Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  “Never mind, she says she did.”

  As they drive me to the bus to Latvia, I wonder what made Victoria agree to let strangers from the Internet stay in her home.

  Aiste wanted to give her sister something special for her upcoming twentieth birthday, so she posted a message on Couchsurfing asking people to send videos with birthday greetings. Responses poured in from all over the world—Pakistan, Guatemala, Tunisia (“don’t be afraid to enjoy your party and do something stupid”), Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Greece—and when she shows me a cut of the compilation, I find myself fighting back tears. A group of friends in Turkey baked a cake that said, “Happy Birthday Indre!” (because of differences in time/location, they ate the cake for her). Lots of people made signs, bought balloons, picked up flowers. A family in Nepal sang her a song; a man in the United Arab Emirates offered sage advice to Indre and to all of his friends: “Love what you do and do what you love; just make sure it keeps you out of prison.” A man from Qatar shares similarly uplifting advice-turned-joke. (“My advice for your birthday is: don’t worry about the past, you can’t change it; don’t worry about the future, you can’t predict it; don’t worry about the present, I haven’t got you one.”) A party in Latvia drank a champagne toast in her honor. A couple wrapped in towels wishes her happy birthday from a sauna; a Moroccan doctor in Senegal examines “her” X-ray (doctor-patient confidentiality?) and muses that “everything is normal here, except for the fact that it’s your birthday!” A guy from Mexico appears to send birthday wishes from a funeral.

  A few videos were made by hosts and guests who were currently Couchsurfing, and some of the pairings made me wish I could send them a list of questions for my own video. How did the young Chinese guy end up in Transnistria, a thin strip of land that claims it broke away from Moldova (though no sovereign nation, including Moldova, recognizes its independence) and outdoes even Belarus in terms of preserving the Soviet Union? Are the gorgeous Swiss woman and the hunky Brazilian man hooking up? What did the Chinese student discuss with his host in Alexandria, Virginia?

  I wonder if Victoria was convinced to try Couchsurfing by the community, or the spirit of generosity that seems to drive it, or the chance to try to understand and be understood by people she’d only know for a few hours.

  I can’t honestly say that I find Couchsurfing easy. I’ve felt less anxious about some job interviews. But if my goal has been to get a better grasp on Lithuania, I think Couchsurfing has done the trick, and, if not, I’ll go to bed beside a glass of water on Christmas Eve and get all my answers.

  As I board the bus to leave Lithuania, I think about the story Aiste and Victoria told me, about how the Baltics sang their way to freedom.

  By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was collapsing under the weight of its own bloat, corruption, and repression. All of the purges, lies, and shoddy policy had taken their toll, politically, psychically, economically. Wages stalled, the black market swelled, and people agitated for change.

  To ease some of this pressure, in the mid-’80s Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pursued a policy of glasnost, which strived for more transparency and openness in government, and instituted a series of political and economic reforms known as perestroika.

  Soviet citizens suddenly had access to information the government had previously kept secret and the freedom to express discontent. Dissent was on the rise all over the USSR, particularly in the Baltic states, which had never really been willing members of the Union.

  Newly permitted protests and demonstrations popped up in each republic, and maybe it was inevitable that the Baltic people, with their long history of singing and dancing, would voice their grievances through song.

  One night, after a music festival in Tallinn, a group of attendees migrated to a hill in the center of the city and began singing patriotic Estonian songs that had been banned in the Soviet Union. Over the next three years, all the Baltic countries held similar rallies in which they sang national songs to agitate for freedom.

  This story I’d known, in broad strokes, when I’d asked Victoria and Aiste for details, but the next part I hadn’t.

  I’d seen a monument to something called the Baltic Way in Vilnius that day. I asked my hosts about it.

  “You don’t know?” Aiste asks, surprised. “It’s really incredible. People stood in the streets, and they held hands across the whole Baltics.”

  On August 23, 1989, more than two million Baltic citizens created a human chain that spanned more than four thousand miles, from Vilnius in southern Lithuanian to Tallinn in northern Estonia, and linked the three capital cities. I ask Victoria if she went. “Oh, yes!” she exclaims.

  I keep thinking about this story for weeks after. I obsessively search for images and sometimes get choked up when I see them.

  I think what moves me most about that story is not the knee-jerk American misty-eyed view of freedom, because what is freedom, really? Even the most liberal among us would probably say that we stand for it, would fight for it if necessary and not terribly inconvenient. When we use freedom in those contexts, we have some vague idea of what we’re referring to—maybe elections, or the right to show up at a protest with a witty poster. But I don’t think two million people line up on highways because they’re so excited to vote or publish an opinion in a newspaper. Most protesters agitating for revolution aren’t there because they have a few points of constructive criticism; they’re there because a system seems broken beyond repair.

  What makes two million people hold hands on the highway, I think, is hope, and hope in the face of a system as powerful and flawed as the Soviet Union’s, a system that has been the only way of life most people remember, is a powerful thing.

  “Back then, people did it because they hadn’t been free for fifty years,” Victoria tells me, through Aiste. “But I’m not sure they’d do it now.”

  The conversation moves on, but then a few minutes later, Victoria says something to Aiste. They have a brief but impassioned exchange.

  “My mom says, maybe today, people would still do it.”

  17

  All Trains Lead to Russia

  The journey to a place you’ve long dreamed about can seem filled with signs that everything you’ve hoped for is about to come true. On my train to Russia, for example, I’m sitting across from a woman wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Freud in neon sunglasses that is captioned, in English, with a Spice Girls lyric: “I’ll tell you want, what I really really want.”

  Oleg’s mother once told me that it would have been social suicide for a Soviet teenager to admit to not having read Camus and Derrida. Ever since then, I’ve imagined the Soviet Union as a place that, in its better moments, fostered a culture of intellectualism (as long as no one was intellectually debating the legitimacy of the Soviet government) and celebrated literature (as long as it was written by people who were dead or loved shock workers). And lo and behold: this T-shirt! Of course “Wannabe” has been about latent desires all along! And the neon sunglasses . . . well, that one has me stumped, but I’m ready to be enlightened.

  “Hello,” I say, in Russian, opening what I hope will be a robust, probing conversation about the influence of nineteenth century psychoanalysis on recent pop culture that will perhaps venture on to the topic of how I can purchase a SIM card when we arrive in St. Petersburg.

  “Hello,” she replies, and then immediately turns to the window.

  A few hours into our trip, the train stops, and a border guard with flowers carefully stenciled onto her fingernails checks our passports and stamps us in, and with this, I have made it, in so many ways. I shake my head. Almost three months ago, I flew to Kazakhstan with a few half-baked plans and the hopes of making it to Russia. At so many points along the way, that outcome seemed uncertain. There were moments, when I was bombarding strangers on message boards or walking the streets with garbage bags full of cash, where I questioned if I’d make it.

  But still: all of the hand-wringing, visa-blundering, and yurt-i
nsomnia was building toward something that was at times clouded by the minutia. Each excursion had been a step toward this triumphant culmination. I didn’t give up halfway through or curtail my ambition when the reality of it proved tedious. I set out to do something that I wasn’t sure I could, and I did it.

  It really hits me when I step off the platform in St. Petersburg and the cold jolts me like an energy drink that’s been recalled for causing heart palpitations. I’m in Russia.

  It’s late. The sky is black and the air is tinged with the familiar scent of burning charcoal. Above the roof of the station, smoke from unseen smokestacks curls up into the heavens. I made it to Russia.

  I start laughing at the sheer improbability of this all. I think back to the darkest hours post-Anton, when it had seemed as if pain would forever permeate every aspect of my life. It’s both easy and misleading, in moments of exultation, to look back on periods of despair and remember the former self who would have never believed this jubilant reality possible. Though I felt that way at the time, it was a mood, not a prior and different me. But that mood lasted a long time, and so I allow myself this moment of fallacy.

  Parents kneel to zip jackets and foist hats upon the unwilling heads of sleepy children, and across the platform men in long coats and women wheeling suitcases exchange the winter night for a cozy berth in an old-fashioned train, bound for Moscow in their sleep. I know this, because I can read the Russian scrolling past on the board above. I think back to those first helpless days in Kazakhstan, when I stood at a pharmacy and said, “Hello, I am inside a car, I am vomiting,” and now I’m laughing and crying, but mostly crying.

  Well, I do cry easily.

  Still, the sense of accomplishment I feel is overwhelming. It feels like for the first time in a long time, I embarked on something ambitious and entirely of my own making, and I saw it through to the end.

  These tears feel so different from the ones I’ve spilled over the past years when I couldn’t talk to Anton and when I missed his family and when I thought that my dreams were dead and my life was over and I’d never be happy again. That I would never love something or someone as much as this person whose absence defined every moment.

  For a long time, I felt like I needed Anton, or someone, to show me what to do next. But it turns out, in spite of all the doubts and missteps, I was capable of guiding myself. The part I’m most proud of is that leap of faith—that I thought I could make this trip and it could lead to something bigger, even if I couldn’t say what shape that would take.

  The horse treks and black markets and taxi rides: even if I sense that most people would have made it just as far, it still feels, not like everything, but like something.

  St. Petersburg stuns you, first with its beauty and then with its sprawl. It’s like Paris, but with more stamina. The City of Love eventually peters out into the City of Look, a Lot of People Showed Up, and We Had to House Them Somewhere.

  St. Petersburg keeps going. I should know: I’m staying on its farthest edges.

  To be fair, the newly built complex where I’m staying is not technically in St. Petersburg. It’s at the end of a subway line in the first suburb over the city limits. It’s a new development, and because the roads won’t be paved until construction finishes, it’s a reminder that St. Petersburg was built on top of a swamp. What I mean is: it’s very muddy.

  The development has the feel of a stop along a larger journey. In addition to the above-mentioned subway stop, there’s a long-distance train station and a bus terminus, surrounded by high-rise apartments that shot up in the late 2000s. But construction stalled, they didn’t build schools, and now the place has a half-finished vibe. In between the apartments and the transport is a caravan-esque enclave of makeshift shops and bakeries, many on wheels or built out of mismatching material that looks like it was left over from the nearby construction site. Most of the vendors are Azerbaijani, and I find myself buying deep-fried pastries and cups of coffee so hot they burn through the plastic cups they’re served in, just to sit in their cafes and listen to their music. It makes me miss Central Asia. It’s EDM meets accordion—not a sound I ever expected to trigger nostalgia.

  I’m determined to get over my discomfort of storing my snacks in a stranger’s refrigerator, which is why I’m here, Couchsurfing again. Though I am already regretting this, because it’s requiring me to barge in on this sweet young family well after midnight on a weekday.

  Natalia doesn’t seem annoyed, which says far more about her than it does about the situation. I’ve been wandering around her apartment complex for close to an hour in a state that is close to full-blown panic. I have only her address, written in too many dashes and slashes for me to decipher, directions that rely on colors that I can’t make out in the dark, and her phone number. Having just arrived, I have no functioning SIM card. The darkness is also impeding my ability to make out building numbers, which are, helpfully, written on doors that are, unhelpfully, located too far behind gates for me to see clearly. Once again, my Couchsurfing has left me stranded on the distant outskirts of a city in a country I’ve only just arrived in with nothing to help me find my way but the kindness of strangers, which arrives, this time, in the form of teenagers who help me call Natalia and wake her up just before one a.m.

  Natalia lives in one of the brand-new apartments with her new husband and an eleven-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

  “Sorry,” I whisper repeatedly, excessively, as she shows me to a room she’s set up with a cot and leaves me to make myself at home in her bathroom.

  I’m soon able to fall asleep, thanks to some potent sleeping pills that are sold over the counter in Ukraine, but should not be.

  The nice thing about St. Petersburg in November is that it’s easy to catch the sunrise. In the morning, I lie in bed and try to will myself to get up. Outside of my window, the first blushes of sunrise are starting to stain the horizon. It’s eight forty-five.

  The not-nice thing is that the sun starts to set in the middle of the afternoon, leaving only a few hours of daylight, which generally has to work its way through a thick blanket of gray clouds, because, according to my meteorological calculations, in winter St. Petersburg is overcast approximately all of the time. I have seasonal depression just checking the times for sunrise and sunset.

  Speaking of, I force myself to kick back the covers. The other downside of living in extended night punctuated by brief periods of lackluster daylight is that I start to crave eleven to twelve hours of sleep. I’m tempted to Google “symptoms of body going into hibernation.”

  I hear someone else in the apartment open a door.

  The incomparable allure of bunking with strangers is that it dangles the prospect of a direct hit of the thing I came here for, which is a deeper understanding of these places. Aiste and Victoria gave me a taste, and now I’m hooked.

  In the kitchen, I meet Dima, Natalia’s husband, who is home sick with a cold that seems worrisome. I’m not a doctor, but I do spend a lot of time on WebMD. His sinuses are so swollen that it looks like he has two black eyes.

  “Are you okay?” I ask nervously.

  He shrugs. “Maybe, if it will be really bad still tonight, I will go to hospital.”

  I’m concerned about Dima’s health, but I’m also not sure, as a Couchsurfer, how much of a say I get in his medical decisions.

  A polite houseguest, I think, would say something flattering.

  “You don’t look sick at all,” I tease. “In fact, maybe you should be at work.”

  As soon as I leave the house, these barbs seem irresponsible.

  Dima is a scientist, I remind myself. I’m actually not sure why I think this is his job—did Natalia say this on their Couchsurfing profile? Or did Dima tell me this morning? Maybe he’s not a scientist at all, and took that as medical advice?

  How’s Dima doing? I text Natalia later in the afternoon, because if I can’t be chill about searching for cups in a stranger’s kitchen, at least I can
dive right in and start getting involved in the family issues.

  He’s in the hospital, she writes back. He might have to stay overnight.

  I’m freaking out but trying to stay cool. It’s okay, she finally reassures me. This is normal. And I am again struck by the unique opportunities Couchsurfing offers, because by butting into a family’s medical emergency, I’ve learned about the Russian health-care system.

  Russian culture strikes me as both deeply superstitious and, incongruously, deeply enamored with exhaustive medical testing.

  In China, some of my Russian friends would return home in summer for a full month of medical tests that they would often translate as “full-body check.” Doctors would test their blood, monitor vital organs, poke and prod and sample, and then provide suspiciously precise predictions for future health outcomes. “My doctor says I have a forty-two percent chance of getting Alzheimer’s when I am older,” a language partner once told me.

  This seemed at odds with how Anton would sometimes run back across the street to redo our goodbye because I’d accidentally kissed him three times (three being an unlucky number because of the holy trinity), and, though he wanted to be rational, he couldn’t get his day off to such an inauspicious start.

  I often wondered if, no matter what the battery of routine annual physical tests revealed, the treatment would just be tossing salt over your shoulder.

  But these are also impressions I’ve picked up from Russians abroad, or, in the cases of Oleg and Anton and Anton’s family—from people who weren’t even Russian at all, just Russian-speaking—and it’s so strange, and borderline unbelievable, that I’m finally here in Russia.

  My first impressions of St. Petersburg are of the ubiquitous underground pedestrian walkways, which provide safe passage at almost every intersection. In St. Petersburg, you rarely cross a major avenue; instead, you descend the set of stairs found on each corner and instantly lose all sense of direction.

  At first, the subterranean network of pedestrian tunnels seemed like a stroke of city-planning genius. It means never having to wait for the light at a crosswalk! Never being goaded by impatience into precarious jaywalking! But I soon conclude it would be much faster to just cross the street.