The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  I recently befriended a five-year-old kid with the unlikely name of Jasper Christmas. Well, I say befriended—this was two years ago, which is a long time in the life of a five-year-old. He may not even remember me by now. Jasper had discovered that if you use the construction “Do the [blank]” that that’s a dance craze, and he set himself to the task of coming up with dance crazes. He had one called the Snail, in which you get down on your knees and pull yourself forward with your hands. He had one called the Pillow, in which you curl up in the fetal position on the floor and you don’t move at all. Very popular dance. Anyone can do it, and most people do. And he has one called the Struggle, in which you take a chair, and you put it up against the wall, and you take the top of your head and you put it against the back of the chair, and you run your feet as fast as you can and try to push the chair through the wall. I heard that and I said, “Jasper, you’re a fucking genius,” and then I thought, “Shit, I shouldn’t say ‘fuck’ in front of a five-year-old,” and then I thought, “Fuck it, he’s going to have to learn from somebody.” Jasper, you’re a fucking genius. That reminds me of all my friends who are activists, and touring musicians, and spend their lives trying to push chairs through walls. This one’s for them, it’s called “Do the Struggle,” and it goes like this . . .

  I try to play about an hour. Twelve songs, give or take. More if the crowd is with me, less if they’re not. End with a rousing crowd-pleaser, usually “Jeff Penalty,” a semi-novelty song about the replacement singer of the Dead Kennedys, with a “whoaoh” sing-along chorus. I drop to my knees with mock guitar heroics in the bridge. Then I use my instincts: end it there, on the high-energy note, or unplug the banjo and sing a sentimental ballad in the middle of the floor. That can be a magical moment. I’ve got a couple sad banjo ballads—“This Is Not a Pipe” or “Cease-Fire”—but the longtime winner is the Jimmy Durante song “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo.” If there are tables or a bench, I’ll get up on them. End on a showbiz major sixth, doff the cap, and skedaddle.

  Exit to the backstage, or the bathroom, for a polite minute or two, then reappear behind the merch table and sell some CDs, LPs, and T-shirts, pose for a few pictures, sign some things (keep a Sharpie in the suit pocket), and try to pack up the stage before the club staff are all packed up themselves. I change back into my street clothes and hang the suit on hangers so I don’t have to put it away sweaty and wet. Mostly I don’t have that luxury, though, and at the end of this six-month tour the suit will be unsalvageable, crusty with white salt, the hat bent and ripped, the knees of the pants patched and patched again. I promise Maria we’ll have a ritual fire and feed the suit to the flames.5

  We made a video of the immolation for the song “The Hearts of Boston.”

  Then it’s off either to the stranger’s house where we’re sleeping—the last great suspense of the day: will it be a bed, an air mattress, a couch, or a floor, and how many cats?—or to the train station, to pile as quietly as possible into the coupe with all our bags without waking our new roommates.

  There is a ritualistic quality to boarding a sleeper train, and a liturgy of grunted courtesies. You slide open the walk-in cooler door and nod to the strangers who got there first, and perhaps claimed the lower bunks. Personally, I prefer the foldaway upper shelves, both for privacy and for the dismount: at least then you’re the one stepping on someone else’s bed, not the stepped-on. You stash your luggage in the metal storage box under the lower bunks and the deceptively spacious cubby over the door. You unwrap the cellophaned and starchy sheets and the scratchy wool blanket and make, of the plastic-padded bunk, your bed. The attendant checks your ticket and offers tea or instant coffee. You prepare your supplies for the night: water bottle tucked against the wall, book and headphones and earplugs handy in the net pocket on the wall. The passengers separate into two tribes: the men in track pants and shower shoes, traveling alone, who stand in the corridor staring at passing fields, and the women and families who share the small tables that jut from below the curtained compartment windows.

  One of the great treats of train touring is those times when the ride to the next show is long enough to spend a night, the whole next day, and another night on the train before disembarking. You snack, snooze, scribble, read, have a beer, nap again, wander to the dining car, get some fresh air at a provincial station, and try not to get left behind. It was a twenty-four-hour journey from Voronezh to Saint Petersburg. Through the window coquettish beech leaves flashed their silver undersides in the breeze. It was the kind of manicured forest you see from eastern Germany through Poland: tall thin pine or birch on a lawn of low grass and shrub or middling oak, the sign of a land that has been logged and resown again and again. Every few kilometers, a small village huddled its hovels shank by haunch: amid an endless expanse of land, they shared waved-tin fences between their small gardens, brick walls, and moldering plaster. Then a few miles of marsh, the trucks on the Don highway visible just to the east. Then a sort of plain, where the shacks by the tracks showed their peaks over squat fruit trees.

  We asked the provodnitsa (the iconic uniformed carriage attendant who brings linens and dispenses tea) if anyone else will be in our coupe. “For a thousand rubles,” she said, “I can make sure there isn’t.”

  We passed a train labeled НОВОТРАНС, which is pronounced “Novotrans” but which I couldn’t help but read as “Hobo Trains.” Finally, they’ve got their own! Separate but equal.

  Before one truly awakens in a moving vehicle, one is subject to synaesthetic misfire; you peer out the window, bleary, and echolocate. This forest tastes like California, this thigh cramp smells of camping. I always have a cycle of night sweats when sleeping on a train bunk. No matter the temperature, I go to sleep uncovered, awake upon a soggy pillow, turn it over, pull up the comforter against the chill; then, in the morning, I dress, clammy and hunched. I awoke four hours from Saint Petersburg in a new landscape: thick birch and conifers of military bearing punctuating patches of swamp. Here were no villages at all. When they appeared, they were a new breed, wood houses instead of brick, weathered to a dark brown or painted a shocking aquamarine, or yellow with maroon trim, or bright royal blue. They were startling and unnatural hues, and probably that was the point. Instead of communities set in relief on the edge of acres of flat farmland, we were now passing woodland riverbank logging towns. Railcars stacked with ruler-straight pine logs waited for deployment. There were more than the usual number of burnt-out houses, skeletons with double-chimney spines. Some houses shared their airspace with birdhouses set at an extraordinary height, twice that of the house itself. I caught glimpses of a sprawling graveyard engulfed in the forest, each plot popping with bright ribbons and flowers around the silver, pressed-aluminum crosses.

  The pace of the stations accelerated, coming every minute or two now. Old men and women carried sacks alongside the tracks. More trains rumbled past station houses and cargo holds. The petite green cabooses with red stars on the front trundled back and forth, dragging a car here and another back there. A city is a matter of pace as much as population, and we accelerated into Saint Petersburg.

  Saint Petersburg’s Moskovsky station set the imperial stage with triumphant orchestral music made somehow more martial by the tinny public-address system. A wild-eyed bust of Peter the Great faced a stylized map of the entire Soviet train system, from Berlin and Moscow in the west to Almaty in the east. We were finally meeting up with Dima, the architect of our itinerary and linchpin of this Russian DIY touring family. He was slim and Scandinavian-looking, with quick-crinkle eyes. The city did not quite possess the European affect of its reputation and intention (Tsar Nicholas I told Custine, “Petersburg is Russian, but it is not Russia”); the upwardly mobile vulgarity of the new Russia resisted the staid gravity of the imperial architecture. The canals might recall Venice, until a pair of dudes on jet skis came tearing up past the garish Swarovski domes of the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood (which marks the spot of the assassination of Tsa
r Alexander II). The bars offered sushi and mojitos (or virgin mojitos—that is, Sprite cocktails). The opportunistic nightclub Barakobamabar used the current U.S. president’s signature for a logo. In the stained, damp, overrun skeleton of Venice itself, what once was a living city had become a kind of corpse that sustained only parasite colonies of tourists and merchants. Meanwhile Petersburg, built by slave labor, now stood as an outpost of muted, aspirational Western liberalism in a revanchist state.

  There was another outpost of Westernness here: the global youth culture of punk rock. Dima had arranged for us to stay with two elfin blondes, Anna and Sveta, who wore black jeans and Converse sneakers, translated lyrics by the politically outspoken Florida band RVIVR, and talked longingly about traveling to Gainesville for the annual international punk gathering The Fest.

  Sveta barely ate—her breakfast was one slice of homemade seitan—though, perhaps unsurprisingly, she loved to watch us eat. They shared a bed so we could use the other, but it was the White Nights, when the sun hardly sets and the sky never darkens (“summer nights,” says Custine, “consist of no more than two twilights”), so they were out almost all night anyway. Maria and I were not quite ten years older than they, but when it came to staying up late, these months of sleep-short touring made the difference feel like decades. We met them at the local—and upscale—punk bar, where the DJ was spinning vinyl of my song “Jeff Penalty” as we entered, followed by the Bouncing Souls and the Gaslight Anthem. They sold croissants at the bar. Drinks were surprisingly expensive—except for vodka, which was as cheap as juice—and the prices and the cigarette smoke quickly chased us from the premises. We tried to buy wine at the supermarket, but the staff had pulled down beer ads like window-shades over the liquor shelves. Stores stop selling alcohol, by law, at eleven p.m.

  “Try the magazin (deli) across the street,” advised the clerk. “He will sell.”

  The magazin across the street had the beer ads pulled down as well, but as we debated our options two loud Russian girls in high heels and tight jeans negotiated over a bottle of cognac with the man behind the counter. We took this as a cue that the beer ads were just for show, and sure enough, the cashier ducked behind them and sold us a bottle of wine.

  We had a week in the city before our show and two practical tasks to accomplish in addition to sightseeing. We were sold out of my album Luck and Courage. I’d tried to arrange to have a case shipped to Saint Petersburg from the label in London, but the distributor’s message was unequivocal: there was no point. The shipping was astronomical and the customs agents unreliable. The box might arrive in time, or weeks late, or never. We would have to bootleg my own record. We spent all day trying to find a copy center, blank CDs, plastic sleeves, and glue sticks, and then spent all night at handicraft (which included cutting up a half-dozen unsalable American XXL T-shirts and refashioning them as more Russian-appropriate smalls).

  Secondly, I had to record a song—a Noël Coward cover, for a split seven-inch with the British singer-songwriter Frank Turner—and it had to be done while we were on the road in order to make the October release date. Dima had engaged for us, at a shockingly low rate, two hours at Petersburg Recording Studio. Dima’s friend Yegor, a well-traveled, dour, and cynical photographer, was our chaperone for the day. On the bus to the studio, I asked him about some of the more obscure post-Soviet regions he’d visited.

  “You’d never know [in Belarus] by being there what’s going on”—he meant politically. “It’s not like a Soviet state. There’s no border, it’s like Europe, you just drive in. But the police will stop you for no reason and you had better have your papers. In Transnistria it is more like a Soviet time capsule. You can’t use a Ukrainian phone or a Moldavian phone because [the governments] are fighting, you have to go there and buy a whole new phone. So I couldn’t call [ahead] and make a hotel reservation. So I walked to this place and there was a drunk passed out in a pool of—well, some kind of liquid—in front of the reception desk.

  “I think Ukrainians are more relaxed than Russians,” he continued. “In L’viv, I saw a group of drunk guys who the police were trying to arrest. They were saying to the police, ‘No, we don’t want to go,’ and eventually the police just let them go. This would never happen in Russia! They would hit them with rifle butts and drag them off to jail.”

  “A work . . . entitled The Russians Judged by Themselves,” wrote Custine, “would be severe.” It had been just a few months prior that large antigovernment protests in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s reelection had foundered, and demonstrations were planned for the next day, Russia Day. Dima and his friends were buzzing with rumors that nationalist gangs would cause trouble. I asked Yegor if he planned on attending.

  “I am not so interested. I talked to some of the guys who would know, and they said this one will be a mixture of people, including very right-wing groups. A lot of people just come to get their aggression out. All of these protests, they are only middle-class people from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. It will be impossible to really make any change without the people in the rural areas, the religious and conservative people.” He dismissed the blogger Alexei Navalny, who had been portrayed in the Western press as a driving force behind the election protests, as operating more in the service of his own ambition than of true political change.

  Young Russians were markedly more cynical about the possibility of political change than their counterparts even in culturally similar countries. “In Ukraine,” wrote William Dobson in his book The Dictator’s Learning Curve, “people younger than thirty were three times more likely to join the Orange Revolution [in 2004] than any other age-group. Meanwhile, in Russia, a large majority of young people accepted Putin’s explanation of the revolution as a Western conspiracy directed at weakening the motherland. The same 2007 poll indicated that 87 percent of young people did not want an Orange Revolution in Russia.” They had reason to be suspicious, even of supposed “opposition” leaders: many headed movements, called “systemic opposition,” that had been quietly created and funded by the government (which also controlled over 90 percent of the media) to be an outlet for frustration “while never pushing their criticism beyond the boundaries set by the Kremlin.” Anyone—the educated class, children of either the perestroika era or the post-Yeltsin era—who showed an inclination toward forming a liberal intellectual elite was encouraged to emigrate as a matter of unofficial government policy. The result, said the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, was a Russia “whose most discouraging side . . . was its amorphousness and its passivity.”

  The studio had a majestic, yellow-lit live room, housed in an eighteenth-century Lutheran church with a pipe organ, a full-size Steinway grand piano, and a harpsichord. Opened in 1959, it had been the studio for the Soviet state record label Melodiya for twenty-five years, and a severe reserve still chilled the atmosphere. A thick-bearded piano tuner finished his work. An unsmiling woman with a tight ponytail introduced herself as Kira, our engineer, and led us up to the control room two floors above. Vintage Soviet guitar amps and framed, faded photographs of house engineers of the 1970s and 1980s ringed what looked like a rec room. A five-foot bass balalaika stood propped beneath a picture of Beethoven. Efficiency was the rule of the day, and we were finished and out the door in three takes and two hours, with a faint smile from Kira at the end as our reward.

  Maria had noticed posters for a concert that week by the Buranovskiye Babushki, and much to the consternation and disdain of Dima and his crowd, we bought tickets. The Babushki—their name translates to “Grannies from Buranovo”—were a novelty act of septua- and octogenarians from a small town in the Ural Mountains who had unexpectedly risen to be the Russian representatives in the kitsch-pop Eurovision Song Contest. (They eventually finished second to the Swedes.) The Svengali of the group was a decades-younger woman who had taken these shrunken-apple gnomes and set their village-style a capella harmonies to Eurodance beats, filling out the records with covers of “Let It Be” and “Smo
ke on the Water.” Their hit was a pile of English-language nonsense called “Party for Everybody” (“Party for everybody/Come on and dance/Come on and boom-boom-boom-boom”).

  Of course, you want to see what kind of crowd turns up for that show: mainly middle-aged mothers with their daughters (and the rare husband), plus a strong showing of barely prepubescent boys likely to discover they were gay in fairly short order. One wore a T-shirt reading “I ♥ My Sister,” another a full velour tracksuit in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. A droopy man in a blue polo shirt sat behind a laptop at the back of the stage, cheek in the palm of his hand, the most despondent or bored DJ imaginable. A terrifying woman in a tight leopard-print dress was the leather-lunged host, handing off to a local radio presenter. He came out into the crowd—there was plenty of room to move—and made straight for Maria and me, asking where we were from.

  “Look! These people have come all the way from New York just to see the Babushki!” he exaggerated.

  The opening act took the stage: two young men flanking three young female dancers in dresses very loosely based on folk costumes. The men wore knockoff Converse sneakers and baggy, light blue velour tracksuits with some folk-ish embroidery on the shoulders. Their matched, loose-limbed choreography and TV preacher grins indicated that they were pretty clearly lip-synching to the folk/dance track—the club kind of folk dance, not the clogging kind. The unplugged balalaika held by one, and the glittering, very probably hollow, bayan—a button accordion—carried by the other, confirmed it.