Into Thick Air (22 page)

A feast wouldn't be complete without a toast or two, maybe three. Then
back to the photo archive—still three inches to go. There are so many baby pictures that my heart flies back to my family in Tucson, and when my eyes begin to cloud I must excuse myself—how can I explain that I miss my son? But they understand—Andrei has two children in school. When it's time to go, he says, “Good-bye—and please take this for your son.”

It's a foot-high stuffed pink bunny, wearing a polka-dot bow tie. Very nice, I say, but where do I put it? When I ride off in the direction of Log, the pink bunny is standing tall on my sleeping bag.

I'm out of the fertile black earth country and happy to be riding through a lumpy sandy land, with hunches of scrub oak on the rises, and poplar tracing the watercourses. The wind, a surprisingly warm wind out of the southeast, swells until it overwhelms. In one hour I pedal three and a half miles, which must be a flatland low-speed record. I stop, exhausted, on the shoulder near a dump, and stand amid a scatter of broken bottles. A bus passes and thirty heads turn in spontaneous synchrony, staring.

Yesterday I was merely odd; today, with the big pink rabbit on my tail, the Russians assume I'm nuts. I desperately want to ride on, past melon fields and goat herders—the enticing signs of aridity—but I admit defeat and retreat to the Hotel Frovolo. I ride the same three and a half miles in only nine minutes, with hardly a turn of my pedals.

I've grown surprisingly fond of this cold-water hotel that falls dark after the tea pot blows a fuse. I hear nothing but the radio in the beauty parlor next door, tuned to a smoky lilting sax carried on the wind.

It blows through the night and into the morn. Anxious to beat the winter, I pedal out of town, around roadkilled hedgehogs, and into a dust storm. Hungry for a shish kebab, I turn too quickly into a roadside eatery and fail to spot a slick of sheep fat. The crash leaves the uncaring rabbit unscathed, but the wind will not stop and I end up on the train, humbled, alongside quiet men with sand under their nails and sacks of melon between their feet, and schoolgirls clutching Spice Girl notebooks. We all rumble and nod into Volgograd, a city reduced to rubble by one of the most terrible battles of WWII.

Volgograd was reimagined and rebuilt by Stalin's team of Soviet planners. This does not sound like the recipe for a pleasurable place, but I'm
learning, and a change of heart comes easy for a man who hasn't had a shower in four days. Freshly scrubbed after a night at the frankly regal Intourist Hotel, I stroll the esplanade that embraces the immense sweep of the Volga River with a chain of linear parks. Kids flit by on in-line skates, sober adults walk drooling basset hounds, and the semisober sit at sidewalk cafés with big mugs of beer. The 1950s housing and shops, built of stone blocks or a reasonable facsimile, are the next step in from the river, and the factories and busy roads are set well back. I really could not have picked a better place for my computer to break down.

It's only four keys that refuse to work, but I'd never realized the importance of O and L until I need them. (The semicolon and dash I can do without.) In a mild panic I visit the American Business Center. They summon computer repairman Alex Shopochkin to my rescue. I tell him that if he fixes the computer I will put him in my story and a hundred billion people will know of his technical savvy. He replies, “And if I can't fix it, I think I will still be in the story.” This guy is smart—he's certain to fix it.

Meanwhile, the staff of the Center, which helps American companies set up shop in Russia, delivers glum news on the economic scene.

“After the crisis hit,” says Karina Ray, “the Pall Mall minivans disappeared. They would park on the street and open up the doors and blast music out the back. They had black lights inside the vans—and even underneath. They'd attract attention, and the Pall Mall girls would hand out cigarettes. They target young men, and light the cigarettes for them.”

Cigarettes are the first taste of America for many Russians. The apartment blocks at the edge of Volgograd feature ten-story-tall Marlboro men, and when I visit the central market I find an entire aisle lined with towers of cigarette cartons. “Cossack” smokes are only 15 cents a pack, yet American brands are selling briskly at $1.60.

It's the busiest market I've seen since Moscow. Now I know where Russian women buy Blondex hair color, where girls get the picture pins of Leonardo DiCaprio, and where men pick up
Speed
, a tabloid reputed to promote safe sex but whose current cover shows a defenseless man in a steam bath being assaulted by three lasses armed with tiny towels and loofahs.

The meat market is slice and whop and long steel tables laid out with cows reduced to a leg, a head with a blank eye, a pair of bull balls. Less disturbing is the domain of the sunflower seed vendors—just follow the sparrows to the mounds of seeds that apparently induce calm not only for the chewers but also for the sellers, who recline in various states of repose on big burlap sacks. Everyone else is busy selling, a scene with the promise of becoming what Maurice Hindus saw here in 1923, when the market “teemed with caravans of carts, drawn by ox, horse or camel. . . . NEP had struck its stride, and trade was booming in the bazaars and shops.”

The NEP was Lenin's New Economic Policy. It was capitalism. Lenin called it a “strategic retreat”—putting communism on hold for five years.

It was a wily move, and Joseph Stalin was just as effective as his predecessor. Volgograd was once called Stalingrad, after the man who, like Lenin, knew when to back down to achieve a larger goal. Stalin allowed the temporary resurgence of the church during WWII, if only because the people are more willing to die for their country if they believe heaven awaits. Russia's dreadful losses during the war are remembered in the monumental statues of Volgograd—a bare-chested man heaving a hand grenade seems to stand on every other street corner. The Battle of Stalingrad was the fulcrum of the war—the Germans lost over 300,000 men, and the momentum shifted to the Russians.

To walk through Volgograd today is to confront the paradox of Soviet communism—how things got better and worse at the same time. Stalin exterminated millions by starvation and gulags, and for the survivors Stalin built the lovely Intourist Hotel and the comfortable city of Volgograd.

Even Volgograd's old state cafeterias are the nicest I've seen, with one featuring perhaps the world's only aluminum bas-relief of dumplings. They look like the plump clouds that slide over the city at dusk. There's a silken breeze off the Volga, and the riverside parks fill with families and lovers and drunks. Teen girls in clunky black shoes walk arm in arm past the most stirring Battle of Stalingrad monument, the blasted shell of a flour mill.

But tonight it is easy to forget the war. Especially if you're staying at the Intourist, the first place outside Moscow where I've encountered actual
tourists. Not many. In the lobby café there is a fleshy German man, ruddy with booze. On his knee sits a woman, a slinky giggler half his age. After I take a seat he points to the café's matron and says without prompting, “This lady can get you anything you desire in Volgograd.”

He's repulsive, but it's true that the Russians seem extra-considerate of wandering men. It's 10 PM when the Welcome Wagon rings me in my room. This mystifies me. It's a big hotel, and there are a lot of empty rooms. How, I ask the caller, how did you know that I was in this room?

“I did not,” she says. “I call all the room numbers. Are you sure you do not want a sleeping woman tonight?”

I'm sure. I have a wife.

“And I have a husband. But I understand. You are good husband. Good night.”

The nicest prostitutes! I like feeling wanted, but I have a late-night appointment with the computer fix-it man, Alex Shopochkin. He delivers my laptop in perfect order, but also delivers the less happy news of his current employment. His job as a computer specialist at the Imperial Bank vanished with the ruble's crash. The bank is history, too. He's fed up with Russia. “I want to emigrate,” he confides. “Russia is no place for people. History, yes, politics, yes—but it is no good for people.”

Not everyone agrees. In the lobby café for breakfast, I meet the buoyant Alex Limanov. He likes what he calls the “Stalin baroque” architecture of the city, yet doesn't mind covering it with ads for his Danish employer, Stimorol Chewing Gum. “We do not sell just chewing gum,” says Alex. “We sell fun. Our ads show the jungles, the ocean, the beach—Stimorol
is
adventure. Teenagers like it very much.”

But, I ask, who's going to buy chewing gum if Russia runs out of money? “Russians, as you know,” says Alex, “have special training to survive. I would not say I'm happy about this crisis. I'm just saying we have to find a way out, to find the right tool to fix the Russian economy.”

It's easy to be optimistic in the dining room of the Intourist, with crisp linen and Turkish coffee under enormous hanging brass lamps. But Alex has fears, too.

“Corruption is very flexible. In an authoritarian regime there will still be
corruption, because
nobody will have to explain
. In an open government, there's less opportunity for corruption.”

Back at the American Business Center, deputy director Galina Tokareva is evasive when I ask about corruption. She scolds the national banks that are “involved in securities gambling rather than in direct investment.” She dismisses Russia's capital: “Moscow is a parasite. It sucks the life out of the provinces.” But when I ask for her vision of the future she says flatly, “No comment.”

Not every Russian is a pessimist, I say—and I cite Mr. Stimorol Chewing Gum. Galina comes back with “A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.” And then she offers a joke that she claims is very popular among Russians but will probably make no sense to me.

“A hedgehog is taking a walk in the forest when it meets a frog. It's just sitting there in the middle of the path. The hedgehog says, ‘You're so
ugly
, so
slimy
, so
green
. How can you go on with your life?' ‘Never mind,' says the frog, ‘I am not feeling well. Usually I am white and fluffy.' ”

White and fluffy Russia will have to wait a bit longer. Galina's joke reflects the sentiments of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “To give time for new kinds of political leaders to be born in Russia, ones not chained to feudalism at birth, we will have to wander long in the wilderness, and resist the temptation of hoping for some sort of homegrown Moses to lead us to the Promised Land. We received freedom as a desert, and we must learn to plant trees in it.”

Volgograd's desert is more than metaphor—it rains only about eleven inches a year. Yet on the morning I leave, the sky is clotted with clouds like steel wool. I wrap my gear in plastic bags, but the pink bunny—which I'm now resigned to carry all the way to the Caspian—will just have to face the elements, perched atop my sleeping bag.

Only a hundred feet from my hotel I ride past a wedding party taking the customary photos of the bride and groom under the chestnut trees in Fallen Heroes Square. It's easy to spot their sedan with a pair of giant wedding rings atop the roof, and it's likewise easy to spot a bicyclist with a stuffed rabbit. Within twenty seconds the party has thrust a shot of vodka into my hands. To the newlyweds! I drink and sputter, and they howl and
give me the antidote, a slice of bread and salami. Then someone gets an idea:
Look! A present for the bride! A pink bunny!

A minute later I ride away, rabbit-free, to take the ferry across the Volga. The temperature is dropping fast, drawing puffs of vapor from every soul. The river is a dull reflection of the muddled sky, but the long and thin sand islands are fringed with autumn cottonwood gilded like church icons. The ferry is packed with commuters, a literate group that hardly looks up from their novels and newspapers.

On the far shore I pick up two apples from a vendor who refuses my money. It's not the first time, but it's the first time the gift is from a Kazak. The Caspian Sea is not only the lowest point in Europe but also its frontier. The rim of Asia is just over the horizon.

 

I DON'T REALIZE how cold it is until I stop at the hotel in Leninsk and discover that my right foot is numb. When the receptionist sees me hobbling, she invites me behind the desk to warm myself with her little electric heater. She's a sweetheart, and for all I know she lives here, cooking on a hot plate and spending her hours in the lobby with the buzzing TV and the philodendrons and palms. It is a strange thing to come out of the gloomy blue chill and find these tropical plants, but the hotel keepers like defying the odds.

It's possible, too, that the plants are in a sort of suspended animation, neither dead nor alive. A little Russian hotel is very tranquil, and it's easy to imagine falling into such a state. I no longer bother to ask if there's hot water. I use my stove to heat up a pint for a bandanna bath, then head out to find dinner.

As usual, there's a kiosk cluster near the statue of Lenin. They all carry ramen noodles and Turkish candies and Stewardess cigarettes. For young men coping with a growth spurt, there are luxuries like nail clippers and naked-lady playing cards. An old woman dodders up to the kiosk and shows me a comic-book tract from the Jehovah's Witnesses, pointing to a picture of a lamb and a lion lying together. If I really spoke Russian I'd mention that this is a potentially fatal gathering of carnivore and herbivore—but she only wants me to accept Jesus.

The next morning I ride down to the shore of the Akhtuba River, the Volga's fraternal twin, which runs alongside its larger sister for several hundred miles, the two intertwined by dozens of distributaries, where water fans out from the main channels. Between the two rivers is neither land nor river—it's the Water Meadows, a constellation of hundreds of oxbow lakes with pastures and farms among them.