasha!” Sasha barked. “Bliad, zayebala menya eta derevnya na huy do polusmerti. Blevat tyanet ot etikh opizdinevshikh starykh zasranok.” This could roughly be translated as “Whore-fuck, this village has dicked me half dead. These old shitty cunts make me wanna puke.” Exhausted by this Shakespearean effort, Sasha rolled down the window, horked into the wind, and muttered, “Fuck. I’m thirsty as shit,” before using the back of Pasha’s seat to rub the spit off his face.

  Pasha twisted out from under Sasha’s hand and shot me a shrugging kind of look. I managed a weak smile in return while a montage of images unspooled in my mind: the flash of roadside weeds and broken bottles, a grainy close-up of a newspaper headline, my parents awkwardly wiping their ashy fingers on their pants after sprinkling my remains in the little pond behind their house …

  A few minutes later we were idling outside Sasha’s mother’s home, where a stout, straw-haired woman with a battered face was stacking firewood in the yard. Sasha leaned heavily on the car door before righting himself and lurching unsteadily toward the house. The woman watched his progress with a pained look, shaking her head sadly. She glanced up and noticed Pasha at the wheel, who rolled down the window and shouted, “Derzhis, Marina Sergeievna! Derzhis!” The woman only nodded gravely and waved at the car as we pulled away.

  “I am sorry,” Pasha said. “My friend is a drunk.”

  “Yes,” I affirmed.

  “He only just returned to the village after a long time away and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

  “Where was he?” I asked, full of awareness of where he was.

  “Prison.”

  “What for?”

  Pasha glanced at me for a long moment before returning his attention to the road. “He got into a fight at a bar and killed a man.”

  “How did he kill him?” I blurted, and as these unfamiliar new words left my mouth I had the distinct feeling that I’d somehow misplaced my immediate priorities.

  “With his bare hands,” he replied.

  And then we settled into the awkward silence that usually follows these kinds of revelations. But once the windows were rolled down and the air cleared of its eye-watering fumes, Pasha and I began to talk again. It turned out that he’d grown up in Kolarovo, where he and Sasha had been childhood friends, but was now a successful businessman, running his own furniture factory in Tomsk. The one advantage, so far as I could see, of sharing a long car ride with the friend of a convicted murderer was that I could finally learn something about the seedier side of life in Tomsk. Surely something darker lay behind the lacework shutters of all those quaint wooden houses? Surely there were more interesting things to do than walk the streets in search of a salad without mayonnaise? Pasha saw what I was getting at and, before dropping me off at my hotel, promised to give me a little tour during my stay. After that, I would get a call from him every few days. Would I fancy a trip to a local casino? Perhaps a visit to a nearby Gypsy village well known for drug trafficking? How about a drive down to the place on the highway where prostitutes wait to pick up truckers?

  Pasha was about ten years older than me, but he had a pretty wife who was much younger, and a baby. I sensed that his interest in me wasn’t prurient, but rather, he just enjoyed having an American around as a weird sort of pet, the way a well-to-do Manhattanite might accessorize herself with an African serval. Regardless of Pasha’s motives or his taste in friends, he turned out to be an excellent guide to the underside of Tomsk, and I returned to Novosibirsk a far better informed Siberian citizen. I also found that, for better or worse, my natural defenses were worn away by this experience. The fear of Russia my parents had worked so hard to instill in me was gone, replaced, it seemed, by a newfound thirst for adventure that left me feeling whorish and pretty much up for anything.

  I suppose this is what accounted for my presence in the front row of a male strip show on the shore of an artificial sea just outside of Akademgorodok a few weeks later. By then I had managed to make some genuine friends in Siberia, among them Roman, a charming half-Gypsy, half-Chechen musician who supported himself by hosting laser shows at local nightclubs, using equipment lifted from one of the many bankrupt research institutes littering Novosibirsk. The special occasion that night was the arrival of a touring striptease starring “Tarzan,” a bodybuilder better known as the husband of the Russian pop singer Natasha Koroleva. To translate this into American terms: imagine going to a club in Umiat, Alaska, to see Céline Dion’s husband take his clothes off. It was something like that.

  Club Neokom was located on the shore of Beach Neokom; both of them belonging to the Novosibirsk megaconglomerate, Neokom. And although it was hard to imagine anything raunchy or dangerous happening in this soulless place, under the canvas roof of a glorified beer tent blasting carrot-love all over ill-clad women and their thick-necked boyfriends, Roman approached the ticket booth with noticeable trepidation.

  “Just be careful,” he said, eyeing me warily as I twirled my digital camera by its faux-leather strap. “I can’t really keep an eye on you while I’m setting up the laser, and there are fights at this place practically every weekend.”

  “No prob!” I chirped.

  “People have been shot and killed here. Seriously.”

  “Seriously!” I repeated joyfully, poking him in the arm.

  “Tonight’s going to be crazy,” Roman warned, shaking his head. “And please watch where you point that thin
g,” he added, indicating my camera. “I mean it.”

  A few minutes later the music cut out for the announcement that the show would begin in ten minutes. Roman wandered off to get some beer and I immediately made for the stage, determined to stake out a spot in the front row. I was resting my elbows on the raised wooden platform, testing the autofocus on my camera, when I felt the firm tap on my shoulder.

  “Coo-coo, Alinachka,” Roman hissed through his teeth. “What the hell do you think you’re doing up here?”

  “I’m waiting to see the show—”

  “Yeah, you can see the show from the laser booth too,” he said, taking me by the elbow.

  “Look at me,” I whined. “I’m barely five feet tall—do you think I’m really going to be able to see anything back there with you?”

  Roman glanced around uneasily. “Listen, I’m going to be running the laser, and if you’re not with me, I can’t be held accountable.”

  “Who’s holding you accountable?”

  “Okay, whatever,” Roman called, as he turned and walked away. “Those pictures better be good.”

  I was too busy trying to puzzle out what had gotten into Roman to pay attention to the announcement that the show was just about to begin. He was hardly the paranoid type, so why the sudden grade-school—WOMP! Both my thoughts and the air in my chest were cut off as my pancreas was mashed into the hard edge of the stage. I was being suffocated by women. Hundreds and hundreds of women, all screaming and filling my vanishing air space with their highly flammable breath. None of them seemed to care that the thing separating them from the object of their desire was not a stack of bricks or a pylon, but an inconveniently fleshy person. A consultant I’d once met in Irkutsk had confessed to me that the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to her on assignment in Siberia was peeing her pants because she could not traverse a narrow, congested pathway carved into the snow fast enough to reach her hotel. Was I about to surpass this impressive milestone by laying down my life here? At Club Neokom? So that a twenty-three-year-old computer programmer from Berdsk could get six inches closer to Tarzan’s tight ass? And my poor family! Sure, they had predicted my death, but what fresh hell of humiliation this would turn out to be. Adrenalized, I started elbowing hard, indifferent to where my blows landed until the pressure eased and the lights dimmed.