zimatravels

The following continues the excerpt in my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.  It took place in Russia in 1998 during another time of significant financial disaster.

The place that came to symbolize Russia’s contradictions to me was the Bolshoi Theatre.  Who among ballet lovers does not want to see the Bolshoi perform?  It was August and Giselle was scheduled on September 4th.  The unmanned box office displayed a sign that said in Russian, “The box office will not open until October 1st.”  As we turned away disappointedly, a man quickly appeared with the good news that he could sell me tickets.  The “system” is that scalpers buy all the tickets and then re-sell them—at ridiculously high rates, of course.  Since I wanted four tickets, his price was prohibitive.  Reluctant to miss my opportunity to see the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, we tried to buy the tickets in the corners of the metro stations.  Two tickets were possible, three or four no.  Eventually I bought two tickets from one vendor, one from another.  “Hopefully they’re not counterfeit,” Svetlana sighed.

Delight and disappointment accompanied us to the theatre.  Although the three tickets cost me the same, two of the seats gave a thrilling view of the entire stage.  The other offered a view of only a tiny corner into which one could only hope a dancer or two would sometimes appear.  In a true gesture of friendship, Svetlana took the single seat and commiserated with a distraught visitor from Texas who had paid $75 to sit in the seat beside her.

As I thrilled to the extremely high professional quality of the dancers, I was amazed to see that quite literally hundreds of spectators in the balconies were standing in order to see a decent amount of the stage.  How could architects have designed such an expensive and elegant, yet useless and impractical auditorium?

Perhaps a certain degree of fatalism helps sustain people in countries in frequent crisis.  I had observed that phenomenon in Israel.  In Russia, I met a Russian Jew who was a long-time friend of Svetlana’s.  “I love Moscow.  I’d never think of leaving it,” she told me.  Her parents had survived World War II by selling their extensive library, book by book.  She took us to a small, dark restaurant one could only find by knowing where it was.  It was here that Moscow’s intelligentsia gathered to share ideas, thoughts, and music.  What Moscow offers her is not fame and fortune, but mental stimulation and the knowledge that she’s “home.”

I left Russia a week earlier than I’d planned.  “Now I can concentrate on the crisis,” Svetlana said with forced gaiety.  The absurdity that Russia had become followed me all the way through the airport.  The lane at the airport for departures was unexplainably blocked.  With the casualness Russians have developed toward inconvenience, we parked where it was blocked and rolled my heavy luggage up the long hill.

I wanted to buy a bottle of water to take with me.  One vendor in the airport asked the ruble equivalent of $5.  So, I went to the next vendor.  She calmly asked the equivalent of $8!  Svetlana and I could only laugh in response.  We tried a third place only a few steps away and bought a bottle of water for $1.

I approached the Customs agent in front of the check-in counter.  He took the form I had made out upon entering Russia.  “No stamp.  Serious problem.  $500 fine,” he said laconically.  I had wondered why the customs agent who looked at my form as I entered Russia hadn’t marked it in any way.

Fortunately, Svetlana was still waiting to wave goodbye.  I motioned her to come and see what the problem was. He mumbled something to her that did not seem to resemble what he had said to me in English.  He backed down, and I hurriedly left when he abandoned this rather (from what I learned later) routine shakedown.  I wondered what would have happened without a Russian friend along.

Checking in was very easy since the whole airport was perhaps one notch above abandoned.  I waved goodbye to Svetlana and her husband with worry for their immediate future mired with my relief at getting closer to getting out of Russia.

To be continued…….

The following is a continuation of an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.  It took place in Russia in 1998 duirng another time of significant financial disaster.

The ruble had not fallen long ago enough to account for the droop of the weary faces I saw all around me.  Their eyes held a weariness, regardless of age, that couldn’t be cured by a few good nights of sleep.  Even the young had pasty white skin and dark patches under their eyes.  The profusion of brightly colored flowers turned pathetic when held out by work-roughened, arthritic hands under old and very desperate faces lining the subway stairs.

As the ruble sank lower and Yeltsin dismissed the present government, I picked berries at Svetlana’s lovely dacha, country house, which was a pleasant walk from her apartment.  As we plucked carrots and onions out of the ground, I unknowingly treaded on the lettuce for our salad.  We had lovely homegrown meals in the dacha’s garden while the refrigerator in her apartment loomed larger and emptier.

The Dow Jones in the U.S. sank 358 points in a day and Clinton came to visit Yeltsin.  My friend said, “It will be okay because the government is preparing to print more money,” but Clinton advised, “Hang on and don’t print more money.”  During a television interview with Yeltsin, Svetlana commented, “He looks very sick, ” as Yeltsin mumbled incoherently.  “That’s all,” Yeltsin said at the end of the interview, and the Russians believed that was definitely true of Yeltsin’s ability and power to rule the country.

Worry lines on faces deepened as bank lines grew longer and butter and sugar disappeared from the shelves.  Tempers flared and nerves frayed.  “There’s no butter because you people bought in all,” snapped a clerk to a complaining customer.  Svetlana whispered to me, “The store has probably taken it off the shelves and it will reappear at a higher price.”  It did.

A nasty vendor in a train station complained about me to my friend in Russian, “Why doesn’t she learn to speak Russian if she comes here?  We speak English when we go to her country.”  When I needed to go to the Aeroflot office, the unsmiling clerk said in Russian to my friend, “Phone number in Moscow?”  When Svetlana didn’t reply, I translated, “She wants to know your phone number.”  We laughed at the absurdity of me, who didn’t know Russian, translating for her.  “I didn’t answer her immediately because I’m wondering why it is that Russian clerks are so rude and unpleasant,” Svetlana told me.

The tour guide at the Armoury Museum told us, “Now you can see why Russia had a revolution,” as she pointed out the bejeweled blankets and saddles of the tzar’s horses.  The magnificence of the old Russia gleamed from many of the gold-topped buildings, but even the grandiose looked grim and grimy in the bleak rain and cold that set in for a solid week in August.

I knew the Russia that I was seeing wasn’t the one Karl Marx had envisioned under communism.  While something was terribly wrong when Ivan the Terrible and absurdly wealthy tzars dressed their horses in jewels while the people who paid for those jewels starved to death, something was going terribly wrong now too.  I made several comparisons of Russia to China, but Svetlana looked at me quizzically saying that Russians never think of comparing themselves to China in spite of both being communist countries.

Economic chaos and instability have challenged the ingenuity of the Russian people to fix their own cars that regularly broke down and littered the streets.  My friend’s husband had devised a very clever lawn mower from a washing machine agitator, proving the adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  When I looked at the fine architecture of Moscow’s old buildings, or appreciated the stands of tall white birch trees and full forests, I felt the power of the past in contrast to the helplessness of Russia’s people who float like flotsam and jetsam trying to keep breathing a little longer.

As in many countries, contradictions faced me every day.  How did what went on above ground relate to the perfectly clean, painstakingly decorated subway stations with a precisely on time metro system far down in the depths of  Moscow’s underground?  Why did it cost more to use a public toilet than to ride the metro?  How could something be as grand and yet as whimsical as St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square?  How could a country produce such fantastic art museums and so much poor quality merchandise?

To be continued…….