It was an awful struggle to leave Lindsay's peaceful, wi-fi equipped flat and drag myself through the downpour to Kievsky Station, there to catch the Sunday night electric train for the 2 hour journey back to Dubravushka.
Back at camp, I started planning seriously for English Day – which meant making some copies of the lyrics to 'We Will Rock You' and taking my laptop with the music to class, and then encouraging my students to pound on their desks until the Russian teachers stuck their heads in to see what was up.
On Monday afternoon, in between classes, I was treated to the gut-punch irony of curling up for a 15 minute nap - just the briefest, blessedest respite from hours upon hours of yelling children – only to have 25 of them suddenly descend upon the piano outside my door, banging amusically and howling. Then two of them pulled open my door (which I stupidly hadn't locked) and discovered me lying on my couch under the chalkboard.
"Look, it's Leely!"
"SHUT THE DOOR!" I screamed in Russian, and they withdrew.
But the other 23 had heard me, and they all started shrieking.
"LEELY LEELY LEELY!"
Oh God. I got up and locked the door and went back and pulled the pillow over my head.
I heard a teacher come back to round them up, and felt a stir of hope – maybe they were going away now? Maybe they were going to do arts and crafts or some other really soothing thing?
But no. On the count of 'Raz, dva, tre!' the teacher started playing, and the children launched into some kind of shrill Pioneer chorus, accompanied by a 7-year old soloist keyed to dog-whistle range.
The song went on and on. When they were finished, there was a pause and then –
'Again!' the teacher cried.
I had that song in my head for the next three days.
Later, some students, prompted by their instructor, actually asked my permission before playing in the afternoon, but since they barged into my room without knocking in order to ask, I wasn't impressed.
Finally, it was Wednesday. The usual frantic morning was enlivened by the arrival of a 3rd teacher, Andrew from Moscow. We were surprised; they had warned us to expect a Polish girl from Warsaw. So was Andrew; they hadn't bothered to tell him he was coming until the day before.
At 3.30 Olga summoned me and Ariel into her office and gave us handfuls of Chupa-Chup lollipops, to be used as prizes for the English Day games. We took them and went back out to wait on a bench, but nobody came. The counselors were nowhere to be seen, no kids wandered the grounds – nothing anywhere, except the presence of me and Ariel on our park bench, suggested that an English Carnival was imminent.
Then, like a sweaty shambling teddy bear of doom, Alexander Borisovich appeared.
"Ah yes! At last! Here you are! Lily, I have your tongue -twisters, and Ari – the translations!"
He shoved fistfuls of paper at each of us.
My station was to sit and listen to students attempt to read English tongue-twisters. If I judged their pronunciation satisfactory, they got a Chupa-Chup.
"But remember!" cried AB, tapping his nose and twinkling his eye, "This game should be about fun, yes, the joy of the day, not sweets and things!"
I think he was alluding to the fact that Olga had been stingy and not given us nearly enough lollipops, so I just shrugged and went off to find my station on the porch of Bungalow Six.
At first all remained silent and peaceful. Off in the distance hordes of children had begun galloping about, but I didn't really connect them with myself until suddenly 20 teenagers stampeded onto the porch and leaned over the chair I was sitting in.
"Mozhno ya? May I?"
"No, may I first?"
"May I?"
"May I?"
I waved my arms to clear them off a little and picked a kid at random.
"You – try a tongue twister!"
I didn't recognize him from any of our classes, and the reason became evident: he didn't speak or read English.
"That was a great try," I said, and handed another twister to a second kid, who did a little better, and then to a third, the best of all. At this point, I made a strategic mistake: I reached into my teacher's satchel and took out a pineapple-mango Chupa-Chup.
"Congratulations!" I told the third student. "This is for you."
The girl's eyes lit up. She seized the lollipop, and at once the whole crowd surged in around my chair again.
"Ooooh, Chupa-Chups!"
"I want!"
"Me me me!"
They blotted out the sun; their elbows were in my eye sockets. I fought free and climbed up on a table.
"One at a time!"
When they had all had a go – two tries each – most of them wandered off, still lollipopless, except a few diehard 15 year old boys who clasped their hands and whined,
"Pleeeez….Chuuuuupa-Chups!"
"No!" I said. "Go away! No Chupa-Chups!"
Then another wave of children, and another, and another. When my 25 tiniest crowded onto the porch, I held my breath, lest even the rustle of a wrapper betray the sacred presence and spark a riot – because I didn't have 25 Chupa-Chups to hand out
Then they were gone and that, thank God, was that.
I went off to dinner – plain cold spaghetti and chopped cucumbers – and at 8 we reconvened in the hall for the skits program. Ari was already there, looking harassed as he ran his middle-schoolers through another reading of Shakespeare. I was watching Sevyeron, the skinny jugheared savant that they had translating everything into Russian, when AB swooped in and steered me into a seat at a table near the stage, which had been draped with a red-and-white English flag.
"I know, I know, you are American, you and Andrew!" he said. 'But today – ha ha! – we are all English in our hearts!"
I sat down without comment. Ariel and Andrew joined me, and shortly thereafter all the students filed in. The tiny ones spotted me and waved with hysterical enthusiasm, as if it had been 2 years instead of 2 hours since we had last met. When everyone was quiet, Olga bounded onto the stage, looking more fanatical than ever. She was still wearing the sweater vest.
"Good evening students, citizens of our beloved Dubravushka!" she screamed, to tumultuous applause. "Are You. Ready. For ENGLISH!"
Apparently they were. She retreated and the first performers, a group of girls in pink and yellow shifts, came up to do some kind of folk dance to the shrill tootling of a recorder.
At the end of this dance, they danced over to our table with a huge lump of black bread and bowl of salt.
"It is traditional,' explained Sevyeron the savant, "to welcome Russian guests with bread and salt…"
With the eyes of the whole school pinned on us, we each ripped off a chunk of bread with our bare hands and dunked it in the salt, then tried not to choke on the resultant saline frosting.
After this little ceremony, the primary schoolers came forward with a crown of oak leaves.
"This is for you, Leely!" said Sasha, their spokeswoman. "Because you are our queen!"
I bent and let them put the leafy crown on my head, then all the kids applauded and 10 or 12 of them rushed forward to hug me before their hatchet-faced Russian counselors hustled them back into their seats.
The show continued. A group of boys pantomimed a traditional Russian market day, complete with a flute playing, fights, juggling, and an openly rigged shell game. Sevyeron sang a little folk ditty that had been translated and considerably bowdlerized for the occasion. At the end of this skit we teachers were presented with a plate of blini and a bowl of sour cream. I nibbled at a blin, but soon had to desist, feeling the longing eyes of children at my back. They'd only had cold spaghetti too…
Finally it was time for what Olga had billed as our 'English Surprise."
We went onstage and summoned all our students to join us. The first strains of Queen, 'We Will Rock You,' began to thud in the background. My students, God help them, were all watching to take their dance cues from me, so I clapped and stamped my feet, and dragged them into it, until we were all clapping and stamping together – except my oak crown kept slipping my eyes. No matter.
At the end I herded them offstage with many cheers of congratulation and attempted high-fives. I say attempted because hardly any of them recognized the gesture: they got confused and we ended up gravely shaking hands instead.
Then it was time for Ariel's Shakespeare production, all but incomprehensible because half had forgotten their lines and the rest couldn't pronounce the words.
"Oh Yuliet, Yuliet…"
"Forget the fazzer and forsek thu nem…"
But Sevyeron's translation at least got big laughs, as did the bawdy little joke of holding up a discreet sheet for the newlywed Romeo and Juliet to duck behind, following the wedding scene. Olga was the only one who wasn't amused. The next day she would scold Ariel for allowing off-color elements into the production (off color? Shakespeare? Never!)…but that was all later. For the moment, all was triumphant. The curtain fell to rousing applause, and English Day was over. For another two weeks at least.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Camp Part II: Olga the Culture Nazi
"There's this woman," said Ariel on Thursday night of the first week. "I've never seen her before, but apparently she wants us to put on an English Day carnival all of next Wednesday, with you know, booths and skits and things. We have a meeting with her tomorrow night at 6."
"Six?" I said. "I can't. I just can't, I'm catching the train to Moscow!"
Ariel blinked. "Well, I suppose I could always go alone and then text you about it later," he said, in that mild way of certain British men, where you can never tell if they're being nice or just incredibly passive-aggressive.
But I ended up attending the meeting anyway, just to see what kind of hoops they were going to make us jump through this time. We showed up at the administration building and were ushered into a back office. There was Alexander Borisovich, an unidentified older woman off in the corner, and Olga. Olga was a youngish woman with a short, bad haircut, and a stripey sweater vest. She beamed when she saw us.
"Please, please, sit down!" she said in Russian, gesturing at the lumpy old couch, so Ariel and I sank awkwardly into the couch while she and Alexander Borisovich loomed over us. The latter apparently hadn't showered all week – he was still in the shirt he'd been wearing on Sunday, and the greasy sweat rolled out of his hair. Discreetly, I leaned out of range.
Olga took out of sheaf and papers and clutched them to her chest. "Privyet Ari, privyet - ?"
"Leely," said the other woman, stirring herself. That was her one contribution: she wouldn't say another word for the rest of the meeting.
"So," Olga said, still in Russian – she didn't speak any English – "So, Ari and Lily, we will have English Day, a celebration of English language and culture! You of course will lead this celebration, there will be booths and station games and in the evening each children's house must perform something, perhaps a song, a skit -?"
She looked at Ariel, who took out the list of haphazard ideas we had come up with on the way to the meeting.
"Yes, of course," he said – conveniently, he spoke fluent Russian. "We thought the youngest ones could do a nursery rhyme – Humpty Dumpty? Do you know Humpty Dumpty?"
Olga looked dubious.
Alexander Borisovich nodded enthusiastically. "Very good, very famous children's poem," he reassured her.
"Well, then, lovely," Olga said. "Lily can do this with her 3rd House, the smallest ones. And the 6th House, and the 7th?" They were the 8 to 10 year olds.
"Maybe a song?" Ariel said. "We thought, something popular, something that they can dance to."
"How about Lady Gaga?" I said. "They love Lady Gaga."
"Yeah, or Beyonce," said Ariel.
Olga frowned. "No, no, this is no good. We need something…more classical, yes?"
"OK," said Ariel. "What about Queen?"
"Much better," she said, scribbling it down on a piece of paper. "And finally, the oldest students. What to do with them?"
"Perhaps theater?" Ariel said. "An act from a play, adapted? I have some modernized Shakespeare that my girlfriend sent me…"
She clasped her hands in delight. "Shakespeare! How wonderful! How perfect! Or…what about Pushkin? Should we train the children to memorize a translation of Pushkin? Or perhaps Chekhov? Can you make a translation of Chekhov for our English Day? You can write it this weekend…"
"I think," Ariel said, diplomatically "we should stick to English authors."
"Right, right, you're very right," she said. "Yes! It will truly be an English Day!"
"OK," Alexander Borisovich interceded. "That's the skits taken care of. Now about the carnival booths…"
"Oh no," Olga said. "We're not finished yet! The children will of course need costumes. We'll need Romeo, Juliet, capes, swords….You can do this, yes, Lily and Ariel?"
I looked at Ariel and Ariel looked at me.
"Costumes?" said Alexander Borisovich. "Costumes, psshh, in my opinion they will not be necessary."
"We'll see what we can do," Ariel said. "Now the booths…"
"I thought, a game," said AB in English. "I don't know how to call it. There are four, heehee, excuse my word, pricks, and you must throw a circle thing, and it touches the pricks, and when you miss you must pay forfeit by speaking something in English, perhaps rhyme or tongue-twister."
"A ring toss," I supplied.
"Yes," said AB. "That. And many games, perhaps geography trivia, questions about England and America, culture, things of that sort."
"In English, of course," said Olga in Russian. "So much better that way!"
"Surely not!" said AB. "English culture – then everyone can play, not just those who speak the best English."
"All right, all right," Olga said. "If you must. Now about rehearsals…"
"No, wait," said AB. "I am trying to remember…Two years we had a game, a very good game. I was a pirate, and I had two women in bondage. With every question the children answered we unwrapped them a little more, first the arms, then…"
"Yes, yes," Olga said, "We'll decide more about games later. But the rehearsals…"
After much haggling, we established that rehearsals would be held for class the following week, and then followed a period of arguing about mundane details, which I tuned out, using my poor Russian as an excuse. At last we were dismissed.
"All this," said Ariel. "By Wednesday? I mean – honestly! Well, at least we have the weekend to prepare."
"Terrible," I said. "That woman is out of her time. She should have organized Pioneer parades for Stalin…But now, if you'll excuse me…"
Pausing only to grab my bag, I caught the 8 PM train and fled to my friends in Moscow, and I didn't think about English Day again until Monday morning.
"Six?" I said. "I can't. I just can't, I'm catching the train to Moscow!"
Ariel blinked. "Well, I suppose I could always go alone and then text you about it later," he said, in that mild way of certain British men, where you can never tell if they're being nice or just incredibly passive-aggressive.
But I ended up attending the meeting anyway, just to see what kind of hoops they were going to make us jump through this time. We showed up at the administration building and were ushered into a back office. There was Alexander Borisovich, an unidentified older woman off in the corner, and Olga. Olga was a youngish woman with a short, bad haircut, and a stripey sweater vest. She beamed when she saw us.
"Please, please, sit down!" she said in Russian, gesturing at the lumpy old couch, so Ariel and I sank awkwardly into the couch while she and Alexander Borisovich loomed over us. The latter apparently hadn't showered all week – he was still in the shirt he'd been wearing on Sunday, and the greasy sweat rolled out of his hair. Discreetly, I leaned out of range.
Olga took out of sheaf and papers and clutched them to her chest. "Privyet Ari, privyet - ?"
"Leely," said the other woman, stirring herself. That was her one contribution: she wouldn't say another word for the rest of the meeting.
"So," Olga said, still in Russian – she didn't speak any English – "So, Ari and Lily, we will have English Day, a celebration of English language and culture! You of course will lead this celebration, there will be booths and station games and in the evening each children's house must perform something, perhaps a song, a skit -?"
She looked at Ariel, who took out the list of haphazard ideas we had come up with on the way to the meeting.
"Yes, of course," he said – conveniently, he spoke fluent Russian. "We thought the youngest ones could do a nursery rhyme – Humpty Dumpty? Do you know Humpty Dumpty?"
Olga looked dubious.
Alexander Borisovich nodded enthusiastically. "Very good, very famous children's poem," he reassured her.
"Well, then, lovely," Olga said. "Lily can do this with her 3rd House, the smallest ones. And the 6th House, and the 7th?" They were the 8 to 10 year olds.
"Maybe a song?" Ariel said. "We thought, something popular, something that they can dance to."
"How about Lady Gaga?" I said. "They love Lady Gaga."
"Yeah, or Beyonce," said Ariel.
Olga frowned. "No, no, this is no good. We need something…more classical, yes?"
"OK," said Ariel. "What about Queen?"
"Much better," she said, scribbling it down on a piece of paper. "And finally, the oldest students. What to do with them?"
"Perhaps theater?" Ariel said. "An act from a play, adapted? I have some modernized Shakespeare that my girlfriend sent me…"
She clasped her hands in delight. "Shakespeare! How wonderful! How perfect! Or…what about Pushkin? Should we train the children to memorize a translation of Pushkin? Or perhaps Chekhov? Can you make a translation of Chekhov for our English Day? You can write it this weekend…"
"I think," Ariel said, diplomatically "we should stick to English authors."
"Right, right, you're very right," she said. "Yes! It will truly be an English Day!"
"OK," Alexander Borisovich interceded. "That's the skits taken care of. Now about the carnival booths…"
"Oh no," Olga said. "We're not finished yet! The children will of course need costumes. We'll need Romeo, Juliet, capes, swords….You can do this, yes, Lily and Ariel?"
I looked at Ariel and Ariel looked at me.
"Costumes?" said Alexander Borisovich. "Costumes, psshh, in my opinion they will not be necessary."
"We'll see what we can do," Ariel said. "Now the booths…"
"I thought, a game," said AB in English. "I don't know how to call it. There are four, heehee, excuse my word, pricks, and you must throw a circle thing, and it touches the pricks, and when you miss you must pay forfeit by speaking something in English, perhaps rhyme or tongue-twister."
"A ring toss," I supplied.
"Yes," said AB. "That. And many games, perhaps geography trivia, questions about England and America, culture, things of that sort."
"In English, of course," said Olga in Russian. "So much better that way!"
"Surely not!" said AB. "English culture – then everyone can play, not just those who speak the best English."
"All right, all right," Olga said. "If you must. Now about rehearsals…"
"No, wait," said AB. "I am trying to remember…Two years we had a game, a very good game. I was a pirate, and I had two women in bondage. With every question the children answered we unwrapped them a little more, first the arms, then…"
"Yes, yes," Olga said, "We'll decide more about games later. But the rehearsals…"
After much haggling, we established that rehearsals would be held for class the following week, and then followed a period of arguing about mundane details, which I tuned out, using my poor Russian as an excuse. At last we were dismissed.
"All this," said Ariel. "By Wednesday? I mean – honestly! Well, at least we have the weekend to prepare."
"Terrible," I said. "That woman is out of her time. She should have organized Pioneer parades for Stalin…But now, if you'll excuse me…"
Pausing only to grab my bag, I caught the 8 PM train and fled to my friends in Moscow, and I didn't think about English Day again until Monday morning.
Life at Camp: Part I
As noted, I had some misgivings about Dubravushka and now I can report that…they were entirely justified. Yet, the difficulties have a certain refreshing unpredictability about them. For instance, I was expecting to be put up in some miserable apartment miles out of town – that's normal. I was not expecting to be escorted up to the top floor of the schoolhouse and handed the keys to an empty classroom. There was a blue couch, several creepy English posters, and a photograph of Queen Elizabeth next to the chalkboard.
My guide, the school secretary, ushered me in.
"Look, it's very good, there is TV – " she tried the TV, but since it was an ultra modern TV with no remote control and no manual buttons, nothing happened. "And radio – " but the radio didn't work.
"Well, best part –" she said, undeflated – "is, other girl teacher never come, so all for you! Very big room!" She stretched out her arms for emphasis.
"Yes," I said, dropping my things on the floor next to a bookshelf. 'Yes, you can definitely say that about it."
"And now, I think, we should go to dining hall. Please, follow me."
We went back downstairs and down the path to a rambling white building close by.
It was quite a pretty campus. 'Dubravushka' has roots in the Russian words for 'oak' and there were oaks everywhere, beautiful spready ones overhanging the paths. Scattered around were white concrete bungalows that served as housing for the children. I was surprised at the size of the camp – it was only 1 or 2 acres total, more like a compound. Adding to this feeling, there was a spiked iron fence all around the perimeter.
I stared at this fence and fought a feeling of irrational claustrophobia. Now that I was in, would they ever let me out? This being Russia, maybe I could bribe a guard?
We went into the dining hall, and here was another surprise – we were going to be fed. Maybe this sounds like a bonus, but I think most adults with their own kitchens would agree with me: it's better to cook what you like, when you like, than be subject to the culinary whims of a stern-faced Slav who pushes across to you, at designated times, a pre-measured portion of whatever she damn well feels like serving, usually something she scraped out of a kettle, or off her shoe, or something.
In this case, it was watery potato soup, with some sprigs of dill floating on top for garnish. For a side, a slab of cold stale bread – no butter, no condiments. And sweet tea.
That's how the meals went at Dubravushka. Soup for lunch, plain mashed potatoes with a small unseasoned piece of meat thrown on top, or plain cold spaghetti topped with a slice of bologna for lunch, and then soup for dinner. Stale bread at every meal. Sometimes a plate of raw cucumbers of tomatoes for veg. It was tolerable. The worst meal was buckwheat kasha, a kind of chemical starch, with something chunky poured over it that in smell and texture resembled nothing so much as hot Alpo. They served this twice a week, on average. Breakfast was OK – cream of wheat, cereal, coffee (Mondays and Fridays only), watery tea the rest of the time. One time they got fancy and created a kind of bitter, leathery cheesecake product with Ѕ c of condensed milk poured over it – this was repulsive and nobody touched it.
I'd like to say that all this was fantastically healthy as well as character-building, but unfortunately, since it was nothing but salt, potatoes, and pasta, I don't think you can take a moral lesson from it. The Russians are just lousy cooks, that's all.
The first week of teaching was exhausting and chaotic. I was teaching eight classes a day, starting at 9 AM and ending at 6:45…80 6 to 10 year olds, a screaming waterfall of children. They all adored me– getting them to come to class wasn't a problem, it was usually harder to chase out the ones who didn't belong – but there were just so goddamn many of them. Ariel taught at the other school, so I could go all day without ever speaking a coherent sentence to an another adult – unless I ran into Alexander Borisovich, our English-speaking administrator liaison. If he spied me crossing campus, he would rush up, rubbing his hands, looking delighted.
"Leely! I'm so glad I run into you! I have such good news! From today – right now – you will teach the 5th class at the other school. So – fourth class primary school, fifth class the high school!"
"But the high school is a quarter mile away," I said, "and I only have a 5 minute break between classes. I'll be late all the time – is that OK?"
"Of course! It is perfectly normal! Great, yes? Brilliant, as our British friends say!"
He was always so excited, and it was never, ever good news – or at least not what any sane person would consider good.
I tried to avoid Alexander Borisovich.
My guide, the school secretary, ushered me in.
"Look, it's very good, there is TV – " she tried the TV, but since it was an ultra modern TV with no remote control and no manual buttons, nothing happened. "And radio – " but the radio didn't work.
"Well, best part –" she said, undeflated – "is, other girl teacher never come, so all for you! Very big room!" She stretched out her arms for emphasis.
"Yes," I said, dropping my things on the floor next to a bookshelf. 'Yes, you can definitely say that about it."
"And now, I think, we should go to dining hall. Please, follow me."
We went back downstairs and down the path to a rambling white building close by.
It was quite a pretty campus. 'Dubravushka' has roots in the Russian words for 'oak' and there were oaks everywhere, beautiful spready ones overhanging the paths. Scattered around were white concrete bungalows that served as housing for the children. I was surprised at the size of the camp – it was only 1 or 2 acres total, more like a compound. Adding to this feeling, there was a spiked iron fence all around the perimeter.
I stared at this fence and fought a feeling of irrational claustrophobia. Now that I was in, would they ever let me out? This being Russia, maybe I could bribe a guard?
We went into the dining hall, and here was another surprise – we were going to be fed. Maybe this sounds like a bonus, but I think most adults with their own kitchens would agree with me: it's better to cook what you like, when you like, than be subject to the culinary whims of a stern-faced Slav who pushes across to you, at designated times, a pre-measured portion of whatever she damn well feels like serving, usually something she scraped out of a kettle, or off her shoe, or something.
In this case, it was watery potato soup, with some sprigs of dill floating on top for garnish. For a side, a slab of cold stale bread – no butter, no condiments. And sweet tea.
That's how the meals went at Dubravushka. Soup for lunch, plain mashed potatoes with a small unseasoned piece of meat thrown on top, or plain cold spaghetti topped with a slice of bologna for lunch, and then soup for dinner. Stale bread at every meal. Sometimes a plate of raw cucumbers of tomatoes for veg. It was tolerable. The worst meal was buckwheat kasha, a kind of chemical starch, with something chunky poured over it that in smell and texture resembled nothing so much as hot Alpo. They served this twice a week, on average. Breakfast was OK – cream of wheat, cereal, coffee (Mondays and Fridays only), watery tea the rest of the time. One time they got fancy and created a kind of bitter, leathery cheesecake product with Ѕ c of condensed milk poured over it – this was repulsive and nobody touched it.
I'd like to say that all this was fantastically healthy as well as character-building, but unfortunately, since it was nothing but salt, potatoes, and pasta, I don't think you can take a moral lesson from it. The Russians are just lousy cooks, that's all.
The first week of teaching was exhausting and chaotic. I was teaching eight classes a day, starting at 9 AM and ending at 6:45…80 6 to 10 year olds, a screaming waterfall of children. They all adored me– getting them to come to class wasn't a problem, it was usually harder to chase out the ones who didn't belong – but there were just so goddamn many of them. Ariel taught at the other school, so I could go all day without ever speaking a coherent sentence to an another adult – unless I ran into Alexander Borisovich, our English-speaking administrator liaison. If he spied me crossing campus, he would rush up, rubbing his hands, looking delighted.
"Leely! I'm so glad I run into you! I have such good news! From today – right now – you will teach the 5th class at the other school. So – fourth class primary school, fifth class the high school!"
"But the high school is a quarter mile away," I said, "and I only have a 5 minute break between classes. I'll be late all the time – is that OK?"
"Of course! It is perfectly normal! Great, yes? Brilliant, as our British friends say!"
He was always so excited, and it was never, ever good news – or at least not what any sane person would consider good.
I tried to avoid Alexander Borisovich.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Updates
Things I've done since last posting here:
Now it seems that I'm going to be spending the month of June in a children's camp (like the Pioneer camps of Soviet times) somewhere outside Moscow. I was informed of this yesterday, via email. No mention of when, what to pack, how I'll get there, only 'Monday to Friday, with the possibility to get out at weekends.' Starting in two weeks.
I asked another teacher, who spent last summer in such a camp. What did he think? A man of few words, he mused awhile, and then said, laconically, I taught from 9 to 2. I played a lot of basketball. And usually I took a nap in the afternoon.
Further interrogation revealed that the camp is located in a swamp. The Language Link website prefaces its section about camp employment with this note:
"Anyone who is familiar with Russia understands that this is a country that lived through seventy years of infrastructure neglect…"
It also suggests that I bring hackysacks, hair beads, and 'soft rubber footballs' to bribe the children, because "Remember, the key to being accepted is popularity and anything that will make you a magnet for kids will help to make you popular."
Machiavelli would have something to say about that, but I digress...
The summer English textbook that I'll apparently be teaching from ('English…the language of international adventure!') revolves around the adventures of a cartoon character called Bobby J, 'a young man haunted by the past,' as he struggles to save ancient ruins from tomb robbers and UFOs.
The problem is that Bobby J is a real person. He is, in fact, Language Link's elusive, 'Nam vet, on-the-run-from-his-family-for-30-years, founder and godfather. And he wrote the textbook.
To hell with King Tut's tomb. Teaching should be more than enough adventure.
At the end of June, after I escape the camp one way or another, I'll be flying home to get my things together before my next job starts in August. This a completely different gig, an Americorps/CCC position as a backcountry ranger in Maine, patrolling the wilderness around Mt. Katahdin, at the head of the Appalachian Trail. So I'll be living in a cabin without electricity or running water, hiking, conducting patrols, leading nature programs for children, and things of that sort....
Well, my one demand of life is that it never get boring, and so far it hasn't let me down…
- sleeping under a bearskin
- watching the Victory Day tank parade from a tree off the Arbat
- attending a concert by a Russian singer who alternated between traditional and Lady Gaga covers – and who insisted on giving us his coat to sit on at intermission because the cold cement floor 'might kill you'
- drinking in a sketchy bar with a kickboxer who had a detachable front tooth that he removed for kickboxing purposes. Said boxer had made up his mind to act like an American, and so refused to speak Russian or respond even when the plate-chucking tracksuited Mafia type at the next table threatened to kick his filthy American face in…. long story, long night.
- Visiting Tchaikovsky's house on his birthday, the one day a year that his personal piano is dusted off and played…
Now it seems that I'm going to be spending the month of June in a children's camp (like the Pioneer camps of Soviet times) somewhere outside Moscow. I was informed of this yesterday, via email. No mention of when, what to pack, how I'll get there, only 'Monday to Friday, with the possibility to get out at weekends.' Starting in two weeks.
I asked another teacher, who spent last summer in such a camp. What did he think? A man of few words, he mused awhile, and then said, laconically, I taught from 9 to 2. I played a lot of basketball. And usually I took a nap in the afternoon.
Further interrogation revealed that the camp is located in a swamp. The Language Link website prefaces its section about camp employment with this note:
"Anyone who is familiar with Russia understands that this is a country that lived through seventy years of infrastructure neglect…"
It also suggests that I bring hackysacks, hair beads, and 'soft rubber footballs' to bribe the children, because "Remember, the key to being accepted is popularity and anything that will make you a magnet for kids will help to make you popular."
Machiavelli would have something to say about that, but I digress...
The summer English textbook that I'll apparently be teaching from ('English…the language of international adventure!') revolves around the adventures of a cartoon character called Bobby J, 'a young man haunted by the past,' as he struggles to save ancient ruins from tomb robbers and UFOs.
The problem is that Bobby J is a real person. He is, in fact, Language Link's elusive, 'Nam vet, on-the-run-from-his-family-for-30-years, founder and godfather. And he wrote the textbook.
To hell with King Tut's tomb. Teaching should be more than enough adventure.
At the end of June, after I escape the camp one way or another, I'll be flying home to get my things together before my next job starts in August. This a completely different gig, an Americorps/CCC position as a backcountry ranger in Maine, patrolling the wilderness around Mt. Katahdin, at the head of the Appalachian Trail. So I'll be living in a cabin without electricity or running water, hiking, conducting patrols, leading nature programs for children, and things of that sort....
Well, my one demand of life is that it never get boring, and so far it hasn't let me down…
Thursday, April 8, 2010
the VVTs and other adventures
No, not some kind of disease, but the All-Russian Exhibition Center, aka Exhibition of National Economic Achievments, aka VDNKh…Spring has finally come to Russia – like a spell breaking – and on Saturday I enjoyed it by going walkabout in Moscow. Such a fine day, everybody out in their good clothes, the furry overcoats and galoshes stowed away for another year. I stepped out in my new black jacket, skinny jeans, and sunglasses, feeling very Russian. Something about the air here in spring – everybody looks happier, or walks with their backs straighter, or something. Stray dogs sunning on the sidewalk and kids flashing by on Rollerblades.
It was the first time I'd been to town since the bombings last week. The Russians that I knew in Zelenograd had taken the news with a kind of sad, disgusted resignation – and superficially, in Moscow seemed the same – except that the crowds in the Metro looked a little closer at each other, and there were many police officers with dogs patrolling. Nobody bothered me for papers or otherwise – except a man who asked if I was foreign and tried to hit on me – but that's normal.
But I got off the train at Lubyanka, and then I felt it for certain, Lubyanka being the station where the North Caucasian girl blew herself up, taking twenty people with her…All of the Metro stations are like museum galleries: spotlessly clean, with elaborate friezes, stained glass, and chandeliers, and somehow the sheer shininess of Lubyanka made the idea of it exploding in blood and glass all the more viscerally horrifying.
Along one wall there was a roped-off section with heaps and roses, and a whole crowd standing silently in front of it. A few were crying, but most were just standing, staring numbly at the candles that guttered in the breeze as the train roared through.
What you can say? There are so many things to say – but in the end maybe only this: I wish we human people didn't have to hurt each other so much.
Then I went up into the street, to Biblio Globus, the big foreign language bookstore, because it was my plan to find a book to read and a park to read it in, out in the air, far away from grief and trouble. Biblio Globus is next door to the former Lubyanka prison, which struck me as ironic - eighty years ago the kind of books sold there would have gotten you sent to Lubyanka and/or shot...
Half an hour later, now armed with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and a dual-language book of poems by the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, I went in search of VDNKh.
There are few things as surreal as totalitarian art when the driving totalitarian element has ebbed away. The warped Orwellian rhetoric, the labyrinth of logic, that forced it into context is gone, and you're left staring at, let's say, a 30-story Space Obelisk, or a fountain crusted with fake mineral chunks and duck sculptures. This was the All-Russian Exhibition Pavilion, all 500 acres of it. It was constructed in the late 1930's, at the very fever pitch of Stalinist paranoia, and the whole point was pan-Soviet unity, the glorification of the collective. And what better way to glorify the collective than to build an immense park, crowded with golden fountains and buildings like the birthday cakes of a mad baker?
I wandered, dumbstruck. There was the famous 'Worker and Kolkhoz Woman' statue – there was (once upon a time) the world's highest Ferris wheel - and a cattle pavilion, and a triumphal arch. Many of the buildings were designed to represent some particular corner of the Soviet empire – Karelia was the most interesting, with its carved wooden friezes, but there was also Armenia, where you could eat at a restaurant called Ararat, and Georgia, where you could buy gold and luxury goods. As for goods, they were everywhere, a barrage of capitalism to make Lenin weep.
I wandered into one building, which felt as though it might have been a museum at one point, or some other large dusty hall, but it had been subdivided into an indoor market, a perfect maze of stalls selling all kinds of things – scarves, fur coats, guitars, handbags, candy. One stall was playing some kind of American 90's boy band music, and the woman in the next stall had manipulated her battery-powered puppets so that they appeared to be dancing to it. A few teenagers had paused to watch. I followed the corridors round and round in circles, never quite sure if I was passing the same place twice. Then I went upstairs, where there was a bliny restaurant, a wax figurine museum, and an exhibition of cats from around the world, hidden from the non-paying public by a series of room dividers and black curtains. Trying to escape the market, I found that all the heavy double doors marked 'exit' were padlocked. The only exit was from a landing above the toilet in the basement. I staggered out into the hazy evening sunlight, and the door banged shut behind me. From the outside, you would never guess that all that was in there…
As I continued to stroll, I heard loud music issuing from the steps of another building. It was some kind of rousing Soviet song, the kind backed up by about 200 baritones and a brass band. Then abruptly the music switched to maniacal children's laughter, some babbling, and then – BLAM BLAM BLAM, like an AK-47. A patter of hysterical laughter. A segue into a selection of light accordion tunes, followed by the chorus, with the whole series playing again…
I stopped dead. There was nothing going on to provide context for this soundtrack. The teenagers on the stone steps, smoking and skateboarding, paid no attention. The young women strolling with their boyfriends – oblivious. So this was normal? I went on.
A ways down, there was a camel, a stolid Bactrian camel, with its spongy feet planted on the pavement, accompanied by a burro in a blaze-orange blanket. In the distance there was a building like a white stone mosque with a rounded dome – except that there was a full-sized rocket ship rising out of its central pavilion. In front of me the sun was setting on a massive, empty fountain that featured ten or twelve frolicking proletariats, all painted brassy gold. The air smelled of charcoal and meat from the shashlik stand close by. Very faintly in the distance I could still hear the gunfire and the accordions, overlaid by the tinkle of carnival music from the amusement park.
Я должен жить, хотя дважды умер
А город от воды ополоумел:
Как он хорош, как весел, как скуласт,
Как на лемех приятен жирный пласт,
Как степь лежит в апрельском провороте
А небо небо – твой Буонаротти…
I've got to live – though twice dead already,The town punch-drunk from water:
How pretty, high-cheek-boned, so alive,
And that oily loam on the plow's blade, how fine –
how the steppe churns in April's turning,
but the sky, that sky – there's your Michelangelo…
-Osip Mandelstam
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Dacha Country
Saturday, the start of a long holiday weekend, and we were about to embark on a quintessentially Russian adventure: we were going to the village. In this case, the exact place was Povarovo, outside of Zelenograd, but really, for a Russian, 'the village' is any place away from the city where they can go on weekends, grow some cabbages, maybe throw a party without the neighbors banging on the walls – their dacha. Usually one of many dachas, a colony, widely varied in scope and design, from a motley straggle of huts (middle class) to a gated, heavily guarded collection of country estates (mafia).
We – meaning me, Lindsay, and Shayla – were headed for the dacha of Nikita, a student at the Moscow Institute of Technology and an old friend of Sasha, administrator Olga's son. Sasha had organized the party and invited the rest of the Zelenograd English teachers, but we three already knew Nikita: he was a regular at our favorite underground art club. By extension, he was a regular of my kitchen, where the party usually moved after the club closed at 3 AM…
On Friday night, over endless nocturnal rounds of black tea and Finnish beer, Nikita and Sasha schooled us in dacha protocol: Bring food. Bring blankets. Bring house shoes (somehow it Russia it always comes down to shoes.)
Further, Sasha informed us, grinning, there were no toilets; they were planning to go out early and dig trails through the snow, leading to the woods – very fine snow toilets, with separate trails for men and women.
Well so be it. On Saturday evening, we set out for the dacha. Owing to a little bus mishap, we were late to Kriukovo Station, and by the time we got there, the other teachers had gone on without us. So we stood on the platform and waited for the next train. It was a clear chilly March evening. Smoke spiraled out of the factories beyond the tracks, and from the mafia-run DVD kiosk behind us, there rose an incessant throbbing techo beat.
Povarovo, three stops down the line, was a shambling little town, one produkti (boarded up), some small cottages up the hill, and the roads running off into the dark countryside. According to Sasha, the next step was to find a taxi to take us out to the dacha. But there were no taxis. The cars rushed by as we huddled beside the road.
At last, though, we located the taxi pulloff beside the railway bridge, and sure enough, there was a beat-up Lada idling there, its driver kicked back smoking a cigarette. Shayla opened the front passenger door. "I don't speak Russian," she said in Russian. "Here, here – he – you –"
She shoved the cellphone into the driver's startled face, and I heard Sasha on the other end, talking fast. Meanwhile, we got in and made ourselves comfy. The driver listened, nodded, shrugged, and then pulled out into the street, heading out of town. What was in his mind? God only knows.
But my amused speculation was cut short as we crossed a bridge, leaving Povarovo behind. The bridge wasn't plowed, not even a pretense of it, and neither was the road beyond. It was pretty clear that a whole winter had gone into the sculpting of that road, the gentle thaw followed by the bitter freeze, a fresh snow fall here and there, grainy strata overlaid by slick black flow. Down the middle there was a thin strip of exposed asphalt, and our driver, clearly a veteran, aimed his Lada at this, so that the left hand wheels ran on good ground and the right hand ones bounced over seven inches or so of ice pack. The hills and bridges were a bit more of an obstacle, being frozen all the way across, but he took a running start and cleared them like a champ. Where the road opened out, he gunned his engine to 80, 90, 100 kilometers an hour, bouncing and fishtailing.
I looked out the window at the passing forests, the glowing dachas gathered by the road, the open fields rolling away into the last sunset light – and I was stricken, suddenly, by a sense of Russia in all its vastness, and I wished I could take off across it, about as far as I could go, just to see what might be there. If you offered a taxi driver enough money, I wondered, how far could you get? They are some intrepid bastards, these drivers.
After a while, there was some confusion concerning where to turn, and we had to phone Sasha again. The driver listened, shrugged – and then overshot the turn completely, fishtailing wildly before plowing straight into a snowbank.
Unperturbed, he backed the car out and had another go. We were now on a single-lane driveway, even less plowed. He barreled on, sliding from side on the ridges of ice. There were thick trees on both sides, and then some high gates.
"Well, ladies," Shayla said. "This might be the end…"
We flew round a few more bends and twists in the road, and then suddenly came across Sasha, who leapt into a snowbank as the driver skidded to a standstill mere inches from where he had been standing.
We bundled out of the taxi, handed the man 100 rubles (~$3), and then followed Sasha through the snow to Nikita's dacha, one of several in the colony. It turned out to be a small a-frame behind a ramshackle iron fence. The walk up to the front door had been shoveled; the drifts on either side were 3 feet high. But inside was another world: a big table with everyone gathered around it, a blazing wood stove in the corner. The Beatles on stereo and the floor littered with boots and logs. One whole table held the juice, wine, vodka, and cocktail supplies.
"Come on," Sasha said. "Put your stuff upstairs."
We dragged our things up a narrow twisted staircase to the upstairs, where there was a landing with couches and bookshelves. Two smaller rooms opened off of it. Glancing through the open right hand door, I was startled to catch sight of a snarling brown bear. Closer investigation proved it to be a monstrous skin, complete with a head the size of a microwave, glass eyes, and a detachable plastic tongue. It was draped over the back of a pullout couch, so that whoever slept there would wake up in the morning staring down its throat.
"Nikita's father shot it," Sasha said. "In Siberia."
Leaving the urso to brood alone, we went back down to the party. Most of the English teachers there, along with several Russians that I recognized from the art club and Sasha's girlfriend Lena. Nikita himself, wearing a somewhat patchy fur vest and beaming away, dished up white Russians all around. They were made with some kind of horrible Arabic coffee brandy and lots of vodka. Somebody decided I looked cold and gave me another fur vest to wear, this one white and carved out of some unidentifiable animal – possibly a goat.
Two white Russians and a strawberry cream liqueur to the better, Shayla got into a fierce argument with Alexandra and Lauren, the British teachers, about Britain and America.
"American culture is nothing but a copy of British culture," Alex said, unprovoked. "A bad copy."
"Yeah, we did it first," Lauren said. "Sorry – I know how terribly gungho you are about America…"
Shayla, predictably, raged.
I broke in to babble something about the American dream, the idea of boundless possibly drawing on boundless space, forever separating us from the island mentality of the British, fallen empire as they might be.
"Yeah," said Lindsay, getting involved too. "I always feel like America and Russia have that in common..."
Then it got nasty. I retreated to the great outdoors for a visit with a snowbank. By the time I got back and found another drink, they had all more or less reconciled themselves, the Beatles had been exchanged for dance music, and the party was going strong. Vanya, a shaggy-haired hipster, and pretty much the happiest Russian ever, was jumping up and down on the sofa, filming a group of people, who were dancing and also jumping up and down. We ate pickles and little sandwiches, drank some more, and danced a lot.
Oh, it went on, this party, all night long with the fire blazing. At some point we Americans all used fabric paints to draw our home states on Nikita's stringless 'zen ukelele.' Shayla put in Wisconsin; Lindsay, Washington with Seattle labeled, and a Texas flag for Josh. Forsaking Ohio, I drew an electric blue Sears Tower. Later a few people left, everything died down a little, and then came back to life again as more Russians arrived at 3 AM. At 7 I packed it in and went upstairs to sleep on the couch on the landing.
The next day nobody moved before 11, minimum. I got up and went downstairs to an icy morning. Sasha was pottering in the kitchen, Alexei stirring the fire, Lauren dozing on the couch. I sat in front of the fire wrapped in furs, looking at the clean day blooming outside the window. Eventually Josh came down. He had fallen asleep, very drunk, under the bear, and gotten a nasty waking when its detachable tongue fell out and hit him in the face.
It was 2:30 before we were all ready to go. The Russian boys dialed a taxi, and we trekked back to the main road to meet it. This driver was far more careful. It was an uneventful trip home. I didn't mind at all.
We – meaning me, Lindsay, and Shayla – were headed for the dacha of Nikita, a student at the Moscow Institute of Technology and an old friend of Sasha, administrator Olga's son. Sasha had organized the party and invited the rest of the Zelenograd English teachers, but we three already knew Nikita: he was a regular at our favorite underground art club. By extension, he was a regular of my kitchen, where the party usually moved after the club closed at 3 AM…
On Friday night, over endless nocturnal rounds of black tea and Finnish beer, Nikita and Sasha schooled us in dacha protocol: Bring food. Bring blankets. Bring house shoes (somehow it Russia it always comes down to shoes.)
Further, Sasha informed us, grinning, there were no toilets; they were planning to go out early and dig trails through the snow, leading to the woods – very fine snow toilets, with separate trails for men and women.
Well so be it. On Saturday evening, we set out for the dacha. Owing to a little bus mishap, we were late to Kriukovo Station, and by the time we got there, the other teachers had gone on without us. So we stood on the platform and waited for the next train. It was a clear chilly March evening. Smoke spiraled out of the factories beyond the tracks, and from the mafia-run DVD kiosk behind us, there rose an incessant throbbing techo beat.
Povarovo, three stops down the line, was a shambling little town, one produkti (boarded up), some small cottages up the hill, and the roads running off into the dark countryside. According to Sasha, the next step was to find a taxi to take us out to the dacha. But there were no taxis. The cars rushed by as we huddled beside the road.
At last, though, we located the taxi pulloff beside the railway bridge, and sure enough, there was a beat-up Lada idling there, its driver kicked back smoking a cigarette. Shayla opened the front passenger door. "I don't speak Russian," she said in Russian. "Here, here – he – you –"
She shoved the cellphone into the driver's startled face, and I heard Sasha on the other end, talking fast. Meanwhile, we got in and made ourselves comfy. The driver listened, nodded, shrugged, and then pulled out into the street, heading out of town. What was in his mind? God only knows.
But my amused speculation was cut short as we crossed a bridge, leaving Povarovo behind. The bridge wasn't plowed, not even a pretense of it, and neither was the road beyond. It was pretty clear that a whole winter had gone into the sculpting of that road, the gentle thaw followed by the bitter freeze, a fresh snow fall here and there, grainy strata overlaid by slick black flow. Down the middle there was a thin strip of exposed asphalt, and our driver, clearly a veteran, aimed his Lada at this, so that the left hand wheels ran on good ground and the right hand ones bounced over seven inches or so of ice pack. The hills and bridges were a bit more of an obstacle, being frozen all the way across, but he took a running start and cleared them like a champ. Where the road opened out, he gunned his engine to 80, 90, 100 kilometers an hour, bouncing and fishtailing.
I looked out the window at the passing forests, the glowing dachas gathered by the road, the open fields rolling away into the last sunset light – and I was stricken, suddenly, by a sense of Russia in all its vastness, and I wished I could take off across it, about as far as I could go, just to see what might be there. If you offered a taxi driver enough money, I wondered, how far could you get? They are some intrepid bastards, these drivers.
After a while, there was some confusion concerning where to turn, and we had to phone Sasha again. The driver listened, shrugged – and then overshot the turn completely, fishtailing wildly before plowing straight into a snowbank.
Unperturbed, he backed the car out and had another go. We were now on a single-lane driveway, even less plowed. He barreled on, sliding from side on the ridges of ice. There were thick trees on both sides, and then some high gates.
"Well, ladies," Shayla said. "This might be the end…"
We flew round a few more bends and twists in the road, and then suddenly came across Sasha, who leapt into a snowbank as the driver skidded to a standstill mere inches from where he had been standing.
We bundled out of the taxi, handed the man 100 rubles (~$3), and then followed Sasha through the snow to Nikita's dacha, one of several in the colony. It turned out to be a small a-frame behind a ramshackle iron fence. The walk up to the front door had been shoveled; the drifts on either side were 3 feet high. But inside was another world: a big table with everyone gathered around it, a blazing wood stove in the corner. The Beatles on stereo and the floor littered with boots and logs. One whole table held the juice, wine, vodka, and cocktail supplies.
"Come on," Sasha said. "Put your stuff upstairs."
We dragged our things up a narrow twisted staircase to the upstairs, where there was a landing with couches and bookshelves. Two smaller rooms opened off of it. Glancing through the open right hand door, I was startled to catch sight of a snarling brown bear. Closer investigation proved it to be a monstrous skin, complete with a head the size of a microwave, glass eyes, and a detachable plastic tongue. It was draped over the back of a pullout couch, so that whoever slept there would wake up in the morning staring down its throat.
"Nikita's father shot it," Sasha said. "In Siberia."
Leaving the urso to brood alone, we went back down to the party. Most of the English teachers there, along with several Russians that I recognized from the art club and Sasha's girlfriend Lena. Nikita himself, wearing a somewhat patchy fur vest and beaming away, dished up white Russians all around. They were made with some kind of horrible Arabic coffee brandy and lots of vodka. Somebody decided I looked cold and gave me another fur vest to wear, this one white and carved out of some unidentifiable animal – possibly a goat.
Two white Russians and a strawberry cream liqueur to the better, Shayla got into a fierce argument with Alexandra and Lauren, the British teachers, about Britain and America.
"American culture is nothing but a copy of British culture," Alex said, unprovoked. "A bad copy."
"Yeah, we did it first," Lauren said. "Sorry – I know how terribly gungho you are about America…"
Shayla, predictably, raged.
I broke in to babble something about the American dream, the idea of boundless possibly drawing on boundless space, forever separating us from the island mentality of the British, fallen empire as they might be.
"Yeah," said Lindsay, getting involved too. "I always feel like America and Russia have that in common..."
Then it got nasty. I retreated to the great outdoors for a visit with a snowbank. By the time I got back and found another drink, they had all more or less reconciled themselves, the Beatles had been exchanged for dance music, and the party was going strong. Vanya, a shaggy-haired hipster, and pretty much the happiest Russian ever, was jumping up and down on the sofa, filming a group of people, who were dancing and also jumping up and down. We ate pickles and little sandwiches, drank some more, and danced a lot.
Oh, it went on, this party, all night long with the fire blazing. At some point we Americans all used fabric paints to draw our home states on Nikita's stringless 'zen ukelele.' Shayla put in Wisconsin; Lindsay, Washington with Seattle labeled, and a Texas flag for Josh. Forsaking Ohio, I drew an electric blue Sears Tower. Later a few people left, everything died down a little, and then came back to life again as more Russians arrived at 3 AM. At 7 I packed it in and went upstairs to sleep on the couch on the landing.
The next day nobody moved before 11, minimum. I got up and went downstairs to an icy morning. Sasha was pottering in the kitchen, Alexei stirring the fire, Lauren dozing on the couch. I sat in front of the fire wrapped in furs, looking at the clean day blooming outside the window. Eventually Josh came down. He had fallen asleep, very drunk, under the bear, and gotten a nasty waking when its detachable tongue fell out and hit him in the face.
It was 2:30 before we were all ready to go. The Russian boys dialed a taxi, and we trekked back to the main road to meet it. This driver was far more careful. It was an uneventful trip home. I didn't mind at all.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Home (a brief description)
The old region of Zelenograd is, indeed, older. On the other hand, it's possibly more interesting and certainly doesn't lack for character...I live on the first floor off a grimy, rubbish-strewn landing that's so poorly lit that I have to find the keyhole by touch. We all have rickety balconies, where everybody hangs their laundry out to dry (or rather, freeze), and every morning a man with a kind of beggar's pushcart comes wheeling by and collects the tra
sh that people leave on the front stoop. The pipes on this side of town are above-ground (permafrost, I guess), and run along between buildings, occasionally rising up into an arch so that cars can drive under them. They're all so old and knobbly and gnarly that they look they're made out of paper mache, and during cold snaps they're blanketed in burlap to stop them freezing...During cold snaps also, you're liable to find migrant laborers out on the sidewalks, grimly chipping away the built-up layers of ice, snow, and sawdust (never salt!) that make street travel a little hazardous sometimes.Then all you need are the babushka in knitted turbans and musty overcoats who shuffle up and down outside all day, eyes glued to their footing, and you have a distinctly Soviet image of life here in the fourth region...
On the other hand: high speed internet. Done Russian-style, of course, which means that a man came yesterday and fooled around with the circuit box out in the hall, drilled a hole in our ceiling above the door, ran about ten yards of ethernet cord (two separate cords of course, one for me and one for Shayla) through the hole, dragged them down the hall, and hooked one each into our laptops. I'm not kidding, an entire kindergarten class could play double-dutch jump-rope with the superfluous ethernet cord that's lying around our house now. Fortunately the dog restrains himself to eating my socks, and doesn't chew on the stuff... (Central Prospekt - my bus stop)
We're on the edge of the forest here, and it's lovely to walk in the morning after a fresh snow when the drifts are all piled up among the birches and fir trees.
One caveat: schoolkids have gym class (cross-country skiing) on the trails, so you have to be careful not to get run down by a flock of them when school is in session.This picture (from Google Earth) shows Youth Square, where there's a movie theater and KFC-spinoff, on the very edge of town, with the forest stretching out behind it.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Moving Day
We knew it was coming, because our landlord, Vladimir, had been threatening to evict us for a month, and now the deadline to vacate was just 48 hours away. Problem was, nobody seemed to know where we were going, not even administrator Olga, who was supposedly responsible for finding us a new flat. For two weeks now she had responded to every inquiry by shrugging and saying, "Where will you live? You will live in box. Box at Kriyukovo Station."
Well, Olga is cryptic and difficult at her very best, but the larger problem, I guess, is that Zelenogradians are touchy about foreigners. There were apartments for rent all over the city, but no one ever called back after finding out that Americans would be their tenants.
Finally, on Saturday night, she telephoned to inform us that we would be moving the next day at 2 PM. Would Vladmir show up to help us with his big truck, as promised? No, apparently he'd been drunk when he offered that. But not to worry, Olga had hired us a taxi. One of Lena's friends. Or maybe Sasha's.
And where were we moving to?
Why, was it important?
Well, yeah.
Grudgingly, she confided that our new flat was in the fourth region, in the older district on the other side of the forest. The phone clicked off.
I packed my belongings by the simple expedient of shoving them in my suitcase, emptied all the kitchen supplies into a box (the flat was apparently furnished, but 'furnished' in Language Link terms means two spoons and a broken futon), and abandoned my sickly houseplant to the tender mercies of the downstairs babushka. There was one thing I couldn't pack or abandon though: my dog. The dog is an illegal refugee, but he's my dog, an amber-eyed beast like a little wolf, and I wasn't leaving him. So I texted Lindsay and arranged for her to come over early and smuggle him out. Then of course I had to stay up half the night talking to people on the Internet, because God forbid I might not have internet in our new flat…
Sunday dawned bright and clear. I spent the morning pacing around cramming the last things in my suitcase. The dog caught the general mood and dogged, excuse the term, at my heels, whining softly, until I made him go lie down. Then I stacked my boxes in the hall.
At 1, Lindsay showed up.
"You might as well hang out until it's time," Shayla said. "Olga's going to call us first anyway, when the taxi is coming."
Lindsay sat down on my futon to use the Internet for a while.
At 1:45 the door opened and Olga strode in. Without acknowledging me, she went directly into the kitchen, where Shayla was sitting.
"Uh, hi, Olga," I said. "Nice to see you –" and ducked into my room, pulling the door shut behind me.
"Christ!" I hissed at Lindsay. "She's here! Quick!"
She grabbed Volchik by his collar and hauled him out on the balcony. I shoved his leash and kibbles into a bag and threw it out after them.
"Hang on," Lindsay said. ''I need my cigarettes. In my coat pocket."
I picked up her parka. It weighed at least twenty five pounds. The pockets felt like dumbbells.
"What on earth do you have in here?"
"Oh you know, stuff. Change. Crayons. Teabags."
"Here, you look for them."
She found a cigarette and scratched Volchik behind the ears.
"OK, dude," she said. "I'll wait until you guys leave and then jet out of here."
I closed the balcony door and pulled the curtains shut, then went back out to the kitchen. Olga was wandering around, poking at things.
"The driver says, twenty minutes probably."
I exchanged agonized glances with Shayla.
"Then Shayla, I will give you keys to flat, you go over first with him, Lily and I will take the bus."
As always, her voice sounded indifferent and on the verge of slurring drunk. Olga is Tatar, and looks it, with her leather coat and two long black braids. She's a big fan of Stalin ("he wasn't a bad man – just misunderstood"), and rumored to hate Americans, because her husband left her for America. Or she left him and he left for America, there are conflicting stories. The only other time I'd met her, at another teacher's party months earlier, she'd spent the entire night vomiting into a sink, and then skipped home through the forest with us singing, 'Follow, Follow, Follow, the Yellow Brick Road,' – which left a lasting, but not entirely coherent, picture of her overall character.
Long minutes ticked by.
I had just tried to mitigate the awkwardness by offering to make everyone tea, when Olga's phone buzzed. She spoke quickly and then hung up.
"He's here now." She rounded on me suddenly. "Lily! Why are you not ready? Go! Go!"
She picked up a box from our stack and rushed out into the hallway. We scrambled after her.
The taxi was an ordinary Lada pulled up to the curb outside. The young driver grabbed things from us and shoved them into the trunk., then the back seat, then the front seat, until there was barely room for Shayla to squeeze in.
"OK," said Olga. "Shayla goes over. I go over. Lily, you stay because Vladmir is coming, half hour maybe, to look over his things. You wait here for Vladmir."
"Right," I said. "I'll do that."
They pulled away. I tore back upstairs and went to the balcony.
"Right, it's clear. Rock out of here."
"That was close," Lindsay said. "Why, why can't the back door be unlocked? Are you sure they're gone?"
"Yeah, but now the landlord's coming. Run!"
She grabbed Volchik's leash and they disappeared down the hall.
Alone suddenly I stared at the boxes still waiting to be moved. Then I decided to repack the teacups, but scarcely had I finished when the door opened and Vladmir came in, followed by a young couple with a toddler.
Vladmir was crazy all the way through. He had certain habits that were disconcerting in a landlord, like sneaking into our apartment during the day and leaving broken television sets in the corners, or suddenly showing up at 1649 School to demand to know why there was water on our bathroom floor, or blaming his tenants when the fridge caught fire. Now he stepped through the maze of our belongings, showing the apartment, or something.
The young couple seemed to feel a little awkward about it. The baby stumbled and stared. Like all Russian babies in winter, he was bundled up until he resembled a tiny Yuri Gagarin. What the hell were they doing here? I just tried to stay out of the way.
"Where's my other remote control?" Vladmir said. He shook it. "Why have you taken out the batteries?"
Then Olga came back, and he decided to make himself useful by throwing all our things into the hall and holding the elevator doors open until every single box was piled in.
Downstairs, all my neighbors were lined up to watch the spectacle. As we frantically scuttled back and forth (Vlad was still standing there with his finger on the hold button), the babushkas waved and called 'dosvedanya!'
Finally it was done. The driver drove away and Olga and I went over to catch the crosstown bus. A short ride later, we disembarked in front of Korpus 440 on the Central Prospekt. My new home was waiting....
Well, Olga is cryptic and difficult at her very best, but the larger problem, I guess, is that Zelenogradians are touchy about foreigners. There were apartments for rent all over the city, but no one ever called back after finding out that Americans would be their tenants.
Finally, on Saturday night, she telephoned to inform us that we would be moving the next day at 2 PM. Would Vladmir show up to help us with his big truck, as promised? No, apparently he'd been drunk when he offered that. But not to worry, Olga had hired us a taxi. One of Lena's friends. Or maybe Sasha's.
And where were we moving to?
Why, was it important?
Well, yeah.
Grudgingly, she confided that our new flat was in the fourth region, in the older district on the other side of the forest. The phone clicked off.
I packed my belongings by the simple expedient of shoving them in my suitcase, emptied all the kitchen supplies into a box (the flat was apparently furnished, but 'furnished' in Language Link terms means two spoons and a broken futon), and abandoned my sickly houseplant to the tender mercies of the downstairs babushka. There was one thing I couldn't pack or abandon though: my dog. The dog is an illegal refugee, but he's my dog, an amber-eyed beast like a little wolf, and I wasn't leaving him. So I texted Lindsay and arranged for her to come over early and smuggle him out. Then of course I had to stay up half the night talking to people on the Internet, because God forbid I might not have internet in our new flat…
Sunday dawned bright and clear. I spent the morning pacing around cramming the last things in my suitcase. The dog caught the general mood and dogged, excuse the term, at my heels, whining softly, until I made him go lie down. Then I stacked my boxes in the hall.
At 1, Lindsay showed up.
"You might as well hang out until it's time," Shayla said. "Olga's going to call us first anyway, when the taxi is coming."
Lindsay sat down on my futon to use the Internet for a while.
At 1:45 the door opened and Olga strode in. Without acknowledging me, she went directly into the kitchen, where Shayla was sitting.
"Uh, hi, Olga," I said. "Nice to see you –" and ducked into my room, pulling the door shut behind me.
"Christ!" I hissed at Lindsay. "She's here! Quick!"
She grabbed Volchik by his collar and hauled him out on the balcony. I shoved his leash and kibbles into a bag and threw it out after them.
"Hang on," Lindsay said. ''I need my cigarettes. In my coat pocket."
I picked up her parka. It weighed at least twenty five pounds. The pockets felt like dumbbells.
"What on earth do you have in here?"
"Oh you know, stuff. Change. Crayons. Teabags."
"Here, you look for them."
She found a cigarette and scratched Volchik behind the ears.
"OK, dude," she said. "I'll wait until you guys leave and then jet out of here."
I closed the balcony door and pulled the curtains shut, then went back out to the kitchen. Olga was wandering around, poking at things.
"The driver says, twenty minutes probably."
I exchanged agonized glances with Shayla.
"Then Shayla, I will give you keys to flat, you go over first with him, Lily and I will take the bus."
As always, her voice sounded indifferent and on the verge of slurring drunk. Olga is Tatar, and looks it, with her leather coat and two long black braids. She's a big fan of Stalin ("he wasn't a bad man – just misunderstood"), and rumored to hate Americans, because her husband left her for America. Or she left him and he left for America, there are conflicting stories. The only other time I'd met her, at another teacher's party months earlier, she'd spent the entire night vomiting into a sink, and then skipped home through the forest with us singing, 'Follow, Follow, Follow, the Yellow Brick Road,' – which left a lasting, but not entirely coherent, picture of her overall character.
Long minutes ticked by.
I had just tried to mitigate the awkwardness by offering to make everyone tea, when Olga's phone buzzed. She spoke quickly and then hung up.
"He's here now." She rounded on me suddenly. "Lily! Why are you not ready? Go! Go!"
She picked up a box from our stack and rushed out into the hallway. We scrambled after her.
The taxi was an ordinary Lada pulled up to the curb outside. The young driver grabbed things from us and shoved them into the trunk., then the back seat, then the front seat, until there was barely room for Shayla to squeeze in.
"OK," said Olga. "Shayla goes over. I go over. Lily, you stay because Vladmir is coming, half hour maybe, to look over his things. You wait here for Vladmir."
"Right," I said. "I'll do that."
They pulled away. I tore back upstairs and went to the balcony.
"Right, it's clear. Rock out of here."
"That was close," Lindsay said. "Why, why can't the back door be unlocked? Are you sure they're gone?"
"Yeah, but now the landlord's coming. Run!"
She grabbed Volchik's leash and they disappeared down the hall.
Alone suddenly I stared at the boxes still waiting to be moved. Then I decided to repack the teacups, but scarcely had I finished when the door opened and Vladmir came in, followed by a young couple with a toddler.
Vladmir was crazy all the way through. He had certain habits that were disconcerting in a landlord, like sneaking into our apartment during the day and leaving broken television sets in the corners, or suddenly showing up at 1649 School to demand to know why there was water on our bathroom floor, or blaming his tenants when the fridge caught fire. Now he stepped through the maze of our belongings, showing the apartment, or something.
The young couple seemed to feel a little awkward about it. The baby stumbled and stared. Like all Russian babies in winter, he was bundled up until he resembled a tiny Yuri Gagarin. What the hell were they doing here? I just tried to stay out of the way.
"Where's my other remote control?" Vladmir said. He shook it. "Why have you taken out the batteries?"
Then Olga came back, and he decided to make himself useful by throwing all our things into the hall and holding the elevator doors open until every single box was piled in.
Downstairs, all my neighbors were lined up to watch the spectacle. As we frantically scuttled back and forth (Vlad was still standing there with his finger on the hold button), the babushkas waved and called 'dosvedanya!'
Finally it was done. The driver drove away and Olga and I went over to catch the crosstown bus. A short ride later, we disembarked in front of Korpus 440 on the Central Prospekt. My new home was waiting....
Friday, January 8, 2010
Walking in Snow
The weather's been a little harsh here, so I've barely gone out, but yesterday, getting that old cabin fever feeling again, I bundled up and ventured into the blizzard. There are so few hours of daylight here; you have to steal what chances you have.
I walked through my neighborhood, crossed the main road. The snow was falling hard and the drifts made walls along the sidewalks – but at Oktoberskaya, people had tramped out a footpath leading downhill, away from the street towards the park and the forest. So I followed this path. I wasn't alone of course. Ahead of me an elderly man was walking with his wife, one in a big hat, the other in a long fur coat. Tromping along hand-in-hand in a blizzard on a Friday afternoon in January.
Love is funny and beautiful sometimes.
And other people – men mostly, but a few women – alone, pacing very slowly with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. They didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking. I guess I too am one of the just-walkers…
So we went on this way, over a bridge and a frozen spillway to the shores of a broad basin all filled up with snow – Skolnoye Ozero, School Lake. There was a boathouse at the near end. I could just see the top of a beached pontoon boat sticking out of the drifts, and close by the lifeguard towers and changing huts of a swimming beach. There's something lovely and surreal about a beach in the snow, I don't know why.
Out on the ice a man had a little fire going in a can; he was crouched over a hole, ice-fishing, and nearby another group was doing the same. Where they had cleaned their fish there were bloodstains in the snow.
Then I had to step off the path to let a cross-country skier go by, but five minutes later I was ahead of him again – he wasn't a very good skier, and he'd tripped out of his skis.
Further down the lake there were other skiers, and some children tobogganing down the bank onto the ice. I passed a group having a picnic on a park bench. The two men were standing. The girl was on the bench, but crouched on the balls of her feet, not actually sitting, because of the Russian dread of cold surfaces…They had laid out a whole spread on the bench: sausages, vodka, a jar of pickles, and they didn't look up as I passed.
When I got to the very end of the lake, I stopped and looked back. Everything was hazy and monochrome in the falling snow – the low sky, the forest, the beach – and the small dark figures moving through the landscape made it seem like a Brueghel painting. Someone somewhere let off a firecracker. A flock of gray crows lifted from a pine, and a woman who had been pacing on her way paused, just for a minute, and looked around.
When it was silent again I realized I could hear the snow falling on my hat and shoulders.
I walked through my neighborhood, crossed the main road. The snow was falling hard and the drifts made walls along the sidewalks – but at Oktoberskaya, people had tramped out a footpath leading downhill, away from the street towards the park and the forest. So I followed this path. I wasn't alone of course. Ahead of me an elderly man was walking with his wife, one in a big hat, the other in a long fur coat. Tromping along hand-in-hand in a blizzard on a Friday afternoon in January.
Love is funny and beautiful sometimes.
And other people – men mostly, but a few women – alone, pacing very slowly with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. They didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking. I guess I too am one of the just-walkers…
So we went on this way, over a bridge and a frozen spillway to the shores of a broad basin all filled up with snow – Skolnoye Ozero, School Lake. There was a boathouse at the near end. I could just see the top of a beached pontoon boat sticking out of the drifts, and close by the lifeguard towers and changing huts of a swimming beach. There's something lovely and surreal about a beach in the snow, I don't know why.
Out on the ice a man had a little fire going in a can; he was crouched over a hole, ice-fishing, and nearby another group was doing the same. Where they had cleaned their fish there were bloodstains in the snow.
Then I had to step off the path to let a cross-country skier go by, but five minutes later I was ahead of him again – he wasn't a very good skier, and he'd tripped out of his skis.
Further down the lake there were other skiers, and some children tobogganing down the bank onto the ice. I passed a group having a picnic on a park bench. The two men were standing. The girl was on the bench, but crouched on the balls of her feet, not actually sitting, because of the Russian dread of cold surfaces…They had laid out a whole spread on the bench: sausages, vodka, a jar of pickles, and they didn't look up as I passed.
When I got to the very end of the lake, I stopped and looked back. Everything was hazy and monochrome in the falling snow – the low sky, the forest, the beach – and the small dark figures moving through the landscape made it seem like a Brueghel painting. Someone somewhere let off a firecracker. A flock of gray crows lifted from a pine, and a woman who had been pacing on her way paused, just for a minute, and looked around.
When it was silent again I realized I could hear the snow falling on my hat and shoulders.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Moscow journeys
Wednesday, the first day of our holiday break, and Lindsay's friend was flying in from Boston to visit. As it happened, he had chosen to arrive at Domodedovo, the most distant airport, all the way across the city from Zelenograd. Poor man, how could he possibly have known that getting to Domodedovo, and then back again, would take us 9 hours? Moscow is one the biggest cities in the world. Moscow is epic.
The snow was drifting down as we set off from Zelenograd at 11 AM, hopping onto a coach bus (marshruta) bound for the nearest Metro station, about an hour away. The roads were barely plowed, but Russian drivers are intrepid in any weather. A little fishtailing didn't cramp our driver's style at all. Lane dividers, psshhhtt. However, we were soon forced to a crawl, and then a standstill, as the highway wound around the mega-mall complex in Khimki, miles of furniture, electronics, Porsche dealerships, supermarkets, and most importantly, a massive Ikea store.
Lindsay chafed, imagining her friend leaving the airport to wander bemusedly through southern Moscow, but I was distracted watching all the people caught in traffic around us: a bespectacled man in a German truck, a driver smoking a cigarette in a sinister black car with smoked windows, girls with bleached hair and matching hooker boots, trudging through the slush, mallbound. Men sold jugs of antifreeze on the side of the road.
An hour and half behind schedule, we finally reached the Metro station and jumped on a southbound subway train. The car was crowded, but not oppressively so – until a babushka got aboard and took a shine to my corner. It was a primo spot, braced against the opposite doors, good handholds, all that, and by God she wanted it. So she stood in front of me, and every time the car lurched, she took it as an opportunity to adjust herself further into my space, treading on my feet twice. At last somebody else got off and I was able to move into a different spot. The babushka stepped triumphantly into the corner, like a rightful queen ascending the throne after years in exile.
On and on we went, crossing under Moscow.
Somewhere along the way, we had established that neither of us really knew where we were going. Inspection of the Metro wall map pointed to two options: Domodedovskaya Metro station, and a special train line running from Paveletski Rail station. Encouragingly, the latter led directly to the little airport symbol, so we opted for it, falling out of the subway into a stampede of people, all dragging children, suitcases, cryptic parcels piled on carts, etc, etc. Then we paid 250 rubles each (~ $8 USD) for tickets on the express airport train, exactly 10x more than your average autobus ticket. I was expecting a standard electric train, wooden benches, metal floors, but the Aerport Express turned out to be a luxury vehicle, with cushy seats and closed captioning TVs. Bossy loudspeaker voices reminded us, in both Russian and English, to mind our belongings and give up our seats to pregnant women. We weren’t even underway before a woman was rolling down the aisle with a shopping cart, selling bottled tea and the latest Dan Brown novel in translation. It felt like the beginning of a real journey. I was happy in my seat and fully ready to just set out and cross the whole country. On reflection, it seemed a little lame that we were just going to pick up the friend and then trek back to Zelenograd.
45 minutes later, following an all-too brief trip through factory yards and snowy birch forests, we cast up at Domodedovo. Everything was under construction and International Arrivals lay on the other side of a labyrinth of snow fencing. Finally, however, we made into the terminal where we hiked, and hiked, until at last we ran into Lindsay's friend hiking the other direction. He was hugely relieved to see her. When she hadn't been there to meet him, he had handed the airport workers a little card she had emailed him earlier. It said: I am lost. I cannot speak Russian. I cannot find my friends. Please help me. First the workers had laughed their heads off, then they took pity on him and escorted him around the terminal, searching.
On the way back we skipped the expensive train in favor of a marshruta to Domodedovskaya metro stop. This was a mistake. The traffic was even worse. For two hours we crawled along the highway towards Moscow. I read the billboards: Fly to Bangkok from 15000 rubles. Fly to Tashkent. Fly to London. Fly away, fly away. The sun went down and the snow fell harder.
At last we came to Domodevoskaya. But here we met another problem: none of us had had a bite to eat all day, and all of us needed the facilities. Across the street, a sign beckoned us: a crossed fork and spoon, lit up in neon ten feet tall. Bingo.
The facilities were outside, a row of porta-johns on the snowy sidewalk. Now, lots of countries make you pay for your convenience, but Russians have it down to an art form: every row of toilets has its own babushka, who stakes out the last booth as her own: she has an electric light, blankets, a teakettle, cleaning supplies. You go to this woman, hand her 15 rubles, and avail yourself of one of the other booths. It's a little bit awkward and pretty damn cold, but they're always clean. In many ways it's a very practical system.
The diner was a barebones waystation, staffed by a lanky hawkfaced man and a Kazakh girl in a purple dress, who kept fixing her hair in the mirror. When he spotted us, the man bounded over.
When Lindsay started to order, he interrupted her, laughing, waving his long arms around.
"Speak English!" he said in English. "Or maybe French?" he added in Russian.
"Speak English?" Lindsay said. "Really?"
"No of course not," he said. "Does it look like I do?"
Thoroughly confused, she finished the order in Russian, three cheese sandwiches, three Finnish beers. The man took note and bounded off again. We took off our hats and gloves, tried to get warm.
The sandwiches were bad, but I really liked that place, I don't know why.
Then we rode all the way back under Moscow, reached our metro stop, dragged the friend and his luggage through heavy traffic, and leapt aboard the marshruta to Zelenograd. Standing room only this time.
Naturally, we got caught in traffic.
(note: just for the record, I didn't take this picture. It was on someone else's blog: http://havemorecake.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html and I borrowed it purely for illustrative purposes)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)