Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  I try to give a brief overview of the specific strategies I’ve come up with for each section of the test, and then I ask them the same question in return.

  “Corporal punishment!” they exclaim.

  They are adamant that I try this approach.

  “You know, some mothers, they come to me, and they say, ‘How can I help my son do well on his test?’ and I say, ‘Let me hit him.’”

  “Oh, wow!” I say. “That’s probably—”

  “You should visit our school tomorrow!” Ruslan adds, brightening.

  My powers of observation evidently dulled by those trips to the bathroom, I’m slow to notice that men and women are sitting on opposite sides of the room.

  When I do, I realize, to my horror, that I’m sitting on the men’s side.

  A dance floor divides the room in half: men on the left, women on the right, Audrey unwittingly shattering the glass ceiling in the middle. I’m not sure what to do. Should I feign ignorance? Use another gratuitous bathroom visit to join up with my sisters in arms? Run away?

  Before I have time to answer this question, the wedding begins with a crescendo of thumping club music.

  The groom has changed from his tracksuit into a regular suit, and we clap as he makes his way up the aisle, followed by his groomsmen. It’s like an American wedding procession, only with Pitbull in place of Pachelbel’s Canon.

  The bride is the last to enter. She looks beautiful and very young. I spend the rest of the evening trying to discern her age: everyone pegs her for early twenties, a few years younger than her husband, but not scandalously so. I can’t ask this, and no one offers confirmation, but to me, she seems far more attractive than the guy she’s marrying, though my eye has yet to align with local beauty standards, like how unibrows are in.

  Brides younger and more beautiful than their husbands are maybe the only thing more universal than feeling too big for the life you were born into or the polarizing effect of cilantro. But there’s something unsettling about the couple standing alone on a stage that also awkwardly resembles a canopy bed.

  I’m momentarily distracted, because the guys have cracked open the handle of vodka and are pouring shots into glasses that would pass for small wine goblets in America. They don’t even bother offering me one, and, as I raise my glass of Coke to join their toast, I know that they skipped my glass for the same reason the identical twins’ guardian poured me soda without thinking. They assume that, as a woman, I don’t drink.

  When they go to pour the next round of shots, I hold my glass out. Tim raises his eyebrows.

  “You want?” he asks.

  I remind myself of Ivanka Trump’s words, delivered by Alonya: women can have a family and a career and vodka.

  “I want,” I say.

  The biggest difference between American and Uzbek weddings is that, at an Uzbek wedding, it’s not all about the bride. It’s not her day. In fact, for a solid chunk of the wedding, we seem to forget about the newlyweds, who are seated side by side on the stage, silently eating eat their dinners.

  Meanwhile, I’m taking vodka shots, arm in arm, with the guys at my table. This is attracting a lot of attention. Two videographers have been hired to film the wedding, and for a while, they’re giving me full coverage. I’m wondering if we really need two cameras on Audrey as she tosses back yet another vodka shot. Maybe they’d like to focus on the other wedding guests, and/or the bride and groom?

  Attention is momentarily diverted from me as the emcee begins making a series of long announcements in Uzbek.

  I look around the room. It’s packed.

  “There must be four hundred people here!” I whisper to Ruslan.

  He shakes his head. “Probably eight hundred.”

  “Eight hundred people?!”

  He shrugs. It’s normal.

  “Do the bride and groom know all of them?”

  He considers. “Probably some, yes. Maybe others, they’ve never met. By the way, they just made a small hint about you.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “He said, ‘We are proud to have many guests here from all over the world, even one from America!’ Everyone will know it is you.”

  A man approaches our table, and Uzbek Leonardo DiCaprio leaps up, grinning. Uzbek Leo and this new man lean in toward each other, as if they’re going to kiss, but at the last minute, they bump their temples together, first on one side, then on the other. I’ve seen men do this all week: it’s an odd combination of head-butting and the French double-cheek kiss. I ask Ruslan about it.

  “It’s the cool way for young guys to greet each other,” he tells me. “But the old people, they say it is not respectful.”

  The older generation wants men to bow slightly while placing their hands over their hearts. I watch the man head-butt bisous his way around the table, and I find myself oddly touched by the affection and physical contact the young men are exchanging in this hypermasculine culture.

  I get weepy at weddings. This isn’t surprising, given that I also cry at graduations, holiday celebrations, YouTube videos, and the occasional inspired boarding announcement. But the head-butting isn’t what does me in.

  My tear ducts start tingling a few minutes later, when the boys all jump up and line up in front of the stage. All the men’s tables are getting up, one at a time, to congratulate the bride and groom and present their wedding gifts (cash, only cash). Uzbek Leo discreetly pats his pocket for the wad of cash, and in that moment, I see his mother kneeling beside ten-year-old Uzbek Leo, helping him maneuver his arms into a suit jacket, explaining the rules for weddings. Only sit with members of your own gender; hand over some cash when you get onstage; if you don’t have a suit, just wear your hiking gear.

  There’s something touching about watching everyone follow unwritten rules dictated by culture. I’m reminded of the time my friend Allison brought her non-Catholic boyfriend Matt and friend Laura to a Catholic wedding. When it was time to exchange the sign of the peace, Allison turned to Matt and kissed him. Matt and Laura, assuming this was the standard peace offering, turned to the strangers around them and began kissing them.

  The part that makes me cry comes later, when a group of older men and women walk into the room. The boys are immediately on their feet, grinning and slightly starstruck.

  “They are our teachers,” Ruslan whispers to me.

  Having your teacher come to your wedding is a huge honor, the boys tell me. I think about the national holiday for teachers and the high esteem in which Uzbekistan seems to hold all educators, and I see the men swarm their teachers like they’re the sample bar at Trader Joe’s.

  Maybe it’s culturally proscribed and maybe it’s regimented respect, but it’s still enough to ruin my mascara.

  After dinner, professional dancers with long, braided wigs perform an elaborate dance, and then I get pulled up to dance in front of all eight hundred guests. One of the groom’s female relatives is a specially trained dancer, and I try to follow her moves, until Aziz leans over to me and whispers, “Just freestyle is okay.”

  The bride and groom are supposed to have their first dance, but halfway through, she flees the dance floor, and I get yanked up to perform again.

  “She’s very shy,” the boys explain.

  I’m kind of horrified. I think about how I haven’t seen her smile all night. For most of the evening, she’s been stuck up on the canopy-bed stage, eating with a blank expression. I start to worry that she’s been coerced into the wedding, and that my dancing is enabling this coercion, but eventually, I continue dancing, and she comes back down and makes it through the first dance.

  Then the women all come up and give her money, just like the men did for her new husband, only she has to stand there and bow to each of them. Tim explains that an Uzbek bride is supposed to be modest and demure on her wedding day, deflecting attention and acting like she doesn’t want to be there. And certainly a lot of people get nervous on their wedding days, even Brooklyn couples who’ve been livi
ng together for over a decade and already have three children.

  Still, it’s hard to tell whether she’s being pushed into a wedding she doesn’t want, or she’s a naturally talented actor.

  Not long after, the couple decide they’re done, and they get up to leave. We all follow them out, pausing at the door to run our hands over our faces in prayer.

  I creep back into the guesthouse, feeling slightly badass for having stayed out past eleven. Jaloladdin nods at me.

  “How was the wedding?” he asks me.

  I beam. “It was wonderful.”

  He nods. “That’s what you wore?”

  I look down at my tight black dress and the butterfly control top that’s slowly slipping down my thighs. “Yep,” I say.

  “That’s perfect.”

  9

  A Visit to a Secret Museum (Uzbekistan)

  The world’s second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde paintings sits in a relatively unknown museum in the middle of the desert in Uzbekistan. According to some, this is no coincidence. The museum’s origin story, as presented by a smattering of Western media outlets and travel books, goes something like this: a brazen collector amassed the collection as an act of dissidence and then hid it in a remote museum where no one would think to look.

  Something about this story gives me pause. So in Khiva, I search for a taxi to take me three hours into the desert.

  In 1966, Igor Savitsky opened the Nukus Museum of Art in a remote city in the Uzbek desert. Nukus was small, obscure, and hard to reach, making it an ideal location for a nuclear testing facility or a secret underground lab, and a less logical place to put an art museum.

  Unless the point was to keep certain people from visiting.

  The Soviet government didn’t take kindly to abstract art or the people who made it. During Stalin’s purges, almost anything could be used as an excuse for arrest, including and often especially writing, thinking, and painting things not sanctioned by the Communist Party.

  But this party, along with the government it ran, was headquartered in Moscow. To the Soviet leaders, Nukus was far away and not particularly important, and no one in the Kremlin was paying close attention to the city or a tiny museum inside it.

  And so the museum became a refuge for art persecuted by the Soviet regime. Savitsky salvaged thousands of works hiding in basements and attics, waiting to be destroyed or forgotten, and gave them a home in his museum. In the end, art triumphed over tyranny. It’s a great story. Maybe too great.

  The museum’s origin story bothers me because it’s too simple, too clear-cut. It’s missing the messiness and moral ambiguity of real life. I worry that it’s a convenient backstory for a museum in an inconvenient location.

  I want to believe in abject heroism in the face of tyranny, but valiant deeds seem more often stumbled into than carefully premeditated. You don’t start out planning to save one thousand people from Auschwitz. You begin as a Nazi industrialist with a factory.

  Did Savitsky go to Uzbekistan with the intention of risking his life to save art? Or is his legacy something that happened along the way?

  I find a driver who will take me from Khiva to the museum. He’s a reticent man who stops before we leave town to stock up on a frozen snack called “ice milk.” I hope, for his sake, that’s a mistranslation.

  Outside the city, the land empties into open vistas of sky and sand. The same unchanging reel of brown desert and scruffy shrubs cycles past our windows. Clouds hang low in the sky and swirl above our heads.

  I wonder whether I’m going to a place Savitsky went in order to save a bunch of paintings, or a place where he happened to be living when he had the idea to open a museum.

  It quickly becomes a long ride.

  Igor Savitsky was born in Kiev in 1915 and grew up in Moscow in the years following the Russian Revolution. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an artist. He took painting lessons while he was young and enrolled in art school as an adult, though perhaps as a backup plan, he trained as an electrician.

  In the Second World War, the art institute at which Savitsky was studying was evacuated to Samarkand. He spent the war in Uzbekistan, and returned after completing his studies to work on a major archaeological excavation in the desert region of Khorezm. There, he studied artifacts and folk art created by the Karakalpak people. In his free time, he painted landscapes of the sandscapes that surrounded him. He still clung to his dreams of making great art.

  A few years later, Savitsky returned to Moscow with his paintings of Uzbekistan. He showed them to Robert Falk, a prominent Russian painter whom Savitsky greatly admired. Falk declared them to be terrible.

  This was a huge blow to Savitsky. Devastated, he cut up his canvases. He decided that he was finished with the Moscow art world, and he returned to Uzbekistan. He settled in the small city of Nukus, where he continued his work in archaeology and ethnography.

  There, Savitsky began collecting art and artifacts of the native Karakalpaks. He amassed jewelry, headdresses, pottery.

  At some point, he decided he wanted to open a museum with his Karakalpak collection. But the Soviets tended to be skittish on cultural heritage, seeing it as a dangerous weapon groups could rally around to question the authority of the Union.

  It’s said that Savitsky browbeat local authorities into giving him his museum. Or maybe Moscow was far away and didn’t feel particularly threatened by an exquisite collection of earrings.

  Either way, Savitsky opened his museum in 1966.

  And then he began collecting paintings.

  Anton’s mother was an artist. She died when Anton was eight. On the wall in Vadik’s bedroom hangs one of her pieces: a weaving of a woman wearing an enigmatic expression.

  “Do you think it’s your mom?” I ask Anton.

  “No,” he says. “I think it’s just a random woman.”

  I can’t see the woman in the weaving as anyone other than Anton’s mother. I can’t not feel like she’s watching while Vadik and I color on the floor of his bedroom, while Anton and I sleep there on summer nights when Elena and Vadik are back in Belarus. When I read to Vadik or sit in his bed making up fairy tales that he forbids from including names from his own life, I try to decipher the woman’s expression. It always eludes interpretation.

  What would Anton’s mother think of all this, of the grandson she never met, of this bizarre setup we all accept so casually? Whenever I tell anyone about Anton, I can sense in their reaction that they feel it is doomed. I know what it looks like, but I hate how no one believes in us.

  Would she? I’m haunted, less by her approval, but more by the omniscience it’s easy to project onto the dead. In my mind, she knows how the story ends. But she won’t tell me.

  Anton is haunted in a different way. “What if her art . . . wasn’t good?”

  The Nukus Museum is a blocky space-agey building that looks like the losing entry in a 1969 design competition for a public library. This could, I suppose, be intentional.

  When the Bolsheviks came to power, they brought with them ideas of what art should be. It should be easy to understand and relevant to people’s lives. It should glorify the worker and support the state.

  By 1934, the Soviet government had issued a list of standards to which it declared all art should aspire. It had to be proletarian and realistic, it had to represent scenes of everyday life, and it had to support the aims of the state and the party. Art that met this criteria was “approved”; everything else was not. An exemplary piece might depict young, rosy-cheeked communists smelting iron with joy. Abstract painting, a category into which almost all of the avant-garde fell, was now condemned as bourgeois and decadent.

  Artists who failed to conform to official tastes were removed from their jobs and barred from exhibiting, or arrested, or worse. Some left. Chagall and Kandinsky took refuge in Europe. Malevich stayed behind and had his paintings confiscated. There are doubtless other names we’ll never know, either because they chose to live by painting smiling
iron smelters, or because they didn’t.

  Within the Soviet Union, the avant-garde movement withered and died.

  Except, the Nukus Museum of Art asks, what if it didn’t? What if some artists kept painting subversive work in secret? What if they hid the results in places where they’d never be found? What if the events that seem most improbable unfold in ways that make it look easy?

  At the ticket counter, I notice a sign offering a private English tour of the collection. I do the math and realize it costs $5 U.S.

  A few other foreigners mill around in the lobby holding tickets or reading guidebooks. Why, I wonder, is no one else booking the private tour? Maybe it’s terrible. Maybe all of their guidebooks say, “Whatever you do, don’t take the $5 private tour!” Maybe there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and also no such thing as a good $5 private tour.

  I’d kind of like to explore the museum myself, but to not ask about the $5 private tour feels like declining the gift horse without even looking it in the mouth.

  I ask the woman behind the desk if there are any English private tours today. I’m kind of hoping she’ll say no and let me off the hook. That way, I’ll be able to say I at least asked about the $5 private tour, and I’ll console myself by reasoning that if you book a private tour that costs less than the average sandwich, you probably get what you pay for.

  To my dismay, she says there is.

  “Is it starting soon?” I ask nervously.

  She frowns and tells me to wait. She disappears behind a door and then returns, nodding.

  “She can do it now,” she says.

  Some of the first paintings Savitsky purchased were by a Russian artist living in Uzbekistan named Alexander Volkov. Once a distinguished painter awarded the title People’s Artist of Uzbekistan, Volkov had fallen from grace after Stalin ramped up the campaign to replace abstraction with Socialist Realism. Volkov’s paintings were labeled “counter-revolutionary” and removed from museums. He was fired from his teaching post. He spent the remainder of his life in isolation, prevented by the local artists’ union from having any contact with the art world.