Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

There were other problems. “My wife doesn’t like it in Birobidzhan,” he said. “The first year was very difficult—there’s no place to get kosher food, and it’s so far away from everything.” His wife wasn’t alone in her aversion to the place: after Mordechai Scheiner left in 2008, Rabbi Riss said, they couldn’t find another rabbi willing to move here. So for three years, Birobidzhan had a beautiful new synagogue, but no rabbi.

“We would have a better life in Israel or Moscow,” Rabbi Riss admitted. “But this is my mission. I will stay here as long as I can.” True to form, he broke into a big grin. “On the bright side, there’s no anti-Semitism here. When I walk around, everyone says ‘Shalom!’ even if they’re not Jewish. In Moscow, I felt like people would say bad stuff, or sometimes curse. But here, it’s like in Israel.”

That seemed a bit of a stretch. Yet once again, thanks to government funding, the new wave of students at School No. 23, and this determined young rabbi, it seemed the Jewish Autonomous Region would continue to survive.

I was starting to think Birobidzhan might be the end of me, though. As soon as I got back to the hotel room, my eyes started to burn again. Now I was angry: I charged down the hallway to ask the dezhurnaya if I could switch rooms. “Do you have any nonsmoking rooms in this hotel?” I asked.

“They’re all nonsmoking,” she said.

“Then why is there an ashtray in my room?”

“Eh, it’s empty!” she said, with a flick of her hand.

I considered changing hotels but was convinced the others would be no better, and at least the Vostok was right in the center of town. More important, leaving a prepaid hotel room seemed like an unnecessary extravagance that only a wasteful American would consider. I didn’t want to be that person.

The other option was to leave Birobidzhan altogether. I was actually ready to leave, but because the town isn’t directly on the Trans-Siberian line, fewer trains came through, and there were none to my next destination, Chita, until two nights hence. I booked a ticket, then consoled myself by thinking, just 48 more hours in that damn room . My eyes hadn’t begun itching until I’d turned on the air-conditioner, so I resolved to leave it off, no matter how hot the room got.

The next morning, though, I woke up as itchy-eyed as ever. I called Rada, a young Russian interpreter who’d struck up a conversation with me at the synagogue. She’d given me her number, and though I hadn’t planned on using it, now I felt desperate. “Do you know of any apartments I could rent just for one day?” I asked. “I’m leaving on the train late tomorrow, but need a place for tonight.” Rada leapt into action, making a few calls, and she even joined me to look at a couple of apartments. But they all seemed just as dusty as the Vostok, so after a couple of hours, we gave up. Grateful for the help, I invited Rada to dinner that evening. Just 36 hours to go.

I couldn’t stand the thought of going back into the hotel, so I went to a café and had a cup of tea. Then I sat outside on a park bench, until a swarm of tiny mosquitoes attacked. I started walking, wandering first past the train station, then to the Philharmonic Hall, then down by the river. At one point, I looked up and saw a jet contrail, which startled me as much as if I’d seen a UFO—that’s how off the beaten track Birobidzhan felt. [6] The nearest airport is in Khabarovsk, more than 100 miles away. It’s surprising how strange an airplane in the sky looks when you haven’t seen one for a few days.

Finally, with the sun setting, I came back and sat on a bench across from the hotel. A big electronic billboard was blaring the same advertisements over and over, and I started to memorize them. My favorite one was for a window supply company called Okna Etalon (Standard Windows), because their jingle was set to the melody of the Passover song “Let My People Go.” I sat waiting for their ad to cycle back around, so I could sing along: “Ok-naaa E-taaaaaa-LON!” [7] My second favorite was for a business called Klatch. I thought this was another Jewish reference ( klatsch ), perhaps for a coffee shop. Then I looked up the store online, and it sells purses. Klatch=clutch. At long last, 27 Okna Etalons later, it was time to meet Rada for dinner.

I took her to the nicest restaurant I’d found in Birobidzhan, an Italian place one block from the synagogue. Over plates of pasta and pizza, we chatted in English, and gradually I started to feel good again. My cold was abating, my eyes were no longer itching, and tomorrow night I’d finally be moving on to a new city.

When I got back to the hotel—for my final night there!—I sent Randi an e-mail. “I’m so ready to get to the next destination, I can’t even tell you,” I wrote. “I am really hopeful that these random irritations will stop happening and I can just settle into the trip.”

I hit “send,” shut my laptop, and lay back on my pillow. Within minutes, I was asleep.

In the black of night, my eyes popped open. The bed is wet. The bed is wet!

Where was it coming from? Was it coming from… me? I staggered out of the bed and felt my way to the bathroom, banging into the dresser and my suitcase along the way. I switched on the light and looked down, but I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Was that water on my legs? Oh, god. No, no, no. It wasn’t water. It was pale, watery diarrhea.

My stomach lurched. How did this happen? I hadn’t even felt anything until it was too late. I started cleaning myself up, then realized in a flash of horror that it might be all over the bed too. I hurried out and pulled back the blanket: the sheets were stained. I yanked them off the bed and carried them into the shower stall, where I began trying, unsuccessfully, to scrub them clean using tiny travel packets of Woolite a friend had given me for the trip. As I hunched over them, with tears in my eyes and my guts rumbling, I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake coming back for this third journey.

The worst thing about getting sick while traveling is that you never know how much worse it might get before it gets better. And if this was food poisoning, which I suspected it was, it could get much, much worse. Fear was making my heart race, so I left the sheets in a heap and began pacing up and down the room, trying to calm myself. I finally remembered I had Imodium in my medicine bag, and I choked down one of those. Then I kept pacing, pacing, pacing for another half hour, until I was too exhausted to continue.

I lay gingerly on the bed. After a while, the gurgling finally subsided, and I dared to think the crisis might have passed. I closed my eyes, and eventually managed to fall asleep.

That’s when the fire alarm went off.

It was a high-pitched shrieking sound, with a recorded voice intoning, “Respected guests! This is the fire alarm!” over and over and over. I lay in the bed, fantasizing about murder, determined that I would not get up unless I smelled smoke or heard people stampeding down the hallway. About ten minutes later, the alarm finally, mercifully, stopped.

The next morning, I woke early and packed my bags. My train didn’t leave until after midnight, but I couldn’t stay in this hotel another millisecond. I knew I’d have to tell the dezhurnaya about the soiled sheets, and I absolutely dreaded it. I felt like a schoolchild who’d wet her pants in front of the class.

At the desk, I could barely get the words out. “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I was sick, and the sheets are dirty…”

“Oh, you poor thing! Don’t worry!” she instantly cooed. “It’s all right.”