Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  I nod. “Sometimes.”

  He shakes his head. “Always.”

  “Always?” I ask.

  “Me, every day, twenty eggs. Each time, ten eggs.”

  “Umm . . .” I am not going to eat twenty eggs a day. “Isn’t that bad for your cholesterol?”

  He doesn’t understand cholesterol.

  I try pronouncing it in a Russian accent. “Kolestrol?”

  He shakes his head, not understanding. “You eat carbs?”

  “Good carbs,” I say. “Quinoa, oats, fruit.”

  He grows angry. “You must never eat carbs!” he shouts. I’m glad there’s no table nearby for him to overturn.

  I had pictured our sessions as half workout, half language lesson, but our first is a struggle against what seems like an insurmountable language barrier. Sergey attempts to communicate the complexities of nutrition and proper form, mostly via pantomime.

  The one thing we have going for us is that many of the Russian words for muscle groups sound similar to their English equivalents. Bee-tseps, I realize, is bicep. Tree-tseps, tricep.

  Some are different.

  “This exercise,” Sergey declares, “for ass muscle.”

  “Glutes?” I try.

  He shakes his head. “Ass muscle.”

  At the end of the session, we’re both exhausted. I sense that Sergey is surprised when I text him later that evening and tell him I’d like to see him three times a week.

  I’m torn. After this round of work, I want to go back to Russia and cross the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but the doubts that preceded my first trip have resurfaced. All around me in Shanghai, friends are following the same path out of their twenties. They’re settling in their careers, taking next steps in relationships, starting to plan for a more grounded future. When I Skype with friends in the States, it’s the same.

  It’s not that I don’t see the appeal. The sense of limitless possibility I have felt in my first decade of adulthood has also come with a great deal of uncertainty. Maybe it would be easier to settle in to something more rooted than continue to chase dreams across the steppes of Central Asia.

  Besides, I’ve already done that. What would a few more months give me that the first leg of my trip hasn’t?

  But to not return for the final stretch feels like backing out. My dream was to spend the whole year exploring the Soviet Union; my fears said stay at home and grow up. Going back to the U.S. without seeing it all the way through feels like trying to have it both ways.

  Which would be nice. Who said there was anything wrong with having your cake and eating it too? Well, Sergey. Cake has carbs.

  “I speak Russian now,” I tell Anton the next time I see him. We’re at an open mic; we keep finding excuses to touch, hug, get closer. When he gets offstage, he kisses my hand. It’s sweet but I’m unsure how to respond.

  Anton shakes his head; he’s not smiling anymore. “Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you really don’t,” he says. We’re both nervous and jumpy around each other. We drink too quickly and then keep an eye out for the smallest slight.

  “Yes, I do,” I assure him.

  “Honestly, those e-mails you sent me from Belarus . . . Your Russian is really terrible.”

  “Nyet.”

  “Oh, really?” He raises his eyebrows and then switches to his native language; I don’t understand a word.

  “Well, whatever,” I say. “You were speaking too quickly.”

  I want to tell Anton all that I’ve seen, but he doesn’t want to hear. He can’t seem to decide whether to be thrilled or outraged by my new adventure. Sometimes I overhear him tell people that I’ve been to Belarus and I hear the pride in his voice, but when I speak to him in Russian, he gets angry. We’ve spent years hurting each other since our Burger King breakup: one reaching out and the other never answering, one offering an olive branch and the other snapping it in two, the rare moments of tenderness ruined by an explosive fight. We both light the fuse, because whatever it is that we’re grasping toward, we both want, above all, to feel like the one walking away with dignity intact.

  While we were together, I think we each represented access to a world the other wanted. Anton’s was Russian, and maybe he’s angry because I decided he wasn’t the gatekeeper. In a way, I understand, because I’ve felt the same wrong before. For me, it came after we broke up, when Anton decided to get serious about comedy.

  Sergey and I are making progress. Before I met him, I had never lifted weights, both because I didn’t know how to, and because I was afraid that the second I touched a squat rack, muscles would burst my clothes at the seams and I’d have to go shopping. Now I’m wearing weighted belts and doing push-ups on bars. Sergey promises me I will develop an “ass like spider.”

  We communicate in our own language. Officially, we’re supposed to alternate languages: one session in Russian, the next in English, but we come up with our own way of speaking. He teaches me to say pussy in Russian when an exercise is difficult, and I tell him it’s better to say goodbye at five p.m. with “Have a good night” instead of “Good night!” We call lunges zombies. Each time he divides our sessions into “leg day,” “arm day,” and “ass muscle day,” I want to correct him, but can’t.

  Each day I come in and he asks me the same question. “Did you eat carbs today?”

  I list all my meals but skip the foods that I know will make him mad, a list that includes apples, brown rice, and everything that’s not salad with cucumbers. His feedback is always the same: “Eat eggs.”

  Sergey’s other clients are all from the Russian diaspora, and they are all extremely perplexed by the redheaded American who constantly mixes up twelve and twenty and frequently pouts when the exercises are too hard. Most have a Russian sense of discipline: they follow Sergey’s rigid dietary guidelines without wavering and look horrified when I admit I eat fruit. When Sergey tells them to do too many push-ups, they say nothing until they collapse; I whine constantly that “It’s not fair!”

  I chat up Sergey and his other clients to try to get out of the leg workouts I hate. I invite them to my shows and out for drinks after.

  One day, he pulls me aside for what I assume will be an assessment of my progress.

  “You’ve been exercising for a few months now,” he says. “And in that time, you have made many friends.”

  It’s strange to see Anton, now that I know I don’t need him for the thing I once thought only he could deliver. It would be easy to look at him now and see only how quickly he gets fucked up after shows or the false bravado with which he swaggers around the club before he goes onstage, but when he squinches his face to itch his nose in a way I’d forgotten but instantly remember, the air disappears from the room.

  I see him almost weekly, and our interactions develop a predictable pattern. Sometimes I ignore him; other times I let him give me lingering hugs, inch too close on the bench where the comics watch the show. We stand in a group and he references a past only he and I share, as though everyone else were back there with us, following along.

  “You’re on this poster twice,” he’ll say, gesturing to his head shot, which has been cropped, but not close enough to remove the hand on his shoulder. “That’s your hand,” he reminds me, as if I had forgotten. The other comics awkwardly fidget.

  “I feel very zen toward you,” Anton tells me another night. “I’ve moved on; I have a new life now.”

  He does. Elena and Vadik have moved back to Belarus. Elena has remarried and will soon have a new baby with her new husband. Anton visits twice a year.

  The nights often end in massive, dramatic fights. We never play out this part in front of people we know; the only witnesses are strangers and cabdrivers.

  “I’ve only gotten better since we broke up,” he spits bitterly one night. “And you’ve gotten worse.”

  “We used to be in love!” I cry. “What happened to that?”

  The cab pulls up to my office where I left my bicyc
le. He jumps out and runs away.

  It’s hard to say what either of us wants out of these interactions. Maybe that’s the problem: neither of us has figured out an agenda. I go home and furiously journal about how much I never want to see him again, come up with elaborate plans for him to leave me alone. I’m so angry that I can’t read myself, much less him.

  In an alternate universe, maybe, we’re both performing in Moscow together. But at the shows in Shanghai, it just feels like we’re trapped in the past.

  Sergey figures out that the best way to motivate me is not to assure me that I can do something, but rather to insist that I can’t.

  “That’s too much weight,” I protest as he pulls out a ten-kilogram dumbbell.

  “Yes,” he nods. “You are weak American girl.”

  Each time he says this, I correct him. “American woman.” Then I finish the set.

  We still struggle to make small talk in between sets.

  “You know Rocky?” he asks me one day.

  “Like the movie?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve heard of it, but never seen it.”

  He nods. “You eat eggs every day?”

  Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s giving me advice on form or life.

  “You control mind,” he reminds me whenever my right shoulder raises higher than my left. “Mind control body.”

  Slowly, I develop a new reputation around the gym.

  “Sergey told me you squatted with fifty kilograms!” Tatiana whispers the first time I meet her.

  “Good night!” Sergey calls as I walk out at five p.m. “Do not eat carbs!”

  Sometimes my interactions with Anton leave me with days of simmering anger. Other times he’s wearing a sweatshirt I remember and I just want to curl up with him in a corner, whisper everything, the whole truth, without posturing.

  I tell Sergey I’m going to visit his hometown in the Russian Far East. He stares at me for a long time and then says, “Why?”

  I start questioning the prudence of taking the Trans-Siberian. Pros: I’m dying to do it, I have the time and money, it’s a chance to improve my Russian, I can see more of Russia, I can write about it. Cons: may not help quest to avoid dying alone. I’m reliving the debate I had before setting off on my journey in the first place, and the doubts are doubling in strength. Seeing Anton reminds me both of what I could maybe have and how far I am from it, and this only increases my anxiety.

  There’s a tiny park around the corner from my old apartment in Shanghai. I used to go there when I first broke up with Anton, because everything in my apartment was something he had once touched, but the park is a place where I’d never seen him. The park has some kind of musical theme—it’s filled with statues of instruments—but it’s mostly used by the old men in the neighborhood as a place to gather and play chess. The crew hasn’t changed much since I started coming here. The man with an ambitious comb-over who, in summer, goes outside in boxers is still here, now in real pants and a coat. So is the man with yellowed teeth who chain-smokes from a red box of cigarettes, though they all do that when they’re losing. Two men play, and a dozen others crowd around them, shouting advice and commentary like it’s a football game.

  I ride my bike here and sit on a bench when I need to be alone and think. One night I stop by on my way home from a show, and I ask myself what I want.

  I keep coming back to that line that slipped out in the taxi with Anton. “We used to be in love!” Maybe the problem isn’t that we used to be in love, but that I did. And I’m putting my life on hold out of fear of not finding that again.

  One day I come into the gym and Sergey looks upset.

  “Someone say me, it’s bad to say ‘ass muscle,’” he tells me.

  I hesitate. “Well, technically, yes,” I reply. “But for you, it’s part of your charm.”

  The Trans-Siberian is just a two-month trip, but in my head it has become a decision between rootlessness and stability. My personal life has become so confusing I can see it only in extremes. If I go, I’m choosing a life of travel but also loneliness. If I go back to New York like my parents want me to, I’m signing up for safety but a life I don’t want.

  It never occurs to me that I have neither a job offer nor marriage proposal waiting in New York.

  I buy a ticket to Siberia. The first person I tell is Sergey.

  “What will I do without you?” I ask.

  “Whatever you do, do not eat carbs after sunset.”

  19

  A Month on the Trans-Siberian

  First Leg: Shanghai to Ulaanbaatar (Three Hours and Thirty Minutes)

  The Trans-Siberian starts in Russia’s Far East and runs clear across the country to Moscow. My journey on it, however, begins the night before I fly to Mongolia, when I throw myself an unnecessarily raucous going-away party. I wake up the next morning exhausted and profoundly hungover. This is bad, because I have an afternoon flight for which I haven’t even started packing, and an apartment I need to move out of before I leave for the airport, and also because, what?!?! I’m about to turn twenty-nine—how am I such a hot mess?

  I somehow make my flight and immediately pass out on the plane. A few hours later, a flight attendant shakes me awake to ask if I want lunch.

  “No!” I shriek.

  He flinches. “Maybe some water?” he suggests.

  I recover from being jolted awake. “Okay,” I acquiesce. “Also, I changed my mind, and I’d like lunch.”

  I’m starting the Trans-Siberian in Mongolia because I’ve heard that route offers the most stunning views from the windows. But first, I have a layover in Beijing, China’s famously polluted capital.

  Surprisingly, the skies today are clear, a stretch of blue with no smog in sight. It could be an auspicious start to my journey, minus the whole hangover.

  I have hours to kill at Beijing’s Capital Airport, which is perfect, because the airport is a wonderful environment in which to enjoy the exhaustion and nausea of a hangover. I lie comatose in an upscale McDonald’s. It strikes me that my life has reached a new low.

  My first trip through the former Soviet Union was many things I hoped it would be. I saw some places I’d dreamed about for years and gained the tiniest glimmerings of understanding of others that had long seemed unknowable. I reawakened some of the insatiable curiosity and sense of direction that had characterized my time in China—even if that direction was sending me aboard a train for the next month.

  Maybe it’s because of this that I still feel torn, besieged by an off-brand version of late-twenties malaise. This feels like the period in my life where I should be reading a lot of memoirs and worrying that what I’m doing isn’t what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. The frightening thing is, I’m already doing what I want—I’m just so afraid that I want the wrong thing that I can’t commit to it wholeheartedly. Maybe I should be back home, trying to settle down.

  Did I expect that learning Russian and discovering a new corner of the world would kick-start the solving of all my problems? And if so, why hasn’t it?

  As I check in for my flight to Ulaanbaatar, I realize that my shirt is on inside out and sporting a sizable wine stain. To compensate for this, I go to duty-free and douse myself in free samples of perfume. Now I have a headache. I get on the plane and again fall directly to sleep.

  This time, I wake up of my own volition. The Mongolian woman next to me smiles and tells me she saved me the dinner that was passed out while I was also passed out. An unsupervised baby climbs into my lap. It’s a gentler reacquainting with the world of the living, one I’m not quite sure I’m ready to reenter.

  When a plane lands in Ulaanbaatar, it lands at Genghis Khan International Airport. The winds blowing in from the Mongolian steppe are so strong, only Mongolian pilots are allowed to land there.

  A recent boom in the Mongolian mining industry has brought an influx of foreigners to the country. Many of my friends and acquaintances from China have visited over the ye
ars, and few had anything positive to say about the experience.

  “I was punched in the face” is a common story brought back, usually followed up with “in broad daylight.” Stories of street brawls, public drunkenness, and general pugnacity had painted a fairly terrifying picture of Mongolia in my mind, and landing at an airport named for one of the most feared warriors of all time is more or less confirming this. Before we get off the plane, we’re asked to give a round of applause for the Mongolian National Boxing Team. It’s not clear if they’re on our flight, or if we’re just proud (or afraid) of them.

  A driver from the hostel I’ve booked meets me at the airport and leads me to the parking lot. I’m so hungover and sleep-deprived that I barely register the Mongolian winter that hits me like a steel door. The air is thick and dark with night, and the cold is instantly everywhere. My head spins on the long drive through dark streets.

  At the hostel, I curl up in the bed and take a well-deserved Xanax and collapse into the kind of sleep that feels like a new lease on life.

  I’ve arrived in Mongolia in April, which I thought would be spring, but is not. I’ve also arrived in a country that I thought was once part of the Soviet Union, but I quickly learn was not.

  “You don’t speak Russian?” I ask the woman making breakfast, after she gave me a confused look when I asked for coffee.

  She shakes her head. She’s in her forties, old enough to have been educated in the Soviet system—if that’s the system that was in charge.

  It slowly dawns on me. “Was Mongolia . . . not part of the Soviet Union?” I ask.

  Mongolians will often tell you that their country was the sixteenth Soviet republic, a nickname that comes from their close ties to the USSR. But while the Soviets helped overthrow the Mongolian monarchy and installed a communist government that answered to Moscow, they never formally annexed Genghis Khan’s homeland.

  This feels like something I should have researched before coming here.

  Julia, my friend from Sergey’s gym, puts me in touch with her childhood friend Darima, who was born in Russia but now lives in Ulaanbaatar. She moved here a few years ago with her Mongolian husband, whom she’d met in New York, married in Vegas, followed to Australia, and finally settled with in Mongolia. But in some ways, moving to Ulaanbaatar felt like a homecoming.