Insomnia was a constant issue for me in Moscow- I come from a quiet place designed so that nothing happens, at least not on the open street. In every apartment I lived in in Moscow for three years, noise was an issue, the proximate cause usually being drilling from remodeling. St. Thomas of Aquinas said that there were several types of pleasure- pleasure outright, the cessation of displeasure, and what he called "delectable inner movement". I struggle to separate the last two, which doesn't mean I'm a masochist, just someone willing to suffer in my imagination in order to heighten future pleasures.
All Chips are Down: Easter Weekend 2008 (18 months in)
There’s no work this Saturday, so Tamara and I agree to meet at two for a walk in Kolomenskoe Park near the Moscow river. We meet at the metro station and start walking towards the entrance to the park. We see facing us a tall, slim, broad-shouldered, slightly hunched man seated on an office swivel chair behind a Casio keyboard plugged into the railed five meter scrubby white concrete wall to his left. His cheekbones are wide apart and his eyes are right above them, his cheeks are hollow and patched with ashen stubble, his hair is greasy and grey and his arms have murky dark tattoos visible through thick hair. His jeans look they belong to an auto mechanic. A clean-shaven man with a round-cornered square head, aviator glasses, salt and mainly pepper hair, pointy beige mesh loafers, fresh light blue jeans, green Heineken t-shirt and charcoal suit jacket is standing on his toes, peering over the musician’s shoulder. Sitting on a second swivel chair is a short Caesarian-purple cotton dress completely full of a middle-aged prostitute in spattered suede boots and flesh pantyhose three tones lighter than the mask she’s brushing on.
The musician starts to make a speech from his swivel chair, but as he starts the man in the jacket comes over, leans under the chair and pulls the lever so the seat drops abruptly, then stands back with his hands folded behind his back. I don’t understand what he’s saying so Tamara interprets for me.
“There are so many reasons to live and I have all of them. I am releasing this record in honor of my dear friend. I wanted to bring this to the public so it can have our reasons, too.” A few people have stopped, the prostitute is filing her nails now, and the musician presses a button that sets off a polka melody, splays his bony fingers as wide as they’ll go and begins fervently hitting keys at random.
“I will soon be with you, my dear [male] friend, life is so long and ours will be forever when it starts, you helped me through the bad times, my dearest friend, I will join you soon, after this record is released…” The crowd is too small for hooting and whistling to be anonymous so they do it half-heartedly, even as more people are gathering, people are pulling out their phones and filming the scene, the cries are getting louder.
“My dearest friend, we will be together in the ground, my wife, my dearest friend, I love you, this suffering will end when I join you underground and we’ll shine together with God who is every reason in the world and you will be my wife again, my dearest [male] friend…”
There are now ninety people, I count them all as more are arriving, people are throwing coins at him, then a few ten, fifty and hundred ruble notes and screaming, ‘turn into a cock amazing!’
“When will this record be released? When will I join her in the ground? When will I be let out?”
We’re near the front of the crowd, we see a man with a baby stroller with a bag of sour cream and onion chips on the roof, he picks the bag up and pulls back the roof, revealing a bald boy with the regal air nursing preverbals share, the father cinches the bag, pulls it open, and begins broadcasting the chips as if they were money, another one joins him, the second squats down and begins hooting like a pigeon and screaming the word ‘zek’, he crumbles the chips in his fist and strews them left and right. The father of the king hands a chip to his son and instructs him to throw, but the boy just stares at the chip and looks around.
“Turn into a cock amazing! [Oхуеть!]” Tamara states, shaking her head with her mouth open.
“It’s just plain pizdets. Let’s get out of here before I get a nightmare.” On the other hand, if we stay, I may get a nightmare. We go to a kiosk opposite and get some dry white French wine, then walk briskly past the scene and into the park, where they’re checking bags for alcohol. Ours is wrapped in a shirt inside my backpack, so we manage to slip past.
We march to our favorite green copse, it’s bordered by a deliberate grove of apple trees and looks over a creek and wooded ridge. We sit down out in the open, open the bottle and I pour some for us into plastic cups. We’ve gotten around halfway through the bottle by the time we feel we’re not alone. We turn around and discover we’re encrescented by around nine isosceles-shouldered cops in towering hats.
“One thousand rubles.”
I didn’t have the time to get to the bank, and don’t want to keep all my money at home. I have 500 dollars in various currencies in my pocket.
“What for?” Tamara asks.
“You’re drinking alcohol in a public place.”
“Please! We’re drinking good French wine, not vodka, not even beer, wine!”
“The law is the law. Who is this guy? Where is he from?”
“He’s from America.”
“Can he speak Russian?”
“No. He’s an exchange student.”
Two of them look at me. “Passport.” I open my bag, they squat down and look in my bag with a flashlight even though it’s broad daylight. One of them has been drinking recently.
“You come with us, he stays here.”
Tamara gets up. Half the cops go with Tamara and half stay with me. I don’t want to do anything to get myself in trouble, so I sit acting like I don’t understand what’s happening, but turn so I can see what they’ll do with her. They’re standing with their slouched shoulders, and Tamara is making exasperated windmill motions with her arms- there must be some kind of negotiation underway. After a few minutes, it’s over, I cork the wine and we decide to relax indoors instead. Tamara tells me she lied about how much money she had with her- she showed them a fifty-ruble note she had in her pocket and they were above taking such a small sum.
As we approach the site of the concert, it’s clear there had been a run on the chips, which are scattered all over the goddamn place. We get closer and I see the money has been separated from the chips, I wonder what’s become of him- he won’t be visible till we walk past the kiosk that he was singing behind.
We look over and see the musician. The swivel chairs and his keyboard are gone and so are the man in the Heineken shirt and the whore, instead there are two Smiling slim young men with permed and dyed yellow hair in dirty white track suits and cheap oil-patch aviator glasses standing right up close to him, poking him in the gut and saying things I don’t understand. The musician is cursed with a naturally sagging posture, but he’s looking up with grave defiance which says, we know your world is the real one, and we know that’s not enough stop me from living in mine. I slow down to hear what they’re saying, I want to take it all in, but Tamara tugs hard on my sleeve. “Come on, Timmy.”
We go for an early dinner together and then I head home to catch up on sleep. When I get there, I finish the bottle of white wine and lie down to sleep. I lay motionless for over an hour before there’s any sign of success, and then the phone rings- I should have taken it off the hook. It’s night before I’m finally calm again, but throughout the night I can hear motorcycle racing right on the street outside and don’t have proper sleep till 4am, when I fall into a regenerative state interrupted at 10am by my mobile phone.
“Tim! Happy Easter, it’s Andrei, I have news, Julia is pregnant, she’s in the hospital, we have to go visit her now, we’re going to leave in a half hour, be at the metro in thirty minutes, it’s too complicated to tell you how to get there so we’re going to drive, so please be on time. Don’t eat anything before you go, it’s Easter we have special food so be hungry.”
“Jesus, Andrei. I was trying to sleep. I mean, congratulations.”
“Tim, come on, this is really important, please meet me there at the metro.”
“Seriously, give me at least forty minutes. I haven’t even gotten up.”
“Fine, forty minutes.”
I grudgingly pull myself out of my healing sleep by making some strong green tea and taking a cold shower. I have the feeling they’re going to be late, but this is an important occasion so I throw some clothes on and walk on wobbly legs to the metro where they’re supposed to pick me up in fifteen minutes. Underneath the shelter of a windowed-in bus stop is laying a 60’s tubercular face up on the rough pavement. His hairless red midget head is locked open in a full apoplectic yell. The rotting shreds on his shoes are called shoes. I scrutinize his black wool naval jacket- the space between every last rough curlicue is packed tight with dry, tan
dust- a life’s work. He’s my first corpse, I think with pride, and then I feel disgust for my pride, and my spoon watches itself swirl the incompatible colors.
A crowd has gathered at a safe distance.
“Is he dead?” I look at his motionless chest.
“No, he’s not dead, look at him.” These are experts.
I ask a middle-aged woman standing next to me with her teenage son, “Ma’am, are you a patriot?” This question has been frying me since a week after I got here.
“I am not.”
“Why?”
“Just look at what you see in front of you. We all know what this place is. It was always bad but it was not always like this. Things don’t have to be this way.”
“What are you proud of?”
“What can you be proud of here? Look around you. Is it supposed to be like this?”
“You can be proud of your books at least.”
“Big problems- big books.” I think of my own thickening journal and nod.
“What can be done?”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s call a hospital. He is a person.”
She pulls out her phone and calls an ambulance- a few others talking on the phone may be doing the same. I am angry for having been awakened, but on some level glad I saw this.
“Will anyone come to help him?”
“I think so. By the way- this is my son Sergei. He is a musician. Can you teach him English?”
“It’s my job.”
“We can cook for you.”
“I’ll think about it.”
She gives me her number.
“Call me to make sure it’s right.”
“I don’t have any money on my phone. I’ll call you later.”
We are interrupted by the man on the pavement. I breach the odor radius to look at his face- there are minor contusions everywhere, and on the pavement there are drops of blood. All night he was drinking and falling on his face. He starts to move, then yell, he shrieks without feeling, then sits up with his arms spread wide- the word resurrection surfaces, I am emphatically de-religioned but feel guilty for this word. A corps of medics arrives with spray bottles- they snap on latex gloves, pull out damp sterile cloths, put on face masks and safety goggles. His old pomegranate stain pus-egg eyes squint before the medics have come any closer, two of them squat down and spray his face in self-defense, they shoot some in his ears and up his nose, he lets them take his limp arms so they can disinfect his bloated to rupture hands, they spray them and then their own just to make sure. The damp cloths are ready, they busily rub the wounds out along their axes, spray the bottles off with each other and wipe them down with fresh cloths, and throw the rags in a Ziploc bag and trot back to the ambulance. He manages to stand up- the word resurrection comes again to mind- and sits down on the bench of the bus stop. In a state of complete relaxation he falls forward face first and lies there uninjured, embracing the home planet.
I’ve had enough, and there’s no sign of Andrei so I get some crepes with mushrooms, cheese and pickles, another with mashed potatoes, and a half-liter cup of kvas. The food makes my limbs feel better after yesterday’s incomplete sleep. As I wait for Andrei, I tell myself that this is exceptional, this doesn’t happen often, otherwise there’d have been no crowd.
While I’m still eating, he calls me and says he’s parked down the road, so I finish my first crepe and hurry to the car- Julia’s brother is there, too. He’s annoyed with me for eating before our meeting.
“Bro, come on, you woke me up for nothing. I need to sleep to be beautiful. I’ll eat, don’t worry.”
“Alright.”
We get lost in a traffic jam on the way to the hospital, and arrive near the end of visiting time. We all put on blue plastic slippers and go up to Julia’s room, where I see her mother Tatiana and a woman I recognize as Maxim’s mother. I want to thank her, but she hasn’t thought about it since it happened. It’s a relief to be in the same room with such clearly good people.
“Tim, the visiting period is only half an hour, so we’ll need to eat quickly.” I see the humor in all this, even though I every day I worry at my deepening crow’s feet in the mirror.
“Can I congratulate Julia first?”
“Oh, shit, yes, of course!”
“Julia, Andrei, congratulations. Will it be a boy or girl?”
“We’re not sure yet.”
“Come on, we have priannik, we need to eat before visiting time finishes!” Tatiana says.
“What’s a pr?”
“Pr-ia-nnik. Priannik.” She pulls a cylindrical brown cake with a crunchy shell from a plastic bag and starts slicing it. It’s a little spicy and has pieces of fruit in it- like a fruitcake but less fruity.
Afterwards they drive me back home. I have a beer in the refrigerator, but don’t drink it because I can already feel the relaxation in my arms and legs and want to have a pure sleep. I go under the covers and fall into a crouch in a wooden dinghy in the trough of a titanium swell awash with 1000-ruble bills and islands of bloodclots. I don't know how to stand. The sky is pre-tornado green. I peer over the edge of the boat and grasp at the cold bills, throwing them hastily on the floor. I don't see any MVD's, but the thought that they may arrive makes me tension my gut, girding my intestines upwards, lessening the pressure they exert on my pelvis. The bottom left corner of my heart is being touched by a minty thumb that massages circles on it, and this makes me pull my shoulderblades back and together. The left one moves down farther to squeeze the thumb out.
The money is cold and some of it is bloody.
...
I am on land, face to face with my friend Jörn. He has an angular face that he says dogs don't like. He's one of the people I trust most. We're face to face, shoulders pushed forward to shield the bills from view. I’m counting them, they're the color of fir needles. They show a four-sided pyramidal tower with a view over a vast plain. We count the bills together- 24,000 rubles, 1000 dollars. We get to the last bill, it's worth 5000 rubles and is sherbet orange on counting thumb textured cream paper. The picture is in motion- conquistadors in tin hats are herding a crowd of Incas over a cliff with their blunderbusses, brilliant cerulean and seafoam plumes are leaping out of the engraved agonized. The women’s breasts are swinging, and they and their children are screaming. Jörn grasps the bill like he wants to take it, but looks at me with the same serious look dogs hate and which makes me know he's listening, and tells me, you're rich, do you understand, you're rich now, do you understand, you're rich. I can see he wants it, and he sees me seeing him, but we are friends.
Nobodyhood. Hours of nothing to look back into.
I get up completely revived- my blood feels different, my extremities are tingling and warm. The landline phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hello, we are carrying out a survey and your help is needed. We’ll start by…”
“I’m not a citizen of the Russian Federation.” I state beatifically.
“We’ll be unable to carry out the survey, then.” She seems to be in a hurry for the next caller but surprised that I answered with a complete sentence.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I hope you have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” she states with sincerity that seems to be surprising her as much as my own reaction surprised me. I’m a different person when I sleep well.
I go back and sit on the bed. I am completely rested, and revel in it. I turn on the TV and surf some, they’re showing all three Rambo movies one after another and are halfway through the first one. I make some tea just for the hell of it and sit down and watch.
