My most intimate and soulful friends,
As my dad reminded me, one of my favorite descriptors of Russia is “maximalist,” a word I lifted from the depths of a misspent youth reading Berdiaev or Ogarev or some early Soviet utopian city planner. I think it basically describes a life spent in the extremes. It also best summarizes the Moscow experience of Jared, my oldest childhood friend, who just spent a long weekend with me in the City of Concrete and Colors. Jared and I have snowmobiled Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, made forts in the woods devoted to the procurement and safekeeping of candy, but have never traveled together. We made up for lost time.
I met Jared on the rail platform at Paveletskii station. It’s always a hoot to meet up with a friend in Moscow. (“What?! You’re here?!”) You just hope they passed through the sulking passport control ladies, the aggressive and swarthy “friend, you need taxi?” drivers without too much trouble and without feeling personally violated. But you cannot protect them from all of Russia, some of it they must bear themselves, abruptly, as a baptism.
The first night I took Jared to the Arbat where he was able to compare Moscow’s pedestrian thoroughfare with those of every other European city: pretty much the same, colder, more matryoshki and tattoo parlors.
We sampled plov, shashlyk, fresh-baked lepyoshka, and some vegetable salads. And thus a pattern was set: meat-heavy meals in which Jared proceeded to remove all the tomatoes and cilantro that dared infiltrate his carnivorous feast, followed by a “that’s good,” and a “you’re sure I can’t pay with a credit card?”
We walked home and, because the night wasn’t so cold, decided to walk around central Moscow, paying homage to Tverskaia, Red Square, the Metropole Hotel, and the Bolshoi Theater. As the drizzle turned to sleet and the city took on a resplendent emptiness Jared’s look said “What?! You’re going to be here for how long?!”
Friday began at 11am, meaning we had slept through almost half the daylight. A quick trip to the local McDonalds for a brunch of double cheeseburgers and fries, a walk around some of the high-end shopping streets, and a fruitless search to learn whether Jared needed to register with the local authorities, and finally we were at the Kremlin gates. At the ticket window we were treated to one of my favorite linguistic experiences: Charles is at the front of a line of 6 Russians, speaking his broken yet expressive Russian to the cashier who is trying to explain why she won’t let us buy tickets to all three Kremlin attractions given our late arrival and the seeming impossibility of racing through Russia’s sacred and historical sites; Charles is annoyed and confused, spouting philosophically about how it should be our right to rush through the exhibits; the standoff ends with Charles losing out to the wisdom of the old woman; the line is perturbed, sensing Charles’ frustration, but sensing incomprehension; they decide, almost in unison, to help by offering simple, deep, tremulous “No entrence. Is closed. Come back.” Yep, thanks comrades, that’s what I wasn’t getting. Thank you for the translations.
The Kremlin armorys’ collection of carriages, tsars’ clothing, royal gifts, arms, crowns, and various bejeweled artifacts is stunning. The 16th century urns made of gold, carved by the King of England’s craftsmen in the shape of snow leopards takes my vote for most cool and or unique item. We both liked the emeralds the size of golf balls.
I think we also liked the various Kremlin cathedrals, but we were running to fit it all in. And who doesn’t love the world’s largest bell that can’t be rung, the biggest cannon which cannot be fired, down the street from the largest building never built? Jared enjoyed the “campusy” feeling of the place, and I have to agree, there’s something mildly collegiate about it, but minus the classes of freshmen poetry sitting on the lawn.
Dinner was Georgian, at a “trendy” new place called Khachapuri, in honor of the cheese and bread dish of the same name. It’s got that sort of Moscow interior that is cozy, angular, indirectly lit and cool, the sort of place you can bring a friend to and say, with your chest bursting with pride, “this is Moscow.” More meat and bread, and we even got Jared to admit to enjoying the eggplant. Over dinner I tried to summarize Erik Scott’s awesome dissertation on the unusually large role of the Georgian diaspora in Soviet Moscow.
We raced out of there to go to the theater. Masha #2 was in a Pushkin play (what else?) called Rusalka. The question was put to us earlier in the day: was it worth Jared’s time to sit through a play he would certainly not understand. In the spirit of roommate relations and Jared’s bold desire to “feel himself Russian,” we took up the offer, not to mention Masha’s description: “there are lots of girls, and singing, and it is short.” Because Masha put us front row center, we immediately felt like part of the performance.
Indeed, the play was short, featured many scantily clad girls who formed a sort of Greek chorus of Rusalki, or mermaids, but who sang in that haunting Slavic female peasant singing style. Mermaids, sirens, same difference. It’s amazing how much you can follow along a play relying on visual cues and music, and I think Jared like the thing, not merely because of the candy of the senses. Masha’s character was the naïve princess who doesn’t realize her fiance’s heart is with another woman until the bitter end, when she breaks down into sobbing convulsions. Her role involved maintaining the same, unbroken, strained smile for 25 minutes, then switching to bitter sorrow.
How come no one told me what “rusalka” was before? And how come no one has commented on the fact that, when the words is broken into parts, it’s further proof that Russian women are, in fact, mermaids?! This would become the theme of the night.
From the theater we went to meet up with some local ladies, one Jared had met in New York a few weeks previously, the other a friend of a friend. Kristina had told Jared to meet her at …..it was muffled, but he heard something about “dance party”, “parents’ place,” and “dance studio.” Confused, but expecting a sea of mermaids, we dutifully followed her directions to meet up, but the closer we got, the quicker our rusalki illusions fell away, leaving one tough kernel of truth: we’d been invited to see crappy Russian teeny bopper hip hop dancing at a tasteless “lifestyle dance studio.” It was a scene taken out of Russian MTV, with hordes of brainwashed teenagers clapping in unison for the dj’s who, who shouted into microphones, and performed low grade breakdance moves. I half expected Vova Putin to come out from nowhere in a ribbed mock turtle neck and commend them on the “charm” and talent of the politically glazed, blind rap-o-philic Russian youth. Jared and I swigged drinks and nursed our own thoughts. I can’t vouch for his but mine included things like: “God, I’m old”; “This is precisely the shitty American culture that I come to Russia to avoid”; and “I can sense that this crowd isn’t that in to Soviet history.”
I strongarmed the group into going to Gogol’, a cool bar decorated (in my view) like a gypsy tent turned cabaret, which shows live music. And, just as had happened last summer upon arrival in Moscow, my favorite Russian band, Markscheider Kunst, was playing! But due to the MTV Russia casting call, we completely missed them. Total bummer. We did get to see a strange drinking ritual though, in which a patron orders a shot and puts on an army helmet and gets pounded repeatedly on the head by the bar tender with a baseball bat. Quite charming, especially cuz the bat had an SS sticker on it.
Kristina suggested we go next to a club called Rolling Stones Bar. At this point in the night she had pretty limited credibility, and she was suggesting going to what we suspected was an atrocious expat hangout, or some classless New Russian glitzfest. It’s called flippin’ Rolling Stones Bar!
Well, Kristina was certainly redeemed. After a few minutes of staring out on the second-story dance floor, with its windows overlooking the Moscow skyline, and its teeming masses of actual Russian mermaids sprinkled with harmless little islands of trolls, Jared was beginning to display several phases of the 12 step reaction of many foreign men who come to Russia for the first time. These include shock, awe, incredulity, inspiration, and quiet contemplation. We met a nice, funny British dude (have you ever met a Brit abroad who wasn’t nice and funny?) and the two of us tried to calm him down and explain things to him about the gender imbalance that results from demographic pressures, the cultural practice of leaving the house looking your best at all times, and the lipstick and heels version of Russian feminism. We also tried more traditional yet unscientific explanations about bone structure, perfect gene pool components, location along east-west trade routes. In the end it was no use. Jared would have to battle these demons that way we all have done, by himself. In the end he had to grapple with what he had seen, and ultimately he would have to explain it to himself.
Because Russian night clubs are essentially casinos, with no clocks, no closing hours, no shortage of drinks, and no let up in the crowd, we stayed out later than 30 year olds should and paid the price the next day. All in all, a good day for mermaid watching.
The mermen came next.
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