Memories from Moscow -- Part 2

After finally letting myself fall asleep in the heat, I slept without waking until 1:00 the next afternoon. By the time I woke, Miriam had already packed her bag for the day and was just waiting for me to get up to escape the heat. The plan was to go to Café Pushkin, the most expensive restaurant in Moscow, because they were guaranteed to have working air conditioning and wireless internet access. We had been invited to stay at her friend Catherine’s house which had extra beds, high test air conditioning and sealed windows that night. So we only had to make it through the day until we reached our luxury version of a refugee camp. Miriam was sure that if we ordered carefully we could work in the air conditioned Café Pushin until the evening and then go directly to Catherine’s limiting exposure to the outside world.

When the taxi called from downstairs, we donned our masks and entered the smog and 105 degree heat. Ten paces outside the door there was a man sprawled out prone on the street. “Is he dead?” I looked at Miriam who grimaced. When we got closer she recognized him as a local drunk. He didn’t appear to be breathing. However, as we approached he choked on his phlegm, briefly opened his eyes and rolled to his side. At least he wasn’t dead.

Not Dead Drunk (though perhaps dead drunk) Laying in the Street

In the cab Miriam confirmed that the driver would not be charging us an extra 30% for air conditioning and then tried to engage him in shared exclamations about what a nightmare this all was. “What are you talking about?” he shrugged. “The smog, the fires, the carbon monoxide in the air,” she waved her hands. “Bah,” he said “I don’t believe any of it. It’s all a conspiracy to make the people who own the mask companies rich.” This completely exasperated Miriam. “But you can see the smoke hanging in the air. You can feel it burn your lungs if you open the window. Look there, you can’t see the Kremlin! Of course it’s real!”  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he waved her away, “a little smoke, who cares? You foreigners get all riled up about nothing. And you try to make everyone else panic so you can control us.” She sighed too fatigued from the heat to argue. Another mile down the road as the driver dropped us off among the limousines and Hummers lined up at the entrance to Café Pushkin, he gestured to a disheveled woman walking from car to car selling hospital masks. “See,” he said, “It’s all about the money.”

Taxi Shot

Hot Shot Lady Making Tons of Money Off the Crisis, Clearly

Entering Café Pushkin was like entering an alternate universe—an alternate 19^th century universe, that is. Under grandiose marble ceilings, slim waiters in waistcoats wove their way between Doric columns to serve their well-healed patrons with one hand behind their back and a bow. Just as we were entering, Miriam got a call from France 24, a new English language media outlet in Paris, asking her to do a radio interview. In the past few days she had been making a killing speaking about the fires and smog on various channels without their own correspondents in Moscow, always ending with or pausing mid-interview for a dramatic (though never entirely faked) cough. She was sure at this rate that she would at least be able to cover the medical costs for treating her uninsured foot at a respectable hospital in the States. A woman with blond braids to her waist in a long flowing tunic seated me in a red velvet upholstered chair at a table for two by the window. When Miriam joined me she expressed concern about carbon monoxide leakage through the window, but conceded that it was worth the risk to watch the people and cars cutting through the smog out on the street.

When we first entered Café Pushkin we were like wilted flowers. These two bedraggled urchins with long faces, covertly using their napkins to wipe sweat from their brows, who didn’t quite fit among the rest of the upscale clientele. I felt like a zombie made of jello having lost all higher level cognitive functioning and simply oozing out of my chair and onto the table. I could barely keep my head up without propping it on my arm. We ordered a few salads and an assortment of piroshki stuffed with various delicacies. And slowly, slowly, the air conditioning worked its magic bringing us back to life.

Wilted Me with Basic Necessities: Water, Mask and Delectable Piroshki

And when we were sufficiently revived, we delighted in the delicious bits of food served up to us with a bow on bone white porcelain plates. Perched at our table amongst the elite now untouched by the elements but still wary of fire tornadoes, uranium laced smog, diminishing levels of oxygen relative to carbon monoxide and other potential plagues to come, Miriam commented that she felt like Americans ejoying their last palatial meal before the fall of Saigon. By the time Miriam's two friends from the other night came to join us, Miriam and I were fully revitalized and had somewhat inappropriately taken over our corner of Café Pushkin despite the fact that we had really only ordered bottles of water and the occasional piroshok for the past few hours. Full of banter and energy we’d been exchanging computers to watch new youtube footage of the fires, laughing loudly at shared jokes and hushing ourselves as more respectable diners turned to stare. The waiters had been lovely in humoring us with our laptops spread across the table, plugged into sockets at the side of the grand dining room, their cords just waiting to trip an unsuspecting oligarch’s mistress in her spiked Prada heals. Miriam's British friend Amie didn’t help our cause as she, also without air conditioning in her apartment and having walked there in her mask, slouched up to the table devastated and sweating in a tank top and short shorts that she was having trouble keeping up because she’d lost so much weight from the sauna-like heat. Miriam's guy friend just looked mortified to be seen with the unseamly lot of us. Luckily, however, they both ordered food and helped us drag out our stay for the last hour we needed before heading over to Catherine’s.

Very Civilized from Afar

Ever Slightly Less So From Up Close

Albeit Well Connected

From air conditioned café to air conditioned taxi to air conditioned expat apartment in a building designed and owned by a Western company, life in the smog had significantly improved. Catherine had made a delectable lasagna that we ate with a chilled rosé and it was almost as if everything had righted itself, except for the fact that we couldn’t open the windows or leave the apartment. After watching the preposterous apocalyptic John Cusack film 2012 in which sun spots cause natural disasters that flood the earth and end the human race, which seemed only appropriate given our plight, the floods in Pakistan, landslides in China and current reports of heightened sun spot activity, I took the top of a queen sized bunk bed and another colleague of Catherine’s escaping the heat took the bottom as Miriam had passed out on the sofa 10 minutes into the movie. I arranged with Catherine to be woken at 8:30 because all of my stuff was still at Miriam’s and technically I was supposed to leave Moscow the next day on a 1:00pm flight to Kazan, that is, if the planes were flying.

After another delicious hunk of lasagna and smoky black tea for breakfast and the lovely company of girls around the kitchen table in Catherine’s palatial apartment, I could not bear to insert myself into the news reports that were coming from the airport. Flights had been grounded at Domodedovo due to visibility issues since the day before and one blogger who had slept on the floor there waiting for her flight reported temperatures well over 100 degrees and over 4,000 people cramming into the waiting areas, most of whom were trying to get on new flights. Moreover, I was still not entirely sure that I should go to Kazan at all. What if I got myself out there and conditions worsened and it made it that much harder for me to get out of the country? Again, it seems a silly concern in retrospect, but at the time most Western Embassies including the US were evacuating all family members and non-essential staff from Moscow. Meanwhile, the news was reporting that levels of carbon monoxide had reached 7 times the “natural level” the day before. The four of us sat on wikipedia trying to interpret what that might mean—whether the air itself could become toxic enough to put us slowly to sleep, whether these fires could act like a giant carburetor in the sky blowing fumes into the closed garage of Moscow killing us all.

And it was soon thereafter that Catherine went over to the window ledge to see why her little song birds were making such a racket only to find one dead on the bottom of the cage and another having a hard time flying. Miriam has since said that this was the point at which she was closest to panicking, although it was not obvious to me at the time. Catherine was of course devastated over losing her little finch and worried for the other two, but we were both wide-eyed with fear that the poor finches were like canaries in the coal mine indicating that the air was becoming too toxic to breathe. For the rest of the morning Miriam and I watched the birds—I can’t help the pun—like hawks, monitoring their behavior and breathing. The one recovered all flying abilities and the other showed no signs of ill health so we gradually came around to the idea that the finch had died of a cause other than carbon monoxide poisoning. However given our tenuous grasp of the situation at hand, even though my flight was not technically canceled that Sunday, I called up Siberian Airlines and rescheduled for Tuesday hoping to have enough information to make a smart decision by then.

The next few days at Catherine’s were surreally lovely, (minus the tragedy of the bird death of course and the fact that the poor little guy was laid to rest in an ice cream container coffin on a pillow in the hall so that every time I passed it my mind would play the same nasty trick on me in which it would first think “oh yay, ice cream!” and then plummet back to the reality of “oh no, dead bird”). Each night Catherine insisted on cooking wonderful meals for us and so we sat with wine and great conversation around the spacious kitchen table, eating and chatting, listening to a great soundtrack of music including the newest National album, clearing the table and each taking up our laptops to work and play and share things from the outside world in what Catherine dubbed “a modern day sewing circle.”

Modern Day Sewing Circle

We took an elaborate photo series of ourselves in our masks playing musical instruments, doing yoga, posing with a life-sized Soviet boxing dummy, though those have not been released to the greater public as they are quite embarrassing. Miriam started doing live television interviews that we would watch on our computers. Eventually, Amie came to join us with her cat Frederick who recovered quickly from his heat lethargy after a few minutes in the air conditioning and began stalking the bathroom doors behind which Catherine had cordoned off her birds. That last night Catherine invited another writer friend to join the festivities, who was full of great travel stories and tangentially appears in my first Kazan blog entry as the purveyor of the cognac that incapacitated me on my flight out of Moscow. And it was if we were in a space bubble hovering just above Moscow close enough to see the tragedy unfolding but protected enough not to have to live the worst parts of it ourselves.

It was a wonderful 3 day party at Catherine’s and yet in the same way that we could sit in Café Pushkin and pay $10 per bottle of water and use of an air conditioned space, there was something vaguely colonialist and disconnected about the experience. It’s exactly this conundrum that keeps me up at night, often quite literally, and motivated me to do the PhD rather than settling into my well paid OSCE job in Kosovo after SAIS. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m any closer to formulating, let alone answering, the research question that will shed sufficient light on why my friends and I get all the good things in life while other people suffer. And even more problematically, why my friends and I get paid exorbitant amounts of money to be flown around from place to place in our hovering Western air bubbles of comfort to “help” the other people suffering when most of us are never actually exposed to what they are going through in a way that might make us capable of helping. Well, I’m actually quite tired right now surrounded by decorative stuffed animals in my bed in Kazan so I suppose I will save further reflections on global inequality and my culpability therein for a significantly more sleepless night and clearer mind. Or maybe since I am after all now studying at the university that brought us Vladimir Ilyich Lenin I will leave you with the ever pressing question that he in the end answered incorrectly but remains worth posing: "What is to be Done?"