Read an Excerpt
All the Clean Ones Are Married
And Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow
By Lori Cidylo Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2001 Lori Cidylo
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-463-6
CHAPTER 1
This Way to the Russian Federation
AMBLING DOWN SOVIET ARMY STREET one apricot-colored summer afternoon, I spotted a pink neon sign. ALL FOR YOU, the cursive letters flashed in English; a purple fluorescent arrow pointed to a staircase. I walked down three narrow steps and opened the massive door. The hinges creaked, and when I let go, the door slammed shut. I found myself inside a ramshackle shop that smelled like an old broom closet. A fine sepia-colored film covered the shelves, and cobwebs hung from the ceiling. In the corner was a tiny window; motes of dust whirled in the small patch of sunlight. I marveled at the motley array of goods: laptop computers, teddybears, refrigerators, lacy underwear, icons, Elvis posters, a pink bathtub with golden lion-paw feet, and a green-and-red parrot in a bell-shaped cage. "Ty mnye nadoyela! I'm sick of you!" the parrot squalled.
I wanted a television set. A black-and-white model would do. My eyes scanned the shop. There, next to a giant poster of the King in a studded jumpsuit, was a small black-and-white Zunabirov, and it cost only five hundred thousand rubles, the equivalent of one hundred dollars. All the other shops I had been to sold only Japanese color televisions for one million rubles (two hundred dollars). Even when I chanced upon a skitka, a sale, they went for at least eight hundred thousand rubles (one hundred sixty dollars).
Did anyone work in this place? "Alyo!" I called out. All I heard was the echo of my own voice. Maybe the sales person had stepped out. Then I noticed a bell on the counter. Next to it was a sign: PLEASE RING FOR ATTENDANT. I rang. No response. I tried again. A stout old woman with a moustache and a few dark hairs sprouting from one of her chins shuffled out of a back room. She was holding a cup of tea in one hand and a cucumber in the other. She looked at me with obvious irritation. "Da?" I asked her whether the TV came with a warranty. Three creases formed on her brow. "A what?" When I explained the concept, she cackled. "Oh, no," she said, still laughing, "we don't have anything like that."
I bought the TV anyway. The following evening, I was watching Carried Away by Wild Horses, a Soviet made-for-TV movie about an urban woman who falls in love with a Cossack. Resplendent in an embroidered peasant blouse, a silver saber tucked into his billowing blue pants, the hero was showing his new love, a sheltered scientist, how to ride a horse bareback. The two of them were galloping through the countryside, her long blond hair pushed from her smiling face by the wind. Suddenly a snake slithered out from behind a tree. The woman's horse neighed and reared; a scream echoed through the countryside: onto the ground the woman fell, hitting her head on a rock. The hero leaped from his horse and slew the snake with one powerful sweep of his saber. Just as he was bending over the heroine's limp body, the picture dissolved into horizontal black lines. Lifting the side panel, I tinkered with a few knobs. The lines were still there, only now they were vertical. When I switched channels, the TV hissed and crackled so loudly that I was afraid it might explode. Finally I turned it off and called a repairman. When he arrived the next morning, I was in a hurry and tried to direct his attention to the TV, but he seemed much more interested in my coffee table. Made of dark cherry oak, its legs were elegantly curved, and each side was shaped like the top of a heart. "What a funny-looking table," he said. "Did you bring it from America?"
"No," I told him. "I bought it here."
His eyebrows arched in surprise. "Well, I guess they're making different kinds of furniture now." He fixed his gaze on the table again and shook his head. "It's too weird for my taste. I like our standard Soviet coffee tables better."
(The repairman was unable to fix the TV, so I decided to use it as a radio. Only the sound worked. As for the images that were supposed to accompany the words, I had to use my imagination.)
Later that same week, I called Lyudmila to invite her to a dinner party at my apartment. Just before I hung up, I said, "Don't forget to bring my copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover." A gifted translator with an impressive command of English, Lyudmila could quote whole sections of Lawrence, Faulkner, and Hemingway and discuss their works knowledgeably. She didn't look the part of a Russian intellectual, though. She didn't wear old, moth-eaten sweaters or drab, shapeless dresses; she always looked well rested; and I don't believe I ever saw a cigarette dangling from her glossy red lips. Tall and lanky, with frizzy brown hair, which she permed herself, Lyudmila dressed in the exaggerated feminine style that Russian women often prefer. Though I had told her that the party would be an intimate affair, Lyudmila arrived in a shimmering evening gown, and as she made her way into the dining room, she swayed her hips a little, Mae West–style. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, went her red high heels as she sashayed across my parquet floor. She walked toward my bookcase, holding Lady Chatterley's Lover in one dainty, well-manicured hand. The sound of her shoes stopped abruptly; Lyudmila was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the coffee table.
"Where did you get this table?"
"Russkiy Suvenir."
"It's beautiful," she said, touching the smooth, polished surface. "It reminds me of a table I saw in an American movie once, I forget what it was called. That actress — the one with the long hair and the big teeth — what's her name? Julia Roberts. She was in it."
Lyudmila told me that when she first started watching American films, in the early 1990s, she was fascinated by the variety of furniture. Here was a dreamland of seemingly endless possibilities, so many different kinds of desks, chairs, lamps, and coffee tables, such a profusion of colors and styles. It was actually possible to buy the kind of furniture one liked, to choose.
Her eyes, which were accustomed to seeing the world through a prism of Soviet uniformity, couldn't help noticing something else: not only was the furniture different in each film, it was displayed in various ways. Lyudmila was especially captivated by the couches. "I remember I was watching Fatal Attraction, and there was this scene — Glenn Close and Michael Douglas were on a couch, kissing and ripping each other's clothes off — and I thought, Now, how can they do that? How can they put a couch in the middle of the room? It would look terrible. Then they showed them from the back and I noticed that the couch was actually finished — it was completely covered with fabric, not just in the front, like ours.
I too had the standard Soviet couch. Or, rather, my landlord did. He and his family had lived in the apartment before I moved in, and their furniture was still there. When I first noticed that the couch was backless — all you could see was cheap wood — I assumed that it was defective. Maybe he bought it at a discount place, I thought. Then I noticed that everyone's couch was like that.
Nowadays upscale shops sell imported couches with backs. Along with Western-style supermarkets, cafés, and restaurants, such shops are infusing the stark, utilitarian landscape with a splash of color. With their neon signs and fanciful, sometimes awkward-sounding names, such as ALL FOR YOU, BURGERS ON THE RUN, and CHIC YOU WILL SOON BE, they are giving some streets and neighborhoods a more distinctive character. In Soviet times grocery stores, cafés, bakeries, and hair salons were all standardized. And instead of names — perish the bourgeois notion — the Communists gave them plain-vanilla labels: CLOTHING, SHOES, BAKERY, RESTAURANT, CAFÉ. One city looked just like another. One neighborhood, street, or apartment building was indistinguishable from the next.
In the classic Soviet-era film, Irony of Fate, Zhenya, a Muscovite, ends up in someone else's apartment in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and doesn't realize it because the street, the building, and even the inside of the apartment all look exactly like his own. His key even fits the lock.
The night before Zhenya's wedding, he is celebrating his last hours of bachelor freedom with three close friends and six bottles of vodka. After the many toasts of the evening have worked their magic, Zhenya's buddies — who don't want him to get married — whisk him off to the airport and deposit him in a plane bound for St. Petersburg. Zhenya stumbles off the plane and takes a taxi "home." Staggering into the apartment, he takes off his pants and passes out on the floor. Nadia, the woman who lives in the apartment, opens the door and screams: there is Zhenya, sprawled next to the dining room table, snoring like a chain saw. Grabbing Zhenya by the shoulders, Nadia shakes him and slaps his face. "Who are you?" she shrieks, "and what are you doing here?" Zhenya mutters something, then goes back to sleep. Furious, Nadia fills a pitcher with cold water and pours it on Zhenya's head. He wakes up instantly. Still hung over, he slips and falls a couple of times as he tries to stand up. Finally he grabs the edge of the table and hoists himself up. Pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, he growls at Nadia, "Who are you? And how did you get into my apartment?"
Just then the door opens. In saunters Nadia's lover, clutching a bouquet of red roses. Seeing Zhenya, who is clad only in a shirt and boxer shorts, he throws the roses down on the floor. "So this is how it is, eh?" Nadia tries to explain. "Don't insult me even more with your lies!" he sneers. "And you —" He takes a step toward Zhenya. "Do you know who I am? I am a respected member of the Communist Party. Don't think that there won't be consequences!"
Later he takes Zhenya aside and says calmly, "Let's suppose that you really do live in Apartment 12, Building 25, Third Builder's Street in Moscow, and that your friendsreally did put you, who were in a drunken state, on a plane to Leningrad. When you opened the door, didn't you notice that the furniture was different?"
"But the furniture is the same!"
"All right, let us accept for the moment your contention that the furniture is the same. Didn't you notice that the apartment is being repaired?"
"But mine is being repaired too!"
Marina, a friend of mine who has a keen eye for the farcical side of Soviet culture, still howls with laughter every time she watches that movie, which is shown on TV every New Year's Eve. One year I watched it with her. We were curled up on my couch, under a fluffy blanket, sipping tea with honey. The movie had just ended, and Marina was reminiscing. "Oh, how we lived in those days! Whenever you invited someone over for the first time, it was impossible to explain what your building looked like because all the other buildings in the neighborhood looked just like it. Usually I would stand in front of the door and yell, 'Over here!'" As the final credits scrolled down the screen, Marina told me a story that Andrei Myagkov, the actor who made a name for himself playing Zhenya, had recounted in a television interview.
One day a friend invited Myagkov to his apartment. Since the friend had to work late, he told Myagkov that he would leave the key in the mailbox and that he should let himself in and wait. "Just make yourself comfortable, I'll be there in a half hour or so," the friend said.
Myagkov found the key and opened the door. To help pass the time, he turned on the TV. Nothing but smiling peasants driving combines through perfect-looking-wheat-fields. ("In twenty years, the Soviet Union will surpass the United States in the production of wheat and many other commodities....") Noticing a bottle of cognac in the liquor cabinet, Myagkov got up and poured some into a snifter.
The hunger pangs in his stomach were getting harder to ignore. If only he had something to snack on. Pickles went well with cognac; maybe his friend had some. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. On the top shelf, behind a pot of borscht, was a big jar of ogurtsi. He took the jar back into the living room, put his feet up on the standard coffee table, and feasted on the pickles. Every so often he got up to pour himself some more cognac. Glancing at the window, Myagkov noticed that it was getting dark. He began to wonder where his friend could be. Maybe something had come up at work. He was a publisher, after all, and deadlines were tight. Or, maybe — he was reluctant even to consider such a possibility — his friend's car had skidded on the icy road and ... Well, why sit here, imagining the worst? Taking out his address book, he found his friend's work number and called him.
"Where are you, old boy? I've been waiting for two hours. I've already helped myself to some cognac and —"
"Cognac?" asked his startled friend. "But I don't have any cognac."
Myagkov hung up the phone, washed the snifter, put the cognac, the pickles, and the key back where he had found them, and ran out of the apartment.
I, too, often got lost in the maze of identical apartment buildings. It was 4:30 one afternoon, and a bunch of us were standing in front of the TASS building, waiting for the tram. I had just finished working the early shift — which began at 7:00 in the morning — and I was tired. When the creaky, mud-caked tram finally came, I was grateful to find a seat. Wiping a corner of the dusty window with my glove, I soon spotted a cluster of bleak, prefabricated concrete buildings that looked just like the ones on my street. I pulled the cord by the window; a buzzer sounded. The doors opened, and I bounded out into the snow only to discover, from the nameplate, that this was Heroes of the Revolution Boulevard, not Kulakova Boulevard. I turned around just in time to see the doors closing. Moving with astonishing speed, the tram chugged down a steep hill and disappeared from view. Down the hill I ran, but my fur boots were heavy, and the snow was knee deep. ... Panting, I finally caught up with the tram. I knocked furiously on the door, but I had mittens on — and a pair of gloves underneath — and the sound got muffled. (The driver, who was staring straight ahead, couldn't see me.) Using my teeth I tore off my right mitten, then the glove — but, before I could knock again, the light changed and the tram went hurtling toward the next stop.
A sturdy-looking woman in a brown astrakhan coat and a beaver-skin hat walked past me. "Izvinitye," I said. "Can you tell me where Kulakova Boulevard is?"
"Don't know, can't help you," she said, without breaking her stride. It was only five o'clock, but the sky was already black, and there was no moon, and I had no idea where I was. I stood there in my enormous fur boots, looking at the dozens of identical apartment buildings, wondering what to do. The silence was broken only by the sound of the wind, which swept the glittering snow up into the cold air.
I scanned the buildings on the other side of the street, hoping to find a nameplate. But from that distance I couldn't see anything, even with my glasses. I would have to get closer. Like many Moscow streets, the one I was standing on was fourteen lanes wide; attempting to cross it would be like trying to walk across the Long Island Expressway. The only safe way to get to the other side was by going through a large underground tunnel. I looked for the familiar blue sign and spotted it on the corner: PEREKHOD["Underpass"], it read. Gingerly I made my way down the slick, icy stairs and entered the tunnel.
The damp, chill air reeked of urine and rotten cabbage. The ground was wet, and the sickly glow of the fluorescent lights made the puddles look green. I put my hands into my pockets and walked briskly; shards of broken glass crunched under my boots. Suddenly I heard footsteps behind me — heavy, rapid, and unmistakably male. I quickened my pace. So did the man; the heavy thud of his footsteps grew louder and echoed in the tunnel. I searched frantically for an exit, but I couldn't see very far ahead of me, and the footsteps were getting closer ...
"I've caught up with you at last," said a deep male voice. I found myself face-to-face with a muscular man who towered over me. He was at least six feet tall and dark skinned. His black hair was disheveled, his face pockmarked. He stared at me with his small dark eyes. Outside, a light rain was falling; a cold drop fell from the dirty, cavelike ceiling and slid slowly down my cheek. In his right hand, the man was holding a pair of shiny black gloves. He put them on, slowly and deliberately. First one glove, then the other. Without taking his eyes off my face, he reached into his coat pocket ... I knew that I should do something — run, scream — but all I could do was watch that hand in its shiny black glove. The man grinned weirdly, and pulled out — a crumpled white handkerchief. "You certainly do walk fast," he said offhandedly. And then, suddenly angry: "You were trying to get away from me." He wiped the sweat from his brow and put the handkerchief back into his pocket. Was he toying with me? "It's not safe for a young lady to be out all by herself at night," he said, grinning. "There are a lot of maniacs out there who would really enjoy a nice young thing like you." (He emphasized the word "enjoy" in a way that made my skin crawl.) "You be careful now." And then he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All the Clean Ones Are Married by Lori Cidylo. Copyright © 2001 Lori Cidylo. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
