Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. # 100 - 3176 words
Columns :: Back from the Boonies With a New Dream

MOSCOW, January 9, 2005 – Comments:   Ratings:

Now boarding: The Mineral Water Airline Special
Meeting and charming the in-laws – and others
A Russian Near Year’s: Stand up, stand up for Putin
Caviar on a beer income
An American restaurant in Stavropol?



MOSCOW, January 9, 2005 – Well, we all survived the meeting with the in-laws and Sergei’s first plane ride.

The whole plane episode was unbelievably Russian: First of all, the name of our carrier appeared nowhere on the tickets and when we arrived at the terminal at Vnukovo airport there still was no name to be seen anywhere; nor of course were there any signs indicating which one of the 22 windows we were to check in at.

Sergei and I got to the front of the first line: “Is this the right line?” “No.” “Where are we supposed to go?” “Window 13 or 14, I think – somewhere down there.”

So we went to somewhere down there. First to window 14. Nobody there. Long line at 13, no line at 16: “Stavropol?” “Number 13.”

We were quite early – about three hours – and began serious preparation for the flight with a couple of “Street” brand hazel-nut-flavored vodka cocktails and two beers. About 7 p.m. we noticed everyone going through a door.

When we got to the door everyone was taking off everything unnecessary, including shoes, and passing through the metal detector. No problem.

From there most proceeded to the boarding lounge while we sat in the adjoining bar until we realized people were going out the door – there was of course no boarding announcement.

We got on the bus for the quarter-mile hop to the plane, and then stood in the zero temperature on the tarmac for 15-20 minutes while groups of three or four were herded up the ramp to be seated. “Why don’t you just let everybody in? It’s freezing out here!” I demanded of the parkaed stewardess on the ramp. “This is Russia,” she shrugged.

It was only then that we discovered from the logo on the plane that we were being catered to by the Caucuses-Mineral Water Airline. Since Mineral Water is actually the name of a small Caucasian city – Shurik lived there – it made sense, but didn’t give me a lot of confidence.

From that point on, either the flight was okay or Sergei and I were well enough prepared not to care. Sergei’s face took on an astonished “wow” look when we began gathering speed for the uneventful takeoff and he chattered and bubbled like the adorable little child he is.


Andrei and his friend Peter, or Petya, met us on schedule at the airport. Andrei and I waited in the car while Petya and Sergei collected our luggage. It turned out Petya was a good friemd of both Andrei and Sergei. In fact, he and Sergei had worked and lived together in one of their starvation wage jobs at the edge of Stavropol. He looked older than his 20 years and wasn’t particularly cute or handsome, but he very friendly and pleasant and I wouldn’t have kicked him out of bed.

I slept most of the way to the twins’ home in Svetlograd, a sleepy – at least by the time we got there – little city of 50,000 povertied Russians. There are few automobiles and few jobs, though the town does support an “Eldorado” electronics store where we bought their dad, Valentin Ivanovich, a microwave for his birthday the day before we left.

Valentine Ivanovich is a very good, kind, hard-working, down-to-earth man of the land who reminded me in many ways of my oldest sister Pauletta’s late husband Gene, an Iowa farmer made of the same mold. The twins’ mother has been mysteriously absent since they were a child, leaving him both their mother and father as well as cook, nurse, and wage earner. It is heartwarming to see the love and respect his six kids hold for him. It hasn’t been easy in his job as bus driver/mechanic at a month – when they get around to paying it – to raise his brood.

Andrei reminds me a lot of him in looks, behavior, and mannerisms. He’s short and stocky and at 53, quite strong I discovered when he raised a 24-kilogram iron weight above his head 20 times with both his left and right arm while we were visiting his brother Aleksandr Yurovich a few days later.

Anyway, when we got home Zhorik was sleeping on the couch in the hallway and their younger sister Anya had a bedroom to herself. Zhorik and I hugged and kissed and I think we all had something to drink before I finally went to my bed, which turned out to be the one which the three young boys had all slept in together as children.

But none of them were sleeping with me in Svetlograd. The sexlessness and the boredom, which were probably two sides of the same coin, were all-pervading. Both Andrei and Sergei were manic about not being suspiciously affectionate.


New Year’s was vintage Russian: Anya – the only female in the house -- spent the entire day preparing New Year’s salads – potato, beet, fish, pickles, saurkraut. But the piece de resistance was a meat dish that I raved about even after I discovered that it was nutria, a kind of rodent whose fur goes into Russian ladies’ coats. We saw nutria being sold a few days later from the hoods of automobiles. Though relatively inexpensive, they’re not exactly cheap and actually cost more than chicken.

Of course New Year’s in Russia is not New Year’s without television, a Click to enlarge lesson I learned when I spent the first New Year’s with Tioufline. I doubt if there is a set of eyes in Russia that isn’t glued to the ubiquitous boob tube. And when Tsar/Kommissar Putin strutted across the screen, everyone rose as he blessed the nation and then when the Kremlin clock began striking 12, Valentine Nikolaevich began ceremoniously opening the champagne bottle we had brought and poured the champagne as the clock struck for the 12th time. We clinked our glasses and duly drank to health and prosperity in 2005.

Their family duties fulfilled, it is at this moment that young people all over Russia start to trickle out one by one to meet their buddies and girlfriends and spend the rest of the night getting mindlessly drunk and laid. It was no different at chez Valentine Nikolaevich in Svetlograd.

We had brought two bottles of champagne with us, and I had bought a bottle of vodka earlier in the day, knowing that the twins’ dad couldn’t possible scare up the money to observe the almost sacrosanct Russian tradition of washing down the New Year with vodka. I bought a liter of the best they had – Gzhelka – which isn’t one of Russia’s best, but still cost six bucksi. The cheapest cost about 50 cents!

The tradition is for everybody to stay up all night long, but the new year was drunk enough for me by 2 a.m.


The next day was the nadir of the visit. Andrei and Sergei were supposed to be back from their night of revelry to take us to visit VN’s cousin and her husband. The twins called about 8 and said they’d be home later, but later came and went and still no twins and no car. Valentine was a gracious host and did his damnedest to entertain me with conversation and with the idiot TV.

I’ve grown to hate Russian TV even more than American. It’s a 50-year-old custom that has its roots in the bread and circus tradition of ancient Rome, when the aloof and privileged elite provided free entertainment to keep the povertied masses’ minds off their hopeless plight and revolution. New Year’s eve is filled with the antics of the rich and famous entertaining and being entertained by the repertoire theater of the same endless cycle of entertainers and comedians – Alla Pugacheva and her disgusting queer husband, Philip Kirkorov, and the usual bevy of stand-up comedians. This year got a boost with the addition of Pugacheva’s latest favorite, 26-year-old Maxim Galkin, who really is gorgeous, talented, and funny.

But New Year’s tradition calls for re-running the show day after day and after Maxim’s first run-through, even he had lost his sparkle, and the twinless day dragged on. Valentine and I talked about America, about farmers, about the twins, about the difficulties of raising a family with no mother, about the hardships of the father of six trying to live on a month when even that sometinmes isn’t paid for months at a time.

You live,” he said at one point. “We exist.”

It’s why all ambitious kids head for Moscow.


The twins left home when they were 18 and have subsisted at everything imaginable: Selling CDs in a market kiosk until the mafia ran them out; working as laborers in a junk yard; selling vegetables from a car; however they could earn a buck. But never stealing. Their father would probably beat them to death if they ever did. He is a devoutly honest man whose pride is greater than his poverty. After meeting their family, I will never again worry about the twins being devious or dishonest with me.

They finally came home that evening, too tired in Andrei’s case and too drunk in Sergei’s to do anything but go to bed. Mine and Valentine’s day had been interlaced with vodka, beer, cognac, and “riabina,” a delightful, fruity spirit made from the berry of the mountain ash, and punctuated intermittently with bouts of sleep. After the twins came home we continued our cycle until I went to bed quite early.

The next day we resumed our interrupted schedule with the visit to his cousin Lila’s and her husband Nikolai Ivanovich‘s, where we were again plied with vodka, home-made wine, and “sam-ogon,” a cognac-like home brew. They had two “vicious” guard dogs which I immediately made up to and began petting, to the astonishment and alarm of everyone. Their home is reminiscent of what I had in mind for West Virginia. Although less than an acre in size, they raise their own chickens, geese – which we were fed that day -- potatoes, vegetables, and berries and fruit for the wine and sam-ogon. We also took a drive up into the foothills to get a look at the steppe, the Russian version of the mid-Western plains.


And so went our days in the “real Russia.” The next day, Andrei, Click to enlarge Sergei, Zhorik, and I drove to Stavropol to get my first look at the city which may become my home. We picked up Petya, who was very gracious, sweet, and helpful. We drove up and down Karl Marx Blvd., the main street of the city, and went through the local museum of history, which boasts one of the world’s five extant skeletons of the gigantic forebear of the mastadon. A truly amazing sight.

Andrei pissed me off when we went to buy the bus tickets home for Sergei, Zhorik, and me. He was very officious, condescending, and controlling. I asked to see the tickets to make sure he had bought three -- he had talked of only buying tickets for me and Sergei. He ignored me, instead announcing imperiously that I was “holding up the line” and ordering me out the door.

I took my time getting out and then warned him: “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again!” “But there was a line!” he argued. “I don’t care if there was a line from here to Moscow, don’t ever speak to me like that again.”

That night when Sergei found out about it, he confronted Andrei and they had a big argument. Sergei called me onto the balcony: “It’s either me or Andrei. I won’t live with him in Moscow ever again.”

I told their father over a glass of riabina that evening that I would have to consider very carefully whether I wanted to give up my jobs and my friends in Moscow to live with them in Stavropol if either of them was going to treat me like that. I don’t ever want again to experience the desertion and treachery of another Tioufline.

In any case, the volcanoes cooled down before I had to make my choice.

While in Stavropol we found the Magnit supermarket and did some exploratory shopping. Groceries and notions were substantially cheaper than in Moscow. I found tuna fish – the first I had seen outside of Moscow’s “Ashan” hypermarket. The black and red caviar were both about per 100 grams. While the black “caviar” certainly wasn’t sturgeon, which retails in Moscow for about 0 per 100 grams, it was still salty black fish eggs and tasted the same to me. Toothpaste, shampoo, everything was cheaper.


We bought champagne to go with the caviar and Petya went home with us to celebrate. We went again the next day to take Petya home and because Valentine wanted to introduce me to his brother, Aleksander Yurovich – Sasha -- and their mother, who lives with Sasha. It was an unannounced visit because V didn’t have Sasha’s telephone number. It was an unsettling experience at first because everyone was still in bed. His mother was very disoriented and confused; his brother was still hung over from his wife’s birthday party the day before; their son Artum seemed to be not quite all there, and the wife, Gallia, was rattled and unprepared

But they pulled themselves together surprisingly quickly. Some of the discomfort was eased when Artum, a 30-year-old freshman at a local university, found out I was an English teacher. He immediately brought an assignment he was having trouble with. Then we began looking at family pix and everybody was quite happy and contented.

It turns out that Artum is in fact not all there. A mysterious fever when he was in the 10th grade has left him brain damaged. Prior to that, according to Valentin, he was normal, bright, and studious. His younger brother Sasha followed the footsteps of his father into the police and is now doing a hitch in Chechnya. I was glad I didn’t speak fluent Russian and that they didn’t speak any English. Things might have gotten quite uncomfortable over the two Sashas’ choice of professions, because I have learned to despise Russian cops even more than American. Their badges are literally licenses to steal. We saw a cluster of newly-built multi-hundred-thousand-dollar houses in the outskirts of Stavropol.

“Who can afford them?” I asked in bewilderment.

“The cops,” smiled Petya wryly.

The Russian hospitality was soon flowing like the vodka. Russians always have a rationale for drinking. After we had toasted two glasses of vodka, Aleksander Yurovich – Sasha -- poured another one: “God loves things in threes,” he pronounced solemly, downing the third.

My animal charm worked this time on their cat. She took an immediate liking to me – so much so that when I went to take a dump, she stood outside the bathroom door and meowed forlornly till I came out.


But the crowning achievement of my animal magnetism came Click to enlarge when Aleksander Yurovich decided to cap the day’s celebration with a hike to the nearby beer dive for a local brandy and half liter of beer.

We had barely sat down when the ugliest old bolshevik I’ve ever seen approached and sat down, mumbling so incoherently that even my Russian hosts couldn’t understand him. But he finally made it clear: He had a three-bedroom apartment, was retired, and his wife died a couple of years ago. Would I please come live with him.

Well, it was the best offer I’d had this year!


Thursday, January 6, the day to bid farewell, dawned like all the rest – grey and cheerless -- but with light snow, the first we had seen since leaving Moscow. The twins’ sister Natasha, who is the mother of her own adorable set of 6-year-old twin girls, got up early and, while I made tuna salad sandwiches with red caviar, fixed chicken and pirozhki -- cooked cabbage encased in a fried dumpling -- for the bus ride home.

By 2 p.m. we had driven to Stavropol, picked up Petya, done the shopping, gotten money out of the bank for Andrei’s driving test, train trip home, gasoline, and last-minute emergencies, and had nearly four hours to kill before time for the bus to pull out. Sister Anya was not at home, so we couldn’t kill it there. We settled on a pivnoe, a beer bar, next to the bus station. Four half liters of tap beer, a can of alcohol-free beer for Andrei, and a longing stare at Alyosha, the gorgeous teenager behind the counter, cost 62 rubles – a little over – more than one-third for the alcohol-free. It’s so cheap and easy to become a drunk here!

When I went for the second round, Alyosha winked at me!!!

By this time, whatever farewell concoction Sergei’s pals had plied him with (I found out later it was milk and marijuana!) had virtually knocked him out, and Andrei’s lack of sleep was catching up with him, so they both went to the car and left Petya, Zhorik, and me to plan the future of the world.


“I think this would be a great place to start a business,” Petya observed.

“Andrei wants to do that,” I replied. “The question is, what kind of business?”

“Maybe a restaurant,” Zhorik offered.

“What about an American restaurant?” I added, beginning to get excited. After all, I’ve wanted to be a restaurateur since our days in West Virginia.

“That would be perfect,” Petya replied. “An American restaurant and a wedding business.”

Wedding business? Then I remembered Basil’s wedding and the thousands of dollars they must have spent on the restaurant, food, alcohol, hosting, etc., in connection with the wedding reception.

“I know a woman in the wedding hosting business who makes ,000 a month just doing that!”

“,000?”

“Yes. Of course it would take a while to get started.”

“I would expect to have no profit for the first six months,” I agreed. “My plan is to spend another year in Moscow, by which time I think I could come down here with ,000 to ,000. That should be enough.”

I asked them not to tell Andrei and Sergei until I’ve had time to think and plan some more, but I’ve thought of little else since. It would have a gimmick – an American restaurant run by an American, something like “Uncle Sam’s Broadway Restaurant” – and the wedding business should clinch it.

It also gives me a very good excuse to stay here for another year unattached to Language Link. Just yesterday I got another new student who wants to study 6 hrs. a week – another nearly hundred bucks a week!

By chance I also stumbled on a new recipe this evening. “Let’s get another can of tomatoes and make a really big batch of spaghetti,” I told Zhorik on our way home from a tour of Red Square to re-take the pictures that hadn’t turned out on our first trip back in August.

So I asked for a jar of tomatoes with juice. But when I opened it, I discovered she had given me a jar of pickled tomatoes. I fixed it anyway, and both Zhorik and Sergei said it was twice as good as what I had fixed the day before.

A new recipe for Uncle Sam’s Broadway Restaurant?