Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Things are not going well for the European tourists in front of me at the visa window.

  “It’s Airbnb,” they’re trying to explain to the woman sitting behind yet another panel of bulletproof glass.

  The visa woman is shaking her head.

  Russia requires that citizens from countries whose leaders don’t capitulate to Vladimir Putin obtain letters of invitation to apply for tourist visas. In theory, a letter of invitation is supposed to come from someone inviting you to Russia for a semi-legitimate reason, but in practice, I’ve learned, it’s something you buy from a sketchy company on the Internet.

  An Airbnb host has to apply in person for the tedious paperwork required for private citizens to invite their friends to Russia; a shady tourist agency can issue a falsified document in minutes.

  I lean toward the woman. “You can just buy a fake one online,” I whisper.

  She eyes me suspiciously. “But we really are staying with this woman on Airbnb,” she explains.

  “It’s really cheap,” I assure her. “And way faster.”

  I share what I’ve learned in my weeks of compulsive Googling, and within minutes, I’ve convinced her that it’s completely illegal, but perfectly safe.

  Buoyed by pride in my own detective skills and general ingenuity, I step up to the visa window full of confidence.

  The woman behind the window wears her hair in a soft perm and her lips in a straight line that passes for a neutral expression in Russia, and would be considered a frown anywhere else.

  She does not speak English. Our conversation quickly surpasses the bounds of my Russian. We struggle for a few minutes, and then she sighs. “Habla español?” she asks.

  Somehow using a combination of phrases gleaned from Taco Bell commercials and French pronounced in a bad Spanish accent, we reach an understanding: I printed out the wrong letter of invitation, and I need to go get another copy.

  I head back outside to try to find someone with a printer. I’m not sure where to begin: most of the businesses around the embassy are small shops, and, as is true anywhere in the former Soviet Union, one out of every four businesses is a notary.

  It’s impossible to imagine a story that begins, “So I was in a former Soviet republic, and I could not, for the life of me, find a notary!”

  I’m not kidding: the storefronts that you pass on any former Soviet street go something like this: notary, grocery store, notary, convenience store, notary, notary, notary, monument to hero of the people.

  Not far from the embassy gates, I find an overworked notary on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A dozen clients with stacks of papers in plastic sheaths hover around her desk or wait patiently in a row of chairs as the notary buries her face in her hands and emits loud, dramatic sounds of distress.

  I decide this will be a good place to print my letter.

  I get to cut the line because I’m the only one who doesn’t need anything notarized, and also, I think, because as soon as they realize I’m a foreigner, they want to get rid of me. I ask the notary if I can get on the Wi-Fi and e-mail the letter to her. She stares at me. There is no Wi-Fi.

  Our conversation is labored and heavily impeded by the language barrier. Finally, the notary shouts something into a back room, and Camilla appears.

  For the first time in my life, I understand the urge that some men have to save certain women, because this is how I instantly feel about Camilla. She’s tiny and pretty and exudes a certain air of helplessness, although she will end up solving every problem I stumble across in the next forty-eight hours. I want to pick her up, pack her in my suitcase, and ferry her off to a better life in Turkmenistan.

  Camilla sits me down at her computer and has me pull up the invitation letter. “So,” I begin, “I kind of need this signature to look . . . like it didn’t come from a printer.”

  She nods. We get to chatting. Camilla is ethnically Russian and speaks decent English. When I ask her how, she tells me she studied to be an interpreter—her dream job. I tell her she seems qualified to work as a translator, and then her responses become more vague. At some points, she intimates that she might not have finished school; at others, she seems to indicate that a woman, or a Russian, can’t run a company, although I want to point out that her boss is at least one of those things. Camilla strikes me as smart and capable, and, above all else, very young.

  As she finishes printing, I realize I need to exchange my currency in order to pay her.

  “Thanks,” I tell her, when she hands me my new letter of invitation. “By the way, where’s the nearest black market?”

  She stares at me like I’m crazy. “In the fruit market, of course.”

  It’s one thing to know that the black market is inside the fruit market; it’s another to locate the black market aisle.

  I assume I’ll know it when I see it. I picture shady characters lurking on the edges with big black bags, scanning the room for eye contact.

  Instead, I find a pretty normal-looking outdoor fruit market, with the slow trickle of shoppers you’d expect at eleven a.m. on a Wednesday.

  So I ask people. I wander up and down the rows of tables murmuring, “U.S. dollars?” like someone peddling drugs outside of a nightclub. I stop to ask a kid selling apples and a group of women hawking SIM cards.

  I’m surprised when they all point me not to a thuggish man scowling beside a pole, but to a small, unassuming woman selling Korean salads. When I approach her, only the top of her head peeks out from a pile of shredded carrots.

  “I’m looking for . . .” I begin timidly.

  Before I can finish my sentence, she whips out a calculator and types in the exchange rate. Her offer is great—higher than anything I’ve heard—but I counter out of habit. She shakes her head and retypes the original number. I slide over a hundred-dollar bill, and she hands me a black garbage bag stuffed with thick wads of cash rubber-banded together. She seems surprised when I dump it all out and begin counting right in front of her.

  I guess I wasn’t expecting a black market transaction to be as straightforward as buying a sweater at the Gap.

  Back at the embassy, the woman at the visa window checks over all of my documents, nods at everything, and then disappears into a back room. A solid thirty minutes pass. I entertain myself by studying the bulletins on the wall, which show the right and wrong ways to take a passport photo. A picture of a woman smiling is covered in a giant red X; the corrected photo beside it shows her frowning. Another NO photo features a man wearing a rainbow clown wig; the YES picture is the same man, sans wig. I wonder if Russia has had an influx of Clowns Without Borders.

  The visa woman reappears with an even more serious man. “Everything is okay with your documents,” he declares in English. “Except that your visa application must be filled out in the Russian language.”

  I stare, incredulous. For a brief, poorly considered moment, I try to reason with him. Why didn’t they tell me that before? Why is the visa application form on their website in English?

  “If a Russian wants to go to America, so, he must submit a visa application in English,” he explains. “American citizens must do the same in Russia.”

  I can’t find fault in his logic. But I also can’t translate my application into Russian. I try one last Hail Mary.

  “The visa office closes in thirty minutes,” I say. “And tomorrow is Teacher’s Day.”

  The guesthouse manager warned me about that this morning. “Tomorrow is Teacher’s Day,” he told me, grimly.

  At the time, this didn’t strike me as particularly earth-shattering information. In America, Teacher’s Day is more or less on the same level as Arbor Day: the type of holiday that shows up on a calendar and then disappoints you by not bringing presents or a reprieve from homework. Suddenly, though, it feels like a potential ace up my sleeve.

  “Yes,” the man at the visa office says.

  “And I plan on celebrating,” I lie, “because I am a teacher.”

  He stares at me
, unmoved.

  “Also,” I continue, “won’t you be closed for Teacher’s Day?”

  “Of course not,” he replies.

  The instructions on the Russian visa application clearly state that the application can only be prepared by the person obtaining the visa or a licensed tour operator. But by this point in the day, I’m too deep into a life of crime to stop. Out on the street, I contemplate how I can hire someone to illegally translate my application. Camilla’s face pops into my head.

  Back at the notary office, the notary–cum-Virginia Woolf character agrees to translate my documents, but rather than handing them off to Camilla, she sends me to a skinny kid in an office across the street who’s blasting Akon, chain-smoking cigarettes, and not at all conversant in English.

  I fume. I wonder where Camilla is, and why she isn’t the one doing this. I’m also curious about why this guy was banished to an empty office across the street, and why, given that the embassy closes in twenty minutes, he’s putting together a DJ set instead of translating my documents.

  “The office closes at noon,” I say. “You need to start now! Fast, fast!”

  My boy DJ Tashkent is pretty stumped from the get-go. He has to look up words like America and name. Eventually, he just gives up and calls Camilla, who, I want to point out, should have been doing this all along! (If only so we can spend more quality time together, and I can encourage her to start an organization to empower young women.) She joins us in the smoky office, but steps outside to draw on her own slim cigarettes and exhale long, thin trails of smoke.

  Even from outside, he calls to her.

  “University?” he asks.

  “Universitet,” she calls back.

  He flies through my work history and family tree, and it’s starting to look like I might just make it back in time to drop off my documents before noon, but then we reach the worst part of the application.

  This section requires me to list the dates of travel for every country I’ve visited in the past ten years. I’d been surprised, when filling it out this morning, to discover that the past decade had brought me to dozens of countries. If I’d have known all that travel would turn out to be such a liability, I think bitterly, I would have stayed home.

  Translating the country names and filling in the travel dates is so tedious and time-consuming that they eventually decide to start skipping most of them.

  “They will not check every country,” Camilla declares confidently. She delivers this, as she does every line, with a seriousness usually reserved for handing down death sentences.

  “They won’t?” I ask, surprised.

  “Most probably, no,” she says. “But maybe yes.”

  Noon comes and goes, with DJ Tashkent wanting to know how to say China, and Akon wanting to make love right now (na na), and me now forced to spend another day in Tashkent.

  “You should be running this place, Camilla,” I snap.

  She’s been nervously eyeing my purse, which I’ve dropped unceremoniously onto the floor beside me. “You shouldn’t put your bag on the ground,” she says finally. “It’s bad luck.”

  While Camilla and DJ Tashkent finish illegally translating my Russian visa application, I grapple with an even more overwhelming conundrum: Should I offer to buy Camilla lunch?

  The thing is, I know my relationship with Camilla is strictly professional, but a part of me senses the tingle of a blossoming friendship. Is it crazy that I’m picturing us giggling over beers at an exclusive, locals-only party later that evening? Or meeting up in New York years later, laughing as we recognize the familiar faces hiding beneath sleeker haircuts and more sophisticated makeup?

  “And, sign here,” she tells me, pointing to a line beside a statement swearing that no one helped me prepare my visa application, which, if I’m being honest, I can’t even read.

  Plus, I tell myself, Camilla really did all the work here, and I bet DJ Tashkent is going to get all the credit. That’s what it’s like to be a WOMAN in UZBEKISTAN!

  They hand me back my application, and I try to say, “Can I buy you some fried dumplings?” It comes out, “I’m going to run to the embassy to see if I can still turn this in!”

  How did that happen? I wonder, as I make my way back down the hot, dusty street to the embassy gates. Men with creased faces stand smoking cigarettes in the paltry shade cast by a thin line of trees.

  Maybe it’s all for the best, I think. Maybe she would have been weirded out by the whole— Hang on! I interrupt myself. You’re telling me, in a part of the world where people invite strangers to babies’ birthday parties, it would have seemed weird to buy someone lunch to say thanks for helping?

  Well, when you put it that way . . . I concede.

  The embassy is, of course, closed, because if there’s one thing bureaucrats do efficiently, it’s break for lunch. As I head back to the main street, and my unexpected extra day in Tashkent, I resolve to invite Camilla for lunch.

  But then I chicken out and scurry past her office.

  Come on, Audrey! I scold myself as I reach the main street. You’re submitting semiforged documents to a government that still poisons dissidents, and you’re scared of a little social rejection?

  Good point! I agree.

  I march back toward Camilla, first full of confidence, and then pretending that I’m just looking for something I dropped.

  As I reach the embassy crossroads at the end of the street, I suddenly feel very silly. This whole lunch no longer feels worth the internal turmoil. I turn around and resolve to head back to the guesthouse, and as I walk past Camilla’s office for the final time, she steps outside.

  I smile and wave. “I was going to ask you if you’ve eaten,” I say.

  She gives me a strange look and tells me she hasn’t.

  “I’d be happy to buy you lunch,” I continue, “to thank you for everything.”

  She shakes her head. “We have lunch at the office. So we don’t take a break.”

  I toe the dirt with my sneaker, unsure if she’s telling the truth or letting me down gently. “Wow,” I finally reply. “That’s tough work.”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “Every day.”

  There’s an awkward silence, so I ask her what her hours are like.

  “We begin at nine,” she says, shrugging, “and then, at night, sometimes we work until seven, sometimes nine, sometimes ten.”

  She says this without histrionics or a bid for sympathy, but as I walk back to the main street, I can’t help but feel sorry for her. Her boss, in my head, has transformed from a Virginia Woolf character on the verge of a nervous breakdown to a callous Dickensian guardian, forcing her to scrub the floors while translating legal contracts into English, and it isn’t until I reach the main street that I realize, Wait, when I’m tutoring and performing, I basically work the same hours.

  I wonder why I was so awkward about all this as I reached out my hand to flag a taxi. Maybe spending so much time alone makes each potential friendship seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If you blow it, you’ll never have a companion for lunch again.

  The knowledge that you’re carrying around hundreds of dollars in garbage bags changes your personality. You become more paranoid. You find yourself possessive of meaningless belongings. You begin locking your toiletries.

  In your eyes, every person is a potential thief. You eye the toddler crawling around at your feet with suspicion. Maybe, you think, he’s one of those babies who’s been trained to steal fistfuls of cash from strangers’ garbage bags. You can’t remember if that’s something you made up, or a tip you read in one of those chain e-mails forwarded by elderly relatives with a subject like “RE:FWD:FWD:FWD:RE:FWD: KNOWING THESE CRIMINALS’ SECRET TRICKS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE.” You begin to understand why drug dealers say they don’t know who their real friends are.

  Before I leave my guesthouse in the morning, I gather up all the bills floating in my purse. I pull bills from the loose change that accumulates at the bottom. I shake
my guidebook, and a few thousand som tumble out.

  It briefly occurs to me that if someone wanted to rob me, he’d first have to organize my bag.

  The next morning, I head back to the Russian embassy to turn in the application that DJ Tashkent took too long to translate.

  In the early-morning light, Tashkent, like all Soviet cities, seems at once hopeful and hopeless. The concrete apartment buildings that will look gray and worn by noon glow in the hazy, golden light. We pass a stocky, inelegant building with no windows called Next Mall of Tashkent. Billboards on its walls advertise an ice-skating rink and a restaurant called American Pizza.

  I walk past Camilla’s office and briefly wonder if I should buy her a present in Samarkand. Would that be weird? Will she think I’m hitting on her? Does she already think I’m hitting on her? Am I hitting on her?

  Things go a little more smoothly at the embassy this morning. The woman at the visa window looks over my application, now written in perfect Russian, nods, and disappears again. When she returns, she tells me, in her signature blend of Spanish and Russian, that everything looks good, and then asks if I want to pick the visa up in ten working days, or spring for the express service and get it in five.

  My mouth goes dry. “I want to pick it up tomorrow.”

  Picture Uzbekistan as a shadow cutout of Walt Whitman’s beard. Tashkent is located at the tip of the beard, just before it starts to curl up, and I want to make it to the chin. In ten days.