You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  Really, all Roman had to do if he wanted to get me as far away from the action as possible was explain that Russian strip shows, unlike those in America, included a graphic audience-participation component. My boss, who is fluent in Managementspeak, liked to call revelations like these “learning points.” Another learning point for me would have been the news that the front row serves as prime recruiting ground for said graphic audience-participation component. Had I known this, I would have happily volunteered to spend the night in the parking lot, watching the show through binoculars from the van window. Instead I was obliviously clicking away when a freakishly taut man dressed in a police uniform hauled the first woman up on stage. This was not Tarzan but one in a long string of gladiators, firefighters, gymnasts, and sailors brought out to warm up the crowd for the main attraction. I watched as the police officer offered the woman a rose, as he led her around the stage by one hand, as he removed her clothes and then proceeded to do some things that I’m pretty sure a fair number of married couples have never gotten around to. And she was just the first of many willing victims.

  Avoiding the rose became my new imperative in life. Every Tarzan mini-me had one. They would prowl the stage, waving it around with a languid motion of the wrist like some mesmerizing wand of shame. Then they would drop dramatically to one knee, extending the rose toward the front row and inducing every woman within reach to claw at one another as if it were a lingerie fire sale at Loehmann’s and the last thong on Earth was at stake. Lucky for me there were too many other contenders, all drunk and hollering and flinging their anatomy into the air, for me to attract much notice. Until the very end, that is. Until … Tarzan.

  I remember there was this palpable shift in the atmosphere, hands tightening around the necks of beer bottles, followed by a cannon blast of carrot-love. Then Tarzan burst onto the stage in a white satin toga, and never in my life had I seen a man who so much resembled a horse. When he threw back his mane of long blond hair I fully expected to hear a long, low braying sound, but instead there was just the roar of the crowd, losing its collective mind. Tarzan cantered into the spotlight and paused dramatically, letting his toga slip to reveal one strategically flexed buttock. The rose was in his mouth, clenched between his teeth. He rearranged his toga again to reveal an aggressively glossy thigh, slid toward the edge of the stage, and pressed what remained of his toga to his prominent crotch with one hand. For a moment he seemed to be locked in some kind of desperate struggle with the crotch, as though a seagull had gotten caught in his G-string and was desperately trying to break free. The woman next to me started screaming so loudly that I feared she might expel a tonsil right there into my beer, and at the sound Tarzan turned his head. But for some reason, his eyes slid right over her and instead landed squarely on me. I immediately dropped my camera to my side and began shaking my head. No, Tarzan, I projected telepathically. This won’t be any fun for either of us, I’m afraid. I am really bad at getting publicly molested. The sight of me sobbing hysterically and pathetically slapping at your big, impossible muscles and screaming for Roman to please melt you with his laser will be a total buzzkill for all the nice people who paid three hundred rubles to come here tonight. You totally deserve better. What about the nice lady in that one-piece spandex thingee over there … ? I look like a hazmat inspector compared to her. See the way her neck muscles are bulging? I think that means she’s really excited to meet you! But Tarzan just stood at the foot of the stage looking down at me, smiling his horsey smile through the rose in his teeth. He turned around and for a second I thought my luck had changed, that he’d decided to seek his next victim elsewhere. But Tarzan didn’t move, instead he started tipping his head back, back, ever further back, until he was suspended in a quivering arc right over my head. I was still completely hemmed in on every side, so there was nothing to do but watch as he opened his mouth and the rose fell, head over stem, down toward me.

  It was very hard to avoid the impulse to raise my hands and catch the rose, but still, I managed to do so, keeping my arms pressed tight to my sides. Even after the rose hit me, even with hundreds of women watching and Tarzan waiting and the rose sitting weirdly on top of my head where it had gotten stuck in my hair, I remained motionless, hoping that if I pretended like nothing had happened, this whole thing might just quietly blow over. It was useless—immediately the hands of half a dozen women were in my hair, pulling and screeching. I dropped down, screaming and slapping uselessly at the swarm above me. A moment later a woman who’d been standing behind me jumped to her feet, brandishing the rose and whooting like a soccer champion. I barely had time to stand and bring the viewfinder to my face once more in time to catch—

  FLASH! Tarzan pulling the woman to his chest with one hand and removing her tank top with the other as—

  FLASH! the gladiator, the bullfighter, the cop, and the gymnast emerged from the wings to—

  FLASH! surround the woman on all sides, feeding on her like some kind of smut octopus and—

  FLASH! doing things that I would feel uncomfortable confessing within the echoing confines of my own subconscious, including—

  FLASH! acts that would surely qualify them all for public execution in certain rogue states until—

  FLASH! the show ends and the strippers abruptly vanish, leaving her to wander the stage topless like a refugee from a porn shoot whereupon—

  FLASH! the M.C. comes out holding a jar of jelly high above his head and announces a competition promising—

  FLASH! the couple that can lick the most jelly off each other’s body within the next five minutes would win the ultimate prize, namely—

  FLASH! this cell phone. Brought to you by Neokom.

  The night did not end there. It ended only after many different couples had announced themselves to the world wearing nothing but apricot preserves, and a barmaid hit me on the head hard when she discovered me reading Garri Potter i Filosofskii Kamen in a dark corner of the tent, where I had crawled off like a sick cat in search of a place to die. It truly ended only after two men got in a fight next to the ticket booth, and with the rising sun reflecting off pools of their blood, Roman steered me around the police barricades and back to the van without even having to say “I told you so.”

  Looking back, this period was clearly the apex of my obsession with Siberia, when I greeted even the cheesiest and most repellent aspects of its culture with the awe, respect, even gratitude, of a visiting anthropologist. This was before my trips to Siberia began to take on the familiar contours of business travel the world over, with its wireless-enabled hotels, overpriced salad bars, and surplus of wood-laminated surfaces. It was still four years before the weekend I spent locked in a train compartment of the Trans-Siberian with a family whose matriarch addressed everyone in the short, angry diction of a Chinese fry cook (“Masha! Slippers! Dinner! Now!”), whose patriarch’s body odor was reminiscent of nothing so much as the Red Army trenches circa 1942, and whose daughter’s handheld electronic game emitted an incessant, circuit-breaking BEEP! that called to mind that famous Communist slogan “Luddites of the World Unite!” This journey broke me the way alcohol broke Hemingway, Hollywood broke Capote, and the Vietnam War broke LBJ. When I finally emerged from this train, in a small city in northern Tyumen Oblast by the name of Ishim, what little enthusiasm I had left for Siberia, for befriending strangers and courting adventure in general, was dead as dust.

  But in the summer of 2005, I was still wide-eyed and eager to experience anything that would impart to me even the thinnest patina of Russian authenticity. So it was with real excitement that I arose one morning and set off for the local Laundromat with a few weeks’ worth of dirty clothes. My first Siberian Laundromat! And perhaps it was that latent desire to go native that accounted for what happened next, because somehow it tests the bounds of credulity to believe that I, the daughter of Soviet political refugees and a person more than a little impatient (desperate?) to embrace my ancient heritage and lay claim to the corresponding dose
of unbearable suffering that was my birthright, just happened to leave my American passport on the bus home by accident.

  It was only after I had returned to my friend Sarah’s flat and started to pack my things for a trip back to Tomsk, where work was sending me on Monday, that I noticed it was missing.

  “Sarah. My passport …” I began.

  Sarah took one look at my face and guessed the rest. “Have you looked everywhere?” she asked, her voice skating up a register.

  But I didn’t have to look everywhere. I had been traveling around Siberia with the same pack for months now. My hands were like airport X-ray scanners. Besides, in Russia everyone kept their passport on the ready, like a gun in a holster.

  “Okay. Don’t panic,” Sarah said. But hers were the eyes of a ferret that had been set on fire, and the full text of her expression read: “Of course you will miss Josh terribly at first, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other fish in the artificial sea! And did I mention that I have a friend who can get you a great deal on a one-bedroom here in Akademgorodok?”

  After not panicking together for two claustrophobic hours, we decided to call our friend Konst. Now, Konst is the kind of congenitally optimistic person who remains cheerful even when informed that a horde of bioengineered mosquitoes carrying the Ebola virus is on its way to his apartment. When I told him I’d lost my passport, I expected to hear something like: Bah! Passports are so overrated. Welcome to the underground resistance, Comrade! But instead, Konst just said, “Duuuude …” And then he said nothing. Since Konst lived around the corner from the bus station, I asked whether he minded checking to see whether someone had turned my things in to the dispatcher. He instantly volunteered to go over there at 5:30 in the morning, just as soon as the depot opened. Now I really started to panic. Konst was taking this dead seriously. It was not a good sign.

  Next we called the American consulate and I had a conversation with an employee of the U.S. government that went something like this.

  ME: Hi. I’m an American citizen here in Novosibirsk and I just lost my passport.

  THEM: You will need to come to the nearest U.S. consulate to apply for a duplicate, but I have to warn you, the process can take weeks.

  ME: Great! Where is the nearest consulate?

  THEM: Yekaterinburg.

  ME: Okay, but that’s over eight hundred miles away …

  THEM: I’m sorry, you must apply in person at the consulate.

  ME: I understand, but without a passport, I can’t buy train tickets or plane tickets, I can’t stay at a hotel or exchange foreign currency. In fact, legally, I’m not even supposed to go outside without carrying my passport.

  THEM: Yes.

  ME: Right, so you see, it’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation.

  THEM: Do you have any idea how serious this is?

  ME: I do. But I can’t buy a ticket to Yekaterinburg without a passport.

  THEM: Yes, well, that’s your problem.

  ME: Ha! Well, of course it’s my problem. I am very well aware of that, thanks. It’s not like I’m asking you to personally come get me, thanks. I just wish someone would explain how the FUCK I am supposed to—Hello?

  I stayed up until 5:45 in the morning, when Konst called to say he’d had no luck at the bus station, before finally lying down to contemplate all my parents’ prophetic warnings. Somehow, relying solely on my own stupidity and carelessness, with zero assistance from nuclear arms dealers, corrupt bureaucrats, the secret police, or the Red Mafia, I had managed to become a prisoner in Siberia. Would self-satisfaction win out over horror, when I called my parents to tell them their instincts had been right all along? They had told me so and now here I was, doomed to a lifetime of white food. I stared at the ceiling, chastened and miserable. Nothing was so dear to me as the image of my triumphant return to America, wreathed in amber necklaces, quoting Lermontov in accentless Russian while doling out gifts of Khokhloma to my parents like Marie Antoinette. Such was my pride that I vowed right then to say nothing. I would not ask for their help in fixing this mess. Not even if it meant crawling to Yekaterinburg on my elbows, camping in the American consulate’s dumpster, and subsisting on mayonnaise-and-potato-peel sandwiches for however long it took.

  So one can only imagine the tender feelings I had for the Akademgorodok bus driver who tracked me down to return my bag with passport, credit cards, and not a ruble missing the following day. I knew full well how lucky I was. And as I took all the cash out of my newly returned wallet and pressed it into the palm of a True Slavic Soul, it was with this silent prayer: May it come to pass that the next time you find a foreign passport on your bus, you will do another hapless stranger the same kind turn, so they too might return home safely to their country, perpetuate the lies to their family, and preserve the illusion that all went well with them in Mother Russia.

  It was on the way to Tomsk that my cell phone rang and I was informed that every hotel in the city was sold out.

  “Your room was supposed to have been booked,” said the guy at our Tomsk affiliate, “but that did not happen.”

  I love how in Russia news like this is always delivered in the passive voice, as though it were God’s fault my room wasn’t booked, and not that of some very specific person by the name of Tatiana or Zhenya who spent the week sitting at her desk experimenting with ringtones. When I arrived in Tomsk, I threw myself at the mercy of the concierge at the hotel next to the train station, who did finally succeed in finding me a bed. It was a share, but I accepted it gratefully.

  Upon unlocking the door to my hotel room, I was greeted by two women. The first was Lyudmila, a short blonde with a bad bottle dye job and some teeth issues. She was in her late twenties, but looked closer to forty due to the fact that she was making the most of stage-three alcohol dependency. Lyudmila was my roommate; the other woman turned out to be her friend Sveta. Sveta was the kind of tall, thin, flawless beauty that Siberian backwaters pump out with such miraculous consistency you’d think a Japanese automaker were involved. Lyudmila and Sveta were both bookkeepers who’d come from the northern Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk for a convention. Was this why every hotel room in the city was booked? I thought to myself. Was Tomsk to bookkeepers what Vegas was to strippers?

  After we discussed America and the price of a two-bedroom apartment, the quality of my car, the state of my marriage and my ovaries, I asked Lyudmila and Sveta about Nizhnevartovsk.

  “Nizhnevartovsk is the best place on Earth,” Lyudmila answered without hesitation.

  “Yes. It is very, very rich. We have one of the biggest oil fields in Russia. So residents have excellent facilities—sports complex, theaters, concert halls …” Sveta added, “Do you know how much a bookkeeper in Nizhnevartovsk earns per month?”

  I had to admit, it wasn’t a data point I kept on hand, so Sveta quoted some number of rubles.

  “Wow,” I said, having no idea whether this was good or bad.

  “Yes, wow. And do you know how much a bookkeeper in Tomsk makes?”

  I shook my head and here Sveta quoted a much lower number.

  “Wow,” I repeated, dutifully.

  “We also have the Ob River, the most beautiful in all of Russia, and forests full of mushrooms and wonderful berries,” Sveta continued.

  “The only bad thing is the weather,” Lyudmila admitted.

  “Yes. Sometimes we have minus forty. Even minus fifty,” Sveta said.

  “Celsius,” Lyudmila supplied.

  The conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit still confounded me, but these were temperatures I associated exclusively with cryogenic freezing.

  “What about the summer?” I asked.

  “Oh, in the summer we have midges.”

  “They are unbearable,” Sveta moaned. “Clouds of them everywhere and they take big bites of your flesh. You put on a blouse and by the time you get to work it is streaked with blood.”

  “Well,” I exclaimed heartily. “It certainly sounds worth a visit—”

>   “Alina!” Lyudmila interjected. “Why don’t you take off your pants and drink with us?”

  This request would have sounded much odder were it not for the fact that Sveta and Lyudmila themselves were wearing no pants and had made their way through most of a bottle of vodka during the course of our conversation. They weren’t really bottomless, though, having torn the bedsheets off both Lyudmila’s bed and mine and wrapped them around their waists. Seeing as how there were no bedsheets left, however, if I were to take off my pants, then I’d simply have … no pants.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said, “but I’m good.”

  “You will be much more comfortable!” Sveta said this with the kind of impatient tone normally reserved for a child who refuses to have a poopy diaper changed.

  While I highly doubted that was true, what really worried me wasn’t the taking off of the pants, but the drinking with Lyudmila, who had clearly gone pro. I might as well challenge Gary Kasparov to a game of chess or invite Bode Miller to hit the slopes with me.

  “How about I make a beer run instead?” I suggested. Lyudmila and Sveta both agreed that a beer run did sound good, and as the only panted one among us, I was a perfect candidate for the job. I dashed off to the kiosk next door, and when I returned fifteen minutes later with a six-pack of Baltica, the television was on, Lyudmila was lying on her bed, and Sveta had a phone pressed to her ear.

  “Shhh … my sunshine, my sweet …” she murmured. “What men? It is only myself and Lyudmila here. And a girl from America … Yes, America … Hm? … Don’t be silly, that is only the television …”