Memories from Moscow -- Part 1

Ok, I lied. Before I bring you any new stories from Kazan I want to pause and return to stories from the chaos of Moscow upon my arrival in Russia before I get blurry on the details. My plan was to land in Moscow on a Friday, stay two nights in the city with my friend Miriam, a freelance journalist who’s been in Moscow since we graduated SAIS together in 2006 and who’d even spent a few years there as a journalist before that. This would be my last big hoorah with her and her glitzy, sophisticated journalist friends before heading off to the significantly less cosmopolitan city of Kazan and onto even more remote provinces of the Volga region for the year. I knew in the lead up to my arrival that there had been an intense and completely aberrant heatwave across “European” Russia that had been decimating crops and cattle and caused a huge spike in the mortality rate due to drownings as people were trying to keep cool in all the wrong places and often with ill-advised amounts of alcohol in their systems. Temperatures were literally off the charts as Russia had never in its thousand years of weather archiving seen temperatures over 100 degrees, let alone temperatures over 100 degrees consistently over the course of days and weeks and months. This heat wave then led to a series of fires, both forest fires above ground across huge swathes of territory and peat bog fires burning underground in areas surrounding Moscow. And this all sounds very blasé. California has forest fires every year. They tragically destroy people’s homes and get put out over the course of a few weeks. We feel bad in the abstract but that's about it. Forest fires don’t evoke the same kind of visceral reaction as more glamorous natural disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes. And yet, if you see the videos of these fires from the ground, it is a completely different story. It literally looks like armageddon, with walls of flame as far as the eye can see shooting high above the structures they’re destroying and ripping through villages and towns at impossible speeds. It literally looks like hell on earth. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttBbMqosm8Y&feature=player_embedded

(this video properly evokes the *terror* of the situation)

Just before I arrived in Moscow, Miriam had gone out to villages in a region outside of Moscow with two journalist friends to report on the fires. The pictures and stories she brought back were heart-breaking.  Her photos from the aftermath of these forest fires look as bad if not worse than the devastation of war I’ve witnessed in any post-conflict country. Displaced peoples with nothing but the clothes on their backs crammed into awkward communal spaces, desperate, poor, their lives in ruin. And yet still the sound of “forest fires in Russia” or the even more obscure “peat bog fires in Russia” does not evoke a sense of global tragedy and with it donations of various resources from around the world to help these people.

Remains of a Village

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

Displaced Couple in Their 70s

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

The Fire Brigade??

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

As soon as I landed in Moscow I was made immediately aware of the level of crisis across Russia. I took one step off of the plane and not only was the heat overwhelming, as if I’d walked directly into the dry baking air of a cedar sauna with all of my clothes on, but the air was so full of a thick ashy smoke that everyone on the gangplank to the airport almost immediately started coughing. It’s so hard to describe because it wasn’t just a smell. There was of course the smell of ash and fire, acrid and thick like bad cigar or cheap cigarette smoke. But beyond that there was a tactile sensation of suddenly being made aware of your entire respiratory system—the inner lining of your nose and throat, chest and lungs—places in your body you don’t usually sense things physically. It’s as if they had all suddenly woken up from a dormant state in the stasis of my body in a panic and had begun sounding the alarm that they were under attack from invading particulate matter. “Get us out of here,” they screamed. And yet there I was in the Moscow airport with the air as thick with smoke and smog inside as out, with nowhere to escape. I was met at the airport by a driver friend of Miriam’s and as we made our way through the mid-day traffic it looked strangely like I had arrived in Moscow in the dead of winter. All around there was that gauzy romantic haze that blankets a city in the midst of its first snowfall of the year. Buildings blur into the muddled white of falling snowflakes so that it’s impossible to make out detail and your vision adjusts to a softer point of view. The scenes of the city as we drove along were exactly like that first enveloping of winter and would have been lovely had I arrived at the beginning of December but dotted with women sweating through sleeveless shirts and men having stripped themselves down to their bare chests at the beginning of August in temperatures the likes of which I’d only experienced in Tajikistan, these Christmas scenes were extremely alarming (think nuclear winter).

A Church Amidst the Smog

I arrived at Miriam’s apartment and she hobbled to the door to greet me and my massive bags. Over tea she explained that while going out to get the story in the villages, she had had a more intimate experience with the fires than intended. Setting herself up to take a photograph of the ruins of a house, she had stepped backward into what she said felt like a sand pit closing around her feet. Immediately her shoes started melting into her skin and she instinctively jumped out of them. But one foot was more fortunate than the other in its landing and the result was first degree burns to the right and third degree burns to the left. She had the less fortunate foot wrapped tightly in gauze and had been to two of the “international” medical centers, which were apparently only international in their pricing structures. At the Swiss medical center, where the Russian interpretation of “Swiss” was a musician plucking a large harp in the lobby, they had popped the blisters which Miriam had since read on the internet was the worst thing to do. Meanwhile, at the European Medical Center, her Chechen doctor had charged her $125 for re-wrapping the foot in gauze and telling her to stay off of it for a few weeks. The foot when she unwrapped it to change the bandages was melted and misshapen like the foot of a wax dummy held over a flame. The upside to the third degree burns however was that her nerve endings had been destroyed and she didn’t feel any pain.

Poor Miriam!

Poor Foot!!

Miriam’s apartment, technically her émigré father’s apartment that she has inhabited for the last few years, was lovely, spacious and homey with only one drawback—it had no air conditioning. This was the norm across Moscow she informed me. Summer in Russia for the last five years had generally involved light sweaters and required at most open windows and a fan. She said that she couldn’t remember a day before this heatwave that she had even thought of getting an air conditioner for the place. Worse yet, because of the smog, which was still palpable inside her apartment but significantly less so than out in the open air, we had to keep all of the windows completely shut. And so the math went something like this: 105 degree weather, 10 closed windows, 2 girls, 1 fan. She had thought about checking us into a hotel but rumor was they were all booked and at astronomical prices that in brutally capitalist Russia had started rising and then soaring with demand.  

Miriam started calling around to restaurants to make sure that their air conditioning was working before we picked one as our evening refuge from the heat. The brief conversation with the proprietor of the first restaurant, “Scandinavia,” which sounded like a sure bet, went something like this loose interpretation from the Russian: “Is your air conditioning working?” “Yes, but not successfully.” “Ok, so is it warm or hot in the restaurant?” “Hot. Would you like to reserve a table” “Thank you, no.” The next effort bore more fruit and Miriam booked us a table directly under the air conditioning unit" at the stylish Apartment 44. We donned the construction masks that I had luckily bought from CVS almost as a gimmick the day before leaving the States and went out into the ashen night.

Forlorn in Our Masks

There was something terrifying about going out into the streets in our masks.  Usually packed with cars and people the streets of Moscow were empty and the headlights of the few people still on the road were muted by smog. It was like a Cold War nightmare of nuclear winter. The restaurant when we arrived was lovely, made to look like a homespun apartment with thick wooden chairs and tables, victorian wallpaper and long patterned curtains all slightly mismatched for romantic effect, however, it was not air conditioned. The one sad wall unit was pumping away on full blast but just barely eased the heat into the low 90s. Moreover, the seat under the air conditioner we’d been promised had been taken and we were offered a nice table on the terrace with a breeze. “Was that a joke?” Miriam asked appalled, our masks still dangling around our necks. But that was the first of many blasé reactions to the ash-laden air that we would hear from the Muscovites who denied it was a problem. We sat ourselves at a sweaty table in the middle of the room and ordered bottle after bottle of water and had the waitress bring us cupfuls of ice some of which to put in our drinks and the rest for cooling off wrists, palms and the backs of our necks. We were joined by two of Miriam’s charming journalist friends, one a guy who had dated a friend of mine a few years back and who didn’t seem as concerned with the state of the city as the rest of us, likely because he had air conditioning in his apartment which he very generously offered to share, and another a British girl who joined me and Miriam in our panic not only because her single fan was not enough to combat the heat for herself but because her poor otherwise healthy young cat Frederick had taken to lolling on his back with his feet in the air and his tongue out in response to the soaring temperatures in her apartment. The vet had recommended that she wrap him in a cool wet towel and in very uncharacteristic cat response the wet towel had elicited much purring.

And now that we have all survived, our panic over the “crisis” that weekend and particularly our conversation at the table over dinner and drinks seems a bit unfounded, perhaps even hysterical. But this is the power of fear. In the moment, it is real. It is the most real, present and pressing “fact” in the landscape of reality. And in this case it was driven not just by assessments of our environment—anomalous inescapable smoke choking the city—and rumors of worse to come as in the reports that the fires were heading for the dry toxic ground around Chernobyl and would send nuclear material into the thick of the smog and the predictions of “fire tornadoes” or swirls of fire whipping across the city that had once wiped out a city of 30,000 in Japan but most of all by our inability to trust the information coming from the Russian government. At that point they were being completely silent. Any announcements they had made about the air conditions were deliberately crafted to assuage panic. But there was absolutely no faith that we had all of the information on the table in front of us with which to make informed decisions about whether to wait this out or flee the city. This was particularly difficult for me because I’d just arrived, had no priors other than that the fires were sweeping across many of the republics I had wanted to stay in and study over the course of the year and could not determine if we were all just fanning the flames of fear for the fun of it like a good ghost story or a scary movie and I needed to put the hysterics aside, calm myself and proceed with my plans for the year or if this was a case in which it was actually quite stupid to proceed with half-baked plans I’d hatched in the ivory tower of academia and stubbornly following through with them would be a suicide mission, would push me deeper into a hell that was not my own, not my responsibility, not necessary for me to experience and might possibly require sacrificing my life to.

Mugging Panic for the Camera

Back out in the apocalyptic city, masks securely fastened, we got into a taxi and instructed the driver to make three stops and to roll up the window and turn on the air-conditioning. “That will be 30% extra for the air-conditioning,” he dead-panned. Miriam flew into a rage at the driver over this latest extortion in the midst of a security and health crisis. The driver called his superiors to confirm that indeed it was company policy that air-conditioning would now cost 30% in addition to the already high cab fares across Moscow. I tried to re-focus Miriam from her escalating rage at the driver to the plight of our return to her single-fanned apartment and how it might be better to stay at the air-conditioned flat of her friend who'd invited us to stay, even though this regrettably would mean sleeping on the floor since his roommate had a friend in town on the sofa. We made a deal that we would give sleeping at her place a try and if it was too intense we would retreat to the friend’s floor.

Unfortunately, this bargain went in different directions. After we had positioned ourselves on her bed with fair allotments of the fan breeze, Miriam, accustomed to and worn out by the heat, immediately passed out. I, on the other hand, jet-lagged and full of nerves, started sweating and slowly crying. I remembered a completely unrelated conversation I had had with my father a few weeks ago. We had been talking about a heatwave in Philadelphia and he’d said, “the problem is that these little old ladies are scared of a draft so they shut their windows and think that turning on a fan will be enough to cool them off but they’ve basically just shut themselves in a convection oven and are slowly baking to death.” This wasn’t how I wanted to go. I looked at my skin and I swear it looked pinker, like I’d acquired a sun burn without being in the sun—surely, evidence that I was baking in Miriam’s convection oven of an apartment. The choice was impossible—open a window, choke on the smog and die from carbon monoxide poisoning or sit here and slowly overheat all my organs like a frog who gets lulled to sleep in a pot of slowly boiling water that he would have immediately jumped out of if thrown into at its end state of boiling. The crying continued. Miriam snored. I grabbed my laptop and went to the bathroom. Now Miriam’s apartment is in no way ostentatious other than the somewhat out of place 5 person jacuzzi in her bathroom. I climbed in, balanced my laptop securely along the ledge and set the faucets to settings as cold and strong as they got. Soothed by the cool water on my limbs despite the fact that the tub was filling at such a slow rate that I had only an inch or two to sit in after an hour, I scanned the news of the day across the world and across the lives of my friends on facebook to distract myself. Eventually, around 5am I crawled into bed wet. I looked over at Miriam and for a moment wasn't sure if she was breathing but completely overwhelmed, I too could do nothing but succumb to sleep myself even if it might have been my last.