Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Out in the bright sunshine, people unzip winter coats, and every other person I pass seems to be eating ice cream. I check the temperature. It’s fifty-seven degrees. Balmy for Siberia. I stop at a hipster coffee shop, which reminds me that I’ll never find love. I ride the subway back and forth, which I have to admit is extremely fun, but when I’m done, I’m still swimming in anxiety.

  Some shops on the main street seem more Brooklyn than Siberia. There’s a drybar and a bougie appliance store selling retro-style refrigerators and coffee makers. The window display is full of chrome and muted colors.

  I stand there for a long time trying to assign meaning to what I see. The aesthetic these blenders and dishwasher are going for is 1950s America—in other words, a nostalgia for something that never existed here.

  Really, though, what I’m struggling with is myself: I’m growing weary of my own compulsion to unpack this image or contradiction or whatever it is, line the pieces up in a way that makes sense, and extract some larger point or conclusion from it. I need my findings to make sense but also be slightly profound.

  I feel this way not just about the appliance store, but also about this trip, and my life in general. I want it all to make sense, want to see a clear picture in my head of what this all means and where it’s going.

  Future Audrey has the distinct advantage of knowing this all works out. But in this moment, I genuinely don’t know if everything will be fine. I have no idea that this is all going to turn into a book, that I won’t still be wandering the streets of Siberia a year from now, that my instincts were right, or that I’m more in control than I realize. Right now, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, and no clue what this is all building toward. It feels like so much is riding on this trip, because my parents, friends, and Russian strangers on the street don’t think I should be taking it. I’m eager for concrete, tangible proof that I have been right to pursue this, because absent that, all I can point at to prove I’m not crazy is trust in myself. Which, at this moment, I don’t have.

  I’m slowly building it, though. Of course, I can’t see this now, but I’ve been building it ever since I left for Kazakhstan against the advice of my parents and medical providers. (Well, technically, they would have only disapproved of the Kyrgyz horse trek.) I have no idea that ultimately it will be this trust, and not a book, that will validate my decision to take this trip, that by choosing to listen to myself and pursue this, I have already given myself the sincerest validation of all.

  On my way back into the main city square, which I’m honestly returning to out of habit more than anything else, a few elementary school kids come up to me and ask for 5 rubles.

  I can’t be bothered. “Sorry,” I say in English, “I don’t speak Russian.”

  Their eyes light up. “English!” I hear one of them whisper.

  I keep walking, but I hear the patter of footsteps, and I turn to see that they’ve caught up with me.

  “Hello!” one exclaims. He hands me his phone, which, like Alexandr I’s, is open to Google Translate behind its cracked screen.

  “Where are you going?” it says.

  I look at their eager, smiling faces, and I realize, Awww, they want to help me!

  I go to type in “Lenin Square” to humor them, but their last search pops up.

  “Smoke weed every day?!” I exclaim. They shriek, and everyone runs away laughing, except the kid whose phone I must be holding, so I hand it back to him, and he, too, escapes.

  By now it’s almost night, and, okay, I need to stop feeling sorry for myself.

  The winter sun in Siberia is bright and glaring. People wear sunglasses until the sun is safely below the horizon at eight p.m. because a low light sometimes comes slanting in over the horizon and blinds you.

  I finally find a salon with an opening, although it feels less like a beauty parlor and more like a dentist’s office. My manicure takes place in a private room with lots of high-tech equipment that moves on retractable arms, and the chair that I’m using was definitely intended for use by a dental practitioner. It fully reclines, and not in the kick back and relax! sense, but in a way that says, I need to get at your back molars. The machine the manicurist uses to remove my chipping nail polish looks like it could easily drill a cavity.

  I study the Russian women’s magazines fanned out on the table beside me. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the headlines are identical to those back home.

  Russian Cosmo promises to explain, “Why he: isn’t married, doesn’t want children.”

  “Bad girl, good sex!” another reads.

  “Do you need to give birth before thirty?” one asks.

  When the manicurist hears my accent, she asks me where I’m from, and then asks me what I’m doing here. I tell her about my trip.

  “You must be very brave,” she says, shaking her head.

  I laugh. “It’s not brave to sit on a train and read,” I tell her. And that breaks the spell. Somehow, by the time I walk out of the salon, I feel fine.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I find myself singing on the walk to the train station. “Smoke weed every day.”

  Fourth Leg: Novosibirsk to Tobolsk (Twenty-One Hours, Thirty-Two Minutes)

  There comes a moment in any great train journey, I think, when one is consumed by a desire to get off the train. This moment, I’ve found, arrives more quickly when one is trapped in a compartment with a two-year-old.

  I wake up in the morning to find that I’ve had the compartment to myself all night. I eat breakfast and start to work, but then we pull up to a packed platform, and my heart sinks. Sure enough, a mother and her son appear in the cabin.

  “You’re American,” the mother says when she hears my Russian.

  I’m impressed; she’s the first person to guess correctly. It seems like we’re about to be friends, but then the provodnitsa comes in to check our tickets and to see if we’d like to buy anything, and I hear the mother tell the provodnitsa that my Russian is very bad.

  This seems like welcome news to the provodnitsa, who returns with a stack of commemorative magnets. “Maybe you’d like to buy one?” she asks.

  The tracks have taken a southward bend, and the snow has been replaced with swamplands. When I think of swamps, I always pictured some unsightly combination of mud and alligators, but this is clear blue water pierced with yellow brush and white birch trees.

  The provodnitsa is back. “Maybe you’d like to buy a postcard?” she asks.

  The two-year-old, Ilyusha, is doing his best, but it’s a long train ride. I hear his mother telling him stories about Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who was the first man in space. I want to tell the mother that, actually, I can understand Russian perfectly when it’s being spoken to a two-year-old, but then I realize Ilyusha can conjugate verbs, nouns, and adjectives better than I can, and I’d probably make a stronger argument by staying silent.

  The weather changes quickly on a train. A swollen black cloud hangs, pregnant-like, over the scraggly swamps, and I realize my main source of entertainment today has been watching for the rain to start. I begin to wonder if it’s healthy to spend so much time on a train. As we pass through a town, I see an old man in a newsboy cap and a heavy coat standing beside a little girl on a pink bicycle. His hand rests on her shoulder as they watch the train go by.

  Ilyusha starts to cry, and for no reason at all, I do, too. I can’t stop thinking about what feels like the central crisis of my life: this pull between settling down and chasing adventure, and this question of how I can do both. If I could just, like, find some speed-marrying app, it feels like all of my problems would be solved. Maybe Ilyusha and his mom symbolize an alternate unrealized view of myself.

  Now the provodnista is back with, and I’m not making this up, a GoPro around her neck. I want to explain to her that she’s negating her camera’s main feature by putting it on a conventional camera strap, but I don’t get the chance, because she wants to take a picture of me sitting in my seat and sell me
the print.

  On the platform at Tobolsk, the moon hides behind a thin layer of gauzy clouds, and though it is freezing and pitch-black, and I’m slightly concerned because this train station is in the middle of the woods, I am so, so happy to be off the train.

  I do not tear up when saying goodbye to Ilyusha, who spent the last six hours screaming, or his mother, who has told me, multiple times, how well Ilyusha speaks for a two-year-old, which, to be fair, is true, but also feels like a dig at how bad my Russian is, and I am not sorry to leave the provodnitsa, whose parting gift is an attempt to sell me a model of the train I’d just spent almost twenty-two hours on, in case I want to, I guess, remember it forever.

  Outside the station, I find one taxi driver. He’s a sweet guy from Azerbaijan, and when his sons calls him, to my delight, his ringtone is Mariah Carey’s “I’d Give My All.”

  Stopover: Tobolsk

  I’m awoken in the morning by chirping birds. The sun is shining, and spring has arrived in Siberia!

  I walk to the nearest railway office to buy my next ticket onward.

  “You’ve come so far!” the woman exclaims when I tell her about my trip. “Also, all the trains you want are sold out.”

  Tobolsk is not exactly a city you want to get stuck in for a few extra days. For starters, the fact that it’s even designated a city really feels like someone pulled a few strings. It’s a tiny, sleepy town with only a handful of restaurants. Most intersections don’t have stoplights.

  It’s famous for its picturesque Kremlin, a charming, walled old town that dates back to the 1500s. (Not to be confused with the Moscow Kremlin—kremlins are fortified complexes containing administrative and religious buildings that are found in many Russian cities.) The buildings have been painted a gleaming white, and the skyline is made up of gold-topped bell towers and onion domes.

  Like many other Siberian cities, Tobolsk’s main historical claim to fame is as a stop on the road to exile. There’s a statue commemorating Dostoevsky’s sojourn, which would seem like a strange thing to celebrate if every other city didn’t do the same. I’m also starting to realize the reason most Siberian cities can claim that famous exiles stopped in them is that there’s really only one main road through Siberia.

  Tobolsk, however, is so Siberian that it even has a bell that was exiled east. It does not explain who exiled a bell, or why it was exiled, but does give a sense of how little it took to get sent to Siberia.

  The local history museum offers tours guided by historical reenactors in costume, which I’m dying to do, but I know the language barrier would prove tortuous for everyone. The museum also offers free entry for heroes of the Soviet Union. Victims of Chernobyl only get reduced entry.

  The top floor is devoted to the brief period the Romanov family spent here as political prisoners, and there’s a whole room about how much the final tsar and tsarina were in love. Russians are obsessed with the love story of their final monarchs—if Romanovs are mentioned, there’s always a quote about how, even if they were murdered, they never lost their love! There’s also a room with traditional costumes for the region’s original inhabitants, the Tatars.

  Outside people walk around in T-shirts and sun themselves on the lawn outside the Kremlin, where the last piles of snow are still melting.

  Because there’s nothing else to do, I spend the next few days walking around and thinking. When I leave Tobolsk, I’ll also be leaving Siberia, and I decide to make a kind of Ural resolution, which is like a New Year’s resolution, except one that you make when you’re crossing the Ural Mountains instead of the timeshold of a new year. I decide I want to be more honest and less afraid of making myself vulnerable. I want to trust myself and my decisions. Would like, but not a necessity: to meet a smoking-hot boyfriend on the train. Also, I want to eat fewer carbs.

  Fifth Leg: Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg (Eleven Hours, Fifty-Four Minutes)

  Only twelve hours on a train almost feels like not enough time, until I meet my companions. They’re three men: one kind, middle-aged Muslim Tatar, and two oil workers returning from the fields in Siberia. One of the oil workers is very drunk.

  The oil workers spend a month in the field, and then return home for a month, alternating all year. The drunk man is carrying most of his wages on him. I know this, because first he shows them to me, and then tries to hand me thousands of rubles. He wears torn, dirty clothes, and he smells like he hasn’t bathed recently.

  “He drank too much,” the Muslim Tatar tells me.

  The drunk man is probably too incapacitated to be dangerous, but I’m still on alert. He’s trying to speak to me; I don’t understand.

  “He’s speaking Tatar,” the Muslim man tells me gently.

  The drunk man wanders off for a while, and I must look scared, because the Muslim Tatar looks up from his book and starts talking to me about hockey. He keeps talking to me, about how most Tatars, like the three men in this car, speak Tatar poorly—we’re all Russians, he explains—until the drunk man returns, and he’s inexplicably bought us all coffees.

  “Go to sleep,” the Muslim Tatar pleads softly.

  I barely sleep that night; it’s the first time on the whole trip I’ve felt really afraid.

  In the morning, I can tell the drunk man is sober and extremely embarrassed—he doesn’t make eye contact with any of us. He’s a different person from the man who was yelling and breaking things the night before.

  I’m surprised by how little everyone else reacted to him. No one yells at him, throws him off the train, or even raises a voice. It’s hard to tell if people have written him off, or they just shrug and accept that some people can’t handle their drink.

  I’m so shaken by the whole thing that I have to stop and eat something. At the nearest cafe, I order a Caesar salad, mostly because it’s listed on the menu as “Roman Emperor Salad.”

  Stopover: Yekaterinburg

  Yekaterinburg is famous for being the site where the Romanov family was murdered, but I will forever remember it as the site of Roman’s Airbnb.

  I’ve rented a small but extremely reasonably priced apartment not far from the train station, and Roman calls to tell me, in shaky English, that his daughter, Olga, will let me in. She’s giving me the grand tour, which is kind of self-explanatory, given that from the bed, you can reach out and touch the stove.

  Olga has braces and a sharp outfit: she wears a red silk scarf, a studded Hermès belt, and nude stockings she keeps brushing like I’m getting dust on her. To be fair, I am very dusty.

  Still, I’m really impressed with the apartment. There’s a hotel-room level to detail: hair dryer, Q-tips, toothbrush. No other Airbnb I’ve stayed in in the former Soviet Union has been so meticulous. Whoever this Roman guy is, he knows what he’s doing.

  He also doesn’t seem to be Olga’s father, because when she calls him, she addresses him as “Roman.” She’s calling because she has just learned that I don’t have a Russian passport, and she’s fairly certain I can’t stay here.

  “What?!” I exclaim when she casually informs me I am no longer welcome.

  “Wait,” she says, holding up a finger. “I’ll call Roman.”

  The problem is just that Olga doesn’t know how to input my information into the form Roman had given her, which is purely for his records and set up for a Russian passport. Roman explains this to me and apologizes while Olga composes herself.

  Back to business, she copies out the information on my passport and hands me the keys. “Any questions?” she asks.

  “Do you have a favorite restaurant in Yekaterinburg?” I ask.

  She pauses for a long time, and then replies honestly, “No.”

  Luckily, a friend from my Russian gym has tipped me off to a pie shop, where I plop down with a book and struggle to order a prelunch dessert. The problem is that I don’t know the names of any of the fruits the pies are made from, and eventually I settle for just pointing.

  My waitress, whose name tag says OLYA, is sweet: she asks
me where I’m from, and I try to ask her about Yekaterinburg, but I’ve realized, while I’ve really nailed the conversations I have every day, I haven’t really moved beyond them. I can buy train tickets, check into a hotel, order dinner, but I can’t really ask someone about her life. I know how to explain that I’m a writer from America, but I don’t always understand the follow-up questions. Olya is beyond patient, but we don’t make much progress.

  It’s frustrating, the ways in which I can almost predict how my conversations will stall out each time. The other person will ask what I do, and I’ll explain, and then I’ll say, “What do you do?” and they’ll use a word I don’t know, so I’ll have to say, “What’s that?” and they’ll say, “You know, a smhemeh,” and I’ll say, “No, what’s a smhemeh?” and they’ll say, “You know, when a person is sick and they go to a premeheh,” and I say, “Oh, like a nurse,” and they’ll say, “No, a nurse is someone who does memehe or gives temehe. I’m a person who does gamehe,” and I’ll say, “A doctor?” and they’ll say, “Oh, yes, doctor is another word for smhemeh.”

  At the table beside me, a group of older women are wearing paper hats and reading a script. They’ve brought their own flowers to the restaurant. I try to ask Olya about it, she tries to explain, and we both seem to agree that the best option is for me to order more pie.

  When I go to leave the pie shop, I stop to thank Olya for being so kind, and I say I’m sorry that we couldn’t communicate. “I speak English”—I laugh—“but not really Russian.”

  “I speak Chinese,” she replies, smiling, “but not Russian.”

  “WHAT??!?!?!” I exclaim in Chinese.