by Jim Malusa
I ride, then push, then drag the bike to the shore, 1,300 feet below sea level. The water is lucid. There are bacteria and algae that can tolerate the Dead Sea, but I see nothing. Nobody around either, so I strip and tenuously enter. My toe says the water is balmy. I try skipping a couple of rocks, and they bounce easily across the hyperdense water, ten times saltier than the ocean. I wade in, and refractive shock waves radiate out from my thighs and fade in swirls of distortion. I’ve never seen anything like it, and push on, to my bellybutton and my chest. One more step . . .
And although my head and arms are still above the surface my feet leave the cobbles and swing up and out of the water.
I’m weightless. A cross-shore current grabs me and takes me away, past the illegal bike that took me here from Cairo, along the shore of the loveliest pit in the world. I’m floating in the Dead Sea, and my elation is unsinkable.
EUROPE
A bicycle was out—too difficult, too
dangerous; another stunt.
—Paul Theroux,
The Kingdom by the Sea
CHAPTER 5
Tucson to Moscow
Once in Russia There Was
No Rich and No Poor
BY THE TIME another year had passed, our house looked as if a two-foot-high wave had swept through and removed everything chewable or breakable. Down the hall crawled my son, a midget engine of destruction with a busted rattle in hand, slapping it against the white tile floor, clunk, clunk, clunk, like Captain Ahab pacing the deck. His name was Rudy, and he wanted a ride in my over-the-shoulder baby holder. I slipped him in. He was a portable pleasure, with breath like cake frosting.
I had work to do, listed on a scrap of paper on which I’d scrawled RUSSIA. I took a scissors to my maps, eliminating Siberia to the west and the Ukraine to the east, leaving the lands between Moscow and the shore of the Caspian Sea, ninety-two feet below sea level. I unzipped my first-aid kit and checked my aspirin supply and the expiration date of my bee-sting epinephrine injector.
Medically satisfied, I left the now-dozing Rudy to my mother-in-law and pedaled off, through the warm puddles of an afternoon cloudburst to Ajo Bikes.
Tracy Cook threaded new gear and brake cables into my machine, greased the bearings, then gave the frame a once-over. He beckoned me over to the upside-down bike. There: a crack in the frame, a fissure thin as a Rudy hair.
“You need a new downtube.”
“But I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“Then all I can do is take it to my place tonight and weld a big thick bead over the crack. It’s going to burn off the paint and look like hell.” He poked his glasses back up his nose and gave me a look of pity and envy. “But you don’t seem the kind that would care about the paint job. The weld should hold for the trip, but keep an eye on it. Don’t want the headtube and front fork to break away.”
Pedaling a bike that could snap in two would have bothered me more if I were going somewhere other than Russia. It seemed a cross-your-fingers-and-pray kind of country. After all, the space station Mir had caught on fire and crashed into another spacecraft, and yet the Russians would not abandon it. Instead they would patch it and say, Thank God it still flies.
It was not my bike but the Russians that worried me. I spent my last day in America making Rudy smile and reviewing my Russian language notes. “Do not expect a Russian to reply to How are you? in the happy-go-lucky style of the Americans, who will say Fine even if their mother just died. The Russian might say So-so, or Normal, or Could be better.”
This was from my first teacher, a Russian with fine skin that faintly glistened because she was doughy and squeezed herself into a tight sweater and slit skirt. My second teacher knew of my bicycle scheme, and concluded our lessons with, “I do not believe in God, but in Russia we make this thing for the good luck.” She made the sign of the cross, and because she was teary-eyed it seemed especially sincere. “I asked my friends and they said that you are not brave. You are crazy.”
Two weeks earlier the Russian currency had collapsed. This meant discount potatoes and vodka. On the other hand, a coup was not out of the question. The Crisis, cried the evening news, and proved the point with video of beet farmers with pitchforks. They were not happy-go-lucky. Their rubles were suddenly a joke, their banks locking their doors and taping up signs that said Nyet Rubles! Nyet Dollars!
Discovery Online decided the time was right to send, via overnight mail, an attachment to my contract, in which “The Undersigned acknowledges ... certain risks and dangers. . . . ” It was their lawyer’s farewell: Don’t blame us if you don’t come back in one piece.
I signed it. I sorely wanted to pedal to the next pit. To any pit, actually. It was the moving I craved, away from the familiar. The money didn’t hurt, either; I was certain I was a writer or a botanist only after the check came in the mail.
I crossed my fingers and did not pray and boarded the first of three planes to Moscow.
I HAD THREE SEATS TO MYSELF for the night passage over the Atlantic. My comfort and a bit of brandy gave me a warm feeling about Russia. The feeling lasted until I woke at dawn near the Arctic Circle. The entire planet appeared frozen, but it was only a blanket of clouds. The jet hurried into daybreak, accelerating the sunrise that tore the clouds into remarkably uniform strips of vapor. A coffee and juice cart rolled down the aisle while the sun continued its work, and over the next hour the strips of clouds humped like frying bacon, then broke into pearly bubbles.
Now I could see tin-roofed cabins and furrowed fields outside Moscow. The landing flaps curled out of the wings, and the plane dropped low enough to see Russians yanking cabbages from their gardens before the clanging finality of winter.
This worried me. My departure had been pushed back to mid-September by Discovery. The novelty of online bike touring to the pits had been surpassed by online whale sex off Madagascar. The humpbacks, I was made to understand, could only be aroused in August; I merely had to buy mittens.
Changing my route to something closer to the equator was appealing. The Caspian Sea is enormous—toss in Britain and it would glug out of sight—and there were a hundred thrilling routes to its shore. Sadly, many were potentially fatal for a cyclist with a spy telephone. The Caucasus Mountains were a crock pot of civil war, simmering in Dagestan and Georgia, blowing the lid off Azerbaijan and Chechnya. I didn’t bother asking Iran, Turkmenistan, or Kazakhstan for permission to wander unattended. It wasn’t just phone worries or excitable fundamentalists. Those countries were in Asia, and I was riding to the lowest point in Europe, through Europe.
One look at a map and it’s clear that the Asia/Europe divide is geo-logically bogus. The two have been one for around 400 million years. The boundary is cultural—us versus the barbarians—and dates back at least 2,500 years. The continental names have stuck, although the frontier itself has slowly crept eastward through time, from the Don River to its current location along the Ural Mountains and the Caspian.
Because my route was to go through Europe, Moscow was the place to begin. There would be no border interrogations—it was Russia all the way to the Caspian. Airport customs would not nab my phone—I would rent one in Moscow. And I knew Moscow from an earlier visit, less than two years after the fall of communism, when billboards had proclaimed “Glory to the Workers!”
Now, seven years after the fall, the billboards outside the airport bore ads for cell phones urging “Be Happy!” And along the drive into the old city were cheery banners festooning the light poles, and freshly painted wrought-iron fences around tidy parks.
“It is our mayor, Luzhkov, that make Moscow look good,” said Sasha the taxi driver. “Nobody knows where he finds the money for this.”
This seemed more than an observation; it was a warning, like the ones Australians gave of their crocodiles, of predators just over the horizon. Mysterious wealth meant Mafia and secret police. Sasha unzipped his genuine leather jacket and drove with one hand on the wheel while puffing on a sli
m Davidoff. I knew where he’d found the money for this: the fare was fifty bucks.
“Before the taxi I worked as a driver for the New Russians in the oil business. A good job, driving the German cars. It is also a dangerous job.” Sasha ignored the lane markings, squeezing his Volkswagen into a promising slot between a mammoth Mercury Navigator and an armored Mercedes. “When my New Russian buys the bulletproof car, I think this is not a good thing. I have only one head.”
Sasha knew the way to Stary Arbat, a pedestrian avenue awhirl with street musicians and tourists, where my satellite phone waited at the home of Mr. Laurent Barrion. He was a Frenchman from a French company, Geolink, but he was a kind of New Russian, too. There were buckets of money to be made in a country full of oil and gas and nickel, but to get the stuff out of the ground it helped to be able to swing a deal from Siberia on a telephone that cost $3,000 a month.
Mr. Barrion helped me find a bank willing to change money on a day when the exchange rate ricocheted between thirteen and twenty rubles to the dollar. He offered a spare room for my stay. The least I could do was show him my maps and my route to the lowest point in Europe: southeast from Moscow, out of the birch forests and across the farmlands. Then I’d slip into the valley of the Volga River and follow her to the Caspian Sea.
He approved, but added, “You must be careful where you bring such a phone. In the south the military is very sensitive about the Chechen problem.”
I assured him I would stay at least two hundred miles from Chechnya.
Might not make a difference, said another man from Geolink. He was a local, a suave fellow named Dmitri, and he casually suggested that in all of Russia, “Things may stay the same. Or there may be a civil war.”
Lacking an armored bicycle, I wouldn’t be wise to ignore local advice. But Dmitri was only musing. Moscow did not seem to be on the brink of destruction, although there was no disputing that it was at least very flammable. Invading Mongols had torched the city in 1238. They liked the results, and repeated the show in 1382, 1547, and 1571. Moscow burned again in 1812, except this time it was lit by the Muscovites to spoil Napoleon’s advance. During the mayhem of the 1900s Moscow was spared the flame but not the bloodshed. Who, I asked Dmitri, could possibly wish upon Russia another war?
“A war can be a profitable thing,” Dmitri said. He wore a bomber jacket emblazoned U.S. Air Force. “You can break into buildings and steal things. Rob people. The poor see what they do not have.”
The poor see many things, some of which were on television that evening. I stayed up with Mr. Barrion, flipping channels with the remote. I opened a Heineken and the window, and from the street came the chords of a guitarist singing “Jailhouse Rock.” From the television came the image of two naked women. Although I was working overtime, I didn’t waver when the women, apparently fond of each other, began squeezing the squeezables.
I presumed we were watching a cable channel. “Not cable,” said my host, “just regular TV. This is democracy.”
DEMOCRACY WAS THE BLATHER of car alarms, the sound of something worth stealing. It was kiosks selling Playboy magazine. And it was Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market, an outdoor smorgasbord of goods from computers to carrots. Here the Muscovites had swiftly cobbled together a breezy mall, with faux log cabins stocked with Italian shoes, and fake yurts hung with Asian rugs. I was happily lost in the bazaar when a man asked me, “Excuse me, but would you like to buy some postage stamps?”
He looked like a Slavic leprechaun with small green eyes and bad teeth. From his Adidas gym bag he pulled a small album.
“Look, the history of the Soviet Union in stamps. This page is revolutionary stamps with Lenin, this page is space travel. This page is New Russia, with stamps of the three men that died defending our White House, in 1993.”
But wasn’t the White House in 1993 occupied by men who did not want a new Russia, Communists who wanted the old Soviet Union?
“Yes, maybe this is so, but these men were run over by the tanks and so became Russian heroes. Now nobody is sure. Here are the stamps. Ten dollars.”
Sorry, I’m not a collector—but where did you learn to speak English so well?
“Buy my stamps and I will tell you.”
I bought the stamps. He whispered, “I was supposed to be a spy. I was a candidate, but I turned down the KGB.”
Was he making this up? But a liar would not have come up with this: “I was afraid.”
I strolled the market with Vladimir, past steel sheds overflowing with CDs. He gripped my arm with surprising strength for someone born in 1943, and said, “Listen to me: the world is upside down. And it is your fault. Not yours personally, but I think you know what I mean. Once in Russia there was no rich and no poor. Everything was free. Education. Medicine.”
He gestured to a meat stand. “Now look. This chicken is twenty-five rubles a kilo. American chicken. Last week it was ten. Everything is crazy.”
He made a secret nod toward some rug dealers and said, “Look: they are Azeris. From Azerbaijan. They scare me. And there are Chechens. They have no mercy.”
I tried to cheer him with a gift of American chicken. In return he gave me a small bottle of Istok vodka. We had a drink near the food stalls, beside the curls of dried fish and sacks of rice, and the liquor loosened us.
“Tell me,” asked Vladimir, “where did you meet your wife?”
At the University of Arizona.
“That is enough. No more.” He had another drink, a friendly swallow, and slipped the chicken into his gym bag. “I am alone in this world. I like women, but they do not like me. Nevertheless, I believe in God.”
God and vodka preceded deeper introspection, which in Vladimir’s case was family problems. His cousin’s daughter, thirty years old and mother of two, was abruptly single after her husband had jumped eighteen floors to his death. “The family wants me to take his place. But I do not love her. She has a secret lover. What should I do?”
Don’t marry her.
This pleased him—until he spotted foreigners.
“Listen to me! Those people are Vietnamese. And there are more men from the Caucusus. Moscow is flooded with non-Muscovites. They are taking over. The Russian is too . . . too . . . heart-minded. This word is my invention. It means they would not make you buy anything.”
I was thinking of the stamps, but instead said that Moscow today looks like other big cities. Change is normal.
Vladimir was astonished. “What? You call this normal?” He turned to face the passing crowds. “You call this good?”
It was a fine day, glowing with the last touch of summer. Crew-cut dudes wearing headphones lugged shopping bags emblazoned with big-busted babes in teeny bras. Teen girls in sheer blouses clomped past in giant platform shoes last seen on Elton John. I said nothing. Vladimir could only fume. “They spoil the Russian character.”
We parted, me leaving on the Metro. The subway cost twenty cents—cheap for a ride and an art museum. The older stations were tributes to the sturdy proletariat building and defending a new country. Glittering mosaics and marble statues depicted Russian men working jackhammers, Russian women loading howitzers, Kazakh steelworkers, and Chukchi ice folk in sealskin parkas. I caught myself thinking, Yes, let us praise the miner, the farmer, the construction worker.
But I was just a tourist; the others on the subway platform had borne the full weight of the communist experiment, good and bad. During my first visit to Moscow five years earlier, its citizens had seemed downtrodden, and my host Boris Ivanov agreed. We were shopping for salami and beer, waiting in line, when he said, “The Russian people do not look healthy to me.”
Foolishly, I suggested that maybe it’s their diet.
“Forget diet,” said Boris. “It is their soul.”
Now, for an update on the Russian soul, I headed off to visit Boris and his wife, Natasha. The Metro car was plastered with ads for Mr. Video, Dallas cigarettes, and Vinorum Cognac, a glass of which was being savored by former cosmonaut Al
ex Leonov, the first person to walk in space, now sitting by a glowing hearth in his official jumpsuit. I got off at a station of aluminum and glass, far from the center of Moscow and the triumphal art of Stalin.
Boris was waiting. He wore comfortably baggy brown corduroy pants and a smile that revealed a rakish gap between his incisors. Outside the station I asked a flower vendor for four mums, please. For Natasha.
“You can have three or five, but not four,” said Boris. “Even numbers of flowers are for funerals and cemeteries; odd numbers are for the living.”
Boris and Natasha live in a shoddy nine-story apartment block amid the handsome dilapidation of autumn, both the building and the birch leaves beginning to fall. Along the street were Russian garages, the semiportable steel boxes that gave the neighborhood the appeal of a rail yard. Inside their apartment, things were much rosier. Wooden parquet floor, big double-pane windows, and lots of books, from Pushkin to geomorphology.
Boris and Natasha, unlike their namesakes in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, are professors. She studies economics. He studies the impact craters of meteors, a vocation that I pointed out is uniquely suited to a Russian: their country is the biggest target, 6,000 miles wide. After a feast to fatten the bicycle tourist, Boris turned on the Sony to watch the “most acid political commentary.”
It was Mikhail Leontiev, a young wit with a ten-day beard. Leontiev said Russia’s military was very hungry, and if the generals drove their tanks and Red Army into Moscow, the soldiers would simply head for the stores and stand in line for food.
It was a good sign, this criticism, and on the walk back to the Metro I reminded Boris of his comment five years ago, about the Russian soul. Had he changed his mind?
“The soul of the Russian, I think, is related directly to the state of our country’s economy. When we have stability in our lives, when we have regular prices and food like the rest of Europe, then we will not be so Russian. We will be like everyone else.”