The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

RUSSIAN DRESSING by Svetlana Boym

“YOU’RE FRIGID,” he told her as they passed the Gorky statue on Kirov Avenue. She was hurt that he no longer had his hand on her shoulder under the thick wool coat, but was walking aloof, chewing pink Finnish gum. Frigid -frigidna... Frigida – Fetida, Femida – probably a Roman goddess, with small classical breasts and pupilless eyes of cool marble. It might have been her in that picture in the history book, standing near the handsome Apollo with broken masculine arms. Right before the Barbarian invasion… or was it after? She caught her embarrassed reflection in the window of the Porcelain Shop. It felt uncomfortably damp and raw. She wanted so much to replay the whole scene, to put his hand back under her wool coat, to experience the meaningful weight of his warm fingers, to press her cheek against his frosted mustache in that split second before they reached the faded neon “P”of the Porcelain Shop. But it was too late now; he wouldn’t give her another chance, another touch. They had already crossed the tram routes and were parting by the park fence where there was the poster for Leningrad Dixieland. Season: 1975.

“Excuse me, miss, are you the last in line?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not anymore. I’m after you… And what’s the line for? Grilled chickens or ‘Addresses and Inquiries’?”

“Addresses and Inquiries, I hope.”

“Good… good… let’s hope together. That’s the only thing we can do these days – hope. Right? I see you’re not from around here…”

“Oh, yes, I am…”

“Oh yeah? You sure don’t look like it… Forgive my curiosity, miss, if you’re from round here, why are you waiting at the Information Kiosk?”

“I’m just looking up my school friends…”

“Oh, okay. One has to do that from time to time… I thought you were some kind of foreigner or something…”

Anya realized she had forgotten how to make small talk in Russian. She had lost that invisible something that makes you an insider, whether it’s a tone of voice, a gesture of habitual indifference, or half-words half said but fully understood. Anya left the Soviet Union fifteen years ago; then she had been told that it would be forever, that there would be no way back; it was like life and death. But now she was able to visit Leningrad again. The city had changed its name, and so had she. She came back as an American tourist, and stayed in the overpriced hotel where you could drink chilled orange juice, that item of bourgeois charm. Like other idle Westerners she began to collect communist antiques, little Octubrist star-pins showing baby Lenin with gilded curls, red banners with embroidered gold inscriptions “To the Best Pig Farmer for Achievement in Labor” or “To the Brigade with a High Level of Culture”. She wanted to pass for a native, but her unwarranted smiles were giving her away and the Petersburgians frowned at her suspiciously in passing.

Anya was born on the Ninth Soviet Street in Leningrad and now she lived on the Tenth West Street, New York. Could she make small talk in New-Yorkese? Yes, of course. During these years she had learned how to be an insider-foreigner, a New-Yorker-foreigner, along with other resident and non-resident aliens, legal and illegal city dwellers. Anya was among the lucky green-card-carrying New Yorkers and could show her picture with the properly exposed right ear and the finger print. New York felt like home. It struck her now that she was much more comfortable in a place like home than she was at home. She was a regular at Lox Around the Clock, and could spell her name fast over the phone. R-o-s-en-b-l-u-m A-n-y-a no, it’s not Annie, it’s N-Y, like in ‘New-York’ – Thank you – You too.”

Surely, she had an accent, but it was “so very charming”, a delicious little extra, like the dressing on a salad that comes free with an order of Manhattan chowder – “What dressing would you like on your salad, dear?” the waiter would ask her. “Italian, French, Russian, or blue cheese?” “Russian, please,” she would say, “with lots of fresh pepper…”

She worked free-lance doing voice-overs for commercials, whenever they needed someone with an accent. The last one she had done was “La Larta. European youglette. Passion. Fat-free – I can’t believe it’s not yogurt.” Female voice: “Remember your first taste of Larta? Was it in Lisboa? Sofia? Odessa? (A mountain landscape, Caucasian peaks and a sparkling sea – a woman with Isabella Rossellini’s lips, her face radiant with Lancôme) Remember La Larta – natural and fresh like first love.”

“Oh,” said the director, “you have to pronounce each sound distinctly. L is soft and French, the back of your tongue touches the palate – let me show you… look here, softly but firmly, and then breathe out on the A, open your lips, yes, yes as if for a kiss… Then tease me, yes, tease me with your Rrr - roll it deep in your throat – yes – rr stands for mystique, and then – suddenly – you let your tongue tickle your teeth – playful and light Ta-ta-ta-Larrta-ta ta-ta-the audience wants to taste it now, yes, yes, yes. ‘La Larta. Passion. Fat-free.’”

And then Anya had done several AT amp;T commercials, she did a voice over the video of falling Berlin Wall. But that happened a few years ago, when it was still news. In any case, these were only temporary jobs. Eastern European accents went in and out of fashion. Anya had been an understudy for the new line of soft drinks: “A Revolution is brewing in the Orient. A Revolution in Cola,” but the role was given to a Romanian. She must have had better connections.

“Are you in line for information?”

“Yes…”

“And where is the line for addresses?”

“It’s here too.”

“Well, what I really need is a phone number… And it would be great to get a home address too, but I know they’re not listed… It’s dangerous now… I don’t blame them. What you need nowadays is an iron door… Don’t look at me like that… You think I’m joking… I know you’re young, miss, you probably think – an iron door, well that’s a bit much… but let me tell you, I know a really honest guy, who was an engineer in the good old days… he makes excellent iron doors. Real quality iron. You can call him, tell him I gave you his number…”

“Thanks, I’ll think about it…”

“Well, don’t think too long or it’ll be too late… Sorry, you should spit when you say it, that or touch wood – we don’t wish anything bad to happen… Maybe we’ll have law and order here some day… or at least order…”

“Hm…”

“Come to think of it, maybe they don’t list the phone numbers either… Have you got a pen, miss? Oh this is a great one! ‘Ai luf Niu lork!’ Did you get it in Gostiny Dvor or in the House of Friendship?”

Anya began to fill out her “inquiry cards” to avoid any further discussion of iron doors. She wanted to find her teenage loves, Sasha and Misha with whom she had had her first failed perfect moments. Both relationships had been interrupted. In the case of Sasha, they had split up after he told her she was frigid; with Misha, they had parted after sealing the secret erotic pact of Napoleonic proportions. She wanted to write an end to their love stories, to recover a few missing links, to fill in the blanks. They were complete antipodes, Sasha and Misha. Sasha was blond, Misha dark, Sasha was her official boyfriend, Misha was a secret one. Sasha was beautiful, Misha intellectual. Sasha had known too many girls, Misha had read too much Nietzsche at a young age. It was almost twenty years ago and the popular song of the day had been “First Love”. “Oh, first love, it comes and goes with the tide,” sang the Yugoslav pop star, the beautiful Radmila Karaklaic, as she blew kisses out to the sparkling sea somewhere near the recently bombed town of Dubrovnik…

In his white coat with blood-red lining… Sasha was beautiful, he wore a long black scarf and the aura of a black market professional. He sang the popular song by Salvatore Adamo about falling snow: “The snow was falling. You wouldn’t come this evening. The snow was falling. Everything was white with despair…” Tombait la neige. Tu ne viendras pas ce soir. His masculine voice caressed her with the foreign warmth. French snow was falling over and over again, slowly and softly, slowly and softly… Was it possible for her not to come that evening, how was it possible that she wouldn’t come that evening? Oh, she would have to come… and she just couldn’t resist. She recalled the shape of his lips, soft, full and cracked, but she couldn’t remember at all what they had talked about. Oh, yes, she had been a bit taken aback when she found out he had never read Pasternak. On the other hand, he was a real man and sang beautiful songs. He had put his hand under her sweater. Touched her. Tried to unfasten her bra. But those silly little hooks in the back wouldn’t come undone. “Oh, it doesn’t matter, let me help…” But he felt that a man should be a man, that there were things a man should do himself. Just at that moment a noise in the corridor had interrupted them. It was Sasha’s father, a former sea captain, coming home after work. So, once again, they had nowhere else to go; there were no drive-ins, no cars, no back seats, no contraception, and only cheap Bulgarian wine. Like all Leningrad teenagers they went to walk on the roofs of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They walked under the sign that said: “No dogs allowed. Walking on the roofs is strictly prohibited…” It would get all icy there and one could easily slip down, distracted by the gorgeous panorama of the Neva embankment. But it was quite spectacular: the imperial palace, dissolving in the mist, the dark grey ripples on the river, a poem or two… Wait, do you remember how it goes…? “Life is a lie, but with a charming sorrow…” Yes, she would say, “yes…”.

They had parted that day at the park entrance. On the way there she had worried that her nose was getting too frozen and red and that she didn’t look good any more. She was too embarrassed to look at him and could only catch glimpses of his blond curls, his scarf and the dark birth mark on his cheek. Then there were some clumsy gestures and an unexpected wetness on her lips. Did she kiss him or not? She tried to concentrate because this was supposed to be her perfect moment.

“You’re frigid,” he said very seriously.

Frigid… frigid… a blushing goddess. So, that’s what it was called? This clumsiness, arousal, alienation, excitement, tongue-tiedness, humidity, humility, humiliation.

“Are you waiting for apricot juice?”

“No…”

“You mean, it’s gone? I don’t believe it… this is really incredible… All they have is the Scottish Whisky”…

“Miss, where are you from?”

This time Anya did not protest. She began to fill out the card for Misha – all in red ink. Misha didn’t know any French songs and he didn’t care much about Salvatore Adamo. They spoke only about Nietzsche, orgasms and will to power. “Orgasms: they have to be simultaneous, or nothing at all. They’re beyond good and evil… For protection women can simply insert a little piece of lemon inside them. It’s the most natural method, favoured by poets of the Silver Age…” If her relationship with Sasha had been a conventional romance with indispensable walks on the roofs of the fortress, then her relationship with Misha was an example of teenage non-conformism. They had dated mostly on the phone and had seen each other only about three times during their two-year-long erotic conversation. She could still hear his voice which had already lost its boyish pitch and acquired a deep guttural masculinity, resounding in her right ear.

When she thought of Misha, she saw herself sitting on an uncomfortable chair near the “communal” telephone, counting the black squares on the tiled floor. The telephone was in the hall and was shared by everyone in the apartment. While talking to Misha she had had to lower her voice, because Valentina Petrovna, the voracious gossip, would conspicuously walk back and forth between her room and the kitchen, slowing down as she neared the phone. The rest of the time she was probably standing behind the door to her room, busily filling in the gaps in Anya’s and Misha’s fragmented conversation. With Misha Anya had been very intimate but theirs was a safe intimacy, and distance had protected them from self-censorship. They knew they were part of a larger system of official public communication. The invisible presence of the others, the flutter of slippers in the hall had only stimulated them, provoked confessions about the things that had never happened in real life.

Anya met Misha on the “Devil’s Wheel” – a special ride in the Kirov Park of Culture and Leisure. Misha fell victim to the calumnia of Anya’s girlfriend – Ira – who observed his immediate fondness for Anya. “He’s handsome,” Ira said, “but he has smooth rosy cheeks – like a girl. You know what I mean…”

“He has smooth rosy cheeks like a girl…” – this strange sentence haunted Anya the whole day, that beautiful spring day when they were riding on the “Devil’s Wheel”, trying to touch each other in the air in an instant of ephemeral intimacy, and then pushing each other away, as they swung on the chains. The song went like this:

Just remember long ago in spring

We were riding in the park on the “Devil’s Wheel”

Devil’s wheel, Devil’s wheel

and your face is flying, close to me

But I’m swinging on the chains,

I’m flying – OH!

“Ahh…”

“Oh?”

“Ahh – ‘I’m swinging on the chains, I’m flying Ahh…’ “I thought you were humming the old song ‘Devil’s Wheel’. It hasn’t been on the radio for ages… It must be ten years old…”

“Yeah… I don’t know why it stuck with me.”

“It’s a nice song. I remember that great Muslim Magomaev used to sing it on TV on New Year’s Eve. It was when I was still married to my ex-wife and our son was in the Army… She would be making her New Year potato salad in the kitchen with my mother-in-law and I would be watching that TV show called ‘Little Blue Light’. And there would be a clock and the voice of comrade Brezhnev – first it was comrade Brezhnev himself, then it was his voice, and in the last years the voice of an anchorman reading Brezhnev’s speech… poor guy had a tic… but the speech always sounded so warm and familiar and it went so well with a little glass of vodka and herring: ‘Dear Soviet citizens… I wish you good health, happiness in your personal life and success in your labor.’ And then Muslim Magomaev would sing – ‘Devil’s Wheel’. Just remember long ago in the spring… We were riding in the park on ‘Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel…’ I know you’re not supposed to remember things like that these days… Now it’s called ‘the era of stagnation…’.”

“But it was such a good song…”

Anya was afraid to lose Misha’s face forever at the next swing. “Devil’s Wheel, Devil’s Wheel and your face is flying close to me”. The words of this popular song shaped their romance. But in this whirlpool of excitement, in the chains of the Devil’s Wheel, in the cool air of the Russian spring Misha’s cheeks were getting rosier and rosier. Ira’s words froze on the tip of her tongue. He blushed like a girl. They were doomed…

They would have made a strange couple anyway – he with his girlish rosy cheeks and his deep masculine voice, and she with her boyish clumsiness and long red nails painted with an imported Polish nail-polish. They didn’t know what to do with their excessively erotic and intellectual selves. After the encounter on the Devil’s Wheel came months of phone calls. They would carefully plan their next meeting and then always postpone it. Finally they decided, that it was now or never, they would conduct a secret ritual, to penetrate deep mysteries of the soul.

She left her house and walked away from the city center. She passed the larger-than-life portrait of Lenin made of red fishnet in the 1960s. Behind the statue of the Russian inventor of the radio was an urban no-man’s land, with the old botanical gardens, the ruined greeneries and endless fences made of wood and iron. This was the border zone – exactly the place that Misha wanted to perform their secret ritual. “This can be done only once in a life time,” he said seriously. “Napoleon did it to Josephine.”

She had to stand against the iron fence with her hands behind her back and her eyes open wide. He touched her eye with his tongue. He touched it deeply, trying to penetrate the darkness of her pupil. He lingered for a second, and then he licked the white around her eyelids, as if drawing the contours of her vision from inside her. Her gaze reacquired a kind of primordial warmth and humidity. They paused for a moment. Her eyes overflowing with desire.

They never deigned to kiss or hold each other; or saying romantic “I love yous” on the roof of the fortress. They despised such conventional games. They committed a single Napoleonic transgression, a dazzling eye-contact, a mysterious pact of intimacy signed with neither ink nor blood.

“Miss, you’ll have to rewrite this… We don’t accept red ink. And try to be neat…”

“Forgive me, I have terrible handwriting…”

“That’s your problem, not mine. And hurry please, we close in an hour…”

“But we’ve been waiting an hour and a half.”

“Well, yesterday, they were waiting for three hours and in drizzling rain. Be grateful that you’re in line for information, and not bread…”

“Oh, by the way, miss, speaking of bread, you should see what they sell in the cooperative bakery around the corner. Their heart-shaped sweet bread now cost five hundred rubles… I mean this is ridiculous… They used to be twenty kopecks – max.”

“What are you talking about? We didn’t have heart-shaped breads before… If it were up to people like you, we’d still be living in the era of stagnation or even worse, in the time of the great purges… You can’t take any change…”

“Hey, Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen, whatever… Stop yelling while you are in line. These working conditions are impossible! I can’t give out any information with all this shouting!”

And in New York there were a hundred kinds of bread – Anya suddenly felt ashamed – bread with and without calories, with and without fat, bread which is not really bread at all but only looks like it. Bread that never gets stale, that is non-perishable, eternally fresh and barely edible. Sometimes you have to rush to an expensive store, miles away to get foreign bread that lasts only a day, that’s fattening and crusty and doesn’t fit into the toaster. So Anya did not express her views on the heart-shaped bread. She tried hard to remain neutral and friendly with all the strangers in line and concentrated on filling out her inquiry cards. But those two intimate episodes were her main clues for tracking down Sasha and Misha. The rest was the hearsay of well-meaning friends, rumors, that were mostly fifteen years old.

Sasha, rumor had it, was married and was drinking. Or rather, at first, he did everything right – he flirted with the black market in his early youth, but then he cut off all his blond curls and ties with foreigners and entered the Naval Academy. He married his high school sweetheart, whom he had begun to date in the resort town of Z just about the time of their romance, and who had waited for him heroically throughout the years. Naturally, they had had a very proper wedding in the Palace of Weddings on the Neva embankment and they had placed the crown of flowers in the Revolutionary Cemetery and taken lots of pictures with her white lacy veil and his black tuxedo. Sasha wanted to be a gentleman officer, like his father, a youngish-looking, well-built man who often played tennis with Sasha at the courts of the town of Z. Sasha was made of the “right stuff. But then something unforeseen happened. Some time in the early 80s he started developing strange symptoms, losing hair and getting dark rashes on his arms… Nobody was sure what it was… During his service somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Sasha might have received an excessive dose of radiation. But those were the things one didn’t talk about, you know what I mean… He quit the service, left the city and underwent special medical treatment somewhere far away. He came back completely cured. Anya’s distant cousin, Sasha’s occasional tennis partner, said that he was in Leningrad, but that he had moved from his old apartment, and no longer spent summers in the town of Z. Another common friend had spotted him down in the subway, but Sasha hadn’t said hello… Then again, the crowds had been moving fast, the light was dim, and, who knows, it might have been someone else…

As for Misha, he was considered lucky… Like Sasha, he hadn’t kept in touch with the old friends, but everyone knows that those old friends did not keep in touch with each other either, gathering only occasionally for someone’s birthday or for a farewell party. Misha started out as unconventionally as one would have expected. In the late 70s he had managed to get into the Philosophy Department, which was almost impossible to do without connections. So he had settled for the Evening Division, which meant that he had to serve time in the Army. What might have seemed like a tragedy turned out to have a “happy ending”. Misha spent two years in the Far East, in the most dangerous area near the Chinese border. He told her during one of their last long conversations after returning from the Army that he was the only person with a high-school education in his detachment. While intellectuals were generally despised and abused, he wasn’t. His will to power won. He made the soldiers polish his boots; they squatted in front of him brushing away methodically every bit of dust. He had liked it. He said that of all the things in the world, he loved power the most. Anya assumed he was still into Nietzsche. By the age of 21 he was chosen to enter the Communist Party on a special basis, that is two years before the official age of eligibility which was 23. During the 1980 Russian Olympic Games – the last epic event of the Brezhnev era – Misha was elected to the Leningrad Olympics Committee. He had called her then, appearing very friendly and promising to get her some Ceylon tea which had long since vanished from the stores and could only be acquired by the privileged few.

She couldn’t forgive him that tea for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t the tea itself but his tone of voice… That year she had become something like an internal refugee and had to leave the university, “voluntarily expelled”. She applied to emigrate and soon after that friends stopped visiting her. Occasionally they would call from the public phones and speak in strange voices, and then when something squeaked in the receiver, they would say goodbye: “Forgive me, I’m out of change. I’ll call you later.” Anya ran endless errands, as a therapy against fear, collecting inquiry cards and papers – spravki - to and from various departments of Internal Affairs… And yes, good tea was hard to get in those days, especially the sweet and aromatically prestigious Ceylon tea. She often imagined meeting Misha somewhere in the noisy subway, in the middle of a crowd. He would be proudly wearing his fashionable brand-new T-shirt with the winking Olympic Bear, made in Finland “I’ve been transferred to Moscow, you know,” – he would shout at her. “I’ve been very busy lately.” “Me too,” Anya would shout back. “I’m emigrating, you know…” She knew she would be compromising him at that moment, that she would be saying something one didn’t say in public, something one could whisper in private only and never over the phone. A few strangers would conspicuously turn around to look at them, as if to photograph Misha’s face and hers with their suspicious eyes. And then Misha would blush, in his unique girlish fashion, his cheeks turning embarrassingly rosy, like in those teenage years, and he would vanish into the crowd.

But all of this was many years ago, and Anya no longer had any problems with tea. Those fragments of intimacy with Misha and Sasha, those tactile embarrassments and unfulfilled desires were the few things that remained vivid in her mind from the “era of stagnation”. Those incomplete narratives and failed perfect moments were like fragile wooden logs, unreliable safeguards on the swamp of her Leningradian memory which otherwise consisted of inarticulate fluttering and stutters, smells and blurs.

Anya had already performed some of the obligatory home-coming rituals but they had been too literal and therefore disappointing. She had walked by the aging but still cheerful Gorky on the now renamed Kirov Avenue approaching the windows of the Porcelain store that now sold everything from grilled chickens to “Scottish Whisky” and Wrangler jeans. Across the street from the square with the monument to the Russian inventor of radio (whose invention, along the others, is now questioned) she searched in vain for the shadow of Lenin made of red fishnet. The house where she used to live was under repair and on the broken glass-door of the front entrance she found a poster advertising a popular Mexican soap opera “The Rich Cry Too”. Otherwise the facade looked exactly like it had in the old days, but it was more like an impostor of her old house, a stage set that was a clumsy imitation of the original. Anya climbed up to their communal apartment through piles of trash. The place looked uncanny. The old communal partitions, including the secret retreats of Valentina Petrovna who had borne witness to her teenage romances, had been taken apart and the whole narrative of communal interaction was destroyed. On the floor she found telephone wires, worn-out slippers and the broken pieces of a French record. She looked through the window: black bottomless balconies were still precariously attached to the building, inhabited only by a few rootless plants. A lonely drunk was melancholically urinating near the skeleton of the old staircase.

“Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen. Remember who’s the last in line and don’t let in anyone else. Can I trust you?”

“But, of course… We’re all family here, miss. We know who’s in line and who’s out, who’s with us and who’s against us…”

“Hurry up, comrades. Fill out your inquiry cards neatly. Be sure to include name and patronymic, place of birth, nationality, permanent address… We’re short of time here…”

Indeed we’re short of time, thought Anya. We are all only a phone call away from each other. Misha, Sasha, let’s all get together… Let bygones be bygones – God, we used to learn so many proverbs in our English classes and then never had the occasion to use them… Let’s chat, remember the golden seventies, have a drink or two. What do you think? There are a lot of blank spaces in our life stories, and we don’t have to fill them all, it’s OK. We’ll just have fun. Let’s meet in some beautiful spot with a view, definitely with a view. We don’t need broad panoramas, no. And I don’t think the Church of our Savior on the Blood is such a good place either – (I heard they took the scaffolding down and you can actually see it now, it’s been restored after so many years…) Let’s meet on a little bridge with golden-winged lions. “Let’s tell each other compliments, in love’s special moments” – I didn’t make up this song; it really existed.

Relax, Sasha… I know what happened. I’ve heard… I don’t have much to say about it, only that it could have been worse… Listen, you looked really gorgeous in that white coat with red lining and I was totally and completely seduced by that silly song about the falling snow… I must have had a real crush on you. I even forgave you for not reading Pasternak. It’s just that we took ourselves so seriously in those days, you and me… But tell me how did you come up with that cruel Latin word “frigid”? In America, you know, women are rarely frigid, but the weather frequently is…

Hey, Misha, I’ve really forgotten about that Ceylon tea of yours… it doesn’t matter any more, I’ve brought you some Earl Grey… Remember our telephonic orgasms in the communal hall? God, I wish someone had taped those… Should we try to continue with that in a more sedate, grown-up fashion and shock the long-distance operator? I remember something about you, from those earlier days. The taste of your tongue in my eyes… There was spring dirt on your boots then, they were still unpolished… Where are you now? Way up or low down? As usual, beyond good and evil? I’m joking, of course, you might have forgotten your high school Nietzsche…

Me, I’m fine really. I love New York, as they say. Like New Yorkers, I love it and hate it. It feels like home and I feel a bit home-sick now, for that little studio of mine on Tenth West Street, bright but rather messy, without any pretense of coziness. Sometimes I go traveling to the end of the world, or at least to the southernmost point in the United States, Key West. Last time I nearly slipped on the wet rocks. You see, I need that, to get perspective, to estrange myself. It’s risky to get attached to one place, don’t you think?

And, yes, naturally I must be having great sex. For that’s what we do “in the West” and it couldn’t be otherwise. It’s actually almost true and not a big deal. I have a Canadian boyfriend, we work out a lot… Sometimes he says he hasn’t found himself yet (found whom? – you would ask…) I know it might sound funny here. Some people try to lose themselves and others try to find themselves. Oh well, let’s have a cup of coffee…

Where shall we go? You’re local, you must know some place. Yesterday we tried to have a drink with my old girlfriend and couldn’t find a place to sit down. It was raining out. So we ended up going to the movie theater “The Barricade” on Nevsky. They have a nice coffee shop there. We even bought tickets to the movies, just in case. They were showing Crocodile Dundee - The cleaning woman tried to get us to go see it. “Hey, kids, it’s such a funny movie,” she said, “You just can’t stop laughing… Our movies are never funny like that.”

“No,” I said, “we bought tickets but really we just want to sit in the coffee shop since it’s open till the next show.”

“But you can’t do that -” she said, “the coffee shop is for moviegoers only and what kind of moviegoers are you?”

“I already saw Crocodile Dundee,” I protested.

“It’s impossible… Don’t try to fool me. This is the opening night…”

“I saw it in a drive-in theater in New London,” I insisted…

“Look, miss, leave the coffee shop this very minute. I tell you that in plain Russian, loud and clear. Coffee is for moviegoers only.”

Maybe we’ll see a movie, Misha, something slow, with long, long takes. Wait, Misha, don’t rush… I’m sure we’ll find a place nearby… I could invite you for a bagel, but it’s far away… We could talk about Napoleon. He’s sort of out of fashion now… I bet the waitress would take us for ageing foreign students…

“The Information Kiosk closes in fifteen minutes.”

“But we’ve waited for so long…”

“This is a public abuse. I demand the Book of Complaints and Suggestions...”

“I’m sorry, comrade, we don’t have one here. You would have to go to the Central Information Bureau on Nevsky. But they close at two today, so you’re too late. And tomorrow is their day off.”

“That’s the whole problem… Whatever the reason, Russian people love to complain… I would have prohibited those Books of Complaints and Suggestions... What we need is The Book of Constructive Proposals.”

“And who are you, mister? Are you a People’s Deputy, or what?”

“No, I am not.”

“Well, we’re very glad that you’re not a People’s Deputy. People have a right to information. If they can’t get the information, they can complain…We’ve been silenced for too long…”

“So what? Before we didn’t have any information and now it’s all over the place… But who needs it when we can’t afford toothpaste! We don’t have toothpaste, but we’ve got glasnost to freshen our breaths… Information… If you want my opinion, there’s too much information these days, too much talk and no change…”

“Excuse me,” said Anya very politely. “It says here clearly: ‘The Information Kiosk is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday’. Today is Thursday and it’s quarter to four now, therefore the Kiosk should be open for another hour and fifteen minutes.”

“Hey, lady… who do you think I am? Do you think I can’t read or something? You try working here for a fucking hundred rubles an hour. I would be making twice as much in the cooperative bakery… But I stay here any way… I feel sorry for folks like you, having to fill out those fucking inquiry cards in the cold… Someone has to give people the information they need…”

“Excuse me, miss… Where are you from?”