Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  When I wake up in the morning, Alexandr II is gone, and the compartment is filled with three strangers, one of whom is snoring so loudly I can’t sleep.

  I go out into the corridor, where I find a few older travelers in matching short-sleeved white button-downs emblazoned with the Russian national railway logo on one arm. They stare out at the scenery. The layer of snow on the ground has grown thicker.

  For no logical reason, I resent the other people in my compartment. I feel like the space belongs to me and the first two Alexandrs. There’s a younger guy in a neat sweater and Hugo Boss shoes who sees that my phone is dying and lends me his portable battery-pack charger. We’re joined by two older men, who put on railway uniforms as soon as they wake up.

  It’s strange how the cast of characters in the entire carriage keeps changing. I feel like I’m in this for the long haul; the only other person in my car who’s been here since the beginning is a guy with long blond hair who constantly makes phone calls.

  Everyone gets off at the first big stop of the morning, and once again, I have the compartment to myself. I’ve been on the train since lunchtime yesterday, but I somehow have another eleven mind-boggling hours to go.

  I read. I sleep. I snack. I think. I remember my first overnight train, with the identical twins preparing for the IELTS, and their chaperone, who poured me Pepsi instead of beer. My awful guide in Samarkand, who thought it was high time I fill myself with babies. The taxi driver in Turkmenistan who tried to explain sex. The university students who helped me find the secret police hotel in Ashgabat. Really, all of the people who helped me, for no reason other than to be kind: the women in Kyrgyzstan who gave me their phone numbers, the Belarusian consular staff who arranged my $5 health insurance, Anton’s friends in Minsk, my Couchsurfing hosts in Lithuania. Rain gently taps at my window, then stops, and then the sun plays hide-and-seek behind a blanket of clouds.

  I unscrew the lid of my jar of instant coffee and pour the last of the grounds into the dirty paper cup I’ve been reusing. I walk out into the hall and past the men staring out of the window and reeking of alcohol to the samovar at the end of the carriage. As I fill my cup with hot water, I think about the candies Alexandr II left on the table, and how satisfying it would be to remove one from its crinkly wrapper and let it melt slowly in my mouth. But then I think of Sergey and how the least I can do if I’m going to his hometown is to not eat too many carbs.

  I pass the final few hours torturing myself with a task I have single-handedly brought upon myself: writing about this trip.

  In my sophomore year of college, I declared a creative writing major after accepting the fact that the economics classes I’d been taking to rebel against my parents’ expectations were not really going well. I begrudgingly enrolled in classes like Narrative Voice while still secretly clinging to dreams of becoming an investment banker.

  I spent my childhood scribbling bizarre stories into free notepads that drug companies give to the elderly. TRY LIPITOR! each story began.

  The thing about writing that no one explained to me as I was dictating confusing narratives about all twenty-four of my kindergarten classmates to my grandmother, or while I was preparing passionate love scenes for a college short-story workshop, is that it’s incredibly hard and boring. If someone had told me I’d spend most of my time forcing myself to write while I was feeling about as creative and articulate as a meat cleaver, I would have begged my way back into Econometrics.

  Writing is the least enjoyable way in which I could choose to spend my time, and the worst part is that I’m constantly forgetting this.

  Each time I close my computer at the end of a day, the memory of the hour I spent trying to remember a naggingly specific word and then rage-scrolling through Facebook immediately vanishes.

  I return to my romantic notions of writing as a noble, not particularly labor-intensive pursuit. I imagine myself getting up around ten the next morning, going to an elaborate brunch, returning to my office in a sprawling castle, and then sitting down at my computer, where words, worlds, stories, and characters flow onto the page as effortlessly as if I were reciting the alphabet. After about an hour, I print out ten single-spaced pages, which I’m shocked and delighted to find are roughly on par in quality and substance with Lolita. I then spend the rest of the day drinking cocktails with Russians.

  Imagine the shock and horror when the next day arrives and I’m confronted with reality. Rather than writing on the balcony of my stone manor that somehow overlooks both the Swiss Alps and the East Village, I’m writing on a five-year-old laptop ruled by an evil, spinning rainbow wheel, while an angelic child who is somehow able to go three hours with zero entertainment mocks me with her tranquility. At the end, when I look down to read what I wrote, I find not Lolita, but an exact replica of the novel Jack Nicholson’s character was working on in The Shining.

  Stopover: Novosibirsk

  Novosibirsk is the third-biggest city in Russia and the largest in Siberia, and it’s famous for having a well-known secret scientific institute hidden in the woods.

  “Maybe you’ve heard of it?” John asks.

  I haven’t, which I guess means the “secret” part is working.

  John is a friend of a friend who graciously dropped whatever he was doing and agreed to spend two days showing me around his city. His job has been made more tedious by the fact his English is about as good as my Russian, which means we spend a lot of time pantomiming, or in silence.

  Novosibirsk is a huge, sprawling city that has, for reasons that are not apparent, earned the nickname “the Chicago of Siberia.” I’ve never been to Chicago, but I’m relatively sure its driving industries are not weapons factories and power plants, as they are here. Novosibirsk is proud of its heavy industry. It even built a park with models of the tanks and armored vehicles its factories have produced.

  It was snowing when John picked me up this morning, but a few hours later the weather has shifted suddenly and dramatically to bright sun. I know, I know: everyone is convinced that the weather in their region is crazy and rapidly changing, but in Siberia, it does seem like the strong winds flip the forecast like a light switch.

  The parks in Novosibirsk all seem to have mismatched, homemade bird feeders. Some are more elaborate, with felt attached to the exterior for insulation, or colorful designs stenciled onto the side, while others seem motivated by the desire to reuse milk jugs. But still I’ve never seen anything like it: a bunch of people building bird feeders, just because, and in the end you have a sanctuary.

  “Who made these?” I ask.

  John pauses. He’s never thought about this before. “Maybe some schoolchildren? Or . . . people who like birds?”

  The things that surround us so quickly become normal that they’re hard to notice, much less describe. Maybe that’s why when you ask someone on Couchsurfing to describe Lithuania, they don’t know where to begin. We all walk around assuming the whole world does things exactly as we do, which is why the strangest parts of traveling are the little things, like the three-som coins, that seem so normal to people around you and so utterly foreign to you.

  My first impression of Novosibirsk is that it is somehow both the muddiest and dustiest city I’ve ever visited.

  The ground is starting to thaw with the first signs of spring, and mud oozes everywhere. At the same time, you come in from the street, and find your jeans and shoes coated in a thin layer of dust.

  This is not the only dichotomy.

  Novosibirsk is, oddly, known for both heavy industry and theater. A city in which weapons manufacturing and the performing arts not only coexist, but thrive, creates a beautiful image in my head of burly men clocking out of a munitions factory and heading straight to the ballet. This image, of course, was pretty much the Soviet socialist dream, and perhaps why Novosibirsk cultivated such disparate industries.

  I must see the ballet in Novosibirsk; on this, everyone is in agreement. Each Russian friend who learns about my trip to Novosi
birsk frowns and tells me there’s not much to do in Novosibirsk. “Maybe see the ballet?” they offer.

  The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre is the largest in Russia. It’s located directly behind a giant statue of Lenin wearing a cape. I feel for him. I, too, have walked into Urban Outfitters and overestimated my ability to pull off a trendy accessory.

  Russian ballets are rumored to be the best in the world. Though ballet first developed in France, the Russians took it over from them in the mid-1800s, and many of the shows and composers best known today come from Russia. The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky. And let’s not forget Aleksandr from Sex and the City.

  I see my first Russian ballet in Novosibirsk. It’s Don Quixote, which I’ve never seen before, and it’s so dreamy and lovely that I go to the ballet at each subsequent city I stop in.

  My mother took me to the Boston Ballet when I was young, and my main memories of the performances is that they took three hours to tell a story that could have been over in twenty minutes if the performers had talked instead of dancing around.

  What makes the Russian ballets somewhat more enjoyable is that they each have approximately fourteen thousand intermissions. Just as you’ve settled into your seat, scanned the program to figure out what’s going on plot-wise, passed the ten-minute threshold where the novelty of watching masterful ballet starts to wear off, the curtains drop and the lights come on for yet another intermission. In the lobby, you can buy coffee, cake, and hard alcohol.

  I’m surprised by how full the performances are. I’d been concerned that on a Wednesday evening, the performers might outnumber the audience. But the entire floor is full, and though I can’t see the balconies, they don’t seem empty, either. And because some of these intermissions are, like, twenty, thirty minutes long, I have a lot of time to people-watch (and, presumably, the performers can watch an episode of a sitcom). I try to figure out who comes to the ballet in Siberia. It’s not an easily qualifiable demographic. There are parents with children, twenty-something couples on dates, old people, young people, some wearing jeans, others in formal wear. Is the answer just, everyone? Is the ballet just a normal outing in Siberia? Tickets are certainly more affordable than I was expecting: they start at $10 U.S.

  Most surprising of all, for me anyway, is the way Russian theaters see The Nutcracker, or more specifically, the way they don’t see it as a holiday-season show.

  The Nutcracker plays in March, July, November—whenever. I will see it in April in Yekaterinburg, a city famous for being the place where the Romanov family was murdered. In the Russian staging of The Nutcracker, Christmas plays a minor role. I think there’s maybe a tree. But if you didn’t know the story, you’d think the ballet was taking place at a birthday party. Also, in the Russian version, the leads are played by children, which makes me wonder about my own deficiencies in discipline. Let me repeat: a three-hour, complex ballet, starring children. On second thought, is that legal?

  The next afternoon, John is taking me to an English class, because he worries that his English is so bad that I need someone else to talk to.

  The school is called Business Class, and it provides group English lessons for children and adults. The center is decorated to look like all of London crammed into one small office: there are tiny red phone booths and tube signs and pictures of double-decker buses, plus a giant cutout of Big Ben. There is also, for no apparent reason, a fake fireplace, and a few American flags scattered throughout. I guess the message is: we’re here to speak English.

  The administrator is a retired teacher named Bella; she taught elementary school for forty years, she says, and she loved her job.

  Marina, the teacher who has invited me to join her class, has different feelings about the municipal schools.

  “I hated it,” she tells me in crisp English. Marina is sipping tea from a personalized mug with her name on it, and she tells me she’s much happier here.

  In the municipal school, she says, classes were divided into groups where the same fifteen students studied together all eleven years. It wasn’t good. She felt micromanaged by the administration, and she didn’t have the freedom to do what she loved, what had driven her to language teaching in the first place, which is: to help her students improve their English.

  “It was just, ‘You must teach this, you must do that,’” she says. “Even if I say, ‘But this book is wrong! The grammar, look, it is wrong!’”

  Her teenage students arrive slowly and sleepily. They’ve sat through a long day at school, and they slump down onto their desks. Only four have shown up: two boys, Denis and Grigor, and two girls, Liza and Anna.

  “Well, okay, I told you I think it would be a small class today,” Marina announces, mostly to me, before beginning. Because I’m here, she scraps the lesson plan for today and instead has the students practice speaking with me.

  “What do you think of our city?” they want to know.

  I tell them I like it. I tell them about the ballet and the monuments John showed me. Marina has a soothing, encouraging patience in the classroom, and when she notices that Grigor, a tall, quiet boy who says he doesn’t like learning English, hasn’t said anything, she makes him ask me a question.

  He hesitates, then asks, “What else have you visited here in our city?”

  I’m kind of out of Novosibirsk landmarks, so I bring up the World War II memorial again. The names of each person from Novosibirsk who’d been killed in the fighting were inscribed on the walls of the monuments, and I’d been shocked by the length of the list. “The number dead, it was . . . unreal.”

  “Yes,” Marina says, shaking her head. “During the war, we say every family lost at least one person.” But then she brightens. “You know, in Germany now, they’re saying that Russia tried to occupy Germany by staying too long after the war.” She laughs and shakes her head. “And now they’re saying Russia is trying to occupy Ukraine.”

  The kids join in her laughter. “So stupid,” Denis echoes.

  I have to stop my jaw from hitting the floor. Marina once took a road trip from New York to Florida; Liza has lived in Japan, and the other three have at least traveled abroad. I had assumed that they would have been exposed to foreign media sources that would be more critical of Putin. Undoubtedly they had been, but I’d overestimated how well those ideas would stick.

  “I hadn’t heard people saying Russia tried to occupy Germany after the war,” I say, cautiously. But still—can they all really support Putin?

  Luckily, Marina moves on.

  “What would you recommend Audrey to do before she leaves our city?” Marina asks.

  Their answer is unanimous: I must go to the zoo.

  “The zoo?” I ask.

  They tell me their zoo is the most humane zoo in all of Russia. “It’s like the animals are actually in nature,” Anna says.

  “And also,” Denis chimes in, “you must see the liger.”

  “Oh, yes!” they all exclaim. “The liger is so cute.” But I’m like, “Wait, a liger?”

  “Yes,” Denis continues. “It’s a cross between a lion and a tiger.”

  This has to be fake; I’m picturing a lion spray-painted with zebra stripes. I haven’t been to a zoo in years and don’t have any particular desire to break that streak, but I have to see whatever this liger thing is.

  The class decides Liza will walk me there after the lesson finishes because it’s on her way home, and they assure me that the zoo is not far.

  Liza has striking red hair, deep blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, so I’m not totally shocked, on our walk, to learn that she is a model.

  Her English is by far the best in the class, because she mostly works in Japan.

  “I love Japan,” she gushes. She tells me about Tokyo, and the apartment she stayed in, and how much she loved her life there, because she and the other models would go to clubs and dance all night.

  “How old are you?” I ask.


  “Fourteen,” she tells me.

  We reach the gates of the zoo, and I offer to buy her a ticket, but she has to go home and do her homework.

  I do find the liger. He’s nibbling on a raw carcass of meat that’s been left in the center of his cage. The kids were right, it turns out. I’d half come to the zoo just to prove them wrong, but ligers are a real thing.

  Also, this zoo may be the most humane in Russia, but that says more about the state of zoological practices in Russia than it does about the Novosibirsk Zoo.

  All Russian women seem to have perfectly sculpted eyebrows and lacquered fingernails adorned with delicate nail art. This, perhaps, explains why I’m having trouble getting into a beauty salon.

  I check out of my hotel in the morning, but my train isn’t until after midnight, and I’ve tapped out most of Novosibirsk’s main tourist attractions. Novosibirsk has a USSR museum, and a handful of churches and the standard Soviet halls of knowledge and culture: history and art museums.

  The best and worst part of traveling alone is the quantity of quality time you get with yourself. When you’re centered and secure, these moments are blissful pockets of self-discovery, but if your mind even veers toward the rabbit holes of self-doubt and insecurity, it’s hard to derail that train.

  Daily routines provide ample opportunity to get out of your head. Joking with colleagues or blowing a red light on your bicycle force you out of your thoughts and into the present. I have none of that, so I decide to get a manicure. Except every store I enter is only booking for appointments next week.

  As I wander through churches and along random streets, I start to feel very lonely. Like, why am I trying to take a train by myself across Russia, why do I think something interesting will happen, how will I remember everything I want to write? And then, even if I can do that, how will I edit it? Print it? What if my computer crashes while printing? What if I can’t find a printer? Am I getting a little ahead of myself? Maybe. Am I making a huge mistake? Definitely. What mistake am I even talking about? Honestly, I’ve kind of lost track of that, but the point is, everything is terrible and hopeless.