Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  “In America, that’s very normal,” I declare, although that is not technically true.

  “Maybe,” she says, “but here you are . . . bodak.”

  “Well,” I say proudly, “then I am bodak.”

  This lands better than any joke I’ve told onstage. The car is in stitches. “You shouldn’t say that!” the men exclaim, almost in tears. I suspect I’ve confidently declared, “I am an old maid.”

  Aktau is a city that combines laid-back beach vibes with aggressive exploitation of fossil fuels. It does so in a manner that I can’t, in good conscience, call “seamless.” On my way into town, I pass menacing machines with spidery appendages sucking the earth dry, and then a billboard with a smiling family splashing in the waves.

  The receptionist at my hostel is a scowling woman with hair that has been bleached and cropped with commitment. When I arrive, she’s in a heated argument on her cell phone (perhaps with the person who gave her the aforementioned hairstyle?). I take a seat beside a black-lit fish tank and stare at a colorful grouper whose only options for friendship are a few tiny minnows and an uninspiring rock. I wonder what happened to his former fish companions. Did they die? Or maybe he ate them? Is excessive concern about aquatic social life a sign that I need more human interaction?

  The receptionist has stepped outside to shout and gesticulate more freely, so I tap my fingernail gently on the glass. I know from my visits to aquaria that this is not something you’re supposed to do, because tapping on the glass somehow traumatizes marine life in a way that capturing them from the ocean and sentencing them to life in a doctor’s waiting room does not. But this, too, fails to elicit any response, and I sigh and stare out at the empty boardwalk.

  When the receptionist needs a breather from her fight, she leads me through the kitchen and down a dark staircase into a basement hallway flanked with dorm rooms. She opens the door to a small room with a jail-cell window and two dusty twin beds.

  “This is a single room?” I ask.

  She nods. “Yes.”

  “So this room is just for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not shared?”

  Another nod.

  “Okay.”

  Back upstairs, I pay for three nights, and after we both sign the receipts, she casually adds, “So, maybe another person will join you in your room tonight?”

  “What?!” I exclaim.

  “Just maybe,” she clarifies. “But probably.”

  The main activity in Aktau seems to be getting lost, which is kind of fine, because Aktau is in peak off-season. The city has the eerie feel of an empty elementary school at night. It feels wrong to be here now, with the sleeping storefronts along the boardwalk, the fading billboards advertising summer fun. Down the street from my hotel, I find an amusement park that seems like it would amuse most people for a maximum of ten minutes. It, too, is closed, except for the central bar, which is open, sound blaring from TVs that play four different channels at once. Outside, a smiling dragon whose brightly colored torso has been chopped up into roller coaster cars sits frozen on a track.

  The whole town feels empty. The one restaurant reliably open is a hamburger joint that serves something that manages to taste not entirely like a hamburger. It has notes of off-brand ketchup and the wrong kind of pickles.

  “You!” the waiter asks in shaky English. “How many . . . ‘Happy birthday!’?”

  By two p.m., I have exhausted (or failed to locate) everything there is to do in Aktau. This includes “walking around in boredom” and “staring out at the ocean in boredom,” both of which I make a mental note to add to the Aktau TripAdvisor page. I guess I’ll have to kill the next three days at the eternal flame.

  Almost every Soviet city has an eternal flame that’s part of a war memorial commemorating the estimated twenty million Soviets killed in the Second World War.

  Before I came to the former Soviet Union, I didn’t have much experience with eternal flames. The only one I’d ever seen had been on an eighth-grade field trip to Arlington National Cemetery. At the time, I was less focused on figuring out how the flame worked than on the fact that my parents were hundreds of miles away, and so eternal flames came to be one of those things I just accepted but couldn’t explain, like physics or the popularity of musicals. If you’d asked me how they worked, I would have said that the fire was feeding on some kind of material that burned forever. Whatever they used in the original Hanukkah. I assumed if one went out, it would be an international scandal.

  Eternal flames are still big in the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that they have all outlived the country that lit them. There are still some four thousand in Russia alone. But many of these eternal flames have been downgraded to occasional flames.

  A fuel source, it turns out, is the key to the “eternal” part, and the flames require a constant supply of propane or natural gas. Anyone who has ever contemplated the purchase of a grill understands that this is expensive. The eternal flames are therefore sometimes turned off to save money, or otherwise burn out due to neglect.

  A village in Russia made headlines when it replaced its eternal flame with a cardboard cutout of a fire, reportedly due to fuel shortages. In response, Putin set aside funding to ensure that all eternal flames were burning for the upcoming Victory Day celebrations. A BBC report on the story gleefully noted that, “Even though Russia has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, a third of the country’s households are not connected to gas pipelines.”

  The eternal flame in Aktau is surrounded by a circle of towering pillars that evoke the image of a yurt from the outside and a huddle of grieving mothers inside.

  As an American, I look at the flame and see irony and hubris, but maybe the Kazakhstanis see something else. Perhaps to them, it’s a reminder of their country’s rich reserves of natural resources, or the horrors of war, or maybe they just see a petite American woman standing by herself.

  Not all who wander are lost, but most people in Aktau are.

  One night, I try to find an Indian restaurant listed in all the guidebooks and end up in an apartment courtyard. I spot two women around my age dressed up for a night out and make a desperate dash toward them.

  “Do you know where this is?” I ask, thrusting an address in their faces. I’m suddenly conscious of the fact that I’ve been wearing the same sweatshirt for three days, after the hostile hostel lady tried to charge me $2 per piece of laundry.

  They seem equally baffled, but they offer to help me find the place. Normally, I’d insist that they continue on to the glamorous plans that clearly await them, but three of my most recent meals have been eaten directly outside grocery stores.

  We wander up and down a busy street, the girls scanning for building numbers and pausing to check their phones. Everything about them seems perfect: their hair brushed and wrapped into neat buns, their eyebrows plucked and penciled into dramatic arches, their eyeshadow applied with something other than fingers. I wonder how I must look to them in my sneakers and skinny jeans that lack of laundry has relaxed into a “boyfriend” fit.

  “Where are you from?” they ask.

  “America,” I say.

  They nod politely, but I can see them trying to work out what I’m doing here at all, and also in October.

  Because I’m obsessed with your language and country, I want to say, but this seems like it will only make me sound weirder, plus I don’t know how to say obsessed in Russian.

  We cross the street back and forth three times. Finally, they take me up an unlit stairwell, and on the second floor of a deserted strip mall, we find the Indian restaurant!

  “Wow!” I exclaim.

  It’s closed. Whether for the season or permanently, it’s hard to say. I sigh and ask them if they know any restaurant.

  Twenty minutes later, they’re in a cab headed somewhere exciting, and I’m in a hookah bar that also serves food. But hey: people who’ve been eating sour cream straight out of the tub because they thought it
was yogurt can’t be choosy.

  I’ve felt very lonely in Aktau, which is maybe unsurprising, given that every shop, restaurant, and stadium is as close as a place can get to, without technically being, empty. Though I know it’s the city shaping my mood, it feels like the opposite. I’ve ended up in a deserted beach town, I think, because it’s where I belong.

  And to be fair, it’s hard to feel like you’re living your best life when you’re eating dinner alone at a hookah bar.

  Being asked if I’m married by so many strangers has made me think about the fact that I’m not, and it has made me wonder, if only because traveling alone inevitably brings moments of loneliness. Though I’ve been quick to assure everyone who seems surprised that I’m 28 and unmarried, that this is normal for women where I’m from—and it is undoubtedly much more acceptable in the U.S. than it is in the former USSR—I don’t mention that a class of self-supporting, unwed women is not exactly what my culture aspires to. I did, after all, return home because I felt pressure to marry.

  Why did I feel that pressure? I’m surprised to find that I’ve never asked myself this before.

  I assume a creeping fear of never finding lasting love afflicts many people in their late 20s. Particularly women, who are told that we’ll age out of our desirability. I do also miss being in love, and sometimes I’m terrified that I’ll never again feel the way that I did with Anton.

  Those feelings had once seemed so important that I would have done anything to find them. Even hiking. Marriage came to look like an attractive insurance policy against future heartbreak. It’s embarrassing to admit all this, both because it’s mortifying to want something so nakedly, and also because it didn’t work. Plus, I almost didn’t go on this trip for the same reasons, and I’m still not sure I made the right move.

  But still, why did I feel like the world was pushing me to settle? It’s a complicated question. Certainly my childhood home was not exactly an incubator of progressivism. My parents loved us and did their best, but they explained adulthood in terms they couldn’t have imagined being interpreted as betraying a value judgment. We would grow up, we would go to college, and we would marry someone who could beat my dad at chess. (It’s lucky that I developed a thing for Russians.) But I had easily shaken so many of their old-fashioned ideas—why had this one stuck?

  I wonder if the progress my home culture had made had blinded me to its shortcomings. The first of my female friends had started to put their careers on hold for a year while they planned elaborate weddings. My disapproval of that is my own value judgment—and one that is popular, but perhaps not taken further. People roll their eyes at this behavior, but they don’t think about the implications. And then I, along with I’m sure millions of others, internalize the tacit message.

  There’s no greater motivator than panic. Many college applications and tax returns owe their completion to threat of a looming deadline. And perhaps turning 30 was starting to feel like April 15.

  I want to find love, yes, but what am I willing to sacrifice in service of just trying to find it? Why did I think I had to return home to get married? And do I even want that?

  This trip has been about five million steps backward in terms of my one-time goal to settle down. And yet, in almost every moment, it has felt more right than anything I was doing in New York.

  But what does feeling “right” even mean? The only arbiter of intuition is time.

  More than anything, I wish I didn’t worry about all this. The Audrey on the beach on the Caspian Sea would have seen beyond these things. The Audrey eating tandoori chicken in a room full of sweet-smelling shisha can’t turn away from them.

  The only other guest staying at my hostel is either a German man or a German ghost. A gauze bandage wrapped several times around his head suggests a troubling wound underneath, though the mummy-like wrapping is unsettling. No wound explains the need to circumnavigate his head, unless someone sawed off the top and he’s trying to reattach it.

  The first few times I happen upon him, he’s on his cell phone, speaking animated German. The cell phone feels like less of a ghost move, which is nice, because it suggests that, though I’m staying in a deserted beach town, I’m not sleeping in a haunted hostel.

  Maybe he did the bandaging himself? But why wouldn’t he just fold the gauze into a square and tape that over the wound?

  But slowly, I start to worry for him. I try to avoid eye contact while studying his cranium each time I see him. But he’s always in the lobby, and I’m picking up on more of his story, and also getting a sense of where his head injury might have come from. He spends hours talking to the receptionist, soliciting a good deal of legal advice from a woman who charges for laundry by the sock. He has asked her, several times, if she thinks he should go down to the police station to answer some questions. The gauze wrapped around his head, I’m beginning to surmise, is somehow related to a sex worker he refers to in euphemistic language. I can understand, but I’m concerned that the receptionist, who seemed to have learned English as a Scowling Language, might not know what to do with “ . . . and she is, how do you call, a lady, just a friend, but not just a friend.”

  He so obviously needs to call his embassy and/or hop on the next Jeep headed out of the country, but I can’t bring myself to offer him unsolicited advice. After all, it’s his life. He might know something that I don’t about how he wants to live it.

  On my last day, I stop in at a convenience store to buy a bottle of water and strike up a conversation with the woman working there. It’s a garbled exchange that relies heavily on body language and is sustained only by my desperation for human contact. Her name is Alira. She’s a petite Kazakh woman in her forties with bright red fingernails and plans to go dancing with her girls tonight. She asks me if I want to join.

  Do I ever. I would go dancing with anyone at this point—my college enemy, a blood relative, the stars.

  We exchange numbers and make plans to meet later.

  Socializing with strangers turns out to be slightly more trying when there’s a sizable language barrier. Nadia and Olga have blonde and red hair, respectively, and no English. I want to tell them that, with Alira, their range of hair colors makes them look like Charlie’s Angels, but I don’t know how to say angels, or Charlie’s, and I’m also not sure that movie made it to Kazakhstan.

  So instead, I break the ice by telling them my story about getting kidnapped in Turkmenistan.

  When I’m done, I’m so proud of myself for getting through the whole thing in Russian that it takes me a moment to register their horrified expressions. They shake their heads. This story was maybe a little too heavy to lead with.

  Olga is wearing a formfitting dress made of leather and chiffon, Nadia’s donned a tight red dress and leather boots that reach up to her thighs, and Alira’s dressed in boot-cut jeans and a comfortable sweater. She’s still wearing her scarf. For the first and only time on this trip, I’m wearing a pair of heels and a skirt that I packed. For the second time, I’m wearing the butterfly control-top tights I bought for the wedding in Uzbekistan.

  The women have ordered a liter of vodka, which they’re sipping alongside cranberry juice, and the look on their faces when I ask the waiter for a beer tells me I’ve ordered the wrong thing.

  Somehow I had imagined that tonight’s dancing would take place in a more nightclub-like venue, but this feels more like a casual Italian restaurant that’s been rented out for a bat mitzvah. We’re sitting at a table with a tablecloth made from the same fabric as the chair coverings. A dance floor has been cleared in the center of the room, a stage for the live band erected in front of it. Colored spotlights flash from the ceiling as people get up to dance or sit down to eat dinner. Maybe it actually feels more like a wedding: guests ranging in age from young children who seem like they’re in an inappropriate environment to grandparents who mostly watch from the sidelines.

  I ask Olga if she, Nadia, and Alira come here often, and she says yes, of course. Maybe night
life in Aktau has more of a function-hall feel in the off-season. The mural facing us is painted to look like a brick wall with a couple salsa dancing through it. A few actual pieces of brick have been glued on to amplify this effect.

  We get up and dance for a while, which removes the burden of talking. The dance floor is surrounded by strategically placed mirrors that allow us all to watch ourselves dance, which is exactly what we do. There’s something that feels nakedly honest about a social activity in which everyone just stares at their own reflections. Then we sit down and drink. The women toast to me, and then I toast to them. The band takes a break and is relieved by a DJ accompanied by a bongo player. We return to the dance floor, then to our table when a slow song comes on. It feels like I’m back at a middle school dance: a few couples slow dance, while the single people sit and stare daggers. A more upbeat song brings us out of our chairs, and then I get danced into a corner by a kid in a tracksuit with his back to me. I’m getting tired and sit down with Olga and Nadia. Alira has befriended a group of men who look closer to my age, and we watch her dance and flirt and laugh with them, and I marvel at the fact that it’s Alira, in her straight-from-work jeans and sweater, who’s the star of the show.

  When Alira returns, I tell the women I have to go because I have an early flight in the morning, which is true, but we’ve also exhausted the limits of small talk that can be made through gesticulation alone.

  Alira walks me outside and we hug goodbye, and as I start back to my hotel, I think about the different paths our lives will take, and how strange it is to spend each day interacting with people you assume you’ll never see again, but most of all, I think about how kind it was for Alira to invite me dancing. It might not have gotten me out of my head, and in fact, has made me slightly worried that I will be spending my evenings at places like that when I’m in my forties—but then I think about how happy Alira looked the whole night, and I think maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.