Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Plus, I want to get out of Tashkent, an interesting but Soviet city, and on to the rest of Uzbekistan, where ancient mosques covered in turquoise mosaics rise from expansive deserts. I planned to visit Samarkand, home to epic madrassas and six-hundred-year-old ruins; Bukhara, a fortress with Zoroastrian temples; and Khiva, an ancient walled city.

  I beg and plead and get transferred to the scowling man from yesterday. Is there any way I can pick up my visa tomorrow?

  “It’s impossible,” he says with a sigh that makes me believe it’s out of his hands. “It takes five days just to get permission from Moscow,” he says.

  Moscow. Just the sound of the name sends shivers down my spine. Part of me still can’t believe I’ll get to see it. Another part of me still can’t believe that Moscow is the thing that makes me all weak-kneed and dizzy. Not a handsome stranger or the promise of professional success. Not even a city it might make sense to have strong feelings about, like Paris or Cory Booker–era Newark.

  I sigh. “How much will the express visa cost?”

  “450 U.S. dollars,” he replies.

  My eyes pop. “450 U.S. dollars?!”

  “Yes.”

  “But, but . . .” My head spins. 450 DOLLARS?! I try to remember the last thing I spent that much money on. “Can I think about it?” I croak.

  I return to my corner with my friends from passport photo-tutorial. Do I hang out in Tashkent and scrap my plans to wander through ruins in Samarkand? Do I go and then come back to Tashkent? How do I get back and forth? Uzbekistan has a rail system left over from the Soviets’ zeal for infrastructure, and though I can take day trains from Tashkent to Samarkand, Samarkand to Bukhara, and Bukhara to Khiva, I’d almost certainly have to take an overnight train to come back to Tashkent and get my visa. An overnight train in western China that my sister and I shared with a flock of chickens made me swear I’d never sleep on the rails again, and to get from Tashkent to Khiva . . . I don’t know what I’d do. Fly, I guess? If buying a plane ticket between two relatively unknown cities a week out isn’t prohibitively expensive?

  Suddenly, I have an idea. I rush back to the visa window.

  “Can I pay the visa fee in local currency?” I ask, breathless.

  “Of course,” the man says. “You have to.”

  “And you calculate that . . . at the official rate?”

  He nods.

  “I need to run to the black market,” I say. The government official is unfazed. “Also, do you know where I could buy a plane ticket around here?”

  Before I leave the embassy, I go on a fact-finding mission. The guard who’s escorted me to and from the bathroom tells me how I can take trains to Samarkand and Bukhara, and the guard who sits behind the bulletproof glass at the door recommends I fly to Khiva and draws directions to the train station on the back of a Post-it note. The guard outside with the machine gun explains how and where to purchase an airline ticket.

  Here’s what I’ve realized: most guesthouses and tourism businesses in Uzbekistan that quote prices in U.S. dollars calculate the exchange using the going rate at the black market, not the official government rate. The embassy, however, does not.

  Take my guesthouse in Tashkent. On its website, it says a room costs $20 U.S. a night. Right now, the government rate says that 2,500 som equals $1 U.S., but at the black market, I can get 5,000 som for each dollar. At the official rate, $20 U.S. would be 50,000 som, but if I want to pay in local currency at my guesthouse, they’ll use the black market rate and charge me 100,000 som, which is more fair.

  Embassies being an extension of the government, paying for a visa will be done at the official government exchange rate, using currency I obtained for half the price, so my $450 visa fee will be cut in half. In fact, any visa I arrange in Uzbekistan will be half the price it would be anywhere else. I want to get as many visas as I can. When you see a list of visa fees on an embassy wall, America is always the only country followed by three digits. “Canada: $10, UK: $25, France: $25, America: $148.” I mentally scroll through the list of any visa-restricted countries I might visit in the next ten years. I briefly contemplate renewing my passport.

  And I immediately call the Belarusian embassy.

  I’d almost given up on the idea of visiting Belarus.

  Out of all the former Soviet Republics, it’s Belarus that I most want to see. Really, out of all the countries on Earth, Belarus has been the place I’ve most longed for, for years, because of Anton. But even he sometimes has misgivings about my going.

  “What will you do when we go to Belarus?” he asks one day.

  I shrug. “Hang out with you.”

  “But what if I have to work one day, or go with Elena to get divorced?”

  He looks panicked; I can’t understand why. “I dunno,” I say. “What do most people do?”

  “My hometown is . . . you know, it’s kinda small.” He’s sitting on my bed, cross-legged, his voice dropped down a register and usual playfulness gone, like this is a gravely important conversation.

  I pull up his hometown on Wikipedia. “I mean, I wouldn’t be going because I want to see monuments or museums,” I say. “I want to see where you’re from.” I hand him the phone with the Wikipedia page.

  “Oh yeah, the fort!” He jumps up, his voice flooding with relief. “I forgot about that.”

  “Okay . . .” I fiddle with the corner of my fitted sheet that is always coming untucked.

  “It’s pretty cool actually,” he goes on. “Lots of people come to my hometown just to see it.”

  “Sure,” I say. “But I’m not worried about sightseeing. It’ll be interesting just because, you know, it’s where you grew up.”

  He starts kissing me, and in between his smile is back. “So, okay, everything’s fine now,” he assures me. “You’ll go to the fort.”

  Like Russia, Belarus requires would-be tourists to obtain a letter of invitation. Unlike for Russia, I can’t just buy one on the Internet.

  Everything I read says I need to book a tour through an official Belarusian agency authorized to hand out invitation letters. These agencies are, unsurprisingly, not cheap.

  “For us to provide a letter, you need to book all of your hotels through us, plus one excursion,” one travel agent writes me. “Might I suggest the excursion of taxi pickup from Minsk train station ($50 U.S.)?” I look up the distance from the train station to the hotel on a map: it is a twenty-minute walk. Fifty dollars for the taxi excursion seems excessive, and also way out of my accidentally-haggling-over-fifty-cents budget.

  To make matters worse, tourists need special health insurance, which I don’t have and assume is expensive. I’ve spent weeks researching everything before reluctantly conceding defeat. Barring an urgent telegram revealing that I’m secretly Habsburg, or a prompt marriage to a Minskovite, visiting Belarus appears to be off the table. I’m crushed and heartbroken all over again.

  But now I’m emboldened by my coup-de-grace at the Russian embassy.

  Maria, the woman who answers the phone at the Belarusian embassy, is far more helpful than her Russian counterparts.

  After I explain my problem with the invitation letter, she has an idea. “Maybe your hotel could invite you?” she suggests.

  I jump online and stumble on a post from a backpacker who visited Belarus. He mentions, offhand, that he got the invitation letter from his hostel.

  I immediately call every hostel I can find in Minsk, and they are all like, “Yeah, if you book a dorm bed for one night, we’ll give you a letter.”

  “But a hostel bed is, like, eight bucks!” I exclaim.

  “Yeah,” they reply, not seeing what the big deal is.

  So why wouldn’t everyone just book a hostel bed and not stay there? I wonder but do not say out loud. Instead, I ask, “How soon can you send me the letter?”

  I call Maria back to make sure an invitation from a hostel will pass muster. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll call the hostel and tell them exactly what to writ
e.” I should introduce her to Camilla.

  She goes over a few more details—I have to get my entire passport translated, but luckily, I know a girl—and then she brings up the health insurance.

  “I have my card right here,” I say, just to add perjury to my criminal-conduct punch card.

  “And does it say, somewhere on the card, that this insurance will cover the Republic of Belarus?” she asks.

  “It covers Belarus,” I assure her.

  “And does it say so?” she asks.

  My heart sinks. “No,” I admit.

  Well, I think, this is it. I came so close, but maybe Anton and his family and the gods of Belarus were right: I’m not meant to stand in the famous fort or visit the homeland of . . . someone? There has to be one famous Belarusian? Marc Chagall? It was fun, I suppose, while it lasted, and maybe the lesson, if there’s one to be had, is that sometimes you need to know when to let go.

  “Audrey, just one second,” she says. “Maybe my friend can help you.”

  Because I wasn’t expecting to drop 1.3 million som on my Russian visa, I run back to my guesthouse to grab more cash.

  The manager directs me to the black market aisle of the nearest bazaar, where I find a group of twenty-something guys in flashy T-shirts who won’t give me the same rate I got from the woman selling Korean salads. We go back and forth, and I make a show of storming away, but I quickly realize they’re the only black market around. I return, somewhat sheepishly, and change $200, which turns out to be thousands of Uzbek bills.

  “Make sure to count out money from black market changers,” all the guidebooks warn. “Remember, they’re not regulated, and totally illegal.”

  But I struggle with the stacks of bills. I’m standing in the middle of a crowded bazaar, trying to count thousands of bills while juggling my purse and guidebooks and official documents.

  “It’s okay,” the guys tell me. “You don’t need to count it.” One of them calls his number from my phone so that I have it, and tells me to call him if any money’s missing. I can’t tell if this should reassure me, or put me even more on guard, because it messes up my counting, and I have to start all over again.

  I’m so flustered that I call the guesthouse manager.

  He listens to my story, and then agrees that I don’t need to count it. “These guys, they will not cheat you.”

  I look at the kids, standing next to me with their starched dress shirts and simple cell phones, and I realize I don’t think they’re trying to cheat me, either. They could have taken off as soon as they had my money, but instead, they’re sticking around, trying to end my performance of Distressed White Woman in a Foreign Country.

  How odd, I think, to be in a country where the black market is more honest than some of its ambassadors.

  The black market is right next to the metro, and so I decide to take the underground back to the Russian embassy.

  Tashkent metro stations only have one entrance. You access them through the entrance doors, if you know what you’re doing, or the exit doors, if you don’t.

  It’s not like New York, where one subway stop might branch off into thirty-two different exits, some of which dump you out blocks away from where you want to be, others that empty out in Staten Island.

  If you want to get on the Tashkent metro, you just walk through the door. You pass through a metal detector so old it might be steam-powered. The three guards chatting beside it pointedly ignore the beeping sounds it emits. At an old-fashioned ticket window with blinds and bars, you struggle to understand the woman’s words that burst forth from a square, staticky speaker.

  You slide your money through an opening in the glass, and in return the woman gives you something so amazing you blink in disbelief.

  It’s an antique plastic token, blue and chipped and translucent, stamped with an M. It’s the type of collector’s item you’d expect to see on eBay or in a severely underfunded museum. This actually gets you on the metro?! you think.

  It does, because the Tashkent metro seems to operate on the honor system. You drop your novelty-style token into a novelty-style turnstile, and you walk through an empty space that probably once had fare gates. You get the sense that you could just as easily not drop your novelty token in the novelty turnstile and still walk through.

  The sight of the escalator leading down to the tracks surprises me. It looks like it was lifted from a department store fifty years ago. Retro steps with thick teeth descend wood-paneled balustrades punctuated by lamps.

  The weirdest part is, it all seems familiar. The lightning speed with which the steps fly away from the platform, the small leap of faith it takes to get on, the thick, rubber handrails you grip so that you don’t topple forward.

  I remember these, I think, as I run my hands along the wooden siding and feel the jolt of the motor under my feet, but of course I don’t. This type of escalator would have been out of use long before I was born. When I get to the bottom, there’s an attendant booth right where I’m expecting it, but how did I know this?

  When I reach the platform, I freeze. An elegant marble floor stretches out beneath a vaulted ceiling, and beside the track, I see an old, boxy train car, painted summer-sky blue. It looks like an old model train come to life.

  It’s as if time stopped in 1979 in this station. Everything, from the font used to label the map of stops on the wall, to the train’s cushioned, leather seats, belongs to another era, and it delivers the emotional gut punch that comes from catching the whiff of the renovation fumes that lingered in your first apartment, or rummaging through a junk drawer and knocking against a forgotten childhood toy.

  But, of course, these artifacts don’t belong to my lifetime. They’re memories inherited from my parents and grandparents. It looks familiar because I’ve seen it in movies, old photographs, heard about it in my parents’ stories.

  Why do I feel paralyzed by a powerful swell of nostalgia? Am I longing for the ’70s? For bell-bottoms and recessions and some of the worst music ever created? Even my dad, who puts on rose-colored glasses any time he looks back in time, never misses a chance to yell, “The seventies sucked!”

  The past is something I’m used to experiencing at a distance, reconstructed in museums, where it’s cordoned off and viewed from behind glass cases and velour ropes. To be able to walk through and interact with it, and to be the only one to whom this isn’t completely normal, provides a brief, tantalizing illusion that we can go back in time.

  If an old escalator can dump me out in 1977, maybe the next one will ferry me back five years, or two, or three months, and I can go back and undo all my mistakes. Maybe I can tell Anton I’m sorry.

  I stare at the train.

  Here’s the other weird thing: there’s something about all this that feels so American. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s not the New York subway system, and it’s not Boston’s, although it’s maybe vaguely reminiscent of DC’s, which makes sense, because Tashkent and Washington opened their metros within a year of each other.

  It’s less the design elements and more the feel. Some sense that it was inspired by a mix of grandiosity and worship of human progress. The insistence on wide, clean open spaces. The feeling of looking toward the future my parents were promised, the one in which technology would ferry us into a new era of flying cars and anthropomorphic robots.

  Which is not to say that there aren’t differences. Each Tashkent metro station is a work of art: some simple, others dripping with ornate chandeliers and detailed murals. One station feels like a church, with painted cupolas and marble columns, another a memorial to the cosmonauts, with bronze reliefs of Yuri Gagarin.

  I’m struck more by what feels familiar. It’s not the last time that I’ll notice that, as the U.S. and Soviet Union were facing off in a nuclear war that could destroy the world as they knew it, they were also designing buildings and erecting infrastructure that carried eerie echoes of those built by their sworn enemies.

  I show up at the Russ
ian embassy thirty minutes before it closes with a few million som in garbage bags. The guard grins as he checks me in. I’ve finally worn him down.

  “Did you buy your ticket?” he asks.

  “I bought four!” I tell him proudly.

  I’m escorted to the payment window upstairs, which is staffed by the same woman from the visa window, only this time, she’s hidden behind tinted glass. I dump mountains of cash from the garbage bags into the sliding drawer, assuming that the woman on the other side will have some sort of electronic bill counter.

  But when I squint through the window, I see that she’s counting it out by hand, and she’s called another colleague over to help. I try to do the same on my side, but I keep getting confused and having to start over. Every so often, the women yell for more money, and I dump more from the garbage bags into the sliding tray. There are times in life when you just have to trust people counting your money behind tinted windows.

  Eventually, they indicate that I’ve paid enough, and even pass me back some change, along with a receipt and a notarized copy of my passport photo page.

  I leave the embassy, with the promise of a visa obtained for almost half the price, four transportation tickets, and an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. Also camaraderie. I’ve spent two days with the embassy staff, complaining and queuing and waiting, and in that time, they’ve somehow come to feel like old friends.

  On the way out, I have an urge to high-five the guard at the door. I remember just in time that we’re separated by three inches of bulletproof glass.

  Maria from the Belarusian embassy puts me in touch with her friend Alonya, who sells health insurance plans that cover Belarus. I take the subway to Alonya’s office more or less on a whim; from what little I know about health insurance, there’s no way I’ll be able to afford it.

  Alonya is an ethnically Russian Uzbekistani woman in her midtwenties with shiny blonde hair and long painted fingernails. She speaks good English and has a decent job working for an insurance company in Tashkent. In the handful of years since she finished school, she became a young bride and a slightly less young divorcée.