Flirting with Danger (6 page)

As Dima could not get to the West, I was expected to bring the West to him. He easily tapped into my guilt about my good fortune to have been born in the land of plenty. Many Soviets did. It was sometimes hard to find the dividing line between opportunism and reliance on friends to do favors. Within minutes of meeting a Westerner, Soviets would size you up for your willingness to transport goods across forbidden borders. Everybody always wanted something—for you to sneak out a manuscript full of venom about the Soviet state or letters to relatives in Israel, or bring back a pair of Jordache jeans or a ski jacket or whatever. I often agreed because I felt I was so lucky to have been born in the West, thinking that the least I could do was risk being sent to the gulag to help veritable strangers. It made crossing any border terrifying, because I was always carrying something I should not have. To this day I get nervous on the customs line, even when I’m not carrying contraband. Russians never offered to pay me for any of the things I was asked to bring. They seemed to assume that all Westerners were loaded with cash and had bottomless suitcases. People with so little often have a huge sense of entitlement when faced with the sudden possibility of so much. But it was not all one-sided: in exchange, I would get a friend for life.

In those days, Russia was essentially a barter society. If a shipment of umbrellas came in, shopkeepers would squirrel away most of
them to sell to their friends, leaving nothing for the general public. If you worked in a food shop, anything edible that showed up was hidden from ordinary shoppers and saved for your friends. A dentist would hoard the limited anesthetic for his acquaintances, charging a hefty fee and leaving those not in the know to rely on a few shots of vodka before having a tooth pulled. I once traded three pairs of high heels, a down jacket, and a pair of blue jeans to get a drunk workman to come and retile our bathroom and replace the cracked wooden toilet seat that splintered my bottom. When I was asked for a favor, I usually had trouble saying no, even if I risked trouble. People would ask me to bring them the strangest things, from prosthetic body parts to dog-grooming products to birth-control pills. Western condoms were a favorite item, since Soviet ones, called
galoshes
, tended to have holes. I brought telephone answering machines, bras, books, music, anything with Western print on it. In most Soviet homes there was usually a shrine to Western capitalism somewhere to be found, usually a faded Western container such as a plastic Coke cup, washed and rewashed until the print had come off of it, or an airline calendar poster. Cheap packaging, which a Westerner wouldn’t think twice about tossing out, was treasured by Soviets, symbols of the forbidden. Soviets saved plastic bags from the West with ads in English printed on them. Marlboro was a favorite. English-language T-shirts were worn threadbare. Anything to transport them even for a moment from their usual world of shoddy goods. I would also bring suitcase loads of the latest fashion items or camera equipment to boost Dima’s budding career as a fashion photographer in the most unfashionable capital in the world. My efforts weren’t always appreciated.

“These aren’t the right Timberlands,” Dima said once, rejecting the shoes I had carried all the way from America. “I asked you for
the ones with black stitching.” My husband, the fashion guru, also memorized the styles he saw in the glossy magazines I lugged over.

No matter how much of a burden all the requests became, my sense of guilt for having more always prevailed. Especially when I looked at the lives of Soviet women. On one hand, the constitution granted women full equality earlier than their sisters in the West. Indeed, Soviets prided themselves on their courageous women pilots, glorious female truck drivers, and the first woman cosmonaut. But usually the women were burdened with two jobs, at work and at home. They were expected to pull their weight in the workforce, and were often given the most miserable jobs like shoveling snow or heavy lifting in factories, and they were expected to fulfill the traditional women’s role in the home, shopping, cooking, and cleaning.

I once asked a Soviet woman what feminism meant to her. “The problem is we have no kitchen aids,” she said. “We’d have no problem with the sexes if we had washing machines and dishwashers.” Getting a man to help with the dishes was not an option. I had trained Dima to do them occasionally as a lark, but he would race out of the kitchen if a neighbor or friend came over, making sure never to be caught in the act. It would have been a stain on his manhood if anyone knew I had him doing women’s work. The situation between the sexes often seemed archaic. After dinner I was usually left alone at the table talking with men while Soviet women went into the kitchen to clean up and talk among themselves. Communism brought a veneer of equality when it suited, but sexual roles seemed rooted in a medieval chauvinism.

Perhaps the worst indignities endured by Soviet women revolved around their sexuality. Contraception was scarce, and sex education was taboo. It was easier to get an abortion than a condom. The
women I knew averaged six to eight abortions in a lifetime. Some had as many as thirty, sometimes resulting in sterility, infection, or death. Giving birth could also be brutal, dehumanized by a gruff, assembly-line approach. A few women delivered in the same room at the same time on cold metal tables with no anesthetic. Men were shut out. Gripped by an ancient superstition, society forbade men even to enter the birth houses. Most women held their newborns up to the window to show a husband who stood waiting outside, no matter how cold or how much snow was on the ground. Today in Russia there are a few progressive maternity wards that allow men inside, but for many it is still forbidden for men to be anywhere around the mysteries of childbirth.

Dima was an extremely talented photographer, funny and bright but petulant and needy. He was as incapable of love as I was in those days. I was in emotional limbo, tied to this man and this country. I often felt as though I were traipsing back and forth between two worlds at war with each other. I suppose I felt much as my father had, driving from his mother’s home to ours, between the two enemy camps. My father’s mother differed from my reserved Northern Irish mother about as much as a Muscovite from your average New Jersey resident. In some way, I too was following in my mother’s footsteps by marrying young and moving to another country. I lost myself in an alien culture much as she must have by coming to America in the 1960s.

My marriage was not at all about suffering, even if that was Russia’s favorite national pastime. Dima and I often had a good time. Laughing at Lenin was a favorite sport, and Brezhnev was a good target too. It was hard to know who was really running the country back in the early 1980s, but they would trot out a corpselike version of Brezhnev to wave stiffly on top of Lenin’s mausoleum on state occasions. Dima did a great impersonation of that ritual. We
spent a lot of time in a vodka-induced haze, doing elaborate black-market deals. We would sell off items of my clothing for next week’s grocery money, surreptitiously handing over a pair of Levi’s in a back alley as if it were a pound of cocaine. A pack of Marlboros perched at the edge of our table for the waiter to slip into his pocket would cover the cost of dinner in one of Moscow’s finest eating establishments, a meal survivable only if one washed it down with vast quantities of vodka. We lived in a constant survival mode.

Dima took me to all his special, secret places rarely accessible to foreign visitors. It was an insider’s tour of the part of the Russian soul that the Soviets had not managed to squash. He introduced me to Novo Devichi Cemetery in the center of Moscow, a veritable Who’s Who of deceased Soviet society. Anybody who was anybody, but did not rate highly enough in the hierarchy to be buried in the Kremlin wall, is buried in this cemetery. Famous writers like Chekhov, Gógol, and Mayakovski were also moved in to enhance the stature of the place. There is a proliferation of headstones bearing the date of 1937, a big year for Stalin’s purges. Resting nearby are Stalin’s henchmen, responsible for carrying out those purges. My friend Lev, now a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, loved to show me around the gravestones. It makes sense that he, as a man who now makes his living penetrating human facades, had loved one of the only sanctuaries for historical truth in Moscow. Soviet leaders had been inventing and rewriting history for decades. They ripped people out of history books. Stalin removed all his enemies from the textbooks, Khrushchev wrote out Stalin, then Brezhnev did the same to Khrushchev. But in the cemetery, the past could not be buried. People who officially no longer existed in the history books could still be found here. Perhaps that is why it was off-limits to the general public until Gorbachev came to power. Dima had a well-known partisan grandfather buried there, so he had special clearance
to visit the cemetery. It was one of my favorite spots in Moscow. Having done away with the afterlife, the Soviets were generous in glorifying the mortal world. Giant granite statues depicting the socialist contribution of the deceased stood in place of a religious symbol or plain gravestone. Famous cosmonauts were memorialized by towering spaceships. A famous communications expert was etched in stone with a phone to his ear. A well-known obstetrician was constructed with a baby in his arms. Some of the statues are so garish, I sometimes wondered if the immortalized were writhing in embarrassment below ground.

Another of my favorite haunts was the beer bars. They were usually down some filthy stairway, stank of urine, and attracted the low end of Russian society. I would go in and hunt down a dirty glass beer mug, take it over to the communal sink, and wash it out before placing it under a beer-dispensing machine. Then I would pop in my twenty kopeks and the beer machine would spit out some foul-tasting warm liquid that Russians called beer, with which they would wash down some salty dried fish innards as they stood slumped over sticky counters, standing in puddles of the spilled so-called beer. Had George Orwell visited this joint before writing
1984?
Despite the decidedly grubby surroundings, I loved them because I was always amazed at the level of conversation at those places. I would often end up discussing Tolstoy or Lermontov with some drunken bus driver.

I was also fascinated by the gas-water machines, a variation on the beer dispenser. In order to quench the thirst of the masses, the great Soviet state erected drinking machines on the streets in place of cafés or kiosks. One filthy chipped glass would be attached to this contraption. First you would turn the glass upside down and rinse it out with a few splashes of water to wash away the germs. You would insert your three kopecks and some yellowish colored
gas-water would spurt out. It must have been an acquired taste that, despite my numerous attempts, I never developed. It made me think sometimes that the Russians must be a super-race, given the things they could consume and still survive.

As long as I did not delve below the surface of our relationship, it was exhilarating. Dima could make me laugh and laugh, when he was in the mood to poke fun at his country. Absurdity was in constant supply. Once I came across a line of people waiting for nothing. It was inside GUM, the cavernous department store on Red Square. Dima explained that at the same time each day, an ice-cream vendor turned up. People were just staking their place in line. I dubbed them lines of anticipation. Laughter was often the best defense in coping with the inanity and degradation of daily Soviet life.

Even with his irreverence for the Soviet state, Dima was sometimes touchy about me mocking it. One line he could not let me cross was Pavlik Morozev. I could make fun of Grandfather Lenin, as schoolchildren were taught to refer to him, but criticism of the little-boy hero, revered by Soviets, disturbed Dima. Pavlik was a Stalin-era invention. During Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Russian peasantry, millions starved. Pavlik is revered for having turned in his kulak parents to the authorities because they hoarded a small amount of grain to feed
him
. The parents were executed. The son was lionized. Throughout the Soviet Union, schools and streets were named for him, statues were erected to honor him—the boy who betrayed his own parents for wanting to feed him. I did not understand Dima’s attachment to this scoundrel. It was a sign of our cultural incompatibility. Maybe the esteem in which Pavlik was held was a good barometer for the health of the Communist Party. I knew the Soviet state was unraveling when I saw a small newspaper article in
Literaturnaya Gazetta
, soon after Gorbachev
came to power, questioning Pavlik’s stature. Things were changing, even though Pavlik represented a mind-set that did not die out with the Soviets. In today’s democratic Russia, officials desperate to collect taxes resurrected that Stalin-era technique, urging children at one point to report their parents to the police for not paying their taxes.

Being a foreigner at a time when they were few and far between meant an automatic entrée into Moscow society. In the elite, artistic circles, it was fashionable for young Soviets to flirt with danger and have foreign friends, so I was kind of glamorous, simply by virtue of my passport. I had never felt like that before. My frizzy hair and lack of mainstream thinking always rendered me uncool when I was growing up in New Jersey. In grade school, I worried about sitting alone on the gym floor because I might be the last girl picked for the team. I dreaded lunch hour and the possibility nobody would want to sit with me in the cafeteria. Now I was hobnobbing with Bolshoi ballerinas, artists, and film stars who lived a privileged life in this so-called classless society. I often hung out at the Dom Kino House of Film, a private club for Moscow’s luminaries in the movie world, where Soviet actors and actresses could dine on special stocks of food unavailable to the masses. They would carefully inspect one another’s clothing labels, and were all glamorously decked out in the latest black-market fashions from the West. Ultimately just about anything was available in Moscow to anyone with money and the right connections.