Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Maybe I am in a Wes Anderson film, because I find myself replying, “Thank you for being one of them.”

  Aiste recently graduated from university in England, where she earned both her undergraduate and master’s degrees in architecture. She speaks English without hesitation and in the charming, lilting way of someone who attained the final flourishes of fluency surrounded by Brits terrified that their country was becoming “less British.”

  Her mother speaks Russian, a language Aiste claims to understand not a word of. This claim will be repeated by young people throughout the Baltics, particularly by those who, like Aiste, were born after the Baltics won a hard-fought struggle for independence. Of the fifteen Soviet republics, the Baltics were perhaps the least enthusiastic participants. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had all been forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire, and when the end of World War I provided an opening for independence, the Baltic states jumped at it. A few decades later, Stalin and Hitler signed a secret pact that divided up Eastern European territories that neither leader controlled, and Germany “gave” the Baltics to the Soviet Union in the same way that the Native Americans “welcomed” the Europeans.

  Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were too small and nascent to do much about this, and after the war, the three states were folded into the Soviet Union.

  Today, Aiste and her mother, Victoria, live in a sleek, modern house in the suburbs of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. They grow vegetables in a backyard greenhouse, bake their own bread, and compost food scraps. Their neighbors seem to do the same. Every backyard has a greenhouse, a charming quirk I attribute to a Baltic affinity for gardening.

  “Oh, no,” Aiste corrects me cheerfully. “It’s a habit from Soviet times, when there wasn’t enough food.”

  Victoria has cooked us a hearty breakfast from locally sourced ingredients—an omelet made from a neighbor’s eggs, bread she bakes fresh every morning, jam from last summer’s garden. We’re all enjoying these labors in the kitchen, or I’m trying to, but I feel so awkward.

  I have spent the night on a couch that was made up into a comfortable bed in the living room, while Aiste and Victoria slept in their bedrooms upstairs. With the exception of a few fish, who kept to themselves in a tank by my bed, I had the whole downstairs to myself. I took advantage of this cozy setup by staying up half the night fretfully tossing and turning.

  Despite the terms of our arrangement, I can’t help feeling like I’m imposing on these two lovely Lithuanian women, and that makes me feel truly terrible. I’m worried I’m a burden or a nuisance, which, of course, is ridiculous. People sign up to host on Couchsurfing.com because they want to have guests.

  Prior to my arrival, my main concern about Couchsurfing had been safety, but as with everything in life, the actual problem ends up being something else entirely. I feel like I’m taking advantage of someone else’s generosity, the way I did with Sayed when I thought he was Jafar.

  I find myself thinking that I would be so much more comfortable if I could just give them money! But that goes against the whole premise of Couchsurfing, which one person explained to me as, “giving without worrying about what you’ll get back.” I know that actually we would all be happier if I could just relax and appreciate their hospitality, but I can’t. Maybe this is something I need to learn how to do.

  I have brought Aiste and Victoria a small gift of Belarusian chocolate. But maybe in Couchsurfing, the best thing a guest can bring is the gift of not feeling weird about showering in a stranger’s bathroom. And that, it seems, I forgot to pack.

  Victoria is a trim, stylish woman with two grown daughters, whom she raised on her own after being widowed when the girls were young. She works part-time in an office downtown and, at her daughter’s urging, has recently started Couchsurfing.

  Victoria is probably the last person I’d expect to find Couchsurfing. She lives in a wooded, suburban home whose minimalist decor suggests an understated affluence. She seems more suburban mom than intrepid backpacker, maybe because she is.

  Victoria first tried Couchsurfing about a year ago, on a trip to Italy with Aiste and Aiste’s sister. This summer, Victoria and Aiste traveled to Georgia (the country, not the state), and again arranged lodging through the site.

  Victoria enjoyed both experiences, though they were clearly Aiste’s idea. I also have to take Aiste’s word for her mother’s positive review, because Victoria doesn’t speak English. Aiste is translating from Lithuanian.

  Aiste started Couchsurfing back in university when she was sharing an apartment with a group of friends. A few of her housemates were into Couchsurfing, and Aiste got hooked. She used it to meet people and find lodging all over the world, and when the job market for architects forced her to move back into her mother’s house after finishing her master’s degree, Aiste begged her mother to let her keep hosting. At first, Victoria was understandably uncomfortable with the idea of travelers on a shoestring budget lounging on her couch, but she eventually warmed to the idea, and here we are. There were some Germans here last week. There always are. Every Couchsurfing stay, it seems, is preceded or followed by Germans.

  In Lithuania, it’s rude to put your hands in your pockets. Days of the weeks are abbreviated with Roman numerals—I for Monday, VII for Sunday, and so on. People, I think, take apples everywhere. Or maybe just Aiste and her mom. That’s the thing about being a tourist constantly scanning for cultural cues—you’re never sure if we refers to the whole country or just the people talking. Before I go sightseeing this morning, Aiste hands me a few apples, and when I look confused, she laughs and tells me to take them in case I get hungry. “We usually take apples everywhere,” she adds.

  Lithuanians are apparently famous for being good at basketball, which I did not know, but quickly pretend to, because this seems to be what the people of Lithuania think is their claim to fame outside of Lithuania. “I think many people know Lithuania because there are many Lithuanians in the NBA,” someone tells me, and I do not have the heart to inform her that, strong as the Lithuanian contingent may be, they do not quite have the starpower of a LeBron or a Steph Curry.

  Folklore and fairies still reign in the Baltic countries, which converted to Christianity belatedly, begrudgingly, and, one senses, halfheartedly. The Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians are apparently known as the last pagans of Europe.

  Aiste is telling me that, in Lithuanian folklore, an unmarried woman is supposed to put a glass of water beside her bed before she goes to sleep on Christmas Eve, because Christmas Eve makes you very thirsty (in the sense of craving water) (also, what?), and then at night, she might dream of walking over a bridge(??), and if she does, and if there’s a man walking toward her, the man will have her future husband’s face. “It’s silly.” She laughs, and then she grows serious. “Or, who knows, maybe it’s true.”

  I file this away, because I am unmarried, though I do have trouble remembering my dreams. What if I forgot what my future husband’s face looked like? Even if I remember, now what? Do I go around searching for that face? And when I find it say, You were on the bridge in my thirsty Christmas dream! Let’s get married?

  We’re sitting around their wooden kitchen table, eating a stew Victoria made fresh for dinner, which, good lord, is just making me feel even more terrible. Aiste spent the day looking for a job, and Victoria spent it working one, while I explored some of Vilnius’ medieval old town and some of its 65 churches. And now they’ve cooked me dinner?

  I can understand why the unmarried women of Lithuania might find comfort in folk remedies for identifying your future husband. Unless she consciously avoids it, the quest for a husband can easily consume the first years of a woman’s adult life.

  Aiste is twenty-five; already, most of her friends are married. She delivers this news with a sigh. She tells me about a close friend with a boyfriend with a sexual habit of forgetting he has a girlfriend. They just got engaged, and her friend is thrilled. “For her, the most important thing is just t
o be married.”

  This is one reason Aiste isn’t eager to stay in Lithuania. Right now, she’s focused on building her career, and she worries about fitting in socially in a country where a gender imbalance has created pressure for young women to prioritize finding a spouse.

  A combination of migration and shorter life expectancies for men has left Lithuania with a population in which women generally outnumber men. Among twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds, there are 0.97 men for every woman in Lithuania. Between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four, that ratio drops to 0.79 men for every woman, and for the population above age sixty-five, it’s just .51 men for every woman, or two women for every man. This, of course, isn’t a perfect picture of the marriage market—some of those men and women will partner with members of their own gender, while others might choose not to pair off at all—but for women who wish to marry men in Lithuania, the general perception is that there aren’t enough spouses to go around.

  Women tend to outlive men all over the world, but in Lithuania, the difference in longevity is particularly pronounced. Sociologists tend to attribute this to higher rates of work, car, and alcohol-related accidents for men, along with early deaths caused by alcohol.

  Though women don’t dramatically outnumber men at the age of most first marriages, many say that the gender ratio has been exacerbated by economic migration facilitated by the Baltic nations’ EU membership. Men make up a higher percentage of migrants in all three countries, and data suggests that male migrants are less likely to return to their home countries than their female counterparts.

  Still, the perception that women have to compete for a smaller pool of eligible men has taken hold in the Lithuanian ethos. And as I’ve learned from personal experience, cultural expectations and perceived pressures can be hard to shake. If the whole country believes that educated, ambitious, and attractive women are fighting over a small cohort of potential matches, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—both on the national and individual levels.

  It probably doesn’t help that, in Lithuania, a woman’s marital status is announced every time she writes her last name. As in most Balto-Slavic languages, Lithuanian surnames take different forms for men and women. A woman’s last name further indicates whether or not she is married. (A man’s does not.) Let’s say, for example, that I were to marry my Lithuanian crush Juozas Glinskis, or as I like to call him, ’Zas, who pioneered a little something called the Lithuanian “theater of cruelty.” (Yes, he DOES sound irresistibly dangerous/emotionally unavailable, and yes I DO think we will triumph over the fifty-five year age gap.)

  Glinskis, like most male Lithuanian last names, ends in a/y/i + s. So, after I promise to have and to hold, I would become Mrs. Glinskienė, -ienė being the most common ending for a married woman’s surname. Our son, if we had one, would be named Barack Obama Glinskis, because men’s last names don’t change with marriage. Our daughter, however, would be Ruth Bader Ginsberg Glinskyte, the -yte/-aitė/-iūtė/-utė suffixes serving as the standard heads-up that a woman is a free agent.

  When people in Central Asia had been surprised to learn that I was twenty-eight and unmarried, I invariably responded by explaining that in the U.S., women don’t think about getting married until they’re in their thirties.

  I’m about to deliver this familiar speech to Aiste when I realize how insincere it is.

  In truth, I know these fears. Well-meaning elders have given me the same horrible advice dispensed to young women the world over: that if I wait too long, all the good husbands will be taken, and that the ones who aren’t might, and may prefer to, marry younger women.

  I want to give Aiste advice first imparted to me by my personal Bible, the dating self-help book Why Men Love Bitches. I want to tell her that your best chance for success in anything is to follow your passion and not worry about things other people want you to be afraid of. I want to say that as someone who has stopped letting those fears dictate my decisions, but it feels hypocritical, because I haven’t stopped fearing them.

  So instead, I ask her what she wants to do.

  “Live abroad again,” she says.

  She’s been applying for jobs ever since she graduated, but Aiste studied architecture, a field almost as famous for its high rates of unemployment as it is for the buildings it has given us. This is months before Brexit, but she’s already warning me about the rising British nationalism and xenophobia—especially against Eastern Europeans from EU countries, who are now free to live in any other member state, and, Aiste says, have overwhelmingly settled in the UK, where wages are highest.

  “There are really so many people from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia,” she says. “I really understand why people are so afraid.”

  This myth, of course, will be dismantled during Brexit debates, when data will show that far more migrants come from outside the EU than inside, and that immigrants make up less than 10 percent of the UK’s population and workforce. The fact that Aiste repeats this rhetoric, when she presumably had five years of firsthand evidence that the population of the United Kingdom is predominately British, provides some insight into what it can feel like to make a home in a place where other people see you as a threat.

  Luckily, I have an entire anxious, sleepless night ahead to mull this all over. My own fears about the increasingly prolonged period of time I’ve spent single change shape. It’s not that the tragic plight of the poor, pitiable Baltic women has made my own anxieties seem moot, but more that I see them in a new context. Particularly the context of: how is every country in the world terrifying women into marrying?

  I wonder if my urge to pair off comes from a genuine desire for romantic partnership or fear of not finding that. Are my motivations so different from those of Aiste’s friend?

  Most of all, I think about women’s fashion trends in Eastern Europe, and what outsiders think and assume when they see them, and while I’m not here to defend the tube top or lip injections or boots that come up to the inner thigh, I’ll never again look at them and not see the weight of scarcity and the pressure these women face in their sultry clothing.

  Aiste and Victoria had vastly different childhoods. Aiste grew up in the first years of Lithuania’s independence, Victoria in the first years of its forced integration into the Soviet Union. When Victoria was young, her family was sent to Siberia, along with 130,000 other Lithuanians.

  Depending on who you ask, either the Soviet Union forcibly took over Lithuania at the end of the Second World War, or the Lithuanians begged the Soviets to let them in. One of these narratives is at odds with the unassailable fact that there was massive Lithuanian resistance to joining the Soviet Union.

  To prevent the resistance from growing into a powerful, organized movement and, as an added bonus, to get rid of the farmers who didn’t want to turn their land and livestock over to collectivized farms, the Soviets sent thousands of Baltic families to remote, desolate parts of the country. They were given housing that could be bleak, sometimes providing little protection from the harsh Russian winters. In some places, food and medical treatment was scarce. The men were forced to work physically demanding jobs, often in logging or timber. Their wives and children were “encouraged” to Sovietize, using the classic carrot-and-stick method of implying that if they thought things were bad now, they should see how much worse they could get.

  Children were punished for speaking Lithuanian in school. Fearing that their children might get confused and accidentally speak the wrong language in public, Victoria’s parents switched to Russian at home.

  After Stalin’s death, many of the Lithuanian deportees were allowed to return. Victoria had left Lithuania as a young child and returned as a teenager. She’d forgotten how to speak Lithuanian. Coming back to her homeland was as much of a cultural shock and transition as it must have been for her parents to land in Siberia.

  Victoria and Aiste tell me this story as we’re walking on the grounds of a castle. I’m not sure what to say. I think back to the manhole
covers I saw in Vilnius, where the Soviet insignia had been scratched out. I say that that’s terrible and they nod.

  “Anyway,” Aiste continues, gesturing to the wide river below us, “isn’t this a nice view?”

  Before arriving in the Baltics, I’d never heard of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and I am dedicated to avoiding ever trying to pronounce its name. I’m surprised to learn it was the largest state in fifteenth-century Europe. Perhaps my ignorance comes from having grown up in the suburbs of Boston, an area that derives potentially excessive pride from its geographic contributions to the Revolutionary War. You know what they say the three most important factors in a revolution are: location, location, location.

  The Grand Duchy united the territories of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, with slivers of Russia and Poland. It was a popular destination for crusaders, who had a cure for the region’s pagan traditions, and that cure was Jesus.

  For this and other reasons, the Grand Duchy built castles. When you visit them, you realize they were more designed to ward off armed missionaries than to provide luxurious accommodations. Trakai Island Castle feels like a military fortress, not a five-star hotel. If the eponymous royal from The Princess and the Pea had been forced to spend the night here, she would have died of low back pain.

  The castle is made of red bricks and accessed by a long bridge leading up to its gates. At Lithuanian weddings, Aiste tells me, it’s tradition for the groom to carry his new wife over a bridge, and newlyweds from in and around Vilnius like to use this bridge because it’s so long. I shudder at the image of the Lithuanian diaspora of New York forcing its young men to haul their brides across the Verrazano-Narrows.

  “Did your mom come here on her wedding day?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so,” Aiste says.

  Victoria giggles and says something to Aiste.