The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  The Kharkov show was abruptly canceled, if in fact there ever was a show. The status reports went from TBA to “open-air picnic” to “I don’t know, it says rain” to “You must have known the show could get canceled.” We couldn’t find our hotel, which was supposed to be near the train station. It was pouring rain. We took shelter under a liquor store awning and asked for directions from a kiosk operator, then a cabdriver, then some young dudes on the sidewalk—no one seemed to be able to agree where the street our hotel was supposed to be on was. We mule-trained up a hill that seemed right only to find a dirt road. This couldn’t be it—the station hotel, within sight of the McDonald’s, on a dirt path? I ran up the hill and back. Sure enough, that was it, and in fact it was a perfectly nice little place with a banya (steam bath) in the basement. After a pilgrimage for Georgian food (it was getting on six, we still hadn’t eaten yet, and I was now sick as the proverbial dog), it was a circuitous walk home past the Constructivist gigantoliths overlooking that second-biggest-square-after-Red-Square and, for good measure, “the second-biggest Lenin.” Lenin gestured in approval of the tents that crowded the square, advertising the upcoming Euro 2012 soccer tournament. The rain had stopped.

  We had a message from booking agent Dima: “You have a show tomorrow in Donetsk, no guarantee, but they’ll pay your ticket to Rostov-on-Don.” We stopped at the bus station to see how painful it would be to get to Donetsk by tomorrow. There was a bus at noon, but “they don’t sell that ticket in Ukraine.”

  They don’t sell in Ukraine a ticket for a bus . . . in Ukraine?

  No. “Six a.m. or eight a.m.”

  Eight a.m. it would have to be, and we hit the banya to sweat out the bad news.

  The morning’s cabdriver quoted us a price of fifty, Maria said forty, he hemmed for a minute, and, thinking she was my guide, said in Russian, “How about forty-five? Tell him fifty, and you can keep the rest for yourself.” When he dropped us at the station, a man was loading boxes of live chickens into the storage bins beneath the bus. The fact that there was a space under the bus was actually a pleasant surprise, since it meant we were in a modern bus, not an old Soviet Ikarus, an exhaust-stinking, shock-free diesel monster. We asked to put our bags in the bays. “Not now,” said the driver. “There are cameras on me. You will have to pay extra.” The bus swung around the corner of the building and parked a hundred yards away. We threw the bags underneath and boarded without incident or extra charge.

  The bus stopped for a bathroom break in a village (Izyum, meaning “raisin”) about halfway between Kharkov and Donetsk. A statue of a woman in a flowing dress strode confidently into the future. A dog slept in the sun in front of an ice cream cart, whose attendant yelled at me for leaving the freezer door open while I counted my cash. A young boy fingered a Rubik’s Cube faster than I’d ever seen, first with both hands and then with just one. He was the “Tommy” of Rubik’s Cube. Two tall, bullet-headed Georgians with sleepy eyes made gentle fun of the etchings of Georgian tourist attractions printed in their passports. My health had started to crumple under the effects of the short, sleepless nights, and there’s not much worse than having a cold in the dusty summer heat. Primary-color Ladas scattered across the streets like M&M’s.

  Halfway through the six-hour sauna of a bus ride, we got another text from Dima: “The Rostov venue”—this was the first show in Russia, supposedly two days hence—“gave me the wrong date! It’s tomorrow. Oh, by the way, there are no trains to Russia either. Please buy a bus ticket at the station when you arrive.”

  Andrey, who was supposed to pick us up in Donetsk, called Maria, who’d been sleeping, for a status report. “I think . . . the bus broke down, we’re still in Slovyansk.” That’s what she’d heard the guy behind us saying to his friend on his phone. The guy tapped her on the shoulder and explained that he’d been lying to his friends because he was late. “Oh, we’re in Donetsk!” she corrected. “Almost there.”

  We pulled in. “Where’s our guy?” She scanned the parking lot. “Not the hippie!”

  A gangly ostrich of a man strutted across the gravel, juggling, woven bag over his shoulder, a couple of halfhearted dreadlocks, zipper pull in one earlobe, a curl of bone in the other, apron tied over corduroy cutoff shorts. He grinned, gathered his juggling balls, waved.

  “Yup, it’s the hippie,” I told Maria. “Are you Andrey?”

  “Nope, they sent the waiter. I’m Anton!”

  Anton was a cheery fellow, as are most hippies at first. He took Maria to the ticket counter to explore our options for crossing the Russian border.

  “You got a ticket?” I asked when they returned.

  “Yeah, but you’re not gonna like it!” Anton grinned. “Leaving tonight at midnight, arrive seven a.m.”

  Donetsk seemed less weighted by physical history than other eastern Ukrainian or Eastern European cities. It was founded only in 1869—by John Hughes, a Welsh mining magnate—and destroyed in World War II. It had, to me, the faint scent of Texas: new mineral wealth showing off, fresh construction, unstained pavement, a pink Hummer parked outside a coffee shop. Donetsk is home to Ukraine’s richest man, the steel and coal tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, who operates the region nearly as a personal fiefdom (when fighting broke out two years later and ground the local economy to a halt, thousands of workers stayed solvent because his factories stayed open and continued to pay their salaries). Anton came to our table in the club with plates of pasta.

  “Dinner for my capitalist friends!” he announced.

  “Did he just call us his capitalist friends?” I asked Maria.

  “Is a joke!”

  We asked promoter Andrey if he thought that the bottle of wine he had given us would be an issue at the border. “In this part of the country, it’s barely a border,” he said.

  (Two years later, it barely was. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, separatist provocateurs began referring to the southeastern provinces of Ukraine as Novorossiya—“New Russia”—and declared a “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Unacknowledged Russian arms, tanks, and soldiers poured across the border from the Rostov region. Bombing destroyed the Donetsk airport and much of the city, including the hospital. The train station closed. Heat and water were scarce. Those who could leave the region fled: 1.5 million of the region’s prewar population of 4.5 million are said to have gone either to Russia or to western Ukraine, depending on their political sympathies. The Russian government both represented the separatists at peace negotiations and denied any control over them. The American government considered sending arms to the Ukrainians.)

  “I don’t like U.S.A., but I like you!” said an audience member after the show. The cab we were supposed to take to the bus station sped away in a huff because his trunk was full and we had too many bags. We packed into the next one, and a drunk jumped in the front seat. I thought he was with the driver until he got out at an intersection, gave us a double thumbs-up to confirm that we had the money, and split.

  We passed the new stadium, built to hold Euro 2012 matches. The old one had been tiny and on the outskirts of town. The new one was lit up in blue like Giants Stadium and was almost as big. A massive statue of Winged Victory, also lit, stood out front. The cabdriver gestured to the hotel across the way: “That, too, has been there forever. And now in the last month they’re calling it a four-star hotel.” (The stadium was damaged by artillery shelling in 2014, and the Donetsk team now plays on the other side of the country, in L’viv.)

  The station was dark, but the security guard, smoking cigs and drinking beer, assured us that the bus to Rostov was coming. He told the driver that it was a four hryvnia charge to continue into the parking lot. We got out on the curb instead. The bus pulled up some time later.

  It was an hour’s wait to board, and a two-year-old girl had the best idea of anyone for making use of her time: jump on the curb, jump off the curb, shake your ass, kick the aluminum wall, get daddy to swing you around like an airplane. Cabdrivers offered to take us the
six hours straight to Rostov-on-Don. We all boarded, crammed into every seat. Truly, as Dr. Pangloss never said, this was the worst of all possible worlds.

  It was three a.m. when we reached the border crossing. The horizon brightened even as the near-full moon was still in the sky. The Russian authorities filed on, tight-lipped and tight-haired, and I had an idea for a worst-selling pinup calendar: “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control.” A guard mumbled his way through some boilerplate. As he left, someone said, “Use your street voice!” The guy sitting next to us joked, “He was asking ‘Everyone all right? Need a drink? Not too cold?’”

  We sat for three hours at the border, from three a.m. to six a.m. Legions of pigeons were nesting and hatching in the eaves under the tin roof of the Ukrainian exit station, and the cacophony of coos, chirps, and warbles was maddening. We were given two cigarette breaks. A dozen giggling women ran into the field and hoisted their skirts to pee.

  Of nineteenth-century Russian customs and border agents, the Marquis de Custine wrote, “The sight of these voluntary automata inspires me with a kind of fear . . . every stranger is treated as culpable upon arriving on the Russian frontier.”

  The paranoia and vindictively selective enforcement had begun thousands of miles to the west, at the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We’d expected some procedural difficulty getting an entry visa at the Chinese embassy, located in the shadow of the USS Intrepid on the desolate West Side, but had sailed through the lines, frictionless. We simply dropped off our passports, photos, and a check for two hundred bucks and a week later picked up the passports with our photos laminated onto a visa page.

  The Russians, though, were a different story. Mark Twain, writing over a hundred years earlier, complained that Russians “are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a complicated passport system.” We were required to fill out the PDF application in advance and show up at the consulate building between nine thirty a.m. and twelve thirty p.m. to apply in person.

  The first day, we arrived at ten thirty a.m. and joined the line on the sidewalk, about twenty people deep.

  “Well, this shouldn’t take too long,” I thought.

  Two hours later, only five people had entered the building.

  “Come back tomorrow,” said the burly security guard in a thick Russian accent and slammed the iron cage around the door shut.

  We looked at our linemates, none of whom seemed shocked. All of them, besides ourselves, were professional line-standers, paid by visa applicants with more money and less free time—or more sense—than we had. They brought books, lined up before the doors opened, and hoped for the best (or, if they were paid by the hour, the worst).

  We returned the next day, at nine a.m. this time, and waited a mere hour and a half outside before being ushered through the glass doors into a waiting room, then to a Plexiglas window like a bank teller’s. A blonde stereotype of a sadistic Slavic bureaucrat didn’t look up from her desk.

  “Papers!” she barked, of course. “Passports!”

  She read unhurriedly through the applications, marking them with a red pen, first mine, then Maria’s.

  “Twenty-six!” she said, circling that box forcefully. “It is wrong.” She shoved the papers back through the slot beneath the window.

  Item number 11 took one’s passport number, issuing country, and dates of validity. Item 26 asked, “List all countries which have ever issued you a passport.” Since she had already entered her passport information, Maria had left it blank instead of entering “United States.”

  “Obviously this was just an oversight,” she said to the lady. “Can’t I just write it in?”

  “No! Reprint it and come back tomorrow.” If she’d had a shutter to slam shut, she would have.

  “We’ve been here two days in a row!”

  She muttered to herself, scribbled something in Russian on a Post-it note, slid it to us, and got up from her chair. The interview was over.

  “What does the note say?” I asked Maria.

  “It says, ‘Can skip line.’”

  “We’re supposed to show armed guards a Post-it note?”

  “Russia is the land of useless formalities,” complained Custine, who was himself detained in customs for twenty-four hours while trying to enter Saint Petersburg. “Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never show enough zeal . . . having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.”

  Yet societies that insist on procedure and red tape can be simultaneously riddled with informal, ad hoc loopholes. We arrived early on the third day, not a little dispirited. We knocked on the cage and showed the guard the note. He waved us in.

  I should properly introduce my other traveling companion on the Russian leg of our journey: a Frenchman, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, author of the 1839 book Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia. He served the same role for me in Russia that Rebecca West would in the Balkans: a perceptive, acid perspective from a different era against which to measure my own impressions. Born in 1790, Custine lost both his father and grandfather to the guillotine at an early age. He became an object of scandal when in 1824 he was found unconscious, stripped, and beaten, the result of a misplaced sexual advance toward another man. He became one of the most notorious homosexuals of his conservative day—“a problem for everyone,” as a contemporary put it—and he grew snide, bitter, and scandalous. He had literary ambitions, but his writing was ignored during his lifetime; Heine called him “a half-man of letters.” But his discomfort in his homeland, and seemingly in his own skin, made him an ideal traveler. “The real travelers,” said his countryman Baudelaire, “are those who leave for the sake of leaving.” Custine was a connoisseur of places, he said, that were “more singular than pretty or convenient; but singularity suffices to amuse a stranger: what we seek in traveling are proofs that we are not at home.” He first wrote a travel book about Spain, which garnered him a complimentary letter from Balzac, who suggested he write about another “semi-European country”—Italy, or perhaps Russia.

  Emboldened by Balzac’s suggestion and envious of Tocqueville’s example, he traveled to Russia in 1839—a short trip, mostly confined to Russia’s northwest, but as George F. Kennan, the American Russia hand and Cold Warrior, wrote, Custine “read countries, he claimed, as other people read books.” Custine arrived in Russia a born elitist and returned (despite his personal respect for then Tsar Nicholas I) a confirmed democrat, sickened by what he saw as the debasing effect of authoritarianism on the population. “When [Russian nobles] arrive in Europe,” his German hotelier tells him on his way to Saint Petersburg, “They have a gay, easy, contented air, like horses set free, or birds let loose from their cages. . . . The same persons when they return have long faces and gloomy looks; their words are few and abrupt; their countenances full of care. I conclude from this, that a country which they quitted with so much joy, and to which they return with so much regret, is a bad country.” The Russian customs agents themselves questioned his motives:

  “What is your object in Russia?’”

  “To see the country.”

  “That is not here a motive for traveling!”

  His ensuing judgment of the country was severe, perhaps unfair, certainly condescending, and somehow persistent: perhaps because his pessimism echoes the “curiosity, sarcasm, and carping criticism” he—and I, and many other observers—found among Russians themselves. It is in his role as critic, and as the personification of the opinion of a Europe toward which Russia has historically looked with a mixture of envy, self-deprecation, and defensiveness, that he served his most recent turn in the public eye. In Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark, filmed in one ninety-six-minute shot, Custine and an unnamed narrator stroll through the Hermitage and thus through scenes from Russian history, from Peter the Great to World War II, still trying to identify t
he soul, or the narrative, or the fate, of the nation.

  II.

  Party for Everybody (Rostov-on-Don to Saint Petersburg)

  This was my first vision of Russia: miles of rolling hills, not a house or tree to be seen, the Don steppe, and vast farms. “All this region,” said Herodotus two and a half millennia earlier, “is entirely bare of trees, wild or cultivated . . . the land consisting of a rich and well-watered plain, with excellent pasture, and the rivers being almost as numerous as the canals are in Egypt.” The treelessness, he points out, has an additional complication: “Because there is no wood in Scythia to make a fire with, the method the natives adopt after skinning the animal [for sacrifice] is to strip the flesh from the bones and put it into a cauldron . . . and then make a fire of the bones underneath it. In the absence of a cauldron, they put all the flesh in the animal’s paunch . . . and boil it like that. . . . In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.”