Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

Back at the table, Vasily, too, professed love for Putin. “He takes care of the homeland,” he said. “He makes sure that other people respect Russia.” They both expressed sharp disdain for Barack Obama, with Vasily opining that he was “weak.” I told them I didn’t agree, to which Vasily said, “Well, you like your president and we like ours. It’s not surprising.” Then he poured our glasses full again, and we toasted to friendship between our countries. Because why spoil the mood with talk of politics?

“So, Liza,” Valya said, leaning close. “Do you have a husband? Or children?”

“No,” I said cheerily, then tried to think of some way to elaborate without elaborating. You could have driven a Mack truck through the ensuing silence, so as a follow-up, I blurted, “No husband! No boyfriend!” as if that explained everything. Valya cocked her head and smiled sweetly, but she seemed unsure what to say.

“Let’s take some photos!” I said.

“Yes, let’s,” she replied. “Wait while I put on some lipstick!”

I followed her into the bedroom, and she perched in front of a small round mirror. She carefully traced the edge of her lips with a dark reddish-pink pencil, then colored in the rest with a lighter shade. “Do you want some?” she asked. Tipsy after four shots of vodka, I said, “Sure!” But after she finished with herself, she glanced at my makeup-free face and just put the lipstick away.

We took a few photos, and then Valya said, “Remember the pictures of me with the radio? All that old equipment is still there. Want to see it?” I told her I did, and she led me to the generator room.

I had forgotten how much equipment was in that room. There were multiple generators, the microwave-sized two-way radio, and a wall-sized metal box with so many knobs and dials that it looked like the Wayback Machine in the old Mr. Peabody & Sherman cartoons. Using my iPhone, I pulled up the 1995 photo of Valya in her kerchief at the radio, and she giggled and tried to pose in that same position. I snapped a couple of pictures, and suddenly she blurted, “Wait! Wait!”

Her smile had vanished. “What if, when you get to the border, they look at these pictures and say, ‘Why do you have all these photos of secret equipment?’” she asked. Just like that, she was as nervous as she’d been 20 years ago.

I was paranoid enough myself that I considered whether this could actually happen, even though the decades-old equipment was more appropriate for a museum than anything else. Then I realized that by the end of my trip, there’d be so many thousands of photos on my phone that anyone would give up before they scrolled all the way back to Vladivostok. “I think we’re OK,” I told Valya. “They’re not going to look at these pictures at the border.” But it was too late; she was spooked again.

“Let’s walk to the lighthouse,” she said.

We exited through the metal gate, then walked past cars and sunbathers as a couple of jet skis roared by, spraying water into the sky. We took a few photos with my selfie stick, then strolled back home. I asked if she wanted to see more of Gary’s pictures from 1995, and she said yes. So I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and booted it up.

At least, I tried to. Nothing appeared on the screen except for a flashing question mark. What was this? I had no idea, but it certainly didn’t look good. I shut the laptop. “It’s not working,” I said. “I’ll fix it later.”

Except that I couldn’t. When I got back to my hotel that evening, I used my iPad to research “flashing question mark on laptop” and then followed the instructions, trying every possible way to get the thing to boot up. It was no use: my laptop’s hard drive had died, on the very first day of my three-month trip. This was a horrific development, but fortunately, all I had to do was call Randi in L.A. and ask her to buy a new MacBook Air, load it with my data from our external hard drive at home, and ship it to me at the hotel. This, too, felt like a miracle of modern technology—that I could get a brand-new laptop, with all my documents and photos, delivered to me in Russia in just a matter of days.

Or so I hoped.

Two days later, Valya came to meet me at the big Lenin statue downtown, just steps from my hotel. This particular statue is of the “taxi-hailing” genre, with Lenin raising his right arm, gesturing toward the magnificent baroque train station perched on the waterfront of the Golden Horn Bay. Now, I was amused to see that Lenin appeared to be welcoming the massive Diamond Princess cruise ship docked just behind the station.

Tourism to Vladivostok is a relatively new phenomenon. As a high-security military port, this was a closed city during Soviet times, meaning no foreigners were allowed in. At the time of my 1995 visit, few Americans had ever been here—with the exception of Gerald Ford, who’d jetted over in 1974 for a quick visit to discuss arms control with Leonid Brezhnev. President Ford had been unimpressed, writing in his diary that the Okeanskaya Sanatorium, where the talks took place, looked like “an abandoned YMCA camp in the Catskills.” The rest of Vladivostok didn’t look much better, so even after the Russian government opened the city to foreigners in 1992, people kept right on not coming.

But now, everywhere I looked I saw souvenir stands, people in sun hats snapping photos, and guides with brightly colored flags leading groups of Asian tourists. Vladivostok’s proximity to China, combined with relaxed visa restrictions for Chinese visitors, had led to a boom in tourism from that country. What was previously a run-down, sleepy, Soviet-feeling outpost had transformed into a gleaming, modern, thoroughly renovated city—including two brand-new, multimillion-dollar suspension bridges. The Russian government had been promising to build these bridges since the Khrushchev era, Valya had told me, but “Putin got it done.” One of these was the bridge to Russian Island that she’d previously feared might obliterate their home.

With the opening of that bridge in 2012, the once-remote Russian Island had become a focal point of Vladivostok. The government built a sprawling new campus for the Far Eastern Federal University, with officials reportedly hoping to turn the area into a Silicon Valley of the East. This apparently entailed hosting numerous conferences, one of which, the Eastern Economic Forum, was going on right now. In fact, at the very moment I was meeting Valya at the Lenin statue, President Putin himself was at the Forum, delivering a major speech about Ukraine. This followed an opening-day speech by Pamela Anderson, the star of Baywatch (or, as it’s called in Russian, Lifeguards of Malibu ) and a spokesperson for PETA, who spoke about climate change and endangered species. [4] A headline the next day read, “Pamela Anderson Presented with White Tiger,” which I initially took to mean she was going all Michael Jackson and starting an exotic petting zoo with the help of exuberant Russians. However, the white tiger turned out to be a small statuette, which she obligingly kissed for photographers.

Valya was wearing a bright pink sun hat and a pink-and-white leopard-print blouse, part of what I was beginning to understand was an impressive collection of pink clothing. She’d brought a friend, a woman about her age named Katya, and as the three of us greeted each other, Valya smiled that wicked smile and said, “Look who’s coming.” She gestured behind me, and I turned, expecting to see Vasily. Instead, I saw a tall, striking brunette in a short dress and spiked heels heading our way. Was this who Valya meant?