Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  It seems odd to keep a prison in the city center, but I also get the sense that the government might not mind having the prominent visual reminder that actions have consequences.

  To add to its superlatives, Minsk is also the most orderly major city I’ve visited.

  “Minsk is the only city in the world where you’ll never see anyone jaywalk,” a friend tells me, laughing.

  “Yeah, why is that?” I ask.

  “Because they don’t want to get a ticket.”

  The police ticket effectively for jaywalking in Minsk, but the fine isn’t always the biggest deterrent. Most Belarusians are eager to avoid any interaction with police, who have a reputation for causing more trouble whenever the mood strikes them.

  No one litters, either. The streets are free not only of garbage, but also of cigarette butts—surprising, given how many people smoke. But over the course of my stay in Minsk, I watch countless people stub out their cigarettes on the sides of buildings or the metal coverings on trashcans and properly dispose of the butts.

  When Anton saw that, against his advice, I went ahead with my plan to come to Belarus, he offered to put me in touch with some more of his friends in an uncharacteristically generous gesture. They’re all young, like twenty, which is kind of weird, but I also can see why Anton gravitates toward people whose lives pick up where his youth ended. When he was their age, he was about to get married.

  Anton’s friends call themselves apolitical, a term that seems to mean that they refuse to engage with the economic or political systems. Hence, the no jobs. Also hence why I rarely see them eat.

  They take me out to clubs improbably located in what look like former gymnasiums and old factories. We spend all night dancing to music that is 90 percent bass, and when the night turns to morning, we walk home, because there’s no question of taking a cab.

  The guy at the center of it all, for me anyway, is Anton’s friend Daniil, a handsome, rail-thin twenty-three-year-old who chooses each word he says very carefully, a habit that lends his speech a staccato cadence. Daniil seems to have aspirations of breaking into “art installations,” but for now, he spends most of the day sleeping in an undisclosed location, and he spends his nights in Minsk’s nightlife scene.

  “It’s very small,” he tells me. “I can go to any party, and probably, I will know almost everyone there.”

  It’s hard to picture Anton in these scenes, because I felt like I didn’t know his Belarusian side. I heard him speak Russian, but I could never understand it enough to know who he was in Russian. I still can’t speak well enough to know that.

  Still, I know he would blend in more fluidly than I do. Not just linguistically: he would understand these small gestures that I don’t, these weird laughs, the awkward game of hot potato when the group has to make a decision. This would all be familiar to him; perhaps sometimes he would find himself slipping into mannerisms he’d long forgotten. He wouldn’t instinctively step into a crosswalk against the light on an empty street.

  The one thing I definitely can’t picture is Anton and me here together. It wouldn’t have worked, I realize. I’d be the odd one out: they’d all be speaking Russian, Anton would have to translate, and this would annoy him. If he were here, I’d never be able to communicate with his friends. Without him, we’re forced to make it work. It’s a weird moment when you realize the thing you think you want doesn’t actually exist.

  One night, I’m walking with Daniil and his friend Anya when we bump into Daniil’s friend Zhenya, who is not apolitical, though he is “hardcore,” in the sense of completely abstaining from alcohol and substances of any kind. He also loves meeting foreigners, which is why he accompanies us to a nearby coffee shop.

  “Anton says that the culture of Minsk is more like a small suburb than a big city,” Daniil says. “Do you agree?”

  I am instantly irrationally angry because I can hear Anton saying it, and it brings me back to a thousand fights I had forgotten. That’s ridiculous, I want to snap. But instead I ask, “Do you agree with Anton?”

  “Not at all,” he says. The city is changing quickly, he explains. It used to be taboo to not eat meat, for example. “But now, almost everyone is a vegetarian.”

  Anya and Zhenya pounce on him: that’s not true, they protest.

  “Okay,” Daniil concedes. “But, for example, these two waitresses.” He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “One is a vegetarian, and the other is a vegan.”

  The next day Zhenya wants to take me on a tour of Minsk. There are a few options, he tells me. I can either have the historic tour or the political tour.

  I opt for the political tour.

  Zhenya is wonderful. He’s friendly and curious and eager to share what he knows about Belarus with others. He has strong ties to Minsk: his grandfather was an architect who designed many of the city’s buildings. Zhenya lives with his girlfriend in an apartment a few metro stops from the McDonald’s. This kind of cohabitation is unusual.

  People marry young in Belarus, and they live with their parents until they marry, though in most cases, a young couple has to keep shacking up with a set of parents for a few years until they can save up for their own house.

  The apartment Zhenya lives in was his grandfather’s, a stroke of luck that allows him more autonomy than most people his age. He works in technology and takes free English lessons from evangelical missionaries at night.

  I ask Zhenya about something I’ve noticed, which is that Belarus is the first republic I’ve been to that seems not only to have preserved its Soviet monuments, but also to have built more of them. Buildings that could only have gone up a few years ago still say “USSR.”

  Zhenya tells me that Lukashenko was one of the few politicians not to turn in his communist party card after the Soviet Union dissolved. I take this to be metaphorical at first, but no: it’s literal. Lukashenko still has the card, and he uses it as a campaign rallying point.

  This seems like the main problem that Belarus faces: it can’t accept that the Soviet Union is over, that it’s no longer a thing. And it’s sad, because as long as Lukashenko keeps trying to bring back the past, people like Zhenya won’t have a future.

  One night, Ilya invites me to dinner at his house. He picks me up after work and we drive to the new supermarket that opened in the recently built mega-shopping complex near Ilya’s house.

  Ilya shakes his head as he shops for flour. “Who would have thought we needed many choices?” he laughs. “Why must we have four different kinds of flour?”

  Ilya’s apartment is small but comfortable: it’s a one-bedroom in a new high-rise a short drive from the city center, and inside, I re-meet his wife and meet his dog, cat, and one-year-old daughter. Anton had mentioned this to me the last time I saw him.

  “Ilya has a daughter now,” he told me. Anton happened to be home when she was born. “We were all waiting on the street outside the hospital, drinking and celebrating.”

  This suddenly feels too weird: like, I am here, eating dinner at my ex-boyfriend’s friend’s house in Belarus. I’m doing something that feels as though it’s against the laws of nature, and it’s like my lizard brain is waking up from a nap and going, Whoa, I would not have signed off on this.

  His wife has been home all day taking care of their daughter, labor whose difficulty Ilya appreciates. “Sometimes, I’ll come home and the baby’s so easy,” Ilya told me on the ride over. “But my wife says, ‘Today was such a nightmare—you have no idea.’”

  The Belarusian government gives three years of paid maternity leave, but the salary is less than $100 U.S. per month. Ilya’s wife is staying home for now because it’s more economical than paying for child care.

  Ilya tells me he and his wife gave their daughter a Belarusian name. “I hate Russians,” he says bitterly, “and I don’t want my child to have a Russian name.”

  At first I’m not sure what to make of this comment—I know Anton is half Russian, and I suspect many Belarusians have at l
east some Russian ancestry.

  But so far in Ukraine and Belarus, the term Russian has been far from straightforward. It’s sometimes a stand-in for the Soviets, other times a reference to the Russian government. It’s rarely used positively, but it even more rarely refers to ethnic Russians.

  I wonder if Russian, in this context, means people who show up from somewhere else and impose their own system of government. And maybe in this context, Belarusian nationalism seems more appealing to Ilya—if only as an antidote to that.

  “Do you see Anton often?” Ilya asks carefully as he prepares dinner.

  “Sometimes,” I say. “You know, we’re rarely in China at the same time, so . . .” I keep it light, because it seems Ilya has no idea Anton and I are on terrible terms. Or maybe I can’t read him, because it’s all too close to home. But if he has no idea, that hurts, too, that Anton hasn’t told him. Also, this is all just so fucking weird. Most of all because I asked for it. I could have easily gone to Belarus without looking up Ilya, could have gotten out of dinner at his house even more easily. And yet I think the discomfort is part of what appealed to me. I’m eating dinner at Ilya’s house because it’s hard and uncomfortable and I’m showing myself that I can get through it.

  Later, when we’re eating, Ilya’s daughter keeps wandering over to me, gesturing that I should pick her up, and I do, gingerly. Ilya laughs. “You don’t have to be so careful,” he tells me. “You won’t break her.”

  My last night in Belarus is Halloween, and Zhenya wants to take me on another walk, this time near the McDonald’s. I’m surprised to find people on the street in costume. Zhenya tells me Halloween is becoming more and more popular each year.

  It seems like every third person is dressed up as a member of the Illuminati, which feels incredibly random, until I realize it’s an easy costume to make. We also find a Grim Reaper with a to-die list, which sadly has only two targets on it: “not you,” which has been crossed out, presumably upon completion, and “you.”

  I’ve realized that Ilya was right about this neighborhood: it is one of Minsk’s most happening, and it’s quiet at night, not because everyone goes out closer to home, but because there’s not much business to justify keeping things open. I’ve never seen a capital city with fewer private businesses. It’s incredible to find yourself in the center of a country’s biggest financial city, at eight p.m. on a Friday, and have no place to buy a bottle of water. And by incredible, I mean awful and hard to believe.

  People say, “Meet me at the McDonald’s,” because they can’t say, “Meet me at the coffee shop on the corner of Lenin and October Revolution.” This won’t stop me, when I return home, from complaining about a Starbucks opening directly across the street from another Starbucks. But it has left me with this odd appreciation sometimes when I walk past a McDonald’s. It always takes me a second to place where it’s coming from, and then I remember.

  16

  Couchsurf the Baltics (Lithuania)

  To outsiders, the three Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia can seem very similar. The three small nations are located, geographically and culturally, between Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. They share strong cultural affinities, and, in the case of Lithuania and Latvia, speak closely related languages.

  But the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians have retained distinct identities, and current borders have been drawn in such a way as to more or less give each ethnic group its own country. Latvians are quick to tell you that they are known for being musical (though they warn that Estonians will claim they are the musical ones). Everyone agrees that the Lithuanians are known for dancing, except for the Lithuanians themselves, who believe their reputation is for basketball.

  The Baltic countries are the only ones I know to have overthrown a colonial regime and gained independence by holding hands and singing, which is why it seems like the perfect place to finally try Couchsurfing.

  Crossing from Belarus into Lithuania feels like leaving the Soviet Union and entering Europe, which it sort of is. While Lukashenko was reminding the world that he never gave up his communist card, the Baltics were busy trying to join the European Union, which they did in 2004.

  If you can tell a lot about a country by the bathrooms on its trains, Lithuania is off to a good start. In Belarus, the train toilets provided a peek at the track beneath. On the Lithuanian train, I push a button and a space-agey door slides open to reveal a previously hidden bathroom.

  Even passport control seems more European. We don’t stop at the border and wait hours for a full-train inspection. I’m not even sure we actually come to a complete stop; it feels more like we slow down enough for a Lithuanian border guard to hop on, and then we speed up again.

  When the squat, stern woman steps into our car, I momentarily panic. For the first time in ages, I don’t have a visa. Then I remember I don’t need one. This is the EU.

  The border guard wears something that looks like a necklace, but where the pendant would be there’s instead a tiny computer that also doubles as a makeshift work table. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say she’s wearing both her desk and her work PC around her neck. Either way, she pulls out a spyglass that fits over her eye and carefully examines my passport. It’s momentarily unclear if I’m crossing into Lithuania or a Wes Anderson film.

  But no, when she stamps it, the stamp says I’m in the EU, which is a strange place to find myself in after all this, and also, in Lithuania.

  One of the first things you notice about Lithuania is that the mullet is in. Because everyone is doing it, it starts to look cool. How have I never noticed that a mullet is the perfect haircut in which to smoke a cigarette, aggressively drink a soda, or wait for a bus at night outside of a train station, as everyone around me is doing?

  I too am waiting for the bus. Thanks to the train station’s free Wi-Fi, I’ve learned that I need to take the 42 bus to the 72 bus to the top of a quiet country lane where Aiste, a recent architecture graduate and my Couchsurfing host, lives with her mother.

  I’ve wanted to try Couchsurfing because I’ve heard so many rave reviews of it on this trip, and also because it’s good to try things that scare you. For those unaware, Couchsurfing is a website and online community where people offer to put up strangers in their homes free of charge. The potential drawbacks to this arrangement are both obvious and numerous.

  But travelers I’ve met on the road have described Couchsurfing as a unique opportunity for cultural exchange, given that the community self-selects for those looking to meet people from different countries and backgrounds. This particular selling point has piqued my interest—I’m hoping that in staying with my hosts, I’ll learn more about Lithuania.

  I picked Aiste and her mother for the reason I’m sure many first-time Couchsurfers pick their hosts, which is that they seemed least likely to murder me. A twenty-something woman living with her mother is about as nonthreatening as a random person on the Internet goes. Though I’m still nervous about showing up at a stranger’s house for a sleepover.

  The 42 bus is a smooth ride. We take what I assume is the scenic route through Vilnius, but I can’t confirm because it’s extremely dark outside. All of the lights have been put to work illuminating statues. So I don’t get much of a sense of the city, besides that there are a lot of marble horses.

  I applaud myself for knowing where to get off the bus. I don’t yet have cell phone service in Lithuania, but I have a preloaded map and the cleverness to trace my progress via a blue dot. The place where I’m supposed to switch buses appears to be an empty bus terminus with not much around. For a moment, things don’t look promising. I’m not sure where to catch the 72. But then I see the 72 bus pulling up beside a sign, and I race over to catch it. The driver looks perplexed but collects my fare. Well done, Audrey. 10/10.

  The 72 bus pulls directly into the same terminus I’d just gotten off at. The driver is now ushering us all off with a broom. There may not be a literal broom, but emotionally, that’s what
it feels like.

  In broken Russian, the driver and I come to an understanding that he will take a break for twenty minutes, and then drive the 72 bus to my Couchsurfers’ surf shack. I’m starving and see a pizza shop catty-corner to the bus stop. But because all the streets are thruways, it takes four minutes of walking and six minutes of trying to cross a highway to get there. I’m so worried about missing the bus that I just buy a bottle of water and head back.

  When I get back on the 72 bus, the driver kindly refuses to let me pay again. From here, the bus ride quickly goes south. Or maybe north: it’s hard to tell, because it’s pitch-dark outside, there are no streetlights, we’ve gone outside the zone of my Google Maps, and we appear to be driving through a forest. The bus has somehow emptied of passengers, except for the couple in front of me, who seem to have used the twenty-minute rest break to drink a liter of vodka. They are loudly, drunkenly, and aggressively making out. Thanks for rubbing it in, I think.

  There are times to put on a brave face, and there are times to admit that you’re lost on a bus in the middle of the night in Lithuania.

  I opt for the former.

  I set my face into an expression that I hope reads, No, I am not wondering whether I passed my stop thirty minutes ago, when we pull over by an unmarked tree at what appears to be the edge of a ravine, and a normal-looking blonde woman my age gets on.

  I wait approximately ten seconds before pouncing. I get up and beeline for the back of the bus, where she’s taken a seat, and ask her, desperately, if she speaks Russian.

  She takes off her headphones.

  “Do you speak English?” she asks.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m standing outside her parents’ house while she goes inside to borrow her mother’s phone. We use it to call my Couchsurfers. They live, miraculously, two streets over. The Couchsurfer is coming to get me; the blonde girl is waiting with me outside.

  “There are a lot of nice people in the world,” the mystery blonde says as we see a hazy outline—my Couchsurfer?—emerge from the murky fog at the top of the dark lane.