Sud'ba

Oh where to start. I have been promising people that I will fill them in on my new living situation. Gone are the days of force feeding, gratuitous nudity and showering under the judgmental gaze of the creepy baby-doll. I have moved on from Aygul and entered the era of Valeria, a retired ethnically Russian school teacher in her mid-50s with two daughters my age who have children she takes care of during the day, thankfully not in our apartment, which is quite spacious (and plush toy free) with a separate bedroom for each of us, a living room, big kitchen and balcony where she spends most of her down-time chain-smoking. She’s a voluptuously large woman with short bleach blond hair she curls with rollers in the morning and blue eyes that are now more bloodshot than bright, but I have a feeling she must have been quite stunning in her youth. Will I refrain from making the clichéd observation about how Russian women are these preternaturally ectomorphic creatures with legs that go on forever, near perfect curves and striking features until they secure a man at which point they balloon into shapeless sallow babushki? No, but I will state it interrogatively to convey how tired a trope it is and then say I am convinced that Valeria is a case in point. Her eating habits are atrocious, all meats wrapped in dough and fried, all fresh vegetables saturated in oil and salt. Her drinking and smoking habits are worse. And it all gives her a kind of glazed over, harsh, jowly look, like someone who would spend a lot of time being angry if she wasn’t so depressed and weighed down by her vices.

The first question Valeria asked me was “Do you pay me or does the university pay me?” And from that moment on I knew we would get along. This was an economic transaction. I was renting a room in her house and signing up for polite conversation only when it suited both our needs. We had one initial confrontation about what she would feed me that went as follows. She asked me what time I wanted to eat breakfast in the mornings and was not very happy when my answer was a lot of squirming and an “I’m not sure, I don’t entirely know my schedule yet” to avoid locking myself into another set of rules governing my food consumption. Somewhat confused she asked, “Well, what do you want to eat for breakfast?” And again I hemmed and hawed a bit. “I kind of want to eat when I get up and am hungry and eat what I am in the mood for at the time.” She again looked mystified by this. “Do you like kasha? Cereal? Blini?” “Yes, yes,” I said “though I prefer blini with meat for dinner than sweet blini for breakfast.” At this she was terribly taken aback and looked like she might get angry, “They told me that I only needed to feed you breakfast,” she said in a tight voice. “Oh really,” my eyes lit up with glee, “Great, really that’s great.” Half of my food battle was already won.

The next day I woke up at 10:00 tired from all the packing and moving and strolled into the kitchen to find Valeria gone and a cold cup of tea with the bag still in the mug sitting next to a sad open faced sandwich of white bread, butter and an old greasy piece of cheese covered with a napkin like it had died and was waiting to be carted off to the morgue. I turned my nose up and left it on the table as I headed out for the day. I knew that this might provoke Valeria but I didn’t want to play the throw the inedible sandwich in the trash outside to make her feel better game. I was done vanishing food in my pockets and into the toilet like some kind of closet anorexic. The sad sandwich seemed symbolic of her lack of desire to cook for me and I would leave it there to make the point that the wall had fallen and we didn’t need to live like communists anymore. She didn’t need to pretend to cook and I didn’t need to pretend to eat. We could both transparently state our real preferences for non-provision and non-consumption and agree to cooperate on those terms. When I came home we had a version of this conversation. She feigned shock and said that she didn’t know what to say because she had promised the university she would give me breakfast. I promised not to mention it to the administration and assured her I was happier fending for myself. She “reluctantly” agreed and I haven’t faced a sad cheese sandwich since. Win win.

I have however joined Valeria for a few dinners. She was very worried the first night I came home and a small feast of grease was laid out on the table where her friend Tanya was sitting wrapped in a goat fur blanket rocking herself back and forth. It was only 8pm but they seemed to have already finished off a bottle of vodka and Valeria was now opening the second. “Leslie, come, sit, eat with us” she said. “Oh I just ate” I said but sat down for conversation. Tanya was moaning and crying and Valeria began to explain that her only daughter had just died. “It was a stomach illness. They did an operation but 100 days later, two days ago, she died. She was 37 years old.” Tanya sobbed and shook. I said how sorry I was to her, my eyes wide, slowly becoming conscious of the fact that I was rocking back and forth on my own chair empathetically. “Sud'ba” Tanya shook her head, “Sud'ba,” she sobbed as she tightened the goat hair blanket around her. I tried to remember the word, which I knew I knew but couldn’t find in my head at the time, only to look it up in the dictionary later and remember it: “Fate.” Valeria explained that Tanya’s husband had died five years ago of cancer so now she was all alone in her house. And she continued, hesitantly, touching my arm as she explained, “Tanya can’t sleep at her place any more. It’s just too sad for her there. Would you mind if she stayed here with us for awhile?” For a moment, and I know this is awful, but for a moment the thought crossed my mind that the dead daughter was an elaborate ruse and that they were together and felt they needed to come up with an excuse for Tanya sleeping over all the time. “Of course I don’t mind,” I said with the utmost sincerity, whichever story was true I was happy to have Tanya stay. From then on I became accustomed to walking in to find Tanya with Valeria at the table, a bottle of vodka by her side that they would stay up late drinking rocking back and forth and talking about “Sud'ba.” Valeria too is a victim of Sud'ba at the moment as her ex-husband is currently insisting she sell the dacha she uses on the weekends and there’s nothing she can do about it. Both situations strike me as things we would deal with not just emotionally but practically through lawyers in the States to regain our control over the situation. We would find a pretense for suing the hospital for the botched operation, take the husband to court to insist on our right to half the property, maybe even the whole thing. And while this wouldn’t take the pain away, particularly in the first case, it would at least give us a feeling of some agency over this damn Sud'ba.

Occasionally I join Valeria and Tanya in their evening dinners. However, not only do they force multiple shots of vodka on me in one sitting, but they then tend to ask uncomfortable questions about how big my house is and how many cars my family has in the States, how much my clothes cost and who is paying for my classes here. I have tried to emphasize how middle class my family is, knowing full well that a “middle class” income in the US is obscene relative to both Valeria’s $200 a month pension and the average Tatar’s $13,000 per year salary, which is in turn high compared to incomes across the rest of Russia. I also try to compensate for my guilt of overprivilege by sharing whatever I buy for myself with them. I once offered Valeria a glass of wine from a bottle I’d brought home and as she tipped back a glass of vodka, she said that she couldn’t for health reasons. I stifled a laugh. She said that the doctor had told her she couldn’t drink wine. “No wine, no beer, no whisky, no rum, only vodka and gin,” she said. And while this seemed like an odd prescription that she might not be entirely upholding in spirit even if practicing to the letter, it at least explained the vast amounts of medicine that took up most of the space in the refrigerator. I didn’t ask her to explain her illness further, but when I came down with a bad cold the other week I began peeking through the medicines to see if any might be of use in unclogging my sinuses and they all had the same word written on them: “rectal.” A friend has since theorized that this might be more about the mode of transmission than the target area of the medicine. Either way, I am content to leave further questions of health unanswered.

While I was very happy with my new living arrangement, a half an hour walk to the city center and university or an equally 30 minute tram ride since the rickety old thing runs so infrequently and creeps along so ploddingly, it was not until last week that I realized how lucky I had gotten. I was in the middle of “conversation practice” with my 22 year old fun stylish teacher Diana. I have four different classes: conversation, listening, reading and grammar each four times a week with three teachers I adore and one I don’t get along with particularly well. More on them to come, but Diana having noted my interest in the smaller ethnic groups of the region, an interest which most people in the region don’t share themselves told me that she had a friend named Marja who was half Mari (the Finnic pagan group with whom I’m obsessed) and grew up in a Mari village with her grandmother, wrote a thesis on the different folkoric costumes of the ethnic groups in the region, studied for a year in Finland and speaks perfect English. “She’s a lawyer” she said, “One of the smartest people I know,” and then went on to describe Marja’s job which sounded to me like she worked for either the government or a phone company, I’m not sure who owns the landlines particularly in the countryside, but traveled out to remote villages daily in order to serve papers telling people that their phones were being shut off for non-payment. Diana said that maybe for an hour of “conversation” she could have Marja come in and we could discuss the different groups and village life. She also began describing a project Marja was currently working on going out to the villages to collect folkloric stories that have not been written down and making live-animated pictures to go along with the tales by taking photos of spritely looking people in the woods and photoshopping elf ears onto them. This all of course sounded fantastic to me and when Marja descended upon the classroom it only got better. She was half my size with flying red hair, huge eyes and a tailored red coat that she whipped off to reveal a super stylish dress—asymmetric and color-blocked—that fit incredibly well. She was basically the image of myself that I wish other people had of me—small, intense, red-headed, smart and fashionable, probably in that order. She started talking a mile a minute in Russian and somehow I caught most of it and soon she was scrawling out maps, pointing out villages on them, talking about old ladies out there still wearing parts of the costumes she had studied in their everyday lives. An in with the Finno-Ugric crowd, I was so excited. 

And as we left the university Marja insisted I pile into her car with Diana and they would drive me home. “Where do you live?” Marja asked and I said “Vishnevskovo Street.” “Oh that’s close to where I have to go. Do you mind if I make a stop to pick up a costume at the Folkloric Center?” Clearly, no. “You’re welcome to come in. We have folkloric singing every Tuesday and Thursday night. You should join us.” “Excellent” I said all of this just being dropped in my lap like a gift. As we were driving down Vishnevskovo, Marja started slowing down in front of my building. “I live right here,” I said and she threw me a funny look. “This is the Folkloric Center,” she said and pointed to a door I hadn’t noticed on the first floor of my apartment block. “Are you kidding?” I asked. And no, she wasn’t. We went inside and more brightly smiling spritely people greeted us whose names I’ve learned since attending folkloric singing twice weekly. And I had originally thought that Marja meant that I should come and watch the folkloric song and dance, but no they have me singing and stomping along in their six person group. It’s a funny nasal tone you have to cultivate along with a loose jaw the leader of the group describes as “drunken” and apparently I’m a natural. As we exited the Folkloric Center and I went to walk upstairs I shook my head at Diana and said “How strange.” She smiled widely, shrugged and said “Sud'ba.” Apparently it goes both ways.

Finally, I Have Friends, Though Limited Internet Access...

Oh, so much has happened and I’m sitting here in my toxic colored orange sofa bed with its noticeable divot down the middle that I always fall into in the middle of the night, laid up with a noxious cold, which at least gives me a reprieve from the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that pervades Valeria’s apartment, but isn’t doing much to motivate me to 1) work on my prospectus and qualifying paper, both due soon or I face some bureaucratically worded version of academic probation, 2) do my Russian homework, which consists of switching past passive participles to clauses with transitive verbs and back, or 3) write this blog entry. Obviously, I am picking the least of these three evils but I warn that my heart and head are not quite in it. I am also currently at war with a single mosquito who has managed to survive the cold by taking up residence in my bedroom. I have been on the verge of squelching him all night as he nosedives toward me in his quest for blood and until I do must remain vigilant over all exposed skin lest I wind up with another bite on the bridge of my nose.

My New Abode (somewhere in there)

Building across the Street Strangely Reminiscent of OSCE HQ in Pristina

Boogie Woogie Pizza down the Street -- My New Destination of Choice

My internet has been acting up, i.e. it loads pages at such a creepingly slow sub-dial-up speed that they never actually surface on my screen and for some reason I have not yet learned to just turn it off when this happens and instead sit there hurling endless hours and expletives into a void of hitting the refresh button and cursing when it doesn’t work. I have at least learned to stop throwing money at the problem, a lesson which took awhile to sink in.

When I first went into the clean, air-conditioned Western looking Megaphon store they sold me a wireless “high speed” 700 Megabytes per second modem for something like $30—“2 months, without limits!” they said. I gorged on skype calls home and addictively bad American television that night and the next morning the internet barely worked. I had to switch my gmail over to html format and even that was not guaranteed to load. I managed to get onto one of those sites that tests your internet speed and it sputtered through the test, spitting out that my connection was downloading at .04 Megabytes per second. I went into the Megaphon store the next day, infuriated, with these statistics in hand. It was a different manager working, a rather rotund and unfriendly Russian girl, obviously put out by the two lithe but vacuous Tatar girls flitting about the store in their short skirted uniforms but not doing much to assist her at the sole computer on the premises. I walked up and made the mistake of trying to be friendly as I began explaining that my internet was downloading at only .04 Mps when I had just paid for 2 months of high speed service at 700Mps. It’s still deeply engrained in me to smile, make eye contact and bob my head about in a non-threatening manner in approaching people in the service industry, a trick that is rewarded with pleasant and efficient interactions in the States but only seems to provoke ire and disgust in Russia where smiling is a sign of stupidity. “700Mps?” she scoffed. “That service doesn’t exist in Tatarstan,” she said taking a passport from the hand of a customer who had come in after me and typing his information into the computer. “Then why did I pay for it?” I asked slightly exasperated. “And why is it right here as an option among your service plans?” I picked up the laminated sheet from which I’d picked my plan the day before. She shrugged without taking her eyes of the computer. “It was working at high speed, or at least at normal speed last night, and this morning it went dead,” I continued, “Can’t I at least get it back to that normal speed?” She ignored me.

I continued to stand there waiting for her to finish with the customer she’d in my mind very rudely taken instead of me. I tapped my foot. I tried to puff up my chest and look tall and menacing. I waited. I planned out the Russian of what I was going to say to her. And when she had finished selling mobile phone service to the guy, I was ready to make my move. However, the guy pushed past me and without even looking up, the sour faced manager reached out to take the passport of a Russian blond beside me. “Noooo. That’s not fair” I screeched, the pitch of my voice unbearable even to my own ears. She looked disgusted, but she did at least look up. “What? What do you want?” she said, still typing into the computer with one eye on the screen. “I want my internet to work!” I said. “I want to communicate with my friends and family. I want to read the news and watch crappy American television.” “Oh you watched television?” she said shaking her head and blowing air out through her pursed lips, “That’s why your internet is now slow.” “What do you mean?” I pleaded. “You can only download 2 gigabytes of information at high speed and then your internet will go to basic speed which is slow.” She shook her head again and scowled, deeply tired of me. “But what do you mean? I paid for the service ‘without limits’” I whined. “You have internet service without limits for 2 months,” she explained to me as if I was the slow six year old that my Russian likely made me out to be, “But after you download 2 gigabytes of information, it will be very slow internet service for the rest of the 2 months. You shouldn’t have used it all so quickly.” “But the guy here yesterday told me that the service was without limits.” She rolled her eyes as she clacked at the computer. “If you want another 2 gigabytes it will be 300 rubles,” she said. I very eagerly opened my wallet and after she had finished with the blond handed over my credit card to add a new 2 gigabytes to my account. “We don’t take credit cards,” she scowled, now forced to deal with me as I was the sole customer in a store with three employees. “What do you mean? I paid for my modem yesterday with a credit card!” She shook her head as if *I* was the crazy one, “You can use your credit card for hard things in the store but not for things you cannot touch.” “So what if I buy a phone charger too,” I said picking one off the shelf with a smirk. “Here, I’ll buy this and the 2 gigabytes on my card.” “You can buy the phone charger on the card” she deadpanned “but you will have to pay for the gigabytes in cash.” “How do you people do any business?” I screeched and breaking into English gestured madly “This is crazy. You are all crazy!” The three girls all started laughing and pointing at me, the stolid manager included. “Craaaazzzy Russia” she said in a thick accent as I threw my hands up and exited in a huff. This was my first attempt to throw money at the internet problem. I went back with cash and bought an additional 2 gigabytes multiple times over the course of the next few weeks. And while the internet service would seem to work for at least a night after the purchase, it was only after another manager sold me 20 gigabytes for an exorbitant sum and I still could only get regular speed service intermittently that I admitted defeat and stopped going into the Megaphon store to try to “fix” the issue.

What I have realized in all this is how ridiculously internet-dependent I am, in a way that I can see from a detached point of view is completely counterproductive to why I am here. I keep comforting myself with the banalities of home. And at the time it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, to unwind after a hard day of grammar with a little television or a movie, to listen to an NPR podcast on the long cold walk to the university. But that temporary “relief” keeps me in this English language headspace, this bubble of comfort I know that I am going to have to leave behind if I really want to get under the surface of things and understand what is going on here. It’s an odd thing to realize how far I have come from the petulant little creature I was living in Tbilisi with a Georgian boyfriend completely embedded in local society with a chip on her shoulder pointed menacingly like an AK-47 of 22 year old contempt at all the Americans living up the hill in western comfort, frequenting expat bars and hanging out with only those Georgian sell-outs who spoke English and worked for NGOs or the Embassy. Now I’m sitting here, yes in my “homestay” with mad Valeria throwing back as much vodka as she can between cigarettes, the polar opposite of the smothering mothering Aygul (I’ll get to that in another entry), but still cushioned from the life of the city and the people buzzing around within and below my new apartment block.

This realization hit hard the other day when I met up with Daniel, the other Boren Fellow in Kazan for the year, hoping to discuss potential research projects with him and his Tatar wife at a tea house on Baumana street. We’d met briefly in the international students’ office while waiting for Azhat Arzlanovich to attend to us and in our few minutes of conversation he had managed to convey that he had been in Kazan 6 years ago on a Fullbright when he had taught at the university and met his now wife who was studying there at the time and that this was like “coming home” for them. He quickly left me when two buff 20-something Australian Tatars, that is members of the Tatar diaspora who’ve grown up in Australia and now come to Kazan for a semester to study their “mother tongue,” walked into the office, and I overheard him attempting to butter these far more interesting friend prospects up with talk of his connections all over town and ability to hook them up with free theatre tickets. Basically imagine the snotty 22-year old Leslie described above had the marriage to Dato been more official (i.e. not kept secret from all friends and family, with particular attention to keeping parents and ex-boyfriends in the dark) and worked out, returning to Tbilisi with 6 more years of the anti-ex-pat chip embedded more deeply in her shoulder and you can begin to image the level of smug that approximates Daniel. And in a way that isn’t a fair description at all because it makes him seem like the bad guy. No. He literally is who I would be if I were in a place that I considered “my own.” And he was gracious in meeting me at the tea house, introducing me to his wife with her broad pretty features and their adorable 6 year old trilingual son in his snappy red polo shirt. But our conversation was in Russian at a level too quick paced and high vocabularied for me to understand exactly what was being said. I floundered. I saw the way they both looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disdain. I was that terrible American academic that I would myself normally love to hate, out of place, trying to do “research” on a question not clearly established on a society in which she has no roots or footholds, tossing about overly theoretical ideas that don’t resonate with anyone on the ground. It was humbling to say the least.

Which is why I was completely surprised when that evening Daniel called and even spoke in English to tell me that a friend of theirs had said he would be happy to speak with me about ethnic identities, also in English, and then gave me an address where I could meet him for the breaking of the Ramadan fast at sunset. It was already 7:00 so I wheeled over to the grocery store to buy an oversized box of chocolates and with a head scarf in hand just in case I raced off to the Tatar Cultural Center. Finally, this felt good. I walked into the small building on Karl Marx street with the name of Daniel’s friend on a scrap of paper—Azat Timorov—and attempted to communicate why I was there to the old woman in the small lobby who was either hard of hearing or didn’t speak Russian but gestured up toward the second floor. I wound my way up the stairs where I was met by a girl in a full hijab including an almost Afghan looking blouse to her thighs over flowing pants. She was unbelievably kind and gentle as she led me to a couch where others had gathered, the rest of the girls in western dress without headscarves and the boys looking slightly scrawny and malnourished. I said again that I was looking for Azat Timorov and they still looked puzzled. Apparently my pronunciation must have been off enough for them to not realize that I was referring to the guy in the corner bent over a computer next to a reedy thin blond, both of whom looked out of place in the environment. The headscarved girl in the role of hostess walked me over to Azat and even though he could not remember meeting Daniel or his wife and claimed to have not talked to them this afternoon, he did in fact speak English and was happy to immediately start gabbing with me. He was 27 with light blue eyes, sandy hair and freckles across his face but claimed to be Tatar through and through as did his very fair blond friend Diana. They were more interested in showing me video clips on you tube of Tatar music dubbed over British hip hop videos than talking about ethnic identity but this seemed to be a better window into what I was after anyway. “If you want to talk politics,” Azat joked, “we’ll have to go underground.”

We broke the fast with tea and a rather sad assortment of sweets to which my chocolates actually made a noticeable contribution. The “emcee” of the cultural center bowed as he introduced himself and invited me to join them at the conclusion of Ramadan for an excursion to the historic Tatar city of Bulgar on the Volga River. As I accepted the invitation gratefully with a bow of my head I attempted to hide all dismay at the thought of returning to Bulgar. The 3 hour journey by boat each way to the historic town of Bulgar, the seat of the Bulgar civilization who adopted Islam in 10 AD and would later become Tatars after being conquered by and mixing with the Golden Horde, was the one excursion that I had taken with the other international students at Kazan State University, (a group of literally 20 year old, chiefly German, college students studying abroad with one lovely British girl I quickly befriended despite our 13 year age gap and the fact that she refuses to speak English with me or anyone else, which while laudable still makes our conversations somewhat stilted and reliant on an exchange of bubbly energy and smiles to convey our good intentions). It was perhaps one of the most boring field trips of my life. We arrived at the “town” of Bulgar, which consists of a few remodeled buildings, some ruins and a shoddy Soviet era museum all widely spread out over an endless uninspiring piece of land. The thing of greatest note while there was the sickly arid yellow color of all grass and plant life that stretched for miles in all visible directions and drove home the extent to which the Russian land had been decimated by the summer heatwave even in places where the fires had not flared up, and the fact that despite this land having been turned into a sad and obvious tinderbox just waiting for a spark to incite the horror shown in warning posters plastered in the visitors’ center and on all television news programs across the country, there were still cigarette butts casually strewn all along the long rambling desiccated paths between buildings.

Off to Bulgar on the Boat

3 Hours Each Way 

We Arrive

Historic Bulgar

View from the Tower

Another View This One with the Start of 'Rustam's Name Etched into the Glass

Note the Stunning Desiccation in All Directions

As I said, I accepted the invitation despite my deep lack of desire to return to Bulgar because it was so nice to finally be in the thick of things. Each of the students went around and introduced themselves. They seemed a bit downtrodden and sad though some were eager to use the English they’d learned in school. There was no overt reference to Tatar culture or politics. We simply shared a meal. Azat later explained as he, Diana and I made our way to a bar just off Baumana street that things were calm now, that there was no real threat to talking about Tatar politics these days because there was really nothing to say. All of the major Tatar activists from the early 90s had been killed off. The Cultural Center, which he said had been a hub of activism back then had dwindled into a kids’ club, with a lot of the students from the university with nothing better to do coming over to hang out but not discussing contentious politics or for that matter Tatar culture at all. “There are no intellectuals left to have discussions with,” he shrugged, “all these kids are from the village.”  He himself had made it out of Tatarstan and was working at a well-paid job in Turkey to which he’d be returning in a few weeks. Diana, a recent graduate of the university, was even less interested in politics but was still very bright spirited, happy to meet me and having majored in German at the university was even more enthralled with the prospect of gaining entry into the community of German students on the fringes of which I’d found myself socially.

In order to facilitate this, I took Gemma, the young lovely British girl I had befriended up on her offer to meet up with Fritz, a Swiss German she admired for his elevated Russian language abilities who was among the new boatload of young German speakers matriculating into the university with the start of the fall semester who were said to be convening en masse at a bar downtown. Normally, when Gemma had texted to express that since the buses had stopped running she would not be joining us, I would have headed home as well. But since I had earnest Diana now eager to meet the new pool of Germans with me, I got in touch with Fritz to make this social exchange happen. And amazingly it was not at all awkward to have my two blind friend dates via Daniel and Gemma join forces in a low key pub where we ate peanuts and pistachios and drank beers that were poured from the tap as more foam that body. Sadly for Diana the remaining horde of German students had wandered off without Fritz who seemed quite eager to ditch them and meet people who actually lived in the city. After only one round my new Tatar friends went on their way with the promise to meet up soon and give us an insider’s tour of Kazan.

As it was still early the dapper young Fritz and I headed on to another drink at the “Beer House,” where he first ordered a tea explaining that he was coming down with a head cold as he often does as a result of his weak constitution. With his round little spectacles, well tailored apparel and posh British accent belying his baby face, Fritz and I became fast friends talking of our unabiding love for, frustrations with and addictions to the discomforts of Russia and how endlessly boring it made the return to the predictability of transparent economic exchanges and clean public bathrooms that provided both toilet bowls and toilet paper seem upon arrival home, as well as sharing stories from our favorite cities around the world, the cracks of his 20 year old veneer of nostalgia only showing through, and charmingly so, when he’d mention where he and his parents’ had dined or had trouble catching a taxi. Unfortunately, somewhere in the matrix of my lungs adjusting to the smoke-laden air at Valeria’s apartment, the abrupt cold snap in Kazan and the fact that my weather appropriate clothes are currently residing in a suitcase at Miriam’s house in Moscow, the germs of Fritz’s latest malady capitalized on my weakened immune system and have rendered me bed-ridden with a hacking cold. In better news, I did manage to kill the mosquito (though only after a bite to the left temple) and book a flight to Moscow to retrieve said clothes and help celebrate a friend’s birthday with a heavy drinking, age appropriate social cohort next weekend.

Day of Knowledge

So in the end Aygul was lovely about my leaving. I assured her that it was only due to the distance from the center and she invited me to come back and drink tea with her and Blanche whenever I like. In the car with Vanya Shupenko on the way to the new apartment he informed me that today was a holiday. “What holiday?” I asked. This seemed strange since Kazan had just celebrated “The Day of the City” two days earlier. “It is ‘The Day of Knowledge’” he said. Hmmm. “What does that mean exactly?” I asked and Vanya replied, “It is September 1, the day that all of the students go back to school.” “Ahh, the Day of Knowledge, I see.” And I didn’t think much of this “holiday.” I mean most kids go back to school on the same day in the States right? No big deal. However, even just on the ride to the new apartment it was clear that The Day of Knowledge was an entirely different beast than our generic Back to School season. Mothers lined the streets with big bouquets of flowers ostensibly for teachers in one hand and children dressed up in mini-formal wear in the other. I arrived at the apartment and my new host mother was wearing a shiny pants suit and heels on her way to a Day of Knowledge celebration to honor her as a retired school teacher. I still didn’t entirely get the picture until I arrived at the university and there were tens of thousands of students lined up by their departments with techno music pounding through speakers in front of the main building of Kazan State University. I went into the crowd and was overwhelmed.

Student Lining up in front of KSU

...All the way down the Street

Lined up by Department

The event was sponsored by Maxwell House and fuzzy hatted mascots were handing out packets of instant coffee. Many of the students were dressed in suits, some of them very shiny suits. Others were too cool for school and smoking along the sidelines.

Maxwell House Coffee Guy

  

 KSU Pride

 Her Boyfriend was in a Particularly Shiny Suit

Alas, She was not Thrilled with my Attempt to Capture Him on Film

I was standing beside a man and a woman in MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) uniforms along the sidelines, very surprised at how little police presence there was for such a huge number of people, when a girl came over with her friend who looked ill. The girl leaned the friend against the wall next to me. The friend, a tall lean Tatar looking girl, put her head in her hands and swayed unsteadily in her spiked heels like she was about to pass out. The girl got scared and rushed over to the MVD officials saying “My friend is sick. Can you please help?” They waved her away like a pesky fly to continue their conversation. The girl ran off to find someone else and unbeknownst to either of them I kept an eye on the unsteady friend as the girl left to get help. The Tatar friend was looking pale and scared, clenching her fists, trying to take deep breaths but only getting little panicky gulps of air in. The girl came back with some guy in a blue sweater who looked like some sort of maintenance man. He lifted the tall Tatar girl off of the wall and put her arm around his shoulder. The other girl took up her other side but they only got ten paces before the girl crumpled to the floor in a pile completely passed out. The guy in the blue sweater slapped her face twice then tried to pick her up and dropped her. The MVD officials next to me didn’t even pause in their conversation to look over. Another man rushed over and together he and the guy in the blue sweater got the girl off the ground and over one of their shoulders to take her away. I walked a few steps forward to see where they were taking her but they faded into the crowd. And then the crowd started moving forward down the street.

Students on the Move

Final Destination: The Statue of Young Lenin

 

On my way home I stopped at the flashy shopping mall Koltso to see what movies were playing for future reference. While there, I noticed that a show was starting up on a little stage in honor of the Day of Knowledge. I couldn’t help myself and sat down on a bench among doting mothers and disaffected teenagers (completely unclear why they were there en masse) and. The show was emceed by an obnoxious little girl with long braids down her back wearing a business casual grey pants suit. She was quite pleased with herself, laughed at her own scripted jokes none of which were funny and kept telling the audience when they needed to applaud. For a moment I forgot that the Soviet Union had collapsed and could see her whole career in the Communist Party unfolding before my eyes. “Applodismenti, Applodismenti.” At the same time I worried that everyone in the audience of the 6^th grade talent show that I emceed in 1988 had felt the same revulsion toward me. I comforted myself with the fact that at least I had been wearing a full length shark costume while telling the crowd when to applaud. Braids then sang a melancholic ballad that was as age-inappropriate as her pants suit about nostalgia for childhood and friends from our school days.

Note the Adorable School Girls behind the Stage

She then introduced a little blond wunderkind in sparkling high tops and skinny jeans offset with a black blazer over a tee shirt with Japanese characters. He sang and tapped and handed her the microphone to do flips across the stage before they broke into a duet.

Braids and Wunderkind Duet

I stayed in part because I was mesmerized by the absurdity of the spectacle and also to see what the ridiculously cute gaggle of schoolgirls with big poofy ribbons in their hair lined up behind the stage were going to do. I was not disappointed as the school girls filled the stage and were paired off with school boys to do a song and dance that involved a jump rope. 

The Grande Finale

A Thrilling Conclusion to my Day of Knowledge

Moving Right Along, Footloose and Fancy Free

Rip off the band aid Leslie. Just rip it off. Stop fussing around the edges needling every little nerve and go tell Aygul that you are changing apartments.

Sigh. This all started two weeks back when I met those two American teenagers. I happily transcribed their advice on lemonade and ice cream and then opened one of those prankster’s cans of spring loaded peanuts that I haven’t been able to since reseal. I knew at the time I was doing it. I could feel myself being sly and strategic as the words came out of my mouth to nonchalantly ask, “So what about your host families? Were they nice? Did they happen to live near the university?” knowing full well that these girls would be leaving empty apartments in the wake of their flights home from Kazan the next day that I could swoop down and prey upon like a vulture. They both gushed and it turned out that the brunette was living with a Tatar woman named Guzel a 10 minute walk from the university and even closer to the carnival of Baumana street. “She walks around naked all the time, but if you don’t mind that she’s a great cook and the apartment is nice.” Noted. I felt like a bit of a jerk both for having been so put out by Aygul’s nakedness when apparently it was cultural and for plotting to win our war through the equivalent of a black ops reconnaissance mission, but on some level I was quite pleased to have the information that could unshackle me from all the “reality” I’d taken on out in the super-Soviet ex-burbs.

However, my tune changed that evening at the apartment when Aygul’s daughter Vera came to visit. She was so gracious and graceful and sat chatting with me in English in the living room about how she’d worked as a waitress at a restaurant in Virginia Beach for two summers and how her boyfriend had done the same program the next year and worked at a Burger King in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a town ten minutes down from the Philly suburb in which I’d grown up, where I’d just attended one high school best friend’s wedding and while there joked to the other about how we should go door to door to visit all of her ex-boyfriends with their matching Phoenixville tattoos while we were in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Aygul walked in half naked looking for a shirt and Vera recoiled and said something in Tatar that had to be the equivalent of “Mom, come on, no one wants to see that!” I smiled empathetically as Vera shook her head and then picked one of the stuffed animals off of the shelf, musing “I brought her this dragon from Bush Gardens.” And suddenly Aygul wasn’t the enemy, she wasn’t some repressed weirdo sexually harassing me, she was just some lovely girl’s embarrassing mom. I remembered the feeling of bringing the crew team to stay at my house when we were racing in Philadelphia one year and how I’d cringed at my mother’s ridiculous snowman collection and her own clumsy but sincere efforts at hospitality. This was the same thing. It didn’t make the fish pie for dinner any more appetizing, (recipe for the daring at home = one thick layer of salted herring, one layer mayonnaise, one layer boiled potatoes, one layer mayonnaise, one layer boiled beets, topped with a final layer of mayonnaise), but it did make me feel like a jerk for publicly framing my frustrations with the well-intentioned Aygul as mortal combat.

A day or two drifted by with most of my time lost to grammar and cheap DVDs of American movies dubbed in Russian bought for “educational” purposes when I found myself in Azhat Arzlanovich’s office waiting to fill out some additional paperwork. His strikingly lean and angular assistant was just sitting there across from me with her severe haircut and jutting cheekbones. She looked a bit bored and I couldn’t help making conversation by asking, “So are there any free apartments in the center of Kazan? Mine is really far away, like almost an hour on the bus. I hear Guzel’s is really nice.” It was a true statement even though I felt very bad making it given my recent détente with Aygul. The assistant leapt into action and before I knew it she had scheduled an appointment for me to visit the apartment of a woman named Aleksandra Valeriovna the next morning who lived only one easy stop away on the metro.

Aleksandra Valeriovna’s daughter Natasha came to pick me up at the university that morning. She had a short boyish blond haircut and was disproportionately lean, long limbed and big breasted in the genetically anomalous way that the vast majority of the girls across Russia seem to be regardless of ethnicity. She was an interesting character. Very dower and yet quirky. She was a freelance web designer who had taught herself English by watching American television in Cyprus where she’d lived for three years with her Tatar husband. They were since divorced but she had a 12 year old daughter at home to show for it who was obsessed with anime and teaching herself Japanese. We got on the metro at Baumana street and I asked how long it would take if I wanted to walk to the apartment instead. “That would be impossible” she said and we proceeded to sit on the subway for 25 minutes.

We got out in an ex-urban wasteland even more desolate than the one I’d been living in with Aygul. I kept asking Natasha political questions as we walked another ten minutes to her mother’s apartment building, trying to determine if it would be worth living all the way out here to get the Russian minority perspective. And the answers to my persistent questions seemed quite mixed. Tatarstan was a rich region, that was good. Former President Shamiev had been really skillful in negotiating a deal with Moscow to get money from the center for Tatarstan while avoiding any kind of extremist nationalist rhetoric, also good. He and his government were mainly crooks, but for some reason, potentially out of pride, they were obsessed with beautifying and bettering Kazan, bringing it up to an “international standard” and this albeit odd was good for the people who lived here. It was however a real shame for those poor kids that now had to study Tatar language in school, that was a terrible waste of time bordering on punishment.

We got into the apartment and the advantages and disadvantages of making the move were clear. There was significantly less space. The rooms were tiny and the kitchen barely fit the three of us as the beautiful white haired Aleksandra Valerievna elegantly tipped her wrist to pour me tea and passed me delicious cherry filled chocolates while making polite conversation. However, there was a clear demarcation of space. I would have my own room that she would not enter in a bra and panties in the morning to rifle through its closets assembling her outfit for the day. She would have her own room which was also the living room that I would not have to keep my own clothes in and said room would keep contained all of the decorative stuffed animals and toys ostensibly from the 1980s including the creepy bust of a doll I remember never having myself but playing with at friends’ houses who existed only from the chest up on a pink platform so that you could focus on braiding and styling her hair. I sat and sipped my tea and the whole time felt like I was cheating on Aygul. I had a creepy doll of my own waiting for me in the shower where it belonged, what was I doing 40 minutes out in the opposite direction leading on this lovely old lady. I said goodbye to Aleksandra Valerievna and Natasha, promising to call them like I was slinking out of the apartment of a guy I’d just mistakenly gone home with but knew I didn’t want to date.

But my extra-apartmental dalliances didn’t end there. I kept finding reasons to drop by Azhat Arzlanovich’s office and smile prettily at his secretary as I asked if Guzel was back from vacation yet and might want to rent a room in her apartment to me. No? Well, maybe then there might be some other host family in the center kind enough to open their home? She smiled angularly back and promised that she would find me an apartment in the center that I could move into on September 1. And once the date was set I hypocritically started feeling bad again. I wanted it to be fate sweeping me into the circumstances of my new apartment not me actively seeking out a better deal. And I’d go back and forth between grumbling on the bus feeling entitled to move and then wondering about Aygul’s financial situation and whether it would hurt her if I left. Blanche, the cat who formerly hated me, decided that she actually loved me and wanted to sleep in my room, just in time for her to go into heat and begin incessantly crying at an unbearable pitch for a full week. And I felt that same tugging between guilt and entitlement as I thought about just picking up and leaving her behind. Some days I felt like they were the lot I had been given and I needed to see the experience of living with the two of them through to its heroic end. Other days I just wanted to get the F out of the apartment.

I once went to a therapist when I lived in New York. It was after the guy I’d been dating co-dependently for three months had come down with encephalitis that had wiped out a small section of his brain and taken much of the person I’d loved with it and I was having a hard time eating. I went to the therapist and I told her about how hard it was taking care of this guy who I still cared about very much but who was only intermittently the person I’d started dating. She asked about prior relationships and I told her about bringing my Georgian rock star boyfriend back to the States with me because I felt it wasn’t fair to leave him in Georgia and then marrying him at the Beverly Hills County Courthouse because I felt it wasn’t fair that I could work in the Parliament of his country and he couldn’t even make lattes at a Starbucks in mine. She told me that I had an overdeveloped sense of loyalty. That was the diagnosis. That and probably some form of PTSD, she said.

And in all honesty I still have a very hard time telling the difference between having an overdeveloped sense of loyalty and being a good person. And inversely, distinguishing between embracing the American individualist values with which I was raised and being a self-serving asshole. I mean was I supposed to just flit on back to the States free and easy leaving Dato chained to the broken concrete of Tbilisi? Was I supposed to just abandon Brian in the hospital and let him navigate the slippery cliffs of post-encephalitic insanity alone? Given the chance to go back, I don’t think I would do any of it differently. And yet in both cases I wound up dragging myself through some of the ugliest human moments imaginable before in the end I wound up severing the same cord I could have quite easily cut well before any mud was slung in my direction. I could have bailed early and got off scott free, untouched, intact but in a way it’s the dirt and the damage still lingering around the edges that give me any sense of being interesting, engaged and accomplished as a person. I still think as a strategy drawing a firm boundary between the physical unit of me and the rest world and then maximizing choices to benefit only the part I call myself won’t pay off in the long run in any way that would be meaningful for me. And any chance I have of doing or saying something that could possibly be of any benefit to society has to involve physically and emotionally trekking through deeply unpleasant territory on its behalf. The question I guess, still unanswered, is how far exactly I have to go to come back with “real” experience and at what point it’s ok to cut my losses and just return to my lucky charmed life and write about where I’ve been. 

Anyway, today, August 31, I was half hoping the assistant would have no news for me but when I entered the office she handed me a slip of paper with a phone number and an address. I marched over to the new apartment open-minded. It was 30 minutes from the university by foot. 25 minutes going back on the irritatingly slow tramway that po-dunks its way along a narrow street. The lobby smelled like dog shit rather than like someone had been gutting fish in the elevator. The separate bedroom that would be mine was a stuffed-animal free zone. The host mother, a retired history teacher, was Russian and chain smoked leaving a dingy haze throughout the house. In other words, this was not some clear allelujah light at the end of the tunnel moment where the rainbows come out and I know in my gut I’m doing the right thing in leaving Aygul and Blanche behind because the other side is just so unambiguously better. Instead I sat with a pot of French press coffee at my favorite café on Baumana street and stewed and felt bad and weighed pros and cons and eventually went back into the office and told the assistant that I would take the new place.

And now, I am getting up from my computer to go rip off the band aid and break the news that I’m leaving to Aygul. Apparently, my sense of loyalty is no longer overdeveloped. I guess this means I’m cured. Or I'm just a jerk.