Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Another stark contrast between the past and the present comes in education. The Soviet campaign to “liquidate illiteracy” proved remarkably effective—by the 1950s, almost every citizen of the USSR could read and write. Schooling was compulsory for all Soviet citizens, which brought education to women in places where girls hadn’t traditionally been sent to school. In some places, and especially in the poorer rural parts of Central Asia, these education gains have been lost. Women don’t always finish school if they marry before graduation, which means young brides may receive less of an education than their grandmothers did. The older generation often speaks more Russian than the younger.

  This creates an odd dynamic for travelers. Anywhere else in the world, if you want to find someone who speaks the lingua franca, you approach young people. In the former Soviet Union, you start with the oldest people you can find.

  I’d always assumed that Soviet citizens saw the collapse of the USSR as a welcome harbinger of freedom and independence. Many did, particularly at the time, but few were prepared for the period of political and economic chaos that followed. A majority of the fifteen post-Soviet states traded one dictatorship for another, and for many of their citizens, it’s hard to see what was gained.

  It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anton years ago that I’d never been able to wrap my head around until now.

  We were discussing Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union. When I’d learned about him in school, he’d always been painted in a positive light, and I was surprised to hear that the opposite had been true for Anton.

  “Some people see him as a coward,” he said, “because he let the Union fall apart.”

  “Yeah, and that liberated, like, millions of people—including you,” I said.

  “Audrey, you don’t understand. One night you go to bed, and you’re part of the Soviet Union, the largest and most powerful country on Earth. And the next morning, you wake up, and you’re Belarus.”

  Mountains speckled with what I’ve come to call Central Asian graffiti—white rocks arranged to spell out words on the sides of impossibly steep cliffs—guide us out of the settlements toward the Ak-Baital Pass, the highest point on the Pamir Highway. As we ascend, the landscape becomes increasingly barren, until it’s just different variations of rock. There’s solid rock that engineers had to blast through to lay the highway, smaller stones that catch underfoot as I scramble to find a suitably private spot to relieve myself on the side of the road, and the fine dust of former rocks that cakes my clothes in a soft layer of powder.

  The mountains turn more colorful: greenish browns and vivid reds swirled together like marbles. There are moments when I look out my window and see the mesas and badlands of the American southwest; others when all I glimpse are snow-covered peaks and open sky. I snap a panorama while squatting on the side of the road.

  Early British explorers nicknamed the Pamirs “the Roof of the World,” which doesn’t make much sense to me. A roof descends from above, while mountains rise from below. I would have called them something simpler, like “Severely Conducive to the Aging Process.”

  We drive by a lone cyclist bundled up in a red Windbreaker struggling up toward the pass, and he raises one arm in salute. “You’d have to be crazy,” we all mutter, although I wonder if I might secretly have it in me to finish my trip on a bicycle.

  We pull up to the sign that marks the highest point on the pass. I’m dizzy from the altitude. We snap a picture. I’ve made it, I guess, to the Roof of the World.

  The penultimate stop on our journey is Karakul Lake, a stretch of clear, turquoise water ringed by snow-covered mountains that’s pooled in the gash left by meteorite impact.

  I’ve already been to Karakul Lake, although not this Karakul Lake. Across the border in China, there’s another body of water with the same name. The two do look remarkably similar. For a moment, I wonder if they share a name because someone mistook one for the other, but then I learn Karakul just means black, and this kind of makes sense, but also doesn’t, because what strikes me most about both of these lakes is the vivid blue of their waters.

  We’re staying in a tiny town that’s more like a cluster of houses huddled together against the high-altitude elements. I get lost wandering the unnamed streets as the wind and sun burn my skin.

  Januzak points out the tip of Peak Lenin across the waters. “It’s the highest point in the former Soviet Union,” he tells us.

  Highest seems to be the superlative most frequently bestowed upon this part of the world. We’ve visited the highest town and the highest pass, while traveling along the second-highest highway in the world. Karakul Lake seems eager to snatch the title “highest navigable lake” from the hands of Lake Titicaca: in 2014, it hosted the Roof of the World Regatta, which was, as I might have guessed, the highest sailing regatta in the world. Outdated calendars in our guesthouse still boast about this distinction, with pictures of sailboats tacking on the lake’s still waters.

  After lunch, I sneak down to the lake for a moment of solitude. The water sits, still as glass, in the crater basin. It’s so quiet I can hear the silence. The sun glitters off the lake.

  Back at the guesthouse, I find a rugged American couple who’ve recently dismounted from bicycles. They’re young, outgoing, and funny; and, most notably, they’re the first native English speakers I’ve encountered on my trip.

  People say you have different personalities in different languages, which for me has been true because I’ve never mastered a second language. Linguistic deficiencies have forced me to be less expressive and talkative—a more muted version of who I am when I don’t have to think about vocabulary.

  Even with Vianney, who spent part of his childhood in Australia and speaks perfect English, there are still cultural references I can’t make and small details you never think of as being specific to your language or country. It’s like an American and an Australian doing improv: one says, “Let’s get in the car,” they sit down on two chairs beside each other, and they both think they’re driving. The Americans and I joke and speak quickly and watch the sun set over the lake. I feel myself relaxing, letting my guard down, and slipping into a version of myself that feels more natural.

  It doesn’t hit me until after dinner, when we’re lounging on pillows, watching a Tajik news program we can’t understand. I realize that what I’m doing with these Americans, Vianney does with everyone. I’m unconsciously putting everyone I meet into one of two boxes—other and not other—and changing how I relate accordingly. In the name of being sensitive, I’m also being more guarded, acutely aware of my identity and how it colors interactions.

  Vianney maintains this sensitivity while also just operating under the assumption that some common, uniting humanity supersedes cultural and situational differences. He finds common ground—work, family, food—and then has a normal conversation. Most strikingly, he doesn’t turn into the worst version of himself when he’s in an unfamiliar environment. It’s so easy to do that when you’re traveling. You’re in a new place and don’t know the language, rules, and best snack foods. It’s easy to go on the defensive: to look out for danger and swindlers instead of keeping an open mind. It’s harder to be a Vianney. But it seems like it might be a challenge worth undertaking.

  The last mountains we see look like frosted red velvet cupcakes. They’re rich with iron and topped with snow. They sit behind the Chinese border, a line clearly marked with posts that once had barbed wire connecting them. Some still do. The only people who’d be thwarted by that border fence would be people carrying wide loads who didn’t think to turn sideways.

  Vianney and I begin speaking about the trip as though it’s already ended.

  “It’s lucky we found you,” he’s saying, “because I was posting on these websites, looking for someone to join us, and no one was responding.”

  I tell him that I was the lucky one, because I was messaging the V guy with the perfect dates, the perfect itinerary, which, now tha
t I think about it, is actually pretty similar to our own, so maybe it all worked out in the end—

  And then it clicks. That the V guy I kept trying to reach on those message boards. The V stood for Vianney.

  6

  Touring the Black Markets of Uzbekistan

  A friend recently asked how I knew where to find the black markets in Uzbekistan.

  I blinked. “You just ask people.”

  At restaurants, you flag down the nearest waiter. “Could I get the check?” you ask. “And by the way, where’s the nearest black market?” You point to a pyramid of apples at a fruit stand and ask the woman peddling them how much they cost. “Also, is this the black market?” When you ask a cop for directions, you don’t ask about the black market, but you get the sense that you probably could.

  It turns out that the snooty German I met back in Kyrgyzstan was right—in Uzbekistan the black market is the place to exchange currency.

  Like many post-Soviet states, Uzbekistan spent the early 1990s putting out the fire that was its economy. When the USSR disbanded, what had once been a unified, centrally planned economy was broken up and divided among the fifteen newly independent nations. Adding further strain, almost all of these countries planned to transition to free-market economies. “Transition” here was a loose term: many governments were so excited about this that they decided to abandon gradual change for instant capitalism (technically called “shock therapy”). Prices immediately skyrocketed, ushering in an era of shortages and rampant inflation. The Uzbek government attempted to combat this by setting an “official” exchange rate that’s about as in touch with reality as the weight I self-report on health forms. The official rate, which is used by banks and mandated by law in Uzbekistan, makes the Uzbekistani som more valuable than it would be if the government didn’t intervene. Uzbekistani citizens and business would rather hold their wealth in U.S. dollars, because the som is so unstable. But because the banks and government lose money each time they sell dollars at the official rate, the pool of hard U.S. currency available through legal channels is limited. The black markets step in to fill the gap, and everyone loses, except the people coming into Uzbekistan with U.S. dollars. When I was there, the official rate was around 2,500 som to the dollar. The black market rate was close to 5,000. Each time I changed $100, I was getting $200 worth of Uzbekistani currency.

  The Uzbek border is a dusty, desolate expanse of desert barricaded behind miles of fence and barbed wire. I’m nervous; although I’ve added a few more land-border notches to my crossing-between-territories-belt, I’ve heard that the Uzbek border is the most restrictive in Central Asia. Guards apparently inspect each item in your suitcase to check for drugs and sensitive materials, a broad and subjective category that includes pornography, documents promoting religious extremism, and photographs of borders. I’ve been warned to discard any medication that could possibly be construed as a narcotic and go through my computer to ensure I don’t have any pictures of borders or men with beards. I’m particularly worried about the border photos. I spent last night going through years of pictures and deleting anything that kind of even looked like an international divide.

  Inside a crowded customs hut, a soldier in an olive-green uniform instructs me to fill out an exhaustive form declaring the value of everything I’ll bring into Uzbekistan. The example provided is: “Sellphone (1). Used.”

  I hesitate, wondering whether to correct the error. Would that be pretentious? Is this a test to weed out the obnoxious know-it-alls? “Sellphone,” I finally write. “(1). Used.”

  I struggle to hoist my suitcase onto the row of folding tables where soldiers inspect the contents of travelers’ suitcases. A female guard begins unzipping my pouches of night creams and antacids.

  “Do you have any drugs?” she asks.

  I’m about to say no when I remember that I do—that is, if you count Xanax as a drug, which, if memory serves, most law enforcement does.

  I’d been so focused on scrubbing my computer of potentially incriminating fences that I’d completely forgotten about the Xanax. I’m now remembering that Uzbekistan has a zero-tolerance drug policy and that an online forum warned about a British couple who were thrown in jail for having cough syrup that’s sold over the counter in the UK. A group of cyclists had told me they’d had to account for each pill in their first-aid kit.

  “I’d toss anything that’s not, like, Tylenol or Tums,” one cautioned. “Just to be safe.”

  “No,” I say as the customs agent opens the backpack containing my drugs. “No drugs.”

  She pulls out the plastic sandwich bag of medications. From it, she removes the blister pack of Xanax, the back of which is clearly labeled, in capital letters, XANAX.

  “What’s this?” she asks.

  “Medicine,” I whisper.

  “What for?”

  “For . . . headaches.”

  She frowns and picks up an old prescription bottle whose label wore off long ago. This is where I carry the rest of my pills—ibuprofen, Ambien, fish-oil pills, and antimalarial medication all jumbled together. The flaws in this system have been revealed many times, as when I went for a dose of what I thought was ibuprofen and ended taking six times the recommended daily dosage of antimalarial medicine.

  “What are these?” she asks, shaking the bottle.

  If she opens it, the forty mismatched pills might not do me any favors. “Also . . . for . . . headaches,” I whisper.

  She shrugs and puts the bottle back in my bag.

  I realize, as I drag my suitcase to the next station, that though she’s been trained to scour suitcases for Xanax, she’s likely never been taught what the word looks like in English.

  Tashkent is a mix of crumbling Soviet infrastructure and beautiful Islamic architecture. Blocks of concrete apartment buildings adorned with vaguely Middle Eastern designs abut tiled mosques and madrases. In the right parts of town, fountains splash over verdant grass, and in the wrong parts, people pour water on the sidewalks to keep the dust down. When you walk down those streets, you learn to watch for the women flinging bucketfuls of water.

  Uzbeks are the largest ethnic group in Central Asia, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, was always the de facto capital of Russian- and Soviet-controlled Central Asia. The fertile farmland in Uzbek territories was well-suited for growing cotton, which is why the tsar decided he needed it. His decision to invade and conquer the various Uzbek khanates was also easy to justify, because the Uzbeks had a habit of kidnapping Russian citizens and keeping them as slaves.

  Today agriculture remains an important sector of Uzbekistan’s economy, but domestic demand has shifted to something the country doesn’t produce. “Right now, people are going crazy for dollars,” the manager of my guesthouse is telling me, shaking his head. He’s checking me in, a process made tedious by government regulations requiring foreigners to obtain registration slips accounting for each night of their stay. Some managers have printed forms; others scribble the details onto the backs of Post-it notes. I have to carry these slips around with me and hand them over on my way out of the country in order to be allowed to leave—a reminder that Big Brother is watching, but can’t track me via computer.

  “You should change money at the black market,” the manager continues. “It’s completely illegal, but perfectly safe.”

  This is music to my ears. I love any chance to feel like I’m living dangerously without risking arrest, bodily harm, or mild embarrassment.

  I’m also excited to see a black market in person. In China, I used illegal money changers and bought knockoff Louis Vuitton purses from a crawl space hidden under a dental surgery clinic, but I’ve never been to a shopping center that calls itself the Black Market (although I have admittedly shopped at White House Black Market).

  “And where is the nearest black market?” I ask.

  At the fruit market, he tells me. All the good black markets, it turns out, are in fruit markets.

  But I have a more pressi
ng concern: my Russian visa.

  Half of the countries I want to visit require Americans to obtain visas in advance. Because I’m not traveling on a tour, I have to arrange my own visas, a task I’ve made more difficult for myself by applying outside of my home country. On the plus side, I’m learning more than I ever thought there was to know about various foreign bureaucracies. For example, did you know most embassies get mildly offended when you show up to apply for a visa and say, “Sorry, can you remind me of the name of your capital?”

  Some of the embassies are so small that the ambassador personally processes visa applications. Each time I submit my documents to an ambassador, it feels like an exchange for which he is vastly overqualified. On two occasions, I have to haggle over the visa price using a calculator as an interpreter between myself and his excellency.

  I’m at the Russian embassy in Tashkent, which looks like something built by the Cold War. By that, I don’t mean that its structure seems ideologically fueled by the paranoia and posturing of U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1960s. I mean that it looks like it was designed, planned, and constructed by a nuclear missile.

  The building is surrounded by gates, fences, and razor wire. The entrance is a steel door guarded by men with machine guns and further cordoned off by a series of gates.

  I’m standing in a crowd of people so tightly packed together that we’d be fully prepared if the ambassador stepped outside and announced that he wanted to stage dive. But this mosh pit is for Uzbekistani citizens, who have a special visa agreement with Russia.

  When a guard sees my American passport, I’m whisked to the front of the line, where I deposit my bag in a locker, then proceed through a six-inch-thick steel door into the vestibule, where a guard protected by bulletproof glass asks to check my documents. I realize that I left those in the locker, and he rolls his eyes because I am clearly amateur hour when it comes to heavily fortified, steadfastly bureaucratic embassies, so I have to go back and sheepishly retrieve my documents from the locker, which makes the armed guards roll their eyes, too, because how did I mess up the first and easiest part of this whole thing? I show my documents and then pass through a metal detector and a second steel door into the custody of another guard who escorts me to the visa window, which is located deep inside the bowels of a labyrinthine collection of fluorescent-lit corridors that have the interior design sensibility of a public swimming pool.