Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  We’re shown into the guest yurt, a dark, warm room filled with rugs, blankets, and pillows. The family sleeps in the yurt next door. I’m surprised to see a solar panel, which powers the single light bulb dangling from the yurt’s ceiling, and a simple sink in which water collected in a small cistern flows into a basin via a foot pump.

  The matriarch, a sturdy woman of sixty, serves us tea while her small grandchildren filter in and out. The guide tells her about my collapse, and she returns a few minutes later with a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. She smiles sweetly, takes my blood pressure, then lets her granddaughter take my blood pressure, take my blood pressure again, and does not seem to reach a diagnosis. “Do you want medicine?” she asks.

  After dinner, the grandmother pushes the table we ate on into a corner of the room and removes a decorative cover to reveal a giant pile of bedding. She stacks blankets and pillows into three piles that form remarkably warm, comfortable beds. We crawl into them and turn off the light, and I sit in bed with my lighted Kindle, surprised at how cozy the yurt is. See? I think. This is how people used to live. What a beautiful, simpler time, when we lived off the land, and went to bed when the sun went down, and didn’t have to–

  Out of nowhere, a bug lands on my head. I slap my face out of reflex. It’s gone; I shiver in disgust and go back to reading.

  Then I feel something in my hair.

  I sit up and hit the top of my head, but I don’t feel anything but hair. Maybe I just imagined it? But then a moth lands on my Kindle, right next to my light. I kill it with my blanket, which only seems kind of gross after I’ve done it. I try to flick the moth carcass away, but it gets stuck on my finger, which is even more disgusting, and I start shaking my hands and slapping myself until I realize that there are other people in the room, calmly compose myself, and hide under the covers.

  I burrow into an airtight cocoon of blankets, but after a few minutes, I hear what sounds like an incoming kamikaze, and then feel one moth hit my blanket. And then another. The moths are dive-bombing me.

  I throw back the covers and start killing all the moths I can see with my Kindle cover. The guide gets up and does the same, except he kills the moths by squeezing them between his fingers. We find them crawling on the floor and landing on our blankets. We continue killing until all that’s left are dead moths, which the guide oddly arranges in a pile on a small table between our beds.

  I go back to reading, above the covers. And then I feel something in my hair.

  I shine my light up to the ceiling, where I see hundreds of moths fluttering beneath the yurt opening.

  The guide laughs. I see no humor in this situation. I click off my Kindle light and crawl back into my blanket cocoon. This will quickly become too hot, and I’ll continue being dive-bombed for the rest of the night. My sleep will be fitful and punctuated by dreams of moths crawling up my leg, which will cause me to wake up, convinced that I am, in fact, being molested by a moth.

  But for now, I allow myself a small moment of triumph, because I realize that I conducted a semi-medical semi-emergency entirely in Russian.

  “Were you viciously attacked by moths last night?” I ask.

  Mireia laughs. I assume it’s a nervous laugh, fueled by fear that the moths are lurking in some corner of the yurt, waiting for the first sign of weakness to resume their assault.

  But her smile is easy. “I just had to turn off my light and go to sleep,” she says.

  HAD to go to sleep? I think. I spent the night cowering under the covers, flinching every time a moth’s aerial attack gently pinged my blanket. Sleep hadn’t been an option, much less a solution.

  We’re sitting at the table, which has been dragged back to the center of the room and covered in breakfast foods while our beds have turned back into a single, tidy stack of blankets. There is, I realize, an intense efficiency to this whole yurt setup. It’s only one room, but, with a little rearranging of the furniture, that room transforms from a kitchen to a bedroom to a living room to a dining room, kind of like a Barbie Dreamhouse.

  I take another sip of scalding tea, which I’m starting to suspect contains no caffeine. I’m no less groggy than I was three cups ago, and I’m now missing most of my taste buds, along with a significant portion of the roof of my mouth.

  “I’m kinda going crazy on that horse,” I confess to Mireia. “Like, I don’t know what to think about? And then my mind just sort of . . .”

  She nods. “You know, I do yoga now, and I just think of it as a practice for that.”

  Wow, I think, this really is just like Eat, Pray, Love, but with pack animals.

  We spend the morning climbing hills whose surfaces resemble the texture of crumpled paper. The day is bright and cool. Locals call this the golden season, because the grass that covers everything has started to die, and the brittle, yellowed stalks glow in the sunlight.

  I’m pretty sure my horse has scurvy. Sure, all I know about scurvy is that it’s something that happens to sailors who don’t eat enough oranges, and sure, all I know about horses comes from a weird movie about a girl who rides horses off of a diving board that my sister and I for some reason watched over and over as children, but I feel confident in my diagnosis.

  First, there’s the fact he’s walking so slowly, I’m pretty sure I would beat him in a potato sack race in which only I had to wear a potato sack. We often fall thirty minutes behind Mireia and the guide, and every so often, the guide gets fed up, rides back, and ties us to his belt.

  My horse has also started stumbling. So has Mireia’s. It’s terrifying: I’m riding along and suddenly, I’m pitched forward toward the ground. Each time the horse gets back up I’m shaken, but what can I do?

  “My friend hired horses in Cuba,” Mireia whispers. “And they were really skinny and sickly. Our horses look okay, but I think maybe they’re the same.”

  Mireia’s yoga suggestion isn’t really working for me. While we crest the top of a mountain range, I wonder how much money is left in my checking account. As we descend a gentle path beside a pair of wild horses, I try to calculate how many calories we’ve burned since yesterday.

  Man, do I think about a lot of stupid, useless shit! Even in the face of raw, unspoiled nature. Especially in the face of raw, unspoiled nature.

  My favorite yoga teacher once said that Tibetan Buddhists believe that at any one time, each person is dealing with seven problems. I’ve avoided fact-checking this, because I like how it sounds, and the person who said it is an American yoga teacher, which experience has shown to be the demographic least informed about Eastern religions.

  Sometimes it feels like all I do is run through my seven problems, most of which aren’t really problems. Did I choose the wrong line at the grocery store? How many calories was my dinner? How will I ever go on if someone I love one day dies? Will I ever find someone I love as much as I loved Anton?

  We reach the lake at lunchtime. The water is a smooth pane of glass that reflects the puffs of clouds on a blue sky. Close to shore, we can see the pebbles that form the lake bed through the bathwater-clear waves gently lapping at the beach. Sheep graze on the golden field beside us; mountains rise on the far side of the lake. I decide to pardon my horse from his murder sentence.

  We eat lunch in a yurt with a bespectacled, dour German man who has just finished a PhD program and is traveling through Central Asia, supposedly to celebrate. But he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy well suited to celebrating.

  “Are you happy to be done?” I ask.

  “I guess.” He sniffs. “But now the German government will no longer pay me.”

  “They were paying you, like paying your tuition?”

  “No, I got a salary also.”

  I’m impressed.

  “And a lot of vacation.”

  “Paid vacation?”

  “Of course. Several months each year.”

  He’d used that time to travel extensively through Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. He seems d
isdainful of all of them.

  The German has hiked in, which, he’s quick to tell us, is probably faster than horseback riding. His guide, who speaks English, reaffirms this, first to us, in English, and then to our guide, in Kyrgyz.

  “And you know,” the German continues, “that in Uzbekistan, you should buy money on the black market?”

  I don’t want to admit that I don’t know this, so I make a noncommittal grunt, and then urge him to keep going. Uzbekistan is a stop on my trip, so this could be useful information.

  “In Uzbekistan, the government sets the value of the currency, and they set it much too high,” he explains. “It’s totally ridiculous. In a free-market economy, the value would be much lower, so people just buy and sell currency on the black market. But everyone does it,” he explains. “It’s totally open: you go to your hotel, and they tell you, ‘Okay, here is where you should buy money on the black market, and here’s how much it should be.’”

  “That seems . . . crazy,” I say.

  He shrugs. “And another thing: the money is worthless. The biggest note they have is maybe 50 euro cents. So they give you these giant plastic bags full of, well, paper that’s worth nothing.”

  “Wow.” I shake my head.

  But he’s not done. “Actually, I heard from a friend who is a tour guide, that one time he was on a bus, and a guy on his tour, he ate something bad, and he had to shit a lot. But they were in the middle of the desert, no bathrooms, so they pulled over, and he started to shit in the desert. And after a while, he ran out of toilet paper, so they decided to use the currency. Because it’s worth nothing.” He becomes serious for this final pronouncement.

  We finish lunch and stand outside in the warm sun as our guides prepare for the final leg of our journey, to the yurts we’ll sleep in at the other end of the lake. We talk about our travel plans: Mireia’s meeting up with her family, the German is, apparently, on a tour of places that fail to impress him, and I’m telling him about my plans for the former Soviet Union.

  “If you like the Soviet Union, you’ll love Belarus,” the German says. He doesn’t know it, but he’s pouring salt on a wound. Whenever anyone hears about my bizarre fascination with the USSR, they all tell me to head straight to Belarus. “It’s the closest you can get to seeing what life was like behind the iron curtain,” they say.

  “Oh!” they exclaim when they find out I’m American. “Never mind. You’ll never get the visa.”

  This, of course, only makes me want it more. But from everything I’ve read online, it’s a nightmare for Americans to get visas to both Belarus and Russia, which Future Audrey will need to figure out at some point, because my flight back to Shanghai leaves from St. Petersburg.

  As we split up to head for the lake—we’re riding, the German’s walking—the German’s guide hoists his own pack onto our guide’s horse, but not the German’s. That poor guide, I realize. He hates the German just as much as I do.

  That night, Mireia and I have dinner with a literal Czechoslovakian couple. He’s from the Czech Republic; she’s from Slovakia. He has long blonde hair and works for an antivirus company; she has short blonde hair and works for a university. He speaks to her in Czech, and she responds in Slovak. The two languages are close enough to be mutually intelligible, but I still imagine it would be strange to be married to someone and never have a conversation in the same language.

  “When we were born, it was all one country,” he reminds us.

  They’re traveling through Kyrgyzstan with a tall, stoic Kyrgyz driver. When Mireia tells him she’s from Barcelona, he says, “Oh, Catalonia.”

  “Wow,” she replies. “I’m impressed that you know that.”

  He stares at her. “I read the news,” he says.

  Mireia thoughtfully doesn’t mention that until recently, so I wasn’t sure if Franco was the bad guy or the good guy.

  The Czechoslovakians are excited about everything. First and foremost, my English.

  “You speak English so well!” they exclaim after I introduce myself.

  For a moment, I’m flattered. This is the first sincere compliment I’ve received on my ability to speak a language. Then I remember that I’m a native speaker. Crestfallen, I admit that I’m American.

  “Ah, that explains it,” the Czech man says.

  Then they’re excited about Turkmenistan—this visit is turning out to be a veritable preview of my itinerary. “In our last yurt, we were watching Turkmenistan TV,” the Slovak woman continues.

  “Wait, your yurt had a TV?” Mireia and I ask.

  “Oh, yes!” she tells us. “These yurts had showers, and real Western toilets, and electricity!”

  Mireia and I haven’t seen a toilet that’s not a hole in the ground in days.

  “So!” she continues. “Turkmenistan TV: it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “You cannot imagine,” her husband muses, shaking his head.

  “The Turkmen president had just come back from a visit, and they were having a parade to welcome him back.”

  “But it’s a GIANT parade. Like, an entire city.”

  “And people are going crazy!”

  “Like, they’re standing on the side of the street, waving flags, screaming!”

  “And then, at one point, he gets out of his car, and he starts riding on a bicycle!”

  “And everyone loses it! They’re cheering, and . . . Wow!”

  “I’m trying to go to Turkmenistan,” I tell them. “But my visa keeps getting rejected.”

  Turkmenistan is supposed to be the North Korea of the former Soviet Union. It’s an insular dictatorship whose leader fosters a cult of personality. I’m trying to get a transit visa, but the embassies in Almaty and Bishkek have raised the very legitimate point that it’s not imperative that I travel through Turkmenistan to transit between the two countries listed on my application—Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—because Uzbekistan is next to Kazakhstan.

  We somehow start talking about Christmas. In Spain, we learn, presents are exchanged at Epiphany, and it’s the Three Wise Men who bring children presents. In America, I tell them, Santa delivers kids presents on Christmas Eve.

  “Who brings your Christmas presents?” I ask the Czechoslovakians.

  “The baby Jesus,” she says, without blinking.

  That night in my yurt, I think about how the Czechoslovakians might be the happiest people I’ve ever met, and how I want to be that happy. Do they not have the same fears and worries that I do? Have they just found a better way to deal with them? Or maybe, have the happy people just realized that we have so little control over some of the things that scare us most, and that there’s a certain freedom that comes with accepting that? Like how I always feel weirdly less afraid on an airplane than I do driving a car, because if the plane crashes, at least it wouldn’t be my fault?

  I can’t decide if the point of this excursion was the lake itself, or the journey to the lake, or maybe to learn how to see life as being about the journey and not the destination, or maybe the universe reminding me why it’s good I didn’t go into entomology?

  Maybe it’s a reminder that we’re less alone than we think we are, even when all we think we want is a little peace and quiet to wallow in our own self-inflicted misery.

  4

  The Most Terrifying Flight on Earth (Tajikistan)

  The thing to do in Tajikistan is to take a road trip along the border with Afghanistan, and the way to do it is to organize everything a year in advance. Because, in characteristic fashion, I’m winging everything at the last minute, I’m waiting to board what’s known in travelers’ circles as the most terrifying flight on Earth.

  The flight goes from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to Khorog, a small city high in the Pamir Mountains on the Afghan border. To get there, a rickety prop plane from the Soviet days has to clear cloud-scraping peaks that threaten the plane’s maximum altitude. It flies once a day, weather permitting, which it’s usually not. The route cuts throug
h dramatic mountain passes that are at times so close you feel like could stick your hand out the window and touch the peaks, which you could theoretically do, because the cabin isn’t pressurized. The runway in Khorog dead-ends into a mountain, leaving no room for error. Also, the flight path passes through Afghan airspace, which apparently isn’t actually dangerous, but still sounds bad.

  So far, the boarding process has consisted of hanging around on the tarmac while Tajik Air crew members circle the plane with clipboards and conduct a visual inspection. This feels like a little too much behind-the-scenes secrets when we would have been fine believing in the magic. Up close, the plane seems too small to stay up in the air. Which makes no sense when I think about it, but there we have it. Aerodynamics has never really been my strong suit.

  Eventually, a flight attendant places a small step stool on the ground and opens the plane’s trunk. Apparently, this is not actually called a trunk, but it should be. I’ve never boarded an airplane before by climbing in under the tail. As I do, I notice that our luggage is bungee-corded to the walls.

  It’s a full flight: a small boy naps on his father’s lap; a puppy is stowed in a box in the center of the aisle; there’s no seat for the flight attendant, who squats on stairs in front of the open cockpit.

  The pilot turns on one propeller, then the other, and the plane fills with the smell of diesel, which strikes me as bad but doesn’t seem to worry anyone else. A frail elderly woman stares out at the crowd of well-wishers, who are, yes, standing on an active runway, waving us off. The plane shakes violently as we accelerate down the airstrip, then lifts a little, falls a little, and works its way off the tarmac. Through the space where there should be a door to the cockpit, I see that the pilot’s headphones are wrapped in hospital-issue booties.

  We slowly rise above the city. No one has asked us to turn off our cell phones; the flight attendant is using his to play Candy Crush. Also, what is the point of the flight attendant? It’s not like there’s going to be a beverage service.

  I keep expecting the pilot to get on the intercom and announce that we’ve reached our cruising altitude of eight feet, but that would, of course, be ridiculous: this plane doesn’t have an intercom. Beside him, the copilot openly naps.