Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

“You speak Chinese, too?!” she squeals.

  We go back and explain everything we’d failed to convey the first time. She tells me the women beside me were doing a play, and I have to admit that I kind of like the mystery better, and she tells me about where she’s studying, and I fill her in on my trip.

  It’s an amazing feeling, to have struggled so hard to communicate, and then to figure out an even better work-around. I’m so excited I have to tell someone. I message my sister to ask if she can talk, and by a miracle she can (it’s eight a.m. her time), and I call home from the Urals.

  “Um, why are you talking so weirdly?” she asks when I’ve finished the story.

  “I am?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says, “you’re speaking sooo slowly, and you’re like using all these weird phrases.”

  “Oh my God,” I realize. “This is the first real conversation I’ve had in . . . days.”

  It’s been so long since I’ve spoken to someone who speaks English fluently, I realize, that it’s become more natural for me to pidgin my English so that it mimics Russian grammar, and the mistakes native Russian speakers would make. Rather than saying, “Olya worked in the restaurant,” I might say, “Olya: woman who worked in restaurant.”

  I burst into tears. “But, Ang!” I exclaim. “What if I’ve permanently ruined my English?”

  “Well,” she says, “then I guess you’d have to stay in Russia.”

  The next morning, I’m awoken by a fierce knock on my door. I don’t move. Did Roman’s daughter, Olga, call the police because of my passport?

  The knocking grows louder, and I reach for my phone and start Googling “American embassy, Yekaterinburg.” The knocking finally subsides, and I lie in my bed, my heart still pounding. Then I hear someone outside my window. My curtains are drawn, and the lights are off, but now I’m terrified. I think back to a nightmare I had on one of the endless train rides, in which I’d been sentenced to a gulag, and my punishment was, somehow, to clean the bathrooms on the Trans-Siberian train cars.

  Suddenly, Roman starts calling me. I don’t pick up, and he texts me.

  “Olga say you want restaurant,” he says. “I send Dima.”

  Dima is the muscle behind Roman’s Airbnb operation. Roman bought the basement of an apartment building, and Dima is renovating it into a suite of Airbnb units. Dima wears overalls covered in flecks of paint, and he chain-smokes as he leads me to the restaurant Roman sent him to show me, which is actually a grocery store.

  It’s not open yet, so we wait outside with a crowd of people that feels like a holdover from Soviet days of shortages. When the gates finally open, everyone rushes inside.

  It’s my last day in Yekaterinburg, so I set out to see the city’s main museum, a kind of Russian version of a presidential library. It’s dedicated to the nation’s first leader, Boris Yeltsin. It heavily emphasizes Yeltsin’s commitment to freedom.

  “He cared so much about democracy,” one placard reads, “that he thought long and hard about who to choose as his successor.” At the end, there’s an exhibition dedicated to freedom, where visitors can record messages of what freedom truly means to them, which I presume will be sent directly to the police.

  The museum’s main selling point is its sweeping view of the river that runs through Yekaterinburg. Across the water is a huge church that was erected on the spot where the Romanov family was murdered in a basement. The Romanovs have since been sainted, in a move that seems to emblemize so perfectly the complicated relationship Russia has to its history, how it picks and chooses the parts of the twentieth century to celebrate while glossing over the lessons that each could have taught.

  I head back to the Airbnb, where Roman has told me to find Dima, and then they’re all going to give me a ride to the train station.

  I knock on Dima’s door, and he invites me in. His clothes are still flecked with white paint, and I see that the room he sleeps in is dusty and piled with boxes. The air is heavy with cigarette smoke.

  Dima is on the phone with his wife, whom he insists I say hello to.

  “Hello,” I say in Russian.

  “Hello,” she replies in English.

  Dima shows me a picture of his son, a smiling, chubby toddler.

  “So cute!” I exclaim.

  “He’s fourteen,” Dima tells me. I guess it’s an old picture. “I have five children,” he continues.

  “Five children?” I exclaim.

  “It will be six,” he tells me. “In July?” He checks with his wife. “Oh, in August,” he corrects himself.

  He shows me photos of his daughter, a smiling girl who looks like she’s five or six. “And now she is sixteen?” He checks with his wife. “No, seventeen,” he tells me.

  This is a lot to process. I don’t know what to make of it. There’s so much unsaid in all of this, and I think of my own parents, and how they may have given me terrible advice, and how they drive me crazy, but how I can’t picture my father having to call my mother to double-check how old I am.

  Roman appears in the doorway. It’s our first time meeting face-to-face. He’s a polite, handsome guy in a suit who has kindly offered to drive me to the train station. Dima, it turns out, is just for muscle: he carries my suitcase to the trunk and then disappears inside.

  “How did you meet Olga and Dima?” I ask Roman on the drive to the train station.

  “Olga worked in a cafe.”

  Here, Olga jumps in. “I saw him,” she says emphatically.

  “Oh, Roman is your boyfriend?” I ask, surprised and not. I’m not surprised, because they both seem young and ambitious, but I am surprised, because when Roman called the first day, he told me Olga was his daughter, which I now realize was likely a word he mixed up with girlfriend.

  “Yes, we’re a couple,” Roman says proudly.

  He says a word in Russian, which, when we look it up in my dictionary, has three translations: chance, luck, and accident. “Luck is good,” I explain in English. “Chance is . . . not bad, not good. Accident is bad.”

  “Then I meet Dima by luck,” he tells me.

  “Dima has six children!” I exclaim.

  “Yes”—Roman shakes his head—“by two women.” As though this is a shock to him. “Two women!”

  Olga asks for clarification, and he repeats what he’s said. “Olga hears with a machine,” he explains, “and she reads lips.”

  Dima’s procreational habits don’t seem unusual for Russia, but I also get the sense that Roman will not be having six children, and when I leave, I offer to help them translate their Airbnb listings into English.

  I board the final train of this trip, ready for luck, chance, or accident.

  Final Leg: Yekaterinburg to Moscow (One Day, Three Hours, and Thirty-Four Minutes)

  The final train ride runs through western Russia, and we pass the remains of hulking Soviet industrial projects. Sunlight filters through trees that turn into houses and back into forests. I fall asleep with one set of roommates and wake up with another, but there’s become a predictable pattern and flow.

  I stare out at the landscape that has become familiar and think about what this whole trip has been about. A person I realize I have to thank for it.

  Maybe he was all three, Anton. Luck, chance and accident.

  We’re on an overnight flight to a tiny island in Vietnam. It’s ten days before the end, but it doesn’t feel like it. We have the row to ourselves, and he insists that I be the one to lie across it while he sleeps upright. At midnight, he shakes me awake. “It’s my birthday.”

  On the island, nothing works—cell phones, Internet, roads—except our relationship, which becomes seamless. We ride bikes to a white sand beach and wade out into the water, where we take turns holding the other’s body up so we can close our eyes and float. When we get hungry, we stop for mangos or bowls of noodles covered in spicy broth. “If it could just be us like this all the time, we wouldn’t have to break up,” Anton muses.

  And he’s right. It
’s the real world, where the past can’t be changed and petty grievances can grow to fill the space left by distance, that has come between us.

  One night we’re walking along the beach and Anton pulls me toward a row of lounge chairs deserted for the evening. I sit down on the one next to him but he tugs me on to his. He does this sometimes, insist that we squeeze both of our bodies into things that were built for one—both of us sleeping on one twin bed instead of pushing two together. Waves crash onto the beach as we hold each other and stare up at the stars.

  “If we could have just been friends, it would have been this pure, beautiful thing that lasted forever,” he says. “We wouldn’t have ruined everything.”

  Months earlier he has free tickets to a concert, and I take the train out for the weekend. The first moment I see him each week, I still marvel at the fact that the world could have produced such a beautiful person who fits me so perfectly, and that we found each other. I spend the days we’re apart half in the real world, half eyeing the countdown clock in my head that ticks down the seconds until his fingers are wrapped around my arm. And maybe that’s the problem. You can’t live when you’re busy loving someone so fully and without restraint.

  The concert is perfect because when we’re not fighting, everything with Anton is perfect. Although, if he were not there, I might notice that a nightclub with fog machines and a catwalk is an odd venue for a funk band. Toward the end, the lead singer says he wants to get someone onstage dancing with him, and suddenly he’s tugging on my arm, pulling me up to the catwalk.

  I know why he picked me—I’ve spent the night dancing the way the happy and deliriously in love can—but I shriek in protest. Although I’ll stand on stage talking into a microphone for as long as people will have me, I can think of few things more mortifying than dancing onstage at a concert.

  I look back at Anton for help, but he’s laughing and he helps the singer pull me up. I look out at the crowd in panic, and then at Anton, and I watch his face mirror my own mere seconds ago as the lead singer grabs his arm and yanks him on-stage with me.

  I look at Anton like, “Well, we’re stuck in this now,” and then he grins and I do too and we dance until the song’s over.

  Another time I’m biting my lip and fidgeting with my hair because the shower in my apartment has been leaking raw sewage and my landlord won’t fix it. I’ve asked him to come over because I’m telling him that I want to break my lease and get all my money back. I’ve done a free consultation with a lawyer whose role in my life I’m planning on greatly exaggerating during this exchange. And Anton’s here because he can always appeal to the humanity in people. Maybe because he always sees it.

  The landlord wears blue suede shoes and smokes in the apartment. He finally agrees to what we’re asking and sits down to sketch out a written agreement. My eyes meet Anton’s above the landlord’s head and Anton mouths, “I love you” just as I was about to do the same.

  There was something rare in our connection, or in Anton, that I didn’t recognize at the time, because I didn’t think I’d ever not have it. I wish I’d told him that. Sometimes I pull up old e-mails, either as proof or penitence.

  Like this one, which I revive as I catch sight of the switches that say we’re pulling into the train yard in Moscow. He’s telling me about a night he spent playing music with acquaintances. “And this couple played this song and the girl had her head on his shoulder and they both sang so beautifully. And it reminded me of you and us, and like we are exactly like that only in other things, you know, and it’s just beautiful. Or just being together, you know, in a peaceful moment, just kinda having each other. I’m listening to the song right now.”

  A few days later. “Are you also getting this new way of looking at us, almost like, we should be together, like it doesn’t make sense not to be together—it would be dumb not to be together—because we’d miss out on so much awesomeness? Do you get that feeling? And like it’s scary ’cause maybe it’s not good to be so attached because you get so vulnerable? But you want to be even more attached? Is that how you feel? That’s how I feel.”

  The woman in my compartment is trying to get my attention. I look up from my phone and swipe my fingers under my eyes in a covert gesture I’ve perfected over the years.

  “Audrey,” she says, “I have something to tell you.” We talked earlier about our jobs and lives and she told me about the sensations she has when we pass certain churches. “I have a strong sense about these things. And I feel that you are very . . . mystical.”

  I look back down at my screen. “I love you, Aud. I’m sorry we don’t talk on the phone all the time. I think we’re still great though.”

  20

  Open Mic Night in Moscow

  Moscow in summer is a different city from the one I saw last winter. The air is warm, and night is a brief blip between twenty-hour spans of daylight.

  I’m awoken one morning by the soft chirping of birds and the sounds of my hostel roommate clamoring down our metal bed frame to use the bathroom. Sun filters in through gauzy curtains. I’ll just lie here for a few more minutes and then get up, I think.

  I lean over to check the time on my iPad: 3:54 a.m.

  Good lord.

  The city feels familiar. I revisit Red Square and the candy-colored St. Basil’s Cathedral, this time with no jacket. I make it to places that were too cold to bother with in November: Gorky Park, which is helpful because one series of audiotapes I listened to taught me all about how to ask for directions, but only in relation to Gorky Park. For a few weeks, the only directions I understood were “to the left of Gorky Park,” “to the right of Gorky Park,” “near Gorky Park,” and “very far from Gorky Park.”

  Inside Gorky Park is a contemporary art museum called Garage. It’s extremely cutting-edge. The exhibit in the foyer is a live group of regular people stretching and massaging one another; a nearby placard identifies the work as Untitled and the materials as “objects,” “the audience’s attention,” and “people passing by.”

  Yevgeniy tells me to meet him on the platform at the metro station where Stalin announced the start of the Second World War, and it’s only when I get there that I realize I have no idea what he looks like.

  Yevgeniy is a friend of a manager at my hostel; the manager put us in touch because we’re both stand-ups. I’ve booked spots in all of the English-language shows in Moscow, while Yevgeniy is starting to break out in the Russian-language scene. I’m curious what Russian stand-up is like in Moscow, but mostly, I’m curious how Yevgeniy and I will recognize each other.

  The former Soviet republics are the first places I’ve visited where I effortlessly blend in. This constantly catches me off guard: the surprised looks on people’s faces when I open my mouth and they hear my accent, the strangers who address me in Russian, the way I can slip onto a subway car without arousing suspicion. No matter how good my spoken Chinese got, my red hair made me stick out like a sore thumb in Shanghai.

  I scan the passengers disembarking from the train in both directions, looking for someone who is similarly searching for eye contact.

  The station, like all on the Moscow metro, looks less like a public transportation depot and more like the lobby of a five-star hotel. The walls and floors are patterned marble; elegant art deco arches line the platform and form a vaulted ceiling. If you look up, you can see one of thirty-four ceiling mosaics that depict various Soviet skyscapes.

  Stalin is once again to thank for this architectural flourish. He envisioned metro stations as “palaces of the people,” and commuters in Moscow pass chandeliers, mosaics, painted ceilings, and statues.

  A guy with short red hair walks toward me with a smile.

  “Audrey?” he asks. Then he hugs me. I’m flustered: Russians don’t smile, and they definitely don’t hug.

  Even stranger: Yevgeniy is wearing a Red Sox hat.

  “I used to live in Brighton Beach,” Yevgeniy tells me as we walk toward the venue where tonight’s Russia
n-language open mic will be held. He enrolled in the work-travel program and then lived in New York and Canada.

  “I miss America and Canada,” he says. “Everyone is so nice, happy, friendly. Here . . .” He trails off.

  Stand-up is still new in Russia, but it’s growing. There’s now a stand-up show on one of the biggest TV channels, and audiences are growing in the big cities. Yevgeniy tells me there are ten main comedians who run the show, which has the original name Stand-Up. He’s trying to get on the show, and he will, a few weeks after I leave, but right now they’re making him rewrite all his jokes. He’s paying his dues.

  The open mic is at a bar called Stalingrad, and it does not feel like an open mic.

  “There are like, a hundred people here,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Yevgeniy says. “They don’t want too many people to come, because they’ll do these sets again on TV.”

  I explain that, to me, one hundred people is an insanely huge audience for an open mic.

  “They’re very popular,” Yevgeniy explains. “So many people know them from TV, so they just post on Instagram, ‘open mic at Stalingrad tonight,’ and all these people come.”

  This is something else I find funny: the comics make all of their announcements through Instagram. When I meet them, they ask how many Instagram followers I have. I try to explain that American comedians build followings on Twitter, because you can post jokes, but this logic does not compute.

  The show is two hours long, and much of it goes over my head. Sometimes I can follow the setup, but not the punch line; other times I understand only the punch line, and therefore don’t get why it’s funny. I understand how my audience in Kazakhstan must have felt.

  There are only two women on the show. One is the host, who does well. When the second woman comes on later, the laughter becomes softer and higher-pitched. It takes me a while to realize that it’s because only the women are laughing.

  But they’re really laughing. The men, in contrast, sit stone-faced. One of her few jokes I could follow in its entirety goes like this: