Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  This would be our day to spend with our Canadian friends. Dinner together was planned, but we hit a snag when the suggested restaurant told us reservations were impossible. To the rescue came the genial owner of the Drei Sonnen, Franz Lechleitner.

  “Your friends will be our guests,” he said in limited but winning English. Franz was an exemplar of rural Austrian hospitality.

  In our stay at the hotel, Franz told us a little about himself and the region. For centuries, the region was a rustic backwater, downright impoverished after the war, populated mainly by hard-working, simple farmers who scratched out a basic living. Like most Austrians, however, these farmers were born with skis attached to their feet and were expert downhillers in the wintertime.

  “In my time I can remember when it was a little village with poor farmers who each owned a few cows,” Franz told me in the lobby of the Drei Sonnen.

  As Europe and the world embraced skiing, Serfaus transformed itself into a money magnet for skiers willing to pay for what the locals had always enjoyed as a birthright.

  Franz started out as a butcher, but in the early nineties he and his wife, Irene, saw that hospitality was the local growth industry and built their little hotel. Every night Irene would stop at every dinner table with a warm greeting in her limited English. If they wanted to expand, they surely could have filled a larger place but to their credit chose to stay small.

  “If a hotel gets too big, it’s like a factory, not a family,” said Franz.

  On this night, the Lechleitners were hosting their gala dinner, which meant Strauss waltzes playing throughout and glasses of Prosecco handed out for a toast to the guests, to Serfaus, and to enjoying winter.

  Sadly, Isabella was confined to the room with a splitting headache, leaving me to host our guests. Also, since the festivities delayed dinner a bit, Roxane had to leave early with their younger daughter, who was past her bedtime and fading. But Dave and I carried on with the older girls, long enough to be able to sample the chocolate buffet that topped the evening.

  Friends, if you ever go to Serfaus, drop by the Drei Sonnen, say hello to Franz and Irene, and give them my compliments.

  Isabella’s headache was receding by the time we returned to the room and we talked about how to spend our final day in Serfaus.

  Julia’s tears of the first day were already a distant memory as she was now utterly devoted to ski school, so much so that she asked if she could do one extra day. The tourism people paid for three days of lessons, but if she did one more she could take part in their fun races and get a medal presentation. We gladly paid up.

  As if to justify the investment, our daughter surprisingly bounded out of bed, ate her breakfast promptly, and allowed us to get to the hill thirty minutes early.

  The Murmli song was blaring in German, something about “SOOP-ER MOORM-LEY … dah da dah,” the guy in the rodent suit was waving and shaking hands, and the kids were all shwooshing down an easy run complete with an authentic-looking finishing line and a medal ceremony for all.

  Despite the warm feeling and the medal around her neck, Julia mysteriously managed to develop a grumpy humour and in the treasured family photo we have of her parents beaming with the Austrian Alps in the background, she stands forever preserved as sour-faced.

  One more swim at the Drei Sonnen pool, a quick stop at a ski shop to drop €199 that I could not afford on a pair of ski pants to match my nice new jacket that I also could not afford, and we bid farewell to lovely Serfaus.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nine days after our return to London, Dan and I were on a flight to Moscow.

  Somehow all the proper paperwork made it through the Russian bureaucracy and we were fairly certain that we could at least get into the country. Our flight was packed and I was seated next to a massive Brit, who had a head that was entirely shaved with the exception of a tuft of hair at the base of the skull that suggested Attila the Hun. A taste of what was to come perhaps.

  Moscow has several airports. We landed at the busiest: dumpy Domodedovo. At passport control, the idea of an orderly lineup was a foreign concept. Far better to form an unruly arc fanning out from the agent, a rabble that never seemed to advance, only compress inward. The arrivals displayed all the jollity of zombies recently risen from the grave, with weary, dead eyes that suggested they had seen all of this before and were resigned to its hopelessness.

  As a good Canadian, I gradually edged forward, my courtesy rewarded with a constant flow of Russians elbowing ahead of me. After approximately an hour in the mob, I found myself standing in front of the passport officer. She looked about twenty, although her listless eyes appeared to have seen decades of dreary Russian history.

  She opened my passport to the visa, stared at it for a moment, looked at me, down to the visa again, then me, then shook her head, showed it to the officer beside her, who took it, followed the same routine, then walked it over to his adjoining desk. I moved in front of his space and opened my mouth to speak, reasoning naively that he was going to help me with whatever problem had arisen. Up came his hand, wordlessly telling me to shut up and wait.

  A supervisor arrived, a large, grim woman who scrutinized my offending passport, shook her head in disgust, and disappeared with it.

  Great.

  A minute later she was tapping me on the shoulder and pointing me toward a side office where a younger guy of better humour explained to me in broken English that my visa listed me as British, which was problematic given that my passport was clearly Canadian. There was no point in asking why the faceless bureaucrat who issued the visa did not note that the nationality on the visa did not match the passport. He pointed at the word in question: “Британская.” Not speaking or reading Russian it could have listed me as donkey.

  “No problem. I fix,” he said with an un-Russian grin. Five minutes later I was on my way, a nice improvement on the two and a half months it took to get the screwed-up visa.

  Now I had to return to passport control where the mob of arrivals had dwindled to a mere three. The officer sadistically found a means to check every comma on the documents of the people in front of me, just to add an extra element of exquisite torture to my arrival in Moscow.

  I met Dan at luggage pickup. He had gotten through only minutes ahead me, also delayed by an erroneous visa.

  “It listed me as a girl,” he said.

  Another mere thirty minutes dealing with the carnet for his equipment at customs and we emerged from the labyrinth into the arrivals hall and found a taxi stand. The ride into the centre of Moscow took the better part of an hour — hyperspeed by local standards. It can take twice as long if traffic is bad.

  The outer reaches of Moscow in late February have all the charm of any dreary North American suburb: grey, with the few people on the streets uniformly grim-faced. But as we approached the centre, the buildings grew grander, the people better-dressed.

  Moscow’s heart often sees swanky shops next door to dumpy greasy spoons, evidence of how Russia has both fabulous wealth and grinding poverty, often within spitting distance of each other.

  Our hotel, only a short walk from Red Square, was luxurious, as it should have been for the price we were paying. I still had not gotten around to advising Vancouver about the cost issue.

  Our local fixer was not Russian. Emmanuel was a tall, elegant Parisian who had moved to Moscow ten years earlier. Over coffee he explained that he came in search of adventure. Given that he arrived with little knowledge of Russian, he most certainly was an adventurous spirit. He freelanced for various French, Belgian, and Swiss publications, and did seem to be well-plugged into the local political scene. He also brought a Frenchman’s sardonic view to the loopiness and edge of Russian society.

  Inevitably, our first shoot had to be at Red Square to get scenic visuals. Equally inevitable was the briefness of the opportunity. Dan barely had placed his camera on the tripod when a cop came over to advise that a special permit was needed to record news video on
the square. As it was unlikely to be granted before year’s end, we opted to walk over to a nearby bridge that offered a perfectly fine panoramic view, without the need for paperwork.

  Emmanuel had gotten wind of a stunt by the Putin forces to launch a charm offensive on the Moscow Metro: young people were to hand out one hundred thousand tulips to subway riders, just to highlight the warmth and cuddliness of the ex-KGB strongman. We dropped off Dan’s news camera at the hotel and headed out with the DSLR, which was less likely to draw frowns from officialdom.

  Revolution Square station (Ploshchad Revolyutsii) was drab at the entrance but grand below — one of the many elegant Metro stops built by the Stalinist regime between the wars to demonstrate that Communists have taste. Under the grand arches we found clumps of millennials standing around with armloads of tulips. But they were just standing there, unsure what to do next, until a party functionary arrived and gave them the cue to start spreading the love.

  Emmanuel advised that the giving of flowers is a big deal in Russian culture, and sure enough, many of the Metro riders, particularly the women, were charmed by the gesture. Of course, given that they were coming indirectly from Vladimir himself, it was probably wise to smile broadly and thankfully.

  As they were working for the boss, there was no issue in shooting them and doing interviews. They were all holding heart-shaped signs with poetic slogans like “Love, Not Meetings,” a Putinesque elbow to the head of his opponents.

  Nineteen-year-old Ivan struggled a bit when I asked him (via Emmanuel’s translation) why he liked Putin. Finally he came out with: “I was able to get an education.”

  Twenty-seven-year-old Evgenia, who appeared to be the leader of the jolly troupe, told us, “My family’s life changed after he became president. Before, we didn’t even have enough food to eat.”

  With the arranged event duly recorded, we went in search of the undecided. On the street above the station, several vendors were selling their wares on the jammed sidewalks. Emmanuel doubted they would talk to us, given that they were acting illegally, but two of them readily spoke up.

  A woman told us that she planned to vote for Putin: “He’s a good guy … but the result is already decided, so it doesn’t really matter.”

  The man standing next to her shook his head: “Everything is hard. I’ll vote for Prokhorov [the billionaire owner of an NBA team].”

  We trolled for more streeters as we walked back to the hotel and came up with a young man named Anton who spoke English: “I won’t vote for Putin. Too much corruption.” But he, too, recognized the inevitability of the so-called race.

  With that, we declared a lunch break. A great thing about having a Parisian fixer was his recognition of the importance of eating well. Dan would always tell me that he would be satisfied with the Moscow outlet of Burger King, but I considered it a sacred duty to fully exploit our expense account and always sample the best of local cuisine whenever we were on the road.

  Emmanuel recommended a Caucasian joint in the neighbourhood, with hearty Central Asian fare. It was dark, rustic, with heavy wooden tables — a perfect setting for a tasty stew, full of huge chunks of meat still attached to the bone.

  With stomachs full, we hailed a taxi to take us to the next interview that Emmanuel had set up. Masha Lipman impressively straddled east and west, working for the Carnegie Endowment and contributing to the Washington Post, while also editing a reformist magazine in Moscow. As we set up for the interview, she explained how the publication was shut down — “collateral damage,” she called it — because it was put out of business the same day that the Kremlin pulled the plug on a TV station that had been too critical of Putin.

  Lipman believed that, although Putin would certainly win the election, his time could be running short. His opponents were heartened by the big protests that followed the corrupted parliamentary votes a couple of months earlier.

  “His legitimacy of course has been eroded by this. His power is weakened. He no longer has an aura of invincibility about him,” she said. Lipman made her point elegantly and convincingly, but later history showed Putin had not lost his touch for crushing opponents and consolidating his grip.

  State media were certainly still firmly on his side. There was fawning Putin coverage every day while his erstwhile opponents received little airtime. Although polls showed him well above the 50 percent mark that he needed to avoid a runoff, the opposition were still out there trying.

  Emmanuel arranged a shoot that evening at a gathering organized by the Russian United Democratic Party “Yabloko,” a centre-left group that supported freedom, civil rights, and more engagement with the West — none of which proved to be much of a vote winner in the Russian political climate of the day. Yabloko no longer had any seats in Parliament. Although no threat to Putin, Yabloko’s presidential candidate was disqualified by election officials just to ensure he would not be able to stir up any trouble.

  Yabloko was holding a meeting to train election observers, hoping to at least document the expected fraud. The meeting room was full, but it made for weak television — just a few earnest speakers addressing an audience of earnest idealists.

  As we started to shoot, there was an email from Vancouver: they did not need a story from us that night, which meant an earlier end to the day, but left an empty feeling. We wanted to file. I resolved to work the video into future stories as we headed back to the hotel.

  Moscow had a taxi culture unlike any I had ever seen. There were the clean limos that you could arrange through the hotel, which were ridiculously expensive and took forever to arrive. And there were the gypsy cabs, which were everywhere and instantly available.

  By everywhere, I mean everywhere. All you had to do is raise your arm and within seconds a guy would pull up and offer a flat-rate ride that was a fraction of the regular cabs: usually three hundred to four hundred rubles, although you often ended up paying five hundred because the drivers rarely had change for a five-hundred-ruble bank note.

  Emmanuel discouraged the use of the gypsy cabs, given that many if not most of them were sketchy operators: no taxi licence, crappy cars, and questionable drivers. But we decided that since we were travelling as a group of three men we would probably be fine, and that taking one would save the company some money on our otherwise pricey mission to Moscow.

  Outside the Yabloko meeting, Dan barely raised his arm before a beat-up compact squealed to a halt. The driver pounded on his trunk to open the rickety lid. Dan deposited his tripod, slammed the trunk shut, and held up a hand that was now black from the grime. We piled inside the heap as he looked for a place to wipe it off.

  Our guy had evidently been sleeping in his vehicle and not indulged in a shower for some time; as a result the car was suffused with the fragrance of rarely washed socks and underwear. Despite frigid temperatures, we lowered our windows in a vain attempt to dissipate the aroma.

  The driver screamed out from the curb, weaving in and out of traffic, waving his arms, and yakking at Emmanuel. Knowing we were Western reporters, he was anxious to give his opinions on the political scene. He was a Communist, a true believer, who thought Russia had slipped into mediocrity with the fall of the Soviet Union.

  Emmanuel struggled to keep up with the translation of our motormouth’s monologue while we all attempted to minimize breathing to keep out the smell and simultaneously held on for dear life as his jalopy lurched around corners with a suspension that was built in Brezhnev days.

  When he screamed to a halt in front of the hotel, Dan gratefully handed him a wad of rubles and we said a brisk “Do svidaniya” as we scrambled out and inhaled the comparatively clean air of a March Moscow night. Our first Russian Communist stank, and not only as a driver.

  Westerners do not appreciate that the spirit of Communism is alive and well in Russia, even if no longer officially in power. The commies would typically finish second in the presidential races, often a distant second, but they were a force.

  The next day we attended
a news conference with the current leader of the party, Gennady Zyuganov. A former propaganda apparatchik from Soviet days, he had managed to not only keep the Communist movement alive but had given Boris Yeltsin reasonable competition in the nineties’ elections.

  Zyuganov exuded all the charm of a concrete block — his face in a permanent scowl, his voice a low rumbling monotone. Given that he was likely to finish second, and we would never have access to Putin, the room was packed with reporters, both Western and Russian.

  Zyuganov intoned how things were so much better under Communist rule — that modern Russia had devolved into a dangerous, corrupt place, rife with economic inequality.

  With not a hint of irony (it might involve a smile), the heir to Stalin promised to be a champion of a free press if he should ever win power.

  Emmanuel brought us to a power lunch joint only a block from the hotel. It was all chrome, glass, and money, with flush businessmen served expensive meals from beautiful wait staff. He flashed a winning smile at our server, who giggled with delight.

  Our fixer explained that Russian women are easily charmed by Western courtesy because Russian men tend to be so brusque. As we ate our lovely, expense account meal, he regaled us with stories of the expected fraudulent electoral tactics. It seemed that evidence of the old adage “Vote early, vote often” would be in view in the election, as many paid operatives would likely be casting many ballots in many places for the same guy.

  Our next interview was with Vladimir Ryzhkov, a poster boy for the new Russia: smooth, well-groomed, English-speaking, and relatively liberal, the Putin critic was in big demand from the Western media in town for the election. We met him in the lobby of one of the luxury hotels, where he squeezed in a quick interview in between meetings with foreign election observers.

  Ryzhkov’s cellphone kept ringing incessantly as I tried to engage him in conversation while Dan set up for our interview. A representative of the observers stood off to the side, openly impatient that a Canadian TV crew was delaying him while a passel of dignitaries was kept waiting.