My plan, as I leap through the open doors of a still-rolling bus, is to jump off the bus when it veers off course, find one headed in a more promising direction, and repeat this process, edging closer to the hostel each time. If all else fails, I will call Kazakhstan’s version of 911. Although, come to think of it, I’m not sure what that number is. But I do know I need to head roughly straight-leftish.
The bus follows the highway back into the city center, passing an American-style strip mall and an American-style mega mall. The side of the road is edged with rosebushes, still in bloom. I jump out at the city’s main east-west artery and jump onto another bus headed toward my hostel. When this turns up a street I’m not expecting it to, I jump off again, walk back to the main road, and try again. Somehow, I make my way back.
I enter the hostel common room, stunned that my plan has worked, and with renewed faith in my abilities to navigate a trip I could have just better planned for. Well, who cares? I wasn’t a Boy Scout, but I’m pretty sure that their motto is “The first step to preparedness is to start out completely unprepared.”
Travel can turn the smallest errands into triumphs that feel like major accomplishments. Grocery shopping, riding public transit, and making it through immigration all fill you with a sense of achievement that’s sometimes even more sweet because you were forced to do something you never thought you could.
Almas is still sitting at a table in the common room and looks up as I come in. “So, the show starts at seven,” he reminds me.
I smile and lie. “I can’t wait.”
Halfway through my set, the bongo player jumps in to provide an unsolicited beat. But the audience is engaged and fairly responsive, except for one woman, who gets a call in the middle of a joke and ANSWERS it.
“Sorry,” she tells me after, through a friend who translates. “I didn’t understand it anyway.”
People who don’t do comedy (aka “noncomics” or “people who have never tried to do their own dry cleaning with a blow-dryer and a gut feeling”) often ask if I get nervous before I go onstage, and I always say, “I do sometimes, but it doesn’t bother me.” People imagine that you stop feeling nervous, but for me anyway, it’s more that you get used to it. The first time you have an awful set—the kind of truly horrendous bombing that makes you want to go hang out with organized criminals, in the hopes that you’ll witness a crime and be placed in the witness protection program—you realize that bombing doesn’t kill you. I get nervous before some shows, but I get nervous every time it looks like the person in front of me is ordering the last everything bagel. Of the two worst-case scenarios, the bagel is more devastating. And all of this is the truth, but only half of it.
The half I’m leaving out is that the nerves are the whole point. They’re what stop most people from ever trying comedy. They’re what give you that rush when you step off the stage—the risk was huge, and everyone watching you knew it.
After the show, I sit outside in the kind of cold that stings your nose while the drum circle’s flutist smokes cigarettes. He’s a handsome, charismatic guy who has the irresistible aura of someone who is both sincere and stripped of self-consciousness.
“Do you like Sartre?” he asks.
“Um . . .” I do not casually read things like Sartre, but the fact that he clearly has is only adding to his sexy vibe, and I have enough sense to know I’ll be shooting myself in the foot if I tell him I’ve recently been on a thrillers-about-women-who-go-missing kick.
“I love No Exit,” I say, which is true in the sense that I saw it once and kind of understood it.
“What do you think is the message of it?” he asks.
I shrug. “Hell is other people. Fucking up is inevitable.” He shakes his head. “To me it is about freedom.” To him, he shares, freedom is when you know yourself, and when you’re at peace with yourself, there’s a light inside you, and when you look at someone else, you’re offering him that light. When your mind and heart are sufficiently open, you can experience things without naming or judging them, and this is true freedom.
“Anyway,” he says. “Sorry, my English isn’t very good.”
This entire conversation has gone down in English with no linguistic problems on his end. This has not stopped him from apologizing for his English, profusely. I don’t have the heart to tell him that earlier this evening, I tried to convey that I wanted to order takeout by saying, “Hello, I would like to eat . . . and stand.”
I ask him what other languages he speaks.
“Russian,” he begins, ticking off on his fingers. “Kazakh. Urdu. Uyghur.”
His grandparents, he explains, spoke these languages. One was Kazakh, another Pakistani, another Uyghur, an ethnic group found in Western China, and the final something he calls “Mountain Jew.”
“A what?” I ask.
“You don’t know what a Mountain Jew is?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Well, I am one.”
A perfectly thin blonde woman standing beside him nods. Though she speaks no English, I decide she must be kind, because any time anyone stubs out a cigarette on the porch railing, she picks up the pack and proffers another. There’s a warmth in this gesture that transcends language and makes up for the fact that she was the one who answered her cell phone during my set.
The blonde woman says something to the flutist, and he turns to me. “My girlfriend wants to know why you wanted to come to Kazakhstan.”
This catches me off guard, because, by this point, I had assumed that the flutist and I were halfway through the process of falling in love, and that I had found my life partner forty-eight hours into my trip.
I’m also fumbling because by now I should be used to this question, but I still haven’t come up with a good answer.
I have variously described my trip as “like Eat, Pray, Love, but with yak-herding,” or “like Wild, but in Turkmenistan.”
I say these things, because mediocre jokes are always a great way to get out of giving an honest response to a question that’s complicated and difficult to answer.
So I go with what I’ve learned is the most satisfying explanation for strangers. It’s the truth, but far from the whole story.
“I’ve had a lot of Russian boyfriends,” I reply.
2
Crossing a Land Border from Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan
If you want to seem suspicious to a seasoned traveler, all you have to do is offer to help her.
“Do you speak English?” a young Kyrgyz woman asks me.
I’m sitting on a bus in Kazakhstan that will depart any minute for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and as it happens I do speak English. But why does she? It seems most likely that she mastered this second, or perhaps seventh, language to rob, cheat, and/or identity thieve me.
“Yes,” I reply cautiously.
She says that the driver is trying to tell me that a ticket to Bishkek costs 1,500 tenge, which is even more suspicious, because that’s how much it’s supposed to cost. So what’s her scam? I thank her and pay the driver. I’ll keep an eye on her.
I’ve been dreading this bus trip, because I’m extraordinarily prone to motion sickness. To me, the two most terrifying words in the English language are “whale watch.” Before leaving, I stop at a pharmacy to pick up some necessary supplies.
A thick layer of protective Plexiglas separates me from the pharmacist.
“Hello,” I say in Russian, “I am inside a car, I am vomiting.” Actually, I don’t say vomiting, so much as pantomime it with sound effects.
He nods and pushes a tiny glass bottle that looks like it came from an old-timey apothecary through a sliding drawer.
“Will this medicine make sleep?” I ask, because I’m also prone to drowsiness.
“No,” the pharmacist replies. “You want sleeping pills?”
“No, I don’t want to sleep.”
“Okay, no problem. These aren’t sleeping pills.”
“And they won’t make me sleep?”
<
br /> “No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” he assures me.
“Great,” I say. Then, casually, “By the way, do you sell Xanax?”
Sitting on the bus behind the “helpful” Kyrgyz woman who is almost definitely casing me, if a person can be cased in the same way as a house, I take out the glass bottle of allegedly nondrowsy motion-sickness pills I purchased earlier.
I pass out about three minutes after taking one.
I wake up at a rest stop, which, in my drug-induced haze, I mistake for the border. I cause a lot of confusion when I hand my passport to the babushka manning the women’s bathroom.
I remain semi-awake as the bus makes its way through parched, stunning valleys to the actual border. The land stretching out before us is a dusty reddish brown that takes on different hues as it rises to form mountains of green and blue and purple. But all of the formations and colors are made of soil. The same brown dust that clings to the sides of my jeans no matter how violently I scrub them.
On maps, borders appear as neat lines that partition the world into shapes so familiar they seem almost inevitable. It can be strange to look out from an airplane window and remember that the land doesn’t conform to the order we impose upon it, that the people who spray paint lines on soccer fields haven’t been hired to mark the boundary between China and Nepal.
That was how I’d crossed most borders in my life: at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. At that distance, you don’t notice the transition from one country to another. Even getting your passport stamped feels like part of the airport, not a migration between geopolitical entities.
A land border is much more deliberate. You feel each step that takes you out of one nation and into another. It’s a transatlantic flight, with more mindfulness, and ten times the chaos.
Oh, is there chaos! First our bus pulls up to Kazakhstan’s exit door, which is actually a series of buildings connected by narrow gravel paths lined with chain-link fences. We have to collect all of our luggage and drag it through the gravel, because gravel is kryptonite to a suitcase’s ability to roll. Then we huddle in front of a line of booths where officers will stamp us out of Kazakhstan. The other travelers yell and smoke and carry bulky bags of cement mix. Next, we drag our suitcases through more gravel to customs, which is located in another building. There’s no one directing us through all this; we just follow whoever looks confident.
A Kazakh woman takes pity on me, probably because I look extremely distressed. She is small but fierce, and she pushes our way to the front of the not-line.
“This is just the checkpoint to exit Kazakhstan,” she assures me. “Kyrgyzstan will be much more organized.”
This turns out not to be true. After I’m given official permission to exit Kazakhstan, I once again have to drag my suitcase through a confusing maze of snaking, unpaved walkways to reach the Kyrgyz entry point. By now, I’m so disoriented that I attempt to enter Kyrgyzstan as a vehicle.
I find my way back to where I’m supposed to cross my first border as a pedestrian. As we’re waiting to get stamped into Kyrgyzstan, my new Kazakh friend asks me if I want to skip the bus and split a taxi to Bishkek.
“Can’t we just wait for the bus to pass through customs?” I ask.
She tells me it takes a long time for the bus to get through, and that, anyway, the bus drops you off on the outskirts of town, so you have to take another taxi to get into the city.
This sounds like either a plausible explanation, or a practiced opening to a well-rehearsed scam.
“I don’t have any Kyrgyz money,” I say, which is both true and, I figure, a noncommittal response.
“Okay,” she replies, “I’ll pay for you.”
Now I’m both more wary and slightly horrified. If this is a scam, it’s getting more elaborate, and if it isn’t, I’m not letting this kind woman pay for my taxi.
The Kazakh flutist’s girlfriend raised a good point last night: What am I doing here, crossing the desert from Kazakhstan into Kyrgyzstan, and more broadly, on this meandering and poorly planned journey through the former Soviet Union?
The summer before my senior year of college, my best friend set me up on a blind date with her friend Oleg. He took me out for sushi and told me he was Russian. Though I smiled, I was terrified. Not because he was Russian, but because, like any good American, I had only vaguely heard of most foreign countries, and I wanted to avoid being asked follow-up questions like, “Have you been to Russia before?” or “Do you know the name of the current president?”
I fell in love with Oleg for all the reasons people fall in love, and then I fell in love with Russian because I thought Oleg was Russian. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. Oleg was born in the Soviet Union and lived in Ukraine until the age of eight, when his family immigrated to upstate New York.
But his family spoke Russian and felt culturally Slavic, and it would take me years to learn the many nuances of the word Russian. In the meantime, I was fascinated by Oleg’s stories of the Soviet factory his grandfather ran, his memories of ration cards, the snippets of Russian I would hear when his parents called. I sent Oleg home with a long list of questions to ask his grandparents, whose answers he begrudgingly recorded, translated, and relayed back to me.
The more I learned about the Soviet Union, the more it fascinated me. It sounded kind of like the U.S., but with table caviar. Like America, the Soviet Union was a huge country that saw itself as the predominate geopolitical power. Its territory spanned regions with distinct languages and cultures, which it too (eventually) attempted to unite with the aspirational melting pot. As in America, the diverse cultures “melted” so that everyone spoke, dressed, and behaved like the majority culture. Also like in America, the Russian ethnic majority tended to be monolingual and figured the rest of the world should just learn to speak its language.
People who harbor intense fascinations with and affinity for Russian culture often find themselves struggling to explain why they find this part of the world so captivating. Sometimes I’ll go off on a rambling explanation of how hard the language is, how the challenge of learning it carries the irresistible allure of other things people do precisely because they’re hard, like climbing mountains and dating people who take a week to respond to a text message. Other times I’ll point to the surprisingly similar ideologies that shaped the childhoods of my parents and those of their Soviet counterparts. How my dad, who was raised to speak one language, geek out over space, and fear that any day now, the Soviet Union was going to destroy his country, would have had been told similar things in Moscow, except swap out the Soviet Union for the U.S. At some point, my listeners’ eyes glaze over, and so I reveal the boyfriend thing. “Oh,” they brighten. “Next time, just say that.”
But if Oleg had been Danish, I suspect I might have written a (much shorter) book about traveling through Scandinavia. Or if I’d met him a week after discovering an intense passion for beekeeping, I might have loved him but never learned to stop calling it “the Ukraine.”
So this whole trip had been a dream for a while, but a distant one. The kind you dip into during a boring meeting but know will never happen.
Unless you find a second Russian boyfriend.
When the Kyrgyz border guard sees my identification, he calls for backup and then disappears with my passport.
When your passport vanishes into a back room at a border crossing, the appropriate response is panic, but I’m too caught up in my neurosis re: Is this woman conning me? If not, what should I do? Where will I find an ATM? Will we become lifelong friends, or is she about to bring up her friend’s “art gallery?” I look up and find that while agonizing, I have paced my way into the guards’ private living quarters, which seems like a terrible place to be caught at a border without your passport.
I return to the guard, who gives me back my passport, and find my new Kazakh friend, who, in turn, has found the Kyrgyz woman who helped me buy my bus ticket and who now also wants to get in on this
shared taxi action.
Okay, I think. This is probably not a scam.
But as we drag our suitcases down the final unpaved no-man’s-land that leads to the taxis, they start speaking to each other in Kazakh and Kyrgyz, which makes sense, because why wouldn’t they communicate in their native languages? But could it also be a sign that they know each other and have been planning some elaborate ruse from the start?
We reach a parking lot, and the women head off to negotiate a taxi while I duck into a small wooden shed to change money.
The Kazakh woman is waiting for me outside. “Is 450 som okay for you?” she asks.
I try to make it seem like I’m thinking while I discreetly type the number into a currency converter on my phone. The dollar equivalent pops up: $70 U.S.
“Whoa,” I yelp. “That’s really expensive.”
If her reaction includes a facial expression, I can’t read it.
“Maybe I should just take the bus?” I venture.
She points to a bus that is, as in a movie, pulling out of the parking lot. “It just left,” she says.
“I thought you said it took a while for the bus to get through the border?!” This woman is now, without a doubt, tricking me.
She shrugs. “I guess it went through quickly. Anyway, you don’t want to go to the bus station; it’s very far away from the city.”
“450 is expensive . . .” My voice trails off, because what choice do I have?
“Maybe you should talk to the driver,” she suggests.
Now I’m furious, in part because I’m going to have to part with 70 bucks, but perhaps even more so because no one wants to be seen as an easy mark. These girls and the driver are old friends, I fume. They saw me the second I got on that bus, and they sent each other a secret signal that means, “Let’s pretend not to know each other for the duration of this six-hour bus ride so we can extort $70 from that drowsy American.”
The driver is a young guy with great English, which makes him seem even more suspect. Who speaks English, I wonder again, except people trying to cheat tourists?
Open Mic Night in Moscow Page 3