You Must Go and Win: Essays (20 page)

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Authors: Alina Simone

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“Well, you’re in luck!” Pasha exclaimed. “I live in Tomsk and can drive you home after dropping Sasha off at his mother’s house. My car is only just down the road …”
I thought for a moment. There was a part of me that doubted getting into a car with two random men I met by the side of a lake in rural Siberia was such a genius move. Then again, neither was spending the night on the streets of Kolarovo, which were mostly made of dirt. I agreed to come along, and when we reached the car, I was happy to see that the trunk really was filled with
fishing gear. But we had been motoring down the lane for only a short time when my qualms surfaced again. I began to notice some other things—specifically things about Sasha, who had settled in the backseat directly behind me. The first was, he stank. The reek of alcohol coming off him was so strong that he may have officially qualified as a solvent. Then, when Sasha leaned forward to paw at Pasha’s shoulder, I noticed something else: the blurry tattoos between the knuckles of his left hand—never a good sign in Russia.
“Pasha? Pasha!”
Sasha barked.
“Bliad, zayebala menya eta derevnya na huy do polusmerti. Blevat tyanet ot etikh opizdinevshikh starykh zasranok.”
This could roughly be translated as “Whore-fuck, this village has dicked me half dead. These old shitty cunts make me wanna puke.” Exhausted by this Shakespearean effort, Sasha rolled down the window, horked into the wind, and muttered, “Fuck. I’m thirsty as shit,” before using the back of Pasha’s seat to rub the spit off his face.
Pasha twisted out from under Sasha’s hand and shot me a shrugging kind of look. I managed a weak smile in return while a montage of images unspooled in my mind: the flash of roadside weeds and broken bottles, a grainy close-up of a newspaper headline, my parents awkwardly wiping their ashy fingers on their pants after sprinkling my remains in the little pond behind their house …
A few minutes later we were idling outside Sasha’s mother’s home, where a stout, straw-haired woman with a battered face was stacking firewood in the yard. Sasha leaned heavily on the car door before righting himself and lurching unsteadily toward the house. The woman watched his progress with a pained look, shaking her head sadly. She glanced up and noticed Pasha at the wheel, who rolled down the window and shouted, “
Derzhis
, Marina Sergeievna!
Derzhis
!” The woman only nodded gravely and waved at the car as we pulled away.
“I am sorry,” Pasha said. “My friend is a drunk.”
“Yes,” I affirmed.
“He only just returned to the village after a long time away and doesn’t know what to do with himself.”
“Where was he?” I asked, full of awareness of where he was.
“Prison.”
“What for?”
Pasha glanced at me for a long moment before returning his attention to the road. “He got into a fight at a bar and killed a man.”
“How did he kill him?” I blurted, and as these unfamiliar new words left my mouth I had the distinct feeling that I’d somehow misplaced my immediate priorities.
“With his bare hands,” he replied.
And then we settled into the awkward silence that usually follows these kinds of revelations. But once the windows were rolled down and the air cleared of its eye-watering fumes, Pasha and I began to talk again. It turned out that he’d grown up in Kolarovo, where he and Sasha had been childhood friends, but was now a successful businessman, running his own furniture factory in Tomsk. The one advantage, so far as I could see, of sharing a long car ride with the friend of a convicted murderer was that I could finally learn something about the seedier side of life in Tomsk. Surely something darker lay behind the lacework shutters of all those quaint wooden houses? Surely there were more interesting things to do than walk the streets in search of a salad without mayonnaise? Pasha saw what I was getting at and, before dropping me off at my hotel, promised to give me a little tour during my stay. After that, I would get a call from him every few days. Would I fancy a trip to a local casino? Perhaps a visit to a nearby Gypsy village well known for drug trafficking? How about a drive down to the place on the highway where prostitutes wait to pick up truckers?
Pasha was about ten years older than me, but he had a pretty wife who was much younger, and a baby. I sensed that his interest in me wasn’t prurient, but rather, he just enjoyed having an American around as a weird sort of pet, the way a well-to-do Manhattanite might accessorize herself with an African serval. Regardless of Pasha’s motives or his taste in friends, he turned out to be an excellent guide to the underside of Tomsk, and I returned to Novosibirsk a far better informed Siberian citizen. I also found that, for better or worse, my natural defenses were worn away by this experience. The fear of Russia my parents had worked so hard to instill in me was gone, replaced, it seemed, by a newfound thirst for adventure that left me feeling whorish and pretty much up for anything.
 
 
I suppose this is what accounted for my presence in the front row of a male strip show on the shore of an artificial sea just outside of Akademgorodok a few weeks later. By then I had managed to make some genuine friends in Siberia, among them Roman, a charming half-Gypsy, half-Chechen musician who supported himself by hosting laser shows at local nightclubs, using equipment lifted from one of the many bankrupt research institutes littering Novosibirsk. The special occasion that night was the arrival of a touring striptease starring “Tarzan,” a bodybuilder better known as the husband of the Russian pop singer Natasha Koroleva. To translate this into American terms: imagine going to a club in Umiat, Alaska, to see Céline Dion’s husband take his clothes off. It was something like that.
Club Neokom was located on the shore of Beach Neokom; both of them belonging to the Novosibirsk megaconglomerate, Neokom. And although it was hard to imagine anything raunchy or dangerous happening in this soulless place, under the canvas roof of a glorified beer tent blasting carrot-love all over ill-clad
women and their thick-necked boyfriends, Roman approached the ticket booth with noticeable trepidation.
“Just be careful,” he said, eyeing me warily as I twirled my digital camera by its faux-leather strap. “I can’t really keep an eye on you while I’m setting up the laser, and there are fights at this place practically every weekend.”
“No prob!” I chirped.
“People have been shot and killed here. Seriously.”
“Seriously!” I repeated joyfully, poking him in the arm.
“Tonight’s going to be crazy,” Roman warned, shaking his head. “And please watch where you point that thing,” he added, indicating my camera. “I mean it.”
A few minutes later the music cut out for the announcement that the show would begin in ten minutes. Roman wandered off to get some beer and I immediately made for the stage, determined to stake out a spot in the front row. I was resting my elbows on the raised wooden platform, testing the autofocus on my camera, when I felt the firm tap on my shoulder.
“Coo-coo, Alinachka,” Roman hissed through his teeth. “What the hell do you think you’re doing up here?”
“I’m waiting to see the show—”
“Yeah, you can see the show from the laser booth too,” he said, taking me by the elbow.
“Look at me,” I whined. “I’m barely five feet tall—do you think I’m really going to be able to see anything back there with you?”
Roman glanced around uneasily. “Listen, I’m going to be running the laser, and if you’re not with me, I can’t be held accountable.”
“Who’s holding you accountable?”
“Okay, whatever,” Roman called, as he turned and walked away. “Those pictures better be good.”
I was too busy trying to puzzle out what had gotten into Roman to pay attention to the announcement that the show was just about to begin. He was hardly the paranoid type, so why the sudden grade-school—WOMP! Both my thoughts and the air in my chest were cut off as my pancreas was mashed into the hard edge of the stage. I was being suffocated by women. Hundreds and hundreds of women, all screaming and filling my vanishing air space with their highly flammable breath. None of them seemed to care that the thing separating them from the object of their desire was not a stack of bricks or a pylon, but an inconveniently fleshy person. A consultant I’d once met in Irkutsk had confessed to me that the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to her on assignment in Siberia was peeing her pants because she could not traverse a narrow, congested pathway carved into the snow fast enough to reach her hotel. Was I about to surpass this impressive milestone by laying down my life here? At Club Neokom? So that a twenty-three-year-old computer programmer from Berdsk could get six inches closer to Tarzan’s tight ass? And my poor family! Sure, they had predicted my death, but what fresh hell of humiliation
this
would turn out to be. Adrenalized, I started elbowing hard, indifferent to where my blows landed until the pressure eased and the lights dimmed.
Really, all Roman had to do if he wanted to get me as far away from the action as possible was explain that Russian strip shows, unlike those in America, included a graphic audience-participation component. My boss, who is fluent in Managementspeak, liked to call revelations like these “learning points.” Another learning point for me would have been the news that the front row serves as prime recruiting ground for said graphic audience-participation component. Had I known this, I would have happily volunteered to spend the night in the parking lot, watching the show through binoculars from the van window. Instead
I was obliviously clicking away when a freakishly taut man dressed in a police uniform hauled the first woman up on stage. This was not Tarzan but one in a long string of gladiators, firefighters, gymnasts, and sailors brought out to warm up the crowd for the main attraction. I watched as the police officer offered the woman a rose, as he led her around the stage by one hand, as he removed her clothes and then proceeded to do some things that I’m pretty sure a fair number of married couples have never gotten around to. And she was just the first of many willing victims.
Avoiding the rose became my new imperative in life. Every Tarzan mini-me had one. They would prowl the stage, waving it around with a languid motion of the wrist like some mesmerizing wand of shame. Then they would drop dramatically to one knee, extending the rose toward the front row and inducing every woman within reach to claw at one another as if it were a lingerie fire sale at Loehmann’s and the last thong on Earth was at stake. Lucky for me there were too many other contenders, all drunk and hollering and flinging their anatomy into the air, for me to attract much notice. Until the very end, that is. Until … Tarzan.
I remember there was this palpable shift in the atmosphere, hands tightening around the necks of beer bottles, followed by a cannon blast of carrot-love. Then Tarzan burst onto the stage in a white satin toga, and never in my life had I seen a man who so much resembled a horse. When he threw back his mane of long blond hair I fully expected to hear a long, low braying sound, but instead there was just the roar of the crowd, losing its collective mind. Tarzan cantered into the spotlight and paused dramatically, letting his toga slip to reveal one strategically flexed buttock. The rose was in his mouth, clenched between his teeth. He rearranged his toga again to reveal an aggressively glossy thigh, slid toward the edge of the stage, and pressed what remained of his toga to his prominent crotch with one hand. For a moment he
seemed to be locked in some kind of desperate struggle with the crotch, as though a seagull had gotten caught in his G-string and was desperately trying to break free. The woman next to me started screaming so loudly that I feared she might expel a tonsil right there into my beer, and at the sound Tarzan turned his head. But for some reason, his eyes slid right over her and instead landed squarely on me. I immediately dropped my camera to my side and began shaking my head. No, Tarzan, I projected telepathically. This won’t be any fun for either of us, I’m afraid. I am really bad at getting publicly molested. The sight of me sobbing hysterically and pathetically slapping at your big, impossible muscles and screaming for Roman to please melt you with his laser will be a total buzzkill for all the nice people who paid three hundred rubles to come here tonight. You totally deserve better. What about the nice lady in that one-piece spandex thingee over there … ? I look like a hazmat inspector compared to her. See the way her neck muscles are bulging? I think that means she’s really excited to meet you! But Tarzan just stood at the foot of the stage looking down at me, smiling his horsey smile through the rose in his teeth. He turned around and for a second I thought my luck had changed, that he’d decided to seek his next victim elsewhere. But Tarzan didn’t move, instead he started tipping his head back, back, ever further back, until he was suspended in a quivering arc right over my head. I was still completely hemmed in on every side, so there was nothing to do but watch as he opened his mouth and the rose fell, head over stem, down toward me.
It was very hard to avoid the impulse to raise my hands and catch the rose, but still, I managed to do so, keeping my arms pressed tight to my sides. Even after the rose hit me, even with hundreds of women watching and Tarzan waiting and the rose sitting weirdly on top of my head where it had gotten stuck in my hair, I remained motionless, hoping that if I pretended like nothing had happened, this whole thing might just quietly blow
over. It was useless—immediately the hands of half a dozen women were in my hair, pulling and screeching. I dropped down, screaming and slapping uselessly at the swarm above me. A moment later a woman who’d been standing behind me jumped to her feet, brandishing the rose and whooting like a soccer champion. I barely had time to stand and bring the viewfinder to my face once more in time to catch—

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