3.

FEELING BLUE IN RED SQUARE

August 6^th. D-Day. After months of planning and research the day of my departure arrived. What a relief. Now I could stop talking about my trip. No more answering questions about where I was going, what my itinerary was, was I nervous? No more feeling awkward when people told me how brave I was. I didn’t feel particularly brave. I felt compelled, like I had no other choice but to make this trip. (My relief was a bit premature. During the trip I had to answer the same questions from locals and from other travelers.) 

The night before I left I had dinner at my brother’s house with his family, my parents and a couple of friends. Around eight o’clock I started to unspool. Suddenly, I was exhausted, and it was noisy with everyone talking at once and kids shouting. I had to get out of there. I needed quiet and solitude. I had felt no stress in the days leading up to my departure. I was well organized, no frantic dashing around town buying all the things I had forgotten to buy. That night, however, all the dread and anxiety I had been holding at bay since I had first decided to make this journey finally wore me out.

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Flying into clouds so dense and vast I felt like I was flying into Antarctica rather than Moscow; the small open patches looked like water intensifying the illusion of landing on ice.

As it turned out, Moscow, if not icy, was certainly cold. August 7^th and the temperature was 41˚F and drizzling. All my warm clothes were in my suitcase, which had decided to remain in Zurich. “Oh God,” I thought. “What if the bag never shows up?  The trip will be over before it begins. I can’t afford to replace everything.” My greatest fear had been that something (my cameras especially) was going to be stolen or lost. I had never expected it to be my luggage on the first day. But maybe that would be it. The bag would turn up tomorrow and it would be smooth sailing, or training, or busing from then on.

The Ismailovo-Gamma Hotel is part of a massive hotel complex that was originally built to house athletes for the 1980 Olympic Games. The four hotels – Alfa, Vega, Gamma and Delta – can accommodate something like 10,000 guests in 7,500 rooms. The thirty-storied buildings and surrounding casinos, supermarket, restaurants and nightclubs were built on the former site of Ismailovo village and Royal Estates, a favorite retreat of the Romanov tsars, including Peter the Great, who learned to sail on the nearby lake. The hotels were promoted as the best low-cost option in Moscow. At ninety euros for a single room, they were hardly my idea of budget accommodation.

I had originally been booked into Vega, but was given a free upgrade to the nicer Gamma. I had heard that some rooms at Vega hadn’t been renovated since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. My 12^th floor room was basic – the bed was about as wide as a coffin – but clean and quiet.

A downside of traveling alone is that there is no one to tell you that your teeth are covered with whatever green herb was used to season the airplane meal. I went through passport control, lost luggage, customs, the taxi ride to the hotel and hotel check-in with a hideous splotch of basil or oregano on my teeth, not discovered until I opened my mouth to brush them in my room.

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I spent my first full day in Moscow feeling outside of myself, disconnected, like I belonged nowhere except inside my own dirty shell – I was in the same clothes that I had been wearing for three days, and my hair was dirty as I had no shampoo (my suitcase would finally turn up at midnight that night).

I was afraid to open my mouth. I said the absolute minimum needed to be understood. I pointed to a dish on the menu rather than ask for it by name even though the menu was in English. I took the metro to a stop I thought was near Red Square. Surfacing on the sidewalk, I had no idea which way to go. I wandered down a street called Arbat, but didn’t know if I was heading towards or away from Red Square. I wasn’t well prepared for Moscow. I considered it only a stopover before the real trip began. I had no good map and no information about the largest city in Europe other than four or five pages copied from The Lonely Planet’s Guide to Eastern Europe, copies whose ink was smearing and coming off on my hands making the pages illegible. Like a man, I wouldn’t ask directions, afraid to appear vulnerable, to admit defeat, to appear incompetent. Like anyone would look down on me because I got lost in a city that I had visited once twenty-two years before. 

Red Square was finally achieved, which, with my difficulty in locating it, had become a bit like scaling Everest. At first glance it looked unchanged from 1986, the year of my previous visit. There was still a long line of people waiting to visit Lenin’s mausoleum. St. Basil’s Cathedral and its colorful domes dominated the southeast end. The building is more impressive in photographs than in real life. Up close it looks like it was dreamed up by Walt Disney rather than by 16^th century architects. Across the square from the Kremlin was ГУМ (pronounced goom), the department store where, in one of the shops, I had long ago pushed my way through large breasted Russian women in polyester dresses and wool sweaters to get to the counter. On closer inspection, however, ГУМ revealed itself to be whatever is the opposite of “a shadow of its former self.”

In 1986, I had purchased two hats, one from Georgia and the other from Uzbekistan. Nothing

 so traditional or folkloric is found there today, unless Dior’s or Burberry’s fall collection has an ethnic flair. It is all high-end boutiques for new Russia’s millionaires and billionaires and those who will spend every penny they earn to wear the latest designer creations.

Ella wrote about shortages and the high cost of living in Moscow. The shortages were now a thing of the past; the smorgasbord breakfast at my hotel confirmed that. Expense, however, was still relevant. At ГУМ I tried on a Russian Olympic team sport top that I thought would be a great souvenir until I calculated that it cost over two hundred dollars. 

✢

Irina, blonde, with big cheekbones, large deep-set eyes and impeccable English refined by several months in Oxford, England, met me in the lobby of my hotel Saturday morning. In addition to being a guide she was a translator/interpreter in English, Serbian, and Spanish. She was also a bit of a mother hen. Within the first half hour I was admonished for flashing my money around, and for being in too much of a hurry. During the day we spent together she found out a lot about me, but was very cagey about herself. She learned my age; I never learned hers. She had a plan for her future, but refused to divulge even the slightest hint as to what that might be. I did find out that she had been married to a Serbian publisher and had lived in Belgrade for three years and that she had been dating a snowmobile importer for four years. Of that relationship she stated quite matter-of-factly, “No, I’m quite sure I don’t love him. He demands too much time from me.”

The line to enter the Kremlin Armory Museum was already several hundred people long when we arrived, and moving imperceptibly. Irina hung her official guide i.d. card around her neck and we insinuated ourselves into a group of Spanish tourists led by her colleague near the head of the line. I don’t speak Russian but I do speak Spanish and I understood every word as one Spanish woman complained, “For God’s sake, I can’t believe those two. It’s just awful that young people can’t wait in line like everybody else.” The reason for the long, snail-paced line was one metal detector to scan the hundreds of visitors.

Jewels, jewels and more jewels. Jewel-encrusted icons, jewel-encrusted Bibles, jewel-encrusted goblets, jewel-encrusted rifles and swords, the jewel-encrusted coronation gowns and wedding dresses of Empresses Anne, Elizabeth, Catherine and Alexandra. One wedding dress had an impossibly small waist; my thigh is thicker. Irina said, “No pain, no gain,” or in this case, “no pain, no sixteen-inch waist.”

Irina described Catherine the Great as a “very loving person, who had lots of favorites,” which I thought was a delicate way of describing the empress’s supposedly insatiable sexual appetite.

Also in the collection were vestments of priests and patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. One robe had the images of saints worked into the fabric, all of whom looked like they were wearing glasses. I remarked that one saint in particular resembled Harry Potter. Irina raised a dubious eyebrow. “No,” she said very decidedly. No diplomatic “Hmm, I don’t see it,” or “Possibly,” just “No,” and she moved on.

We grabbed some tasteless, overpriced lunch in the food court of a mall that ran alongside the Alexander Gardens outside the walls of the Kremlin. It was oddly comforting to learn that Muscovites are subjected to the same misleading food photos that we in the West are. What appeared on the menu as a steaming bowl of buckwheat with herbs and crispy bacon was in reality a scoop of buckwheat plopped onto a paper plate with three strips of barely cooked bacon draped over it and no sign of anything green, with the possible exception of my face after I tasted it.

Next on the tour was Mitinskoye Cemetery, a tranquil, pleasantly overgrown place where many “impressive” Russians are buried. The graves of Dimitry Shostakovich, Boris Yeltsin, Raisa Gorbachev, Sergei Eisenstein, Anton Chekhov, and Nikita Khrushchev, the only Soviet premier not buried at the Kremlin, are mixed in with the graves of generals, colonels and other Soviet military leaders. Great effort and expense had gone into the creation of elaborate tombstones to commemorate the dead, with carved busts or busts and torsos of the deceased that incorporated symbols of their fields. A famous radio personality holds a microphone; carvings of airplanes decorate the cenotaph of an aeronautical engineer; a famous pediatrician (or pedophile) spanks the butt of a naked baby. All the Soviet era monuments had been paid for by the state, which explained why no factory workers were buried there, albeit interesting since communism supposedly champions the proletariat.

My feet ached

“Never wear new shoes to walk around the city,” tsk tsked Irina. 

“I have to break them in somehow,” I moaned.

To appease my feet we took a cruise on the Moskva River. We secured two seats that gave us some relief from the sun – Moscow weather had returned to summer temperatures – and chatted as Moscow drifted by. If, though, I casually asked Irina a question about a building we were passing or she wanted to point out something to me she became an automaton. Regular speech was gone replaced by a well-rehearsed description of the building or structure like she was reading a script printed on her eyeballs. “That is the stadium where the solemn ceremony of the opening of the 22^nd Olympic Games was held.” A double level bridge – upper for cars, lower for the metro – was described as “a very interesting construction from a technological point of view.” 

When I paid Irina for the day, she rejected the hundred-dollar bill I handed her. “Could I have a new note, please?”

Oh God, followed by a string of expletives. I had forgotten to change the money. More expletives. I had withdrawn six thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills from my bank in Taos and I knew I should have asked for all new ones, but I didn’t. I got a lot of old, limp notes mixed in with some new; bills that are more than a couple of years old or that are wrinkled or marred in any way are not accepted in many countries. At home later, I told myself, “Remember to get new bills.” But I didn’t.

Up in my room I pulled out all my money and with knots in my stomach, I examined each note, setting aside one after another until there was a pile totaling three thousand dollars – half the money I brought – that no bank or exchange booth would accept. What was I going to do? “You have the audacity to consider yourself a seasoned traveler,” I thought scathingly, tears burning my eyes. 

Photos: (1) Red Square,  (2) Kremlin Guards, (3) Russian Folksinger, Ismailovo Market, (4) Khrushchev's tomb