Into Thick Air (18 page)

He approved, but added, “You must be careful where you bring such a phone. In the south the military is very sensitive about the Chechen problem.”

I assured him I would stay at least two hundred miles from Chechnya.

Might not make a difference, said another man from Geolink. He was a local, a suave fellow named Dmitri, and he casually suggested that in all of Russia, “Things may stay the same. Or there may be a civil war.”

Lacking an armored bicycle, I wouldn't be wise to ignore local advice. But Dmitri was only musing. Moscow did not seem to be on the brink of destruction, although there was no disputing that it was at least very flammable. Invading Mongols had torched the city in 1238. They liked the results, and repeated the show in 1382, 1547, and 1571. Moscow burned again in 1812, except this time it was lit by the Muscovites to spoil Napoleon's advance. During the mayhem of the 1900s Moscow was spared the flame but not the bloodshed. Who, I asked Dmitri, could possibly wish upon Russia another war?

“A war can be a profitable thing,” Dmitri said. He wore a bomber jacket emblazoned
U.S. Air Force
. “You can break into buildings and steal things. Rob people. The poor see what they do not have.”

The poor see many things, some of which were on television that evening. I stayed up with Mr. Barrion, flipping channels with the remote. I opened a Heineken and the window, and from the street came the chords
of a guitarist singing “Jailhouse Rock.” From the television came the image of two naked women. Although I was working overtime, I didn't waver when the women, apparently fond of each other, began squeezing the squeezables.

I presumed we were watching a cable channel. “Not cable,” said my host, “just regular TV. This is democracy.”

 

DEMOCRACY WAS THE BLATHER of car alarms, the sound of something worth stealing. It was kiosks selling
Playboy
magazine. And it was Moscow's Izmailovsky Market, an outdoor smorgasbord of goods from computers to carrots. Here the Muscovites had swiftly cobbled together a breezy mall, with faux log cabins stocked with Italian shoes, and fake yurts hung with Asian rugs. I was happily lost in the bazaar when a man asked me, “Excuse me, but would you like to buy some postage stamps?”

He looked like a Slavic leprechaun with small green eyes and bad teeth. From his Adidas gym bag he pulled a small album.

“Look, the history of the Soviet Union in stamps. This page is revolutionary stamps with Lenin, this page is space travel. This page is New Russia, with stamps of the three men that died defending our White House, in 1993.”

But wasn't the White House in 1993 occupied by men who did not want a new Russia, Communists who wanted the old Soviet Union?

“Yes, maybe this is so, but these men were run over by the tanks and so became Russian heroes. Now nobody is sure. Here are the stamps. Ten dollars.”

Sorry, I'm not a collector—but where did you learn to speak English so well?

“Buy my stamps and I will tell you.”

I bought the stamps. He whispered, “I was supposed to be a spy. I was a candidate, but I turned down the KGB.”

Was he making this up? But a liar would not have come up with this: “I was afraid.”

I strolled the market with Vladimir, past steel sheds overflowing with CDs. He gripped my arm with surprising strength for someone born in
1943, and said, “Listen to me: the world is upside down. And it is your fault. Not yours personally, but I think you know what I mean. Once in Russia there was no rich and no poor. Everything was free. Education. Medicine.”

He gestured to a meat stand. “Now look. This chicken is twenty-five rubles a kilo. American chicken. Last week it was ten. Everything is crazy.”

He made a secret nod toward some rug dealers and said, “Look: they are Azeris. From Azerbaijan. They scare me. And there are Chechens. They have no mercy.”

I tried to cheer him with a gift of American chicken. In return he gave me a small bottle of Istok vodka. We had a drink near the food stalls, beside the curls of dried fish and sacks of rice, and the liquor loosened us.

“Tell me,” asked Vladimir, “where did you meet your wife?”

At the University of Arizona.

“That is enough. No more.” He had another drink, a friendly swallow, and slipped the chicken into his gym bag. “I am alone in this world. I like women, but they do not like me. Nevertheless, I believe in God.”

God and vodka preceded deeper introspection, which in Vladimir's case was family problems. His cousin's daughter, thirty years old and mother of two, was abruptly single after her husband had jumped eighteen floors to his death. “The family wants me to take his place. But I do not love her. She has a secret lover. What should I do?”

Don't marry her.

This pleased him—until he spotted foreigners.

“Listen to me! Those people are Vietnamese. And there are more men from the Caucusus. Moscow is flooded with non-Muscovites. They are taking over. The Russian is too . . . too . . . heart-minded. This word is my invention. It means they would not
make
you buy anything.”

I was thinking of the stamps, but instead said that Moscow today looks like other big cities. Change is normal.

Vladimir was astonished. “What? You call this normal?” He turned to face the passing crowds. “You call this good?”

It was a fine day, glowing with the last touch of summer. Crew-cut dudes wearing headphones lugged shopping bags emblazoned with big-busted
babes in teeny bras. Teen girls in sheer blouses clomped past in giant platform shoes last seen on Elton John. I said nothing. Vladimir could only fume. “They spoil the Russian character.”

We parted, me leaving on the Metro. The subway cost twenty cents—cheap for a ride and an art museum. The older stations were tributes to the sturdy proletariat building and defending a new country. Glittering mosaics and marble statues depicted Russian men working jackhammers, Russian women loading howitzers, Kazakh steelworkers, and Chukchi ice folk in sealskin parkas. I caught myself thinking,
Yes, let us praise the miner, the farmer, the construction worker
.

But I was just a tourist; the others on the subway platform had borne the full weight of the communist experiment, good and bad. During my first visit to Moscow five years earlier, its citizens had seemed downtrodden, and my host Boris Ivanov agreed. We were shopping for salami and beer, waiting in line, when he said, “The Russian people do not look healthy to me.”

Foolishly, I suggested that maybe it's their diet.

“Forget diet,” said Boris. “It is their soul.”

Now, for an update on the Russian soul, I headed off to visit Boris and his wife, Natasha. The Metro car was plastered with ads for Mr. Video, Dallas cigarettes, and Vinorum Cognac, a glass of which was being savored by former cosmonaut Alex Leonov, the first person to walk in space, now sitting by a glowing hearth in his official jumpsuit. I got off at a station of aluminum and glass, far from the center of Moscow and the triumphal art of Stalin.

Boris was waiting. He wore comfortably baggy brown corduroy pants and a smile that revealed a rakish gap between his incisors. Outside the station I asked a flower vendor for four mums, please. For Natasha.

“You can have three or five, but not four,” said Boris. “Even numbers of flowers are for funerals and cemeteries; odd numbers are for the living.”

Boris and Natasha live in a shoddy nine-story apartment block amid the handsome dilapidation of autumn, both the building and the birch leaves beginning to fall. Along the street were Russian garages, the semiportable steel boxes that gave the neighborhood the appeal of a rail yard. Inside their
apartment, things were much rosier. Wooden parquet floor, big double-pane windows, and lots of books, from Pushkin to geomorphology.

Boris and Natasha, unlike their namesakes in the
Rocky and Bullwinkle
cartoons, are professors. She studies economics. He studies the impact craters of meteors, a vocation that I pointed out is uniquely suited to a Russian: their country is the biggest target, 6,000 miles wide. After a feast to fatten the bicycle tourist, Boris turned on the Sony to watch the “most acid political commentary.”

It was Mikhail Leontiev, a young wit with a ten-day beard. Leontiev said Russia's military was very hungry, and if the generals drove their tanks and Red Army into Moscow, the soldiers would simply head for the stores and stand in line for food.

It was a good sign, this criticism, and on the walk back to the Metro I reminded Boris of his comment five years ago, about the Russian soul. Had he changed his mind?

“The soul of the Russian, I think, is related directly to the state of our country's economy. When we have stability in our lives, when we have regular prices and food like the rest of Europe, then we will not be so Russian. We will be like everyone else.”

I rumbled away in the subway, back to my room and my bicycle in a box. I unpacked it and screwed it together, and I patched my sleeping pad where it had been punctured by the teeth of the chainring.

There was little point in asking further information of my host, Laurent. He had never been south. And the tourists did not go there. The thickest guidebook devoted only 8 of its 1,200 pages to the thousand miles between Moscow and the Caspian. The trusty
World Book
provided only a map with the symbols for pig and sugar beet.

The Russian heartland was the Europe that nobody knew. Or the Europe nobody wanted to visit. Even the Muscovites knew little of the rural folk, and that was pure gossip: they're exceedingly hospitable; they're crude barbarians; they're frankly dangerous.

The rumors made me wonder. I had a wallet full of questionable rubles and a bike that was priceless, and I aimed to reach the Caspian before the season of insulated underwear.

 

ONE CYCLIST, riding without grace under thirty pounds of gear, cannot challenge the fleet of Volga taxis that rule the main avenues of Moscow. I retreat to the back streets with good results, pedaling past just-raked parks of pointy spruce and broad linden, where grannies in black talk to the pigeons. My bicycle frame seems made of rubber, but does not crack anew. The weld is holding, and so is the weather, a scatter of innocent clouds.

On the walkway of a stone bridge over the Moscow River, kids eating cotton candy point with sticky fingers to the dome of Christ Our Savior Cathedral. Three hundred feet high, it's a just-completed replica of the cathedral that once stood on the same site: Tsar Alexander's gilded thanks to God for the 1812 defeat of Napoleon. The tsar desired the grandest church in Russia, and so it was sheathed with granite, marble, and bronze. The interior dazzled with nearly a half-ton of gold leaf. Like Notre Dame and St. Peter's Basilica, the cathedral was an extravagance and a masterpiece. For two centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had bestowed its blessings on the tsars, and in return the tsars had made the church a branch of the government.

This relationship the communists would not forget. In 1931, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, had the cathedral obliterated. He had in mind his
own temple, the Palace of the Soviets. It was never built, but the important thing was erasing the past.

Now Christ Our Savior stands again, its astonishing cupola high above the slow barges on the river a reminder of the enormous wealth of the tsars, the grip of the church, and the terrible energy of Stalin.

Two miles south of the river, at Paveletski Station, I hop a commuter train south out of Moscow. I've no particular destination, only the goal of escaping the traffic of Europe's largest city. The farther from the city center, the bigger the apartment blocks, until they are twenty-two stories of concrete and ceramic tiles that have absorbed the local color—mud, ash, smoke. The newer blocks have primary color cues—blue, green, red—so you can tell one building from the other.

With my bicycle held tight against the wooden bench, we roll away from the moneyed heart of the city. Hawkers jump on and announce,
Good afternoon, would you like to buy some batteries?
There are no takers. Thirty minutes out of downtown and we're clicking past the smokeless smokestacks of idled factories. Past the airport and it's the Moscow equivalent of suburbs, the summer gardens with attendant cabins called dachas. Not far beyond are deep stands of narrow birch and reedy glades and genuine farmers, full-timers toting gargantuan cabbages and tending goats.

I get off at the next station and head for the first town en route, Stupino. In need of food to camp out, I ask a geezer closing a crooked wooden gate, Sir, is there a store?

He kicks mud clods off his rubber boots and cocks his head. “Store?” he says incredulously, sagging against the gate. He begins rambling in Russian, and I believe he's saying that he's had no money for the last ten days or months or years, and so there is in fact
No Store
. But another man walks up and injects,
Yes, there is a store. That way
.

After more directions from a healthy lad on a bike, I find a store evocatively named “Store.” There's bread, yogurt, candy, milk in a foil box, Baltic Beer, and Saint Springs Water blessed by the archbishop. I buy one of everything except the beer (two), then pedal out of town. Occasionally a blimpish bus grinds past, sounding urgently in need of gear oil. The wooden houses are edged with wedding-cake trim on the eaves and around the
windows, and the picket-fence yards contain long-handled water pumps and fancy chickens. The birds can be any color, but the houses are mostly blue or green, the hopeful hues of sky and garden. The sun settles in the west, swelling gloriously in a haze of wood smoke. Satisfied with my escape from the city, I roll down to the Oka River valley, where I find not the river but the perfect footpath leading into a thick woods.