Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“You’ll get used to it,” Corinne said. “There’s a terrible story about a foreigner who went home with a prostitute, had sex with her, and then realized her grandmother was in the other bed in the room and had been there the whole time. Maybe it’s urban legend, but it’s totally plausible.”

“Yikes.”

“You know what they call hookers here?”

I shook my head.

“Night butterflies,” she said. “Nochnye babochki.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“And you know what the slang for ‘pussy’ is?”

“No.”

“Bunker,” she said in a Russian accent. “Means the same thing as in English. A bunker, where dicks can hunker down and feel safe.”

“Until the postcoital fallout,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “Sam said you were funny.”

“He did?” It was good to remember that I had friends who didn’t just think I was sad.

“He sings your praises. Did you ever hook up?”

“With Sam? No. We’re just friends.” Sam and I had been friends since our freshman-orientation camping trip. He was a fixture of my campus life.

“I think he has a little crush on you. He talks about you a lot.” She burped. “I’ve been drinking, so it’s full-disclosure time.”

It was nearly five when we got home. I’d never been so intoxicated and haven’t been so since. I spent the next two hours stretched out on the bathroom floor, lifting my head every ten minutes to clutch the toilet bowl. Corinne drank two glasses of water and went to sleep. She had already built up a tolerance for Russia.

ULITSA PETROVKA WAS A NARROW STREET. It was one of the places in Moscow that probably hadn’t changed much in a hundred years, though its Old World charm was tarnished by chipped moldings and peeling paint. The entrance foyer of number 26 was in a state of aggressive decay. A uniformed militsiya man stood outside the booth that had been installed next to the elevator, his rifle on prominent display.

“Pasport,” he said. The word is the same in Russian and English, but he fired it at me in such a threatening manner that it took me a moment to understand. I felt like I was at Checkpoint Charlie and might be shot if I tried to get over the Berlin Wall. I shimmied my passport out of my bag—despite warnings about pickpockets, I refused to carry one of the hidden wallets or fanny packs that so many Americans use—and handed it to him. He studied my passport while I studied him. He could not have been older than I was. His cheeks were pocked with scars, and his chin was corrupted by cystic acne. One pimple was particularly ripe; the pus was practically oozing out.

“Amerikanka?” he said. I nodded. Obviously I was American, not just because my passport had been issued by the United States but because my body’s stiff, awkward simulation of deference revealed how unaccustomed I was to having my movements monitored. Sure, we had to go through airport security and show ID to buy beer, but we never questioned our freedom or our privacy. In 1995 I was not used to being watched. I was a privileged, white, American girl; I had never before worried that I’d be arrested or detained. The sight of this guard’s gun changed that. He seemed tempted to punish me just because he could.

“Otkuda vy?” he asked. Where are you from?

“Washington,” I said. “Iz Vashingtona.”

“CIA?” he said.

“Nyet,” I said quickly. “Studyentka.”

I was not a student anymore, but I wasn’t anything else yet. And I didn’t remember the words for any other professions. He raised an eyebrow. I suppose my grasp (a tenuous grasp, but most Americans don’t speak any Russian) of his language made him suspicious. Either that or I was so busy trying not to seem suspicious that I was especially suspect.

He picked up the red phone in his booth. “Allo?” he said, and then began talking so fast that I couldn’t follow anything, except that he definitely said, “Amerikanskaya devushka” (American girl) twice. He paused for a long time, listening and interjecting an occasional “Ladno” while I tried not to gawk at the acne on his chin. He hung up the phone and regarded me. I waited. He didn’t release me from his stare.

“Moy pasport?” I said, reaching for it. He stepped toward me and adjusted his gun. “Nelzya,” he said. It was forbidden.

I didn’t know what to do. There were no cell phones then. The public telephones in Moscow were broken. (“I’ve never found one that works,” Corinne had told me.) I was supposed to meet Svetlana upstairs in the DDBD office on the seventh floor at eleven o’clock. I was late. And it was clear that I was not permitted to move. This was a mistake, I thought. Jenny had been a guest of the Soviet government, so she saw only the best of Russia. But I was on my own in a city so crooked that you couldn’t count on the law to protect you. I didn’t know where the American embassy was, but I vowed to find out as soon as I got my passport back. My mother’s anxiety about Moscow suddenly didn’t seem so unfounded.

I stood there for what felt like hours trying to avoid the officer’s gaze. I did not have the Russian vocabulary to ask why he was keeping me there. I could feel tremors creeping up my body and willed myself not to cry. I’m going to end up in prison, I thought. I’ll be put in one of those cages they lock the accused in during Russian trials, like a zoo animal in the courtroom. I won’t even know why I’m on trial. I’ll be sent to rot in Siberia. My brain was stuck in these Kafka- and Solzhenitsyn-powered circuits— Gulag, I kept thinking, gulag —and then I heard the feminine click of heels on the stairs.

“So at last you are here.” I looked up to see Svetlana in a gray pencil skirt and a crisp white blouse. Mascara had caked in the corners of her eyes, but otherwise she looked very professional. She said something feisty to the guard in Russian, and he wilted. With stooped shoulders he gave me my passport and a curt nod. “Do not worry about him,” Svetlana said to me. “He just needs to feel important.”

“Lift ne rabotayet,” he said, which can be translated as “The elevator isn’t working (right now)” or “The elevator doesn’t work (generally).” The latter seemed more accurate.

I was beginning to understand that elevators never worked in Moscow. “Soon it will be fixed,” people said to save face, but as with so much of the infrastructure, one had the sense that they couldn’t be fixed anytime soon. And so we began the long climb up to the seventh floor. The stairs were wide and dark—the bulbs in each stairwell were out—and despite the grand sweep of the entrance hall the successive flights narrowed. I was short of breath when we reached the top. There were piles of cigarette ash on the floor. Svetlana opened the door and ushered me in.

The office took up the whole floor of the building, and the walls had been knocked down to create one big, open space with large windows looking out at the Bolshoi. The carpet was an industrial gray, and wooden tables were plotted around the room, most of them crowned with desktop PCs. The people at these computers were smoking, and the air was gauzy with unfiltered cigarette smoke. A plate of glass separated two large, private offices from the main room. Blinds were drawn in one; in the other a bearded man sat at a desk and smiled strenuously as he held a phone to his ear.

“Our directors,” said Svetlana, gesturing at the offices.

“So this is an ad agency,” I said. I had never been inside an ad agency, but my impression had been that they were shiny places where the phones never stopped ringing. This smoky, sleepy room did not measure up.