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Overview
A Russian American writer catapults herself into the maelstrom of Russian life at a time of seismic change for both
The daughter of Russian émigrés, Ingrid Bengis grew up wondering whether she was American or, deep down, "really Russian." In 1991, naïvely in love with Russia and Russian literature, she settled in St. Petersburg, where she was quickly immersed in "catastroika," a period of immense turmoil that mirrored her own increasingly complex and contradictory experience.
Bengis's account of her involvement with Russia is heightened by her involvement with B, a Russian whose collapsing marriage, paralleling the collapse of the Soviet Union, produces a situation in which "anything could happen." Their relationship reflects the social tumult, as well as the sometimes dangerous consequences of American "good intentions." As Bengis takes part in Russian life-becoming a reluctant entrepreneur, undergoing surgery in a St. Petersburg hospital, descending into a coal mine-she becomes increasingly aware of its Dostoevskian duality, never more so than when she meets the impoverished, importuning great-great-granddaughter of the writer himself. Beneath the seismic shifting remains a centuries-old preoccuption with "the big questions": tradition and progress, destiny and activism, skepticism and faith. With its elaborate pattern of digression and its eye for the revealing detail, Bengis's account has the hypnotic intimacy of a late-night conversation in a Russian kitchen, where such questions are perpetually being asked.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429998833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2003 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 338 KB |
About the Author
Ingrid Bengis lives in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Stonington, Maine. She is the author of the 1972 bestseller Combat in the Erogenous Zone and a novel, I Have Come Here to Be Alone.
Read an Excerpt
Metro Stop Dostoevsky
PART ONE1991one
The train from Helsinki to Leningrad's Finland Station leaves Helsinki at 1:00 p.m. and arrives in Leningrad at 8:00 p.m., crossing the Russian border after a two-hour customs delay at Wiborg, once part of Finland but incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of the Russo-Finnish war in 1939. There is no change in the landscape between Finland and Russia; on both sides of the border, it is almost interchangeable with the landscape of coastal Maine, even down to the scattering of islands offshore, and the rose-granite ledges at the edge of the Baltic. But the barbed wire is still there, going off at a ninety-degree angle from the landward side of the border and stretching as far as the eye can see up over the spruce-covered hills. It testifies that, although these are times of profound change in Russia, the watchtowers and the barbed wire have not yet been taken down. You are the same, the train is the same, the landscape is the same. The only difference is that you are crossing into Russia.It is February 28, 1991, and the fifth time that I have come to Leningrad on this train, the same one taken by Lenin when he was returning to Russia from Switzerland in April 1917, and was greeted at the Finland Station by swarms of supporters: soldiers, sailors, workers. It was, in fact, from this train that the Russian Revolution was launched, with Lenin addressing the crowds at the station: "Dear comrades, I am happy to greet you in the victorious Russian Revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army ... . The hour is not far when ... the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters ... . Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian Revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch ... Long Live the International Socialist Revolution."The ticket counter where you purchase tickets for the train to Russia is in a shabby little room, no more than a cubicle, hardly noticeable when you walk through the Helsinki station, where tickets to Everyplace Else But Russia can be bought in a big shiny ticket office with orderly lines of people paying their money and starting off on their journeys. But the door to the Russian ticket office is closed, and when I open it, there are only two people inside, a Filipino couple from California on their honeymoon, sitting on plastic chairs. They want to go to Russia for a few hours to have their pictures taken in the Finland Station, or maybe in front of the Winter Palace, just so their friends will know they were really there, and they can't understand why no one will give them permission to do this, why they must stay for at least one day when they don't want to, why they need a visa and can't get it on the spot, why Russia is so, well, different from all of the other countries where they've had themselves photographed. They are traveling all over Europe for three weeks, and they've never experienced this before, beingtold no so absolutely. Crestfallen, they go out of the office and take each other's pictures in the grand waiting room of the Helsinki train station. At least they can tell their friends that they were in Helsinki. Wouldn't it have been nice, though, to say that they were in Russia?The two young Russian women behind the counter are wearing red lipstick and flowery dresses. They are carefully, elaborately made up, and when one of them comes out from behind the counter I see that she has on spike heels. They have neither the sloppy informality of Americans and many Northern Europeans nor the casual elegance of the French or Italians, but, rather, a certain mixture of determination and wistfulness, which seems to say, as women in Russia do, Life may be hard, but I'm still a woman. They carry their femininity like a badge of courage, wanting to look like European women but not succeeding, only because you can tell how hard they are trying. Yet they are lovely, in a particularly Russian way. No one would ever mistake them for Finns, even though they may be wearing clothes from Finland or are living temporarily in Finland, even though clothes like these can be found in Russia, purchased at great expense to make Russians feel European. The most insulting thing you can say to Russians these days is that they are not Europeans, not really, even if they are, geographically speaking. It is because they are caught in a time warp, because their lives, their experience, shows in their faces, and because theirs is not a European experience. Still, they want to be really European. There is nothing they want more.The ticket agents are always faintly surprised when I ask for a second-class ticket on this afternoon's train without a reservation and then produce the necessary visa. Foreigners don't usually do things like that. Either they travel in groups with a guide, or else they try to buy a ticket but don't have a visa, or they have already bought their tickets ahead of time, paying in a foreigncountry in foreign currency and carrying with them only travel vouchers. What they are not used to is someone who acts like going to Russia is no different from going anywhere else, as the Filipinos did, but who has a visa, travels alone, and isn't afraid.It's true that I'm not afraid. I never have been. Fear wasn't bred into me the way it was bred into native Russians who lived with the system all of their lives. Nor was the typically American cold-war fear of Russia and Russians bred into me, since my parents were both "Russian," and, growing up in America, I always felt the ambiguity produced by recognizing oneself in the enemy.In 1988, at this very same ticket counter, after an unsmiling man in a gray military uniform with red stripes on the shoulders and a red star on his cap told me that there were no tickets available on the Leningrad train for a month, I simply boarded a Finnish train going in the same direction, traveled two hours farther down the line to Lahti, and waited for the Leningrad train to pull into the station, presenting my visa to the conductor and climbing aboard when he waved me on and seated me in a car where I turned out to be the only passenger. I never could understand why they preferred having an empty train to selling seats on that train, or why they lied about it, but after that, I always approached the ticket counter with confidence. Because I knew already that the sternness was a sham, and that in Russia there is a way to do everything if you persist. "Terpyenye y trud fsyo peritrut" roughly translated as "With patience and work everything will come to you"--still applies. On the other hand, there is another popular saying that might apply as easily: "Without papers, you are shit. With papers, you are a human being."In either case, I don't care that Russians never smile when they say yes (or no). Nor does it matter that the American habit of smiling under stress is something Russians find irritating.What matters is getting on this train. And the knowledge that B, wearing her white fox fur coat and hat, will be waiting for me at Leningrad's Finland Station. In her arms will be red carnations.
An enormous white banner flutters from the ceiling near the swinging doors that open onto the platform from which the Repin, the daily train to Leningrad, will soon be leaving. I look up at it. It reads:WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT LOVE AND PEACE FROM JOHN AND YOKOLast night, while I was flying across the Atlantic, my mind already leaving America behind, focusing tightly, intently, on Russia, the war in the Persian Gulf ended. Cheers went up all over America as Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf appeared on TV wearing his camouflage fatigues and boasting about how the Allies had tricked Saddam Hussein into believing that an amphibious attack was imminent, when in fact a land-based attack was sneaking around his troops to victory. How uncomfortable I am with this upsurge of superheated patriotism, this emphasis on rubbing Saddam's nose in the dirt. Humiliation rarely leads to improvement of character, but acts as a corrosive agent, breeding a hypersensitivity to one's condition and a continuing desire to settle scores. No people can long stand being made to feel inferior; it was, after all, humiliation and economic disaster that led from World War I to World War II. But today, the Berlin Wall is down, Germany is reunited, Iraq is defeated, and socialism is everywhere collapsing. Does this mean that, after almost fifty years, World War II is finally over, or has it just sprouted new, as yet invisible shoots? Today is America's hour of triumph.Why, then, do I feel such treasonous relief to be leaving behind this glorious New World Order for the safety of Russian uncertainties? Perhaps it's because deep down, I suspect myself of still being Russian.The Repin is now in the station, ready for boarding. I walk out onto the snowy platform, breathing in the Russian winter, even though it is still on the other side of the border, wheeling my overloaded luggage cart unsteadily across the packed whiteness. We all know, every newspaper in America has said so, that these are hard times in Russia. Chances are that there will be nothing to eat. For safety's sake, I have brought along five boxes of De Cecco spaghetti, two pounds of sun-dried tomatoes, Moroccan olives, anchovies, and several heads of garlic, as well as two liters of extra-virgin olive oil. Not exactly proletarian fare, but also things I'm not likely to find in Leningrad. Anyway, sitting all afternoon or all night around B's kitchen talking, I will probably forget about food. My mother once told me that after she and her family escaped from Russia in 1921, when she was twelve, she never again met anyone with whom she felt she could talk soul to soul. The Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya once recounted that when she used the word soul in a lecture at an American university, the audience laughed. B doesn't laugh. People don't laugh about the soul in Russia. They just worry about losing it.Almost fifteen years ago, on my first trip to Russia, during the Brezhnev years, I went searching for my mother's dacha by the sea in Odessa, with its miniature theater where the officers of the White Guard performed during the summer, its cherry orchard and fountain and avenue of lime trees that before the Russian Revolution led to a wide field and then a beach on the Black Sea shore. What I found was a dom otdykha, a vacation house, for families with tubercular children. I hadn't expected that. I hadn't expected to find the dacha at all, and in fact, followingmy mother's directions, had stumbled on it by accident. When I told an old babushka who lived there that it had been my mother's summer house before the Revolution, she insisted that I take a handful of earth with me to give to my grandmother in America. I did, but somehow along the way I must have lost it, and didn't even realize that it was gone. My mother shrugged. My grandmother didn't. This was what happened to souls in America. I had to come back to Russia to find mine.During my last trip to Russia in June, I went to Odessa with B again, but I couldn't remember the exact directions to the dacha and never was able to find it. Was it possible that it had simply disappeared? I spent three days looking for it, looking at places that resembled it but weren't it. I finally gave up. On the train back to Leningrad, we shared our compartment with a young painter, twenty years old. We were traveling illegally, without a visa for Odessa, and B had warned me against speaking either English or bad Russian, so I remained mysteriously silent despite his hearty Z'drastvuite and friendly-puppy manner. He began talking immediately, however, with none of the wariness of a Russian from Moscow or Leningrad. There was paint under his fingernails, and he carried a bag with a paintboard and pad. Instantly, he fell in love with B, and when he realized that my silence was not exotic but practical, he fell in love with me as well. He could not believe that B was Russian and I was American, and that we were traveling together and she had stayed in my home. He thought that she could not possibly be Russian. Where did I live in America? he asked. Where did she live in Leningrad? Impossible! It was all impossible! And then he asked me, "Do you know that we are a socialist country? Do you know what is socialism?" A few minutes later, he asked, "Do you think Bush wants peace or war?" and then, "Please, what are the words for this song 'Glory, Glory, Hallelujah'?" He was working in an Odessa theater, designing sets for a TennesseeWilliams play, and was on his way to Leningrad, having decided to take the examination for admission to the Institute for Theater and Cinematography in acting; for the exam he would have to recite one poem, do one scene and one improvisation, dance, and sing. He planned to recite Trofimov's monologue about philosophy and kindness from The Cherry Orchard, a poem of Krillov's called "The Rich Man and the Poet," some Japanese haiku, and Nikolai Tikhonov's World War II song about a soldier going to war. In preparation for the trip, he had brought with him pirozhki made by his grandmother, Odessa sausage (famous throughout Russia, he said fervently), and cucumbers and tomatoes from his family's garden. Later, he bought tiny strawberries in a newspaper cone from a peasant woman selling them at a Byelorussian station platform uncomfortably close to Chernobyl. We shared with him smoked ham from the Odessa farmers' market ("so expensive," he said) and blueberries and little sweet cherries, but kept for ourselves the five-kilo bucket of sour cherries we planned to use in Leningrad to make jam for the coming winter--if, of course, we could find enough sugar, which was always in short supply during jam-making season, but was in especially short supply prior to this winter of Leningrad's anticipated discontent."Do you like realist art or abstract art?" he asked."Good art," I said."Yes, but which? There are only two styles. In Russia, we have the realist tradition. In the West, you have abstract tradition. Which do you like better?""Too difficult to answer," I said. "Though I probably feel closer to the Russian tradition.""We in Russia don't need what you in the West call democracy," he said, giving up on that subject. "We need a good strong leader. This is also our tradition, and our problem is that we don'thave one now. But the catastrophe is happening so quickly. It is maybe too late already. The greatest experiment in kindness in the history of the world is dead. Socialism is finished. Every man has part of himself which is like an animal--only for himself, an egotist. The animal in man has finally won over the God in man."Only eight months have passed since that conversation. This time I am not just visiting Russia, biting into watermelon slices of my past history and spitting out the seeds. This time it will be seeds and all. In less than three short weeks, everyone will be voting on whether or not to maintain the Soviet Union as a union. The second question listed on the ballot will be whether or not Russia should have an independent president of the Republic. Everyone in Russia knows what this means. It means Yeltsin, a vote for Yeltsin, who has promised all things to all people, everything with the exception of socialism. For this, he has become a hero. A vote for Yeltsin probably does mean the end of socialism. "The greatest experiment in kindness in the history of the world" or a prison for the Soviet people? Or perhaps, yet again, an experiment that has never really been tried, at least not here?I remember Edmund Wilson's phrase from the 1971 preface to his classic 1941 study of the Russian Revolution, To the Finland Station: "It is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some country other than one's own." Last year I taped this sentence to the mirror above B's kitchen sink, which doubles as a bathroom sink, so that I could see it every morning when I brushed my teeth. Just to be sure I didn't forget.What I want to know now, though, is what has socialism (or its simulation) killed in the Soviets, and what has it created? What has capitalism killed in Americans, and what has it created? I need to ask these questions now, before socialism disappears altogether.As I struggle through the snow toward the platform for the Repin, three men approach me and offer to help with my things. I gladly accept. The man who takes over my luggage cart begins to speak to me in Russian. He wants to know if I would mind taking a letter with me and mailing it from Leningrad. He puts his fingers to his lips and pleads with me in a whisper as we trudge through the snow. "Hide it in your pocketbook," he says."Of course," I say immediately, taking the letter, which I know would need a month to get from Helsinki to Leningrad by mail, even though the cities are only four hours apart by train, not counting delays at the border. But why the whisper? Why the secret?He kisses my hand after he has brought my things to the train, and once I am inside the compartment, I see the three of them standing outside the window waving at me, like old friends. I close the compartment door, then lower the window shade and hold the letter up to the light, thinking that maybe it contains money which he is sending to his family in Leningrad. But there is nothing visible through the envelope aside from a letter. So why did he seem afraid? Is this the memory of censorship or its perpetuation? The address on the letter is in Yalta, the Crimea. Maybe he's a Crimean separatist? Yalta, of all places, just when the Persian Gulf War has ended, and all of Eastern Europe is once again being recarved.Someone knocks at the door. Instinctively, I put the letter under my skirt. The compartment is filling up. As the train pulls out of the station, my co-conspirators wave at me until the train is completely out of sight. I sit back in my seat and look out the window at the spruce trees heavy with snow. Each car has its own conductor, and the woman who is responsible for this one comes by to ask if anyone would like some tea. Within an hour, we all know each other: an Estonian psychologist, a Korean studentstudying in Leningrad, a West German computer scientist going to a conference on semiconductors in Sverdlovsk, and a heavy Russian woman who sits directly across from me and keeps wiping her brow anxiously and sighing, "Kakoy koshmar" ("What a nightmare"). The tea finally arrives in a glass, with an ornate nickel-plated holder that commemorates the launching of Sputnik, and two sugar cubes, which I save.The letter is still tucked under my skirt when the Estonian starts to speak about Estonian independence, which, if all goes well, should be achieved in two years. He talks about it as if Russia is somehow irrelevant to all this, as if Estonia has gone beyond thinking about Russia. The Russian woman sighs heavily again and again. Who has died? Who is suffering? But never, throughout the entire journey, does she reveal the source of her nightmare.
As the train pulls to a stop at the Finland Station, B appears in front of my compartment window, standing so close to it that her high aristocratic cheekbones, translucent complexion, and classic profile reminiscent of Akhmatova are framed by the dusty glass like a prerevolutionary sepia photograph. Her unsmiling face is luminous with feeling, but there are no flowers in her arms, and instead of her white fox fur coat and hat, she is wearing a dark-gray wool tweed coat, a red fedora, and a red woolen scarf that make her seem, if anything, more elegant than ever.Out on the platform, she apologizes for having come to the station empty-handed; the friend of a friend who promised to bring her to the station in his private car never showed up, and after standing in the street for half an hour, hoping for a ride in a taxi, car, or anything else on wheels, she finally gave up and took a bus to the station instead of stopping for flowers. "So much for that beautiful Russian soul you're so romantic about. People don't care about each other at all now."What about her fur coat? I ask. She shrugs and says that she doesn't wear it anymore. "No one goes out now anyway," she says. "Only prostitutes and speculators. After eight o'clock the city is empty." Besides, in these difficult times, it is provocative, dangerous, and perhaps immoral to show that you are okay, or at least appear to be. She is acutely aware of the distinction, and hardly needs me to remind her that her conductor husband bought the coat three years ago for two hundred dollars while on a performance tour in Greece, at a time when she is quite certain that he didn't have two hundred dollars. She wore it anyway, almost as an act of defiance. From her perspective, the homecoming present was a form of what she would call "protection money," and in this way no different from any of the thousand acts of bribery that pockmark everyday Russian life like a case of the measles; it was clearly intended, along with a sewing machine from Germany that she had long coveted, to help ease his passage through the rocky shoals of their marriage to the safety of a new marriage to a "woman from the West." Who, after all, but a woman from the West would pay two hundred dollars for her lover's wife's fur? Now that B and A are finally separated, however, the coat has to some extent lost its raison d'être, and B, who cares little about material possessions, is sincere when she says, "It doesn't matter," speaking as much of the marriage as the fur coat. "For what do I need a fur coat anyway?"In front of the Finland Station, she negotiates strenuously for a taxi, finally settling on a two-dollar fare with the driver of a private car who recently had a heart attack and needs extra money. Moments later, under the watchful eye of Lenin's statue urging the workers forward across the Neva to the Winter Palace, we cross the bridge into the city center, with its faded but still-ravishing beauty, like a former grande dame fallen on hard times who nonetheless cannot help comporting herself with her customary sense of dignity.Along the way to B's apartment, we pass the wrought-iron gates of the Summer Garden, its naked statues safely ensconced in their winter wooden enclosures, the Field of Mars, where in June the profusion of hundreds of varieties of lilacs exhaling into the white midnight sky is so intoxicating that it lingers in the imagination long into February, and the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage, all pale blue-green and dazzling white, facing out onto the vast openness of Palace Square. Across the river, on the shore of the icebound Neva Embankment, the gilded spire of the illuminated Peter and Paul fortress, where the tsars are buried and Dostoevsky once languished in prison, pierces the sky with a sharpness rendered all the more acute by the absence of anything taller in the vicinity, for in this city, unlike any other European or American city, there are no skyscrapers, no neon, no steel or glass or glittering storefronts. Just the naked, unblemished city itself, with the pastel hues of the palace façades built during the time of Catherine the Great reflecting in the icy river. A city that, visually at least, remains untouched by any of the confusing jumble of twentieth-century progress.A wave of nostalgia washes over me, despite my awareness of the rutted streets dug up in anticipation of needed repairs, and then, as perestroika's promise turned to poverty, abandoned to their asphaltless fates, the shops with their dirty windows behind which there is virtually nothing to show, and the crumbling courtyards of the center city, within which most people still live in communal flats. But I am too much enamored of this city to see its faults as anything other than a manifestation of its suffering, and I suspect that I might love it less were it more perfect, and thus, in some sense, more ordinary. Besides, I have always been reluctantly dragged along by progress, and if there is one thing communism has done for this city, it is to stave off progress. Russia lives in a time warp where every element of life moves at a lumbering pace, a pace all but destroyed by the modernworld, a knotty, tangled, intractably conservative pace. Will the capitalism now waiting so impatiently in the wings turn all that into something merely archival, a fossil imprint left behind by the onrushing sweep of the glacier, or will it endure, as it has endured every other onslaught for centuries, with its customary patience and stoicism? Napoleon and Hitler couldn't conquer Russia. Can Pepsi? Sure. Only a privileged Westerner can afford to think this way, but I still can't help begging the future to wait just a little bit longer, to spare this city from the turmoil of contemporary times, to let me climb quietly back through this window from the West in peace.
We met in 1986, when I was on tour for the first time in Russia, singing Boris Godunov. She was in the audience with her sister and her niece. It was November. At the end of the opera, they came up to the stage and spoke to me. I had no idea who they were, nor did I know that her husband was a musician at the Kirov Theater and that he had been the first person to initiate contact with our opera company. I certainly didn't know that he had been Communist Party vice-secretary for ideology for the musicians at the Kirov and had been forced to resign his position as a result of having friendly relations with Americans, or that her mother had spent ten years in the Gulag. She spoke in a low, soft, musical voice that suggested an unusual inner calm, and her cool, appraising gray eyes seemed to register, like some powerful magnetic field, everything that passed before her gaze. There was something catlike about her, and I have always been afraid of cats, with their strange compressed energy threatening to break out unexpectedly, their claws ready to scratch out my eyes in a second. They stare at me. I stare at them. There is no question which of us would win in a staring contest. Every cat that looks at me knows that I am a hopeless case, a dog for life.I looked away from B and asked her niece if she knew the Russian lullaby my mother had sung to me throughout my childhood; kneeling at the edge of the stage, I sang it to them in Russian. Then B invited me to come back to their apartment for tea. She met me in the lobby of my hotel. I didn't know that she wasn't allowed to come in. She never said anything about it, and I didn't ask, though I knew that other people were cautious about how and where they met me, and about telephone calls, which I was told to make only from pay phones on the street. Americans find Russian friendships demanding. "They give so much, but they expect so much," I have heard Americans say. I have even heard Russians who have been living in America for several years say about Russians who haven't, "They have no sense of limits." But as far as B is concerned, Americans don't know what friendship is. I wonder if this judgment includes me.
We are woken up at noon the day after my arrival by B's brother-in-law Pavel, ringing the doorbell, bringing carnations and champagne and enough food to get us through the first few days in Leningrad, since B has been in Moscow for the past week. Pavel works as the manager of a hotel restaurant, and in Russia this is as advantageous a job as it is possible to have. It means that you have permanent access to good food. Pavel has brought us a vacuum-packed side of smoked salmon, produced by a Soviet-German joint venture. The Russians provide the salmon, the Germans provide the packaging and handle the distribution in the West, they split the profits fifty-fifty. I am reluctant to comment that I think this is a lopsided deal, since what counts most is the salmon. On the other hand, if you don't have vacuum packs and can't produce them, what good does it do to have the salmon? In any case, it is superb. We will eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, alternating it with some sausagethat Pavel also has brought for us, and bread from the corner bakery--good, heavy Russian bread, the kind B dreamed about so often when she was visiting America.But Pavel has not only brought us something. He is waiting for something too. I look down at his shoes, dove-gray slip-ons with thick crepe soles, very soft and beautiful leather. The shoes surprise me, since B had told me that he had no shoes for spring and asked me to bring him some. But the ones he is wearing look like the shoes I couldn't afford to buy for him in New York, the ones reduced from $200 to $126. I thought I was being extravagant with what I brought: three pairs of Italian shoes from Sym's in New York, intended to astonish him with the revelation of beauty wedded to craftsmanship. Now I'm not so sure.While I am in the other room, B gives him the shoes. I don't hear a word of reaction, nothing but complete silence. I spent so much money, and he doesn't like them. It's true that one pair is size fifteen, and he wears size thirteen, but they were Ballys, on sale, reduced from $180 to $20. I've learned from being in Russia that you should always buy what is available if the price is right; if you don't need it yourself, someone else will, and then you can exchange it for something you do need. In this way, having an extra pair of shoes is like having money in the bank.I come into the living room, and ask if I can take a closer look at the shoes he is wearing, and if he can tell me where they come from. They are Salamanders, he says, from Germany."What are Salamanders?" I ask.He and B look at me as if I must be slightly retarded."They're the best," B says. "We used to have a lot of such shoes from Germany and Italy and Spain. Our stores were full of them. And they were only sixty roubles. Now it is impossible to find them, and if you can, the price is five or six hundred roubles. This is why our people are angry. It is the result of our perestroika."So I understand why Pavel is not overjoyed with the shoes,which for him are only a bitter reminder of how things used to be. The irony, however, is that most Americans can't afford German or Italian shoes like the ones he is wearing either. Except most Americans probably could never afford them, and never expected to, whereas he feels entitled to them, the most dangerous legacy of socialism. As they say, it's easier to go up than to come down. Yes, I agree: people should be entitled to a good education and medical care and a decent place to live and a job and enough food to eat and security in their old age. But these things to which all people should be entitled are things that many Americans have never had, things they only dream of or hope for in the future, if they even consider them to be possibilities for themselves. In Russia, however, the romance of "having," the raw, exotic exposure to Western consumer goods (perhaps of dubious usefulness, but nonetheless imbued with dazzling panache) flooding in from the West, or displayed to Russians when they travel to the West, is beginning to take its disorienting toll, producing a kind of frenzy, a consumer madness that makes them covet everything they see, especially if it comes in an appealing package. All their lives they have been hoarding snippets of what is necessary, what is available, and now they see places in the West where everything is available, and they're still hoarding, buying until they collapse from exhaustion and indigestion. This frenzy for having is much more powerful for them right now than the drab, unadvertised, unglamorous fundamentals to which they have always felt entitled, and which they take for granted in much the same way that we take for granted the right to express our opinions. The Russians, I'm afraid, are in for a rude awakening. German shoes are just the tip of the iceberg.
Late in the afternoon, in waning silvery light, we go for a walk to the farmers' market across the Neva on Vasilevsky Island. Wecross the Potseluiev Bridge over the Moika River, from which I can see the gilded dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral in one direction, and in the other, the pale-blue confection of Nikolsky Cathedral, its three domes transforming themselves as the light shifts, sometimes seeming to be silver, sometimes silvery blue, sometimes platinum, ringed with a silver halo so delicate that it appears to merge and dissolve into the sky above it. Behind it is the cobalt-blue dome of the Troitsky Cathedral, really quite far off, on the opposite bank of the Fontanka River, but from here it seems to be pasted onto the back of Nikolsky's dome, echoing it like a half-moon in eclipse. Nikolsky is a working church; the Troitsky is not. For the past thirty years, like Cinderella dressed in rags, it has been used for storing potatoes, though the penetrating blue of its dome never fails to draw attention to the beauty of its true identity.The Russian Orthodox Church is steeped in a sense that beauty itself is redemptive, and every time I glimpse Nikolsky out of the corner of my eye, or face it head-on, or sit in the park that surrounds it, I am drawn in by its splendid yet intimate harmony, at once joyful, playful, and serene. But I am often embarrassed by its effect on me. After all, I am a practicing Jew, and all around me, Jews are in flight from Russia. Every week, tour buses pull up in front of the synagogue near B's apartment. The surprise is that the buses contain not only American Jews but non-Jewish Russian tourists visiting churches of various denominations and learning about Judaism from their tour guide. I never go to the synagogue. Instead, I turn to Nikolsky Sobor and its park, which have always been my retreat, soothing as a baby blanket. I am ashamed to admit this, but it is true. I will never be anything but Jewish, yet I cannot imagine living here, in a neighborhood where it would be impossible to see the Nikolsky.At the market, it is late in the day and long stretches of metal countertop are already bare. Under the outer arches of the market is a stall selling beer, and the line in front of the stall is long, rowdy, and bleary-eyed. We walk past it into the courtyard that houses the market complex, going into the warehouse-sized "root-vegetable room" to buy potatoes, cabbage, beets, and onions, and passing on from there into the next huge building. Here, pork and beef are butchered from whole animals on huge chopping blocks directly behind the counters, the ax-strokes resonating with great thumps throughout the high-ceilinged room. Women stand longingly in clusters before the meat counters, asking, "Pochom?" ("How much?"), then lapse into silence and wander away. On the other side of the room, they sample the farm women's fresh sour cream from little slips of paper dipped into buckets, and chunks from the wheels of farmer cheese covered in muslin. Again, "Pochom?" followed by silence. At one counter, someone is selling rabbits, but a rumor has been going around that hundreds of rabbits injected with cancer cells were stolen from a lab. Despite the strict controls on what comes into the farmers' market, no one is buying rabbit today, and the farmer selling them, who has only a few rabbits, is standing alone and silent.The market is crowded, but B says that people shop here only when someone in the family is sick or a child is on a special diet or they have guests or it is a holiday. Here is the finest in fresh food, without nitrates or chemical filters or stabilizers. Food bought outside, on the street surrounding the market, is cheaper, but also riskier. Maybe it came from soil contaminated by Chernobyl and couldn't be certified to be brought into the market. The people who live around Chernobyl are trying to survive just like anyone else; they sell what they can to whoever is willing to buy."It used to be cheaper in the farmers' markets than in state stores," B says. "But now you have to be either rich or desperate to buy anything here.""Well, I'm not rich and I'm not desperate," I say."You're a foreigner. Chuzhie. Ni nasha. Not one of us.""Thanks," I say. "It's always nice to feel welcome."B looks at me and then looks away. She says nothing."You don't understand what I love about this market," I insist. "The tomatoes from Azerbaijan that we bought last spring made American tomatoes taste like rubber balls. The pork you get here can only be found in America on small family farms, where the pigs are fed apples and natural-food garbage. The slop pails on the second-floor landing of your building, where we deposit all of your food garbage for the trucks to collect and use as pig food--things like that don't even exist in America. There are a lot of things you have here that we don't have in America.""Why are you telling me this?" B says."Because I'm sure that everyone here isn't rich or desperate.""You can think whatever you want," B says coolly. "It's a free country."That throws me. Of course she knew it would. I wish she would argue with me. It might make me feel better. I know she has food coupons for sugar, meat, sausage, kasha, and macaroni that she gives to her mother. I know she gives her coupons for wine and vodka to her upstairs neighbors. But why should that make me feel ashamed of my love for Azerbaijani tomatoes, or the fact that I can afford to buy our groceries?All around us, I hear snippets of conversation about the price increases that went into effect at the beginning of the year. Ryzkov, Gorbachev's premier, who has a gentle, intelligent face like so many of the other people around Gorbachev, has just gone on TV to announce a doubling of the official price of meat. He always takes the time to explain the reasons for whathe is doing. Then there is a storm of protest, and the price hikes are retracted. He can't seem to bear the prospect of causing pain. He is an idealist, the Russian word carrying the Russian contempt reserved for anything associated with ideology. People here are allergic to ideology. It was idealists who thought they could make Russia a better place, idealists who believed in the "New Soviet Man." Hah! Look at him, this New Soviet Man. That's what our idealism has produced. Besides, how can an idealist like Ryzkov reform the economy?The price of meat has been the same throughout the entire Soviet Union ever since the 1960s. So has the price of bread. You get used to it being that way, to giving day-old bread to the birds, to buying eggs that are more than three days old at a reduced price. Russian doctors recommend eating eight times a day. Meat and potatoes. Whatever time of day you walk into a Russian home, there is always something on the table. B says that Americans don't know how to eat, that in America she was always hungry. What do you mean? I say. How could you have been hungry? We ate so well. No normal bread, B says. No normal soup. No normal tea. What do you Americans have against meat? Don't you know that pizza isn't food? Wait a minute, I say. We never ate pizza. And you cried when you went into that New York meat market with me and saw what they had in the case. I remember you crying. I was crying for a different reason, she says. What reason? I say. Never mind, she says. I don't want to talk about it.Before she left Maine to return to Russia, an American woman we knew asked if she could send a food basket for a friend back to Leningrad with B. The basket had macaroni in it, split peas, packaged Kraft cheese, and miniature smoked sausages. B said that she would be embarrassed to give someone such a present. Cheese like rubber. Split peas and macaroni that we get for coupons. Sausages that taste like I don't know what,maybe sweetened cardboard. How could this woman think that Russians eat worse than that? Better to send ten dollars, or maybe some aspirin, the kind that fizzes up when you put it into a glass of water. Or, just for fun, how about those little blue bars that you put in the toilet tank to turn the water blue?We walk back through the snow to B's apartment with a week's worth of groceries packed into her sturdy Soviet rolling cart with its built-in canvas shopping bag. It is four o'clock in the afternoon and already close to dark. The street lamps reflect in the canals as the full tramways make their arching turn at the edge of the Moika, where it meets the Kriukov Canal, and snake around onto the straightaway to the Kirov Theater and Nikolsky. Alongside the stage entrance to the Kirov, the tramway bedding and rails have been dug up, abandoned by a crane that seems to be idling permanently in midair. Everywhere are mountains of crushed rock delivered to the site a year ago, left unused through a winter and a spring and another winter, diminished only by slow but steady theft. Is this the decay of neglect or the decay of trauma, of shell shock, of "the transition period to capitalism," its rosy future imbued with the same lingering sweetness as once was signified by its predecessor red star? The statues, with water dripping down their necks from widening cracks in the classic surrounding masonry, look down on us sorrowfully. All around us are houses that have been gutted, though their façades have been left intact. B says that they're waiting for the city to have enough money to fix them. She remembers the days when Leningrad's houses were painted every year, when the streets were clean, the roads repaired. But what is the point? she says. It only makes one crazy to think about it.A musician carrying a cello case and a dancer from the Kirov who recognize B stop to speak to her. They evidently know who I am, but don't speak to me or even acknowledge me. B is silent on the way back home. "We were good friends," she finallysays. "Bivsheh." Formerly. Before. That has become the saddest word in the Russian language to me, signifying memories of a life that is vanishing from one day to the next. Was it better or worse? When B says "before," does she mean before perestroika? Before her separation from A? Before her trip to America? Before A began his romance with a Western woman? When did "before" end and "now" begin? B's sorrows balloon into the courtyard as we wheel the shopping cart up over the entry step and close the apartment door behind us.Copyright © 2003 by Ingrid Bengis