Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  I rumbled away in the subway, back to my room and my bicycle in a box. I unpacked it and screwed it together, and I patched my sleeping pad where it had been punctured by the teeth of the chainring.

  There was little point in asking further information of my host, Laurent. He had never been south. And the tourists did not go there. The thickest guidebook devoted only 8 of its 1,200 pages to the thousand miles between Moscow and the Caspian. The trusty World Book provided only a map with the symbols for pig and sugar beet.

  The Russian heartland was the Europe that nobody knew. Or the Europe nobody wanted to visit. Even the Muscovites knew little of the rural folk, and that was pure gossip: they’re exceedingly hospitable; they’re crude barbarians; they’re frankly dangerous.

  The rumors made me wonder. I had a wallet full of questionable rubles and a bike that was priceless, and I aimed to reach the Caspian before the season of insulated underwear.

  CHAPTER 6

  Moscow to the Caspian Sea

  Special Training for Survival

  ONE CYCLIST, riding without grace under thirty pounds of gear, cannot challenge the fleet of Volga taxis that rule the main avenues of Moscow. I retreat to the back streets with good results, pedaling past just-raked parks of pointy spruce and broad linden, where grannies in black talk to the pigeons. My bicycle frame seems made of rubber, but does not crack anew. The weld is holding, and so is the weather, a scatter of innocent clouds.

  On the walkway of a stone bridge over the Moscow River, kids eating cotton candy point with sticky fingers to the dome of Christ Our Savior Cathedral. Three hundred feet high, it’s a just-completed replica of the cathedral that once stood on the same site: Tsar Alexander’s gilded thanks to God for the 1812 defeat of Napoleon. The tsar desired the grandest church in Russia, and so it was sheathed with granite, marble, and bronze. The interior dazzled with nearly a half-ton of gold leaf. Like Notre Dame and St. Peter’s Basilica, the cathedral was an extravagance and a masterpiece. For two centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had bestowed its blessings on the tsars, and in return the tsars had made the church a branch of the government.

  This relationship the communists would not forget. In 1931, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, had the cathedral obliterated. He had in mind his own temple, the Palace of the Soviets. It was never built, but the important thing was erasing the past.

  Now Christ Our Savior stands again, its astonishing cupola high above the slow barges on the river a reminder of the enormous wealth of the tsars, the grip of the church, and the terrible energy of Stalin.

  Two miles south of the river, at Paveletski Station, I hop a commuter train south out of Moscow. I’ve no particular destination, only the goal of escaping the traffic of Europe’s largest city. The farther from the city center, the bigger the apartment blocks, until they are twenty-two stories of concrete and ceramic tiles that have absorbed the local color—mud, ash, smoke. The newer blocks have primary color cues—blue, green, red—so you can tell one building from the other.

  With my bicycle held tight against the wooden bench, we roll away from the moneyed heart of the city. Hawkers jump on and announce, Good afternoon, would you like to buy some batteries? There are no takers. Thirty minutes out of downtown and we’re clicking past the smokeless smokestacks of idled factories. Past the airport and it’s the Moscow equivalent of suburbs, the summer gardens with attendant cabins called dachas. Not far beyond are deep stands of narrow birch and reedy glades and genuine farmers, full-timers toting gargantuan cabbages and tending goats.

  I get off at the next station and head for the first town en route, Stupino. In need of food to camp out, I ask a geezer closing a crooked wooden gate, Sir, is there a store?

  He kicks mud clods off his rubber boots and cocks his head. “Store?” he says incredulously, sagging against the gate. He begins rambling in Russian, and I believe he’s saying that he’s had no money for the last ten days or months or years, and so there is in fact No Store. But another man walks up and injects, Yes, there is a store. That way.

  After more directions from a healthy lad on a bike, I find a store evocatively named “Store.” There’s bread, yogurt, candy, milk in a foil box, Baltic Beer, and Saint Springs Water blessed by the archbishop. I buy one of everything except the beer (two), then pedal out of town. Occasionally a blimpish bus grinds past, sounding urgently in need of gear oil. The wooden houses are edged with wedding-cake trim on the eaves and around the windows, and the picket-fence yards contain long-handled water pumps and fancy chickens. The birds can be any color, but the houses are mostly blue or green, the hopeful hues of sky and garden. The sun settles in the west, swelling gloriously in a haze of wood smoke. Satisfied with my escape from the city, I roll down to the Oka River valley, where I find not the river but the perfect footpath leading into a thick woods.

  Somewhere dogs are yelping and a train is hooting, but they won’t keep me up tonight. The tent isn’t needed. I’d forgotten to get fuel for my stove, but the warm beer goes well with the heavy bread. I light my little lantern and read Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s supremely unfunny account of the Soviet Empire. “In my imagination, the USSR constituted a uniform, monolithic creation, in which everything was equally gray and gloomy, monotonous, and clichéd.”

  With one puff the lantern is out and the stars are on. Gray and gloomy Russia was my cliché, too, and my first visit to Moscow had only reinforced the image. But I’d never left the city until today’s little taste of the village. With a thousand miles to come, I’m certain of nothing but this: chickens are never gloomy.

  I WAKE IN THE MORNING with leaves on my face—maple, oak, and birch. Hundreds are pinwheeling down in the slow dawn of the far north. It’s a pretty sight and a bad sign. A big wind is blowing, the advent of a storm.

  Out on the open road the wind is much worse, but this hasn’t kept people inside. They’re emerging from the little glassed-in porches that serve as a boot and coat room on most every house, and, depending on their age and occupation, heading for their tractor or car, for the pump or the well or the garden, or simply to sit on a bench and watch the leaves fall. When I stop to get a better look at the Oka River, a big man with rheumy eyes ambles out of his garden and intercepts me.

  Boris Zvezdakov, with his grimy canvas coat and bashed thumbnail, looks like the other folk I’ve seen hunched over rutabagas—who would have guessed that he speaks English and was a representative in the Russian parliament? A member of the Our Home Is Russia party, Boris served in the Duma, the lower house of the parliament, which is much like the U.S. House of Representatives. There’s an upper house, too, similar to the Senate, giving voice to less populated states like Siberia.

  How, I ask, Boris, is the new parliament working? Lousy. “There is not democracy in Russia—there are too many . . . too many bad people.” He draws his hammy hands into fists and throws a fake jab. “Like Chuck Norris.”

  The current parliament is not the first trial for democracy in Russia. The Duma was permitted by Tsar Nicholas after the 1905 revolution, to quell the striking workers. It was a ruse—the tsar ignored its authority, and fifty days later the army ran the county again. Over the following decade the Duma was resurrected and throttled again and again, until Lenin and the Bolsheviks, helped immeasurably by the Germans and World War I and a mad monk named Rasputin, took the reins during the 1917 revolution. Since 1991, the Duma and the parliament have hardly been more stable—the 1993 coup meant to eliminate Yeltsin was stopped not by debate but by tanks.

  Boris asks my ultimate destination, frowns, and asks for my dictionary. He looks up “prudent” and “to fear.” I explain that in the event of trouble I plan to run away. Boris lets me go with the Russian farewell, All beautiful.

  Bucking the blasted wind, dodging potatoes that have fallen from the trucks, I ride to a town with a neat line of fir trees along main street. It’s Ozery, and although it’s home to seven thous
and, there is only one café, and it doesn’t open until 3 PM. Near a ten-story apartment block is a row of metals sheds, the ubiquitous kiosks filled with booze and snacks. The café is at least useful as a windbreak, and while I sit and watch the wind rip branches off the trees, the door swings open a half hour early, just for me, courtesy of Svetya.

  She serves me hot, sweet tea, then gets to work slicing potatoes. I sit, thankfully, at one of six white plastic tables, listening to the rare disco version of the Monkees’ “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” under a poster for Lucky Strike “Made in USA” cigarettes. I’m the only customer for over an hour, yet Svetya waves me away when it’s time to pay. Leaving town, I ask a man for directions to a gas station, and he flags down a friend with a gas can in his trunk, tops off my fuel bottle, and won’t take a single ruble. This stirs memories of Arab hospitality, but with a Russian bonus: an actual bike path out of town and down to an Oka River ruffled with whitecaps. The one-lane floating bridge creaks and tugs at its moorings.

  Beyond lie open and rolling fields of potatoes in harvest. The farm equipment looks vaguely military, drab green, stenciled with numbers—just as Frederick Engels imagined, in 1847, in The Principles of Communism: “Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” Bent ladies with headscarves—babushkas—trail the equipment and snatch up potatoes the machines have missed.

  Twenty miles on, I reach the town of Zarajsk as a lid of clouds slides over and locks out the sun. Three fishermen on the banks of the Osetr River keep casting. Up the road are a pair of teens in Reeboks and Nikes, and I use my best Russian to ask Where hotel? They blurt out in tandem, “We speak English!”

  That’s great—where did you learn?

  Sergei and Sasha don’t understand my question, and exhaust their complete store of English in twenty seconds: Hello, Good-bye, Rap, Rave and Rock, Aerosmith, and Welcome to Hell. They can count to ten. And they know the way to a dreamy old hotel.

  The little lobby holds a cushy divan, a still-living potted palm, and a three-foot-tall Sputnik-looking ashtray built of intersecting steel loops. Varnished wood floors shine in the weak light. The receptionist cooks dinner for me, a half-kilo of a hybrid between meatballs and ravioli. While spooning up the steaming morsels in my room, I accidentally drop one onto the crotch of my pants and leave a stain that is likely to cause future embarrassment unless attended to. So I am pantsless when the night falls and the windows rattle in the black wind. For the first time I know it’s true: it gets terribly cold in Russia.

  THE RAIN COMES HARD in the morning, stripping leaves from the ranks of linden outside the Zarajsk Hotel and pummeling my mini-umbrella. I find breakfast in an old state-run café with walls upholstered in padded vinyl. The tall windows, taped against drafts, admit enough light so the electricity is turned on only when needed to run the cash register. The lady running the joint is a middle-aged lump, friendly and loud, and when I ask for an egg she yells No! then adds what may be Too late or All gone or Never. Then she bats away my dictionary, hauls me into the kitchen, and points to a rack of steaming poppy seed rolls.

  Yes, I say. With tea, please.

  Not until I leave do I realize that the cash register is being used only as a strongbox; the bill itself is worked up by zestfully slapping the beads on an abacus—an unbreakable technology without a plug, and the sort of minimalism that naturally appeals to a bicyclist.

  I head out through the double-door airlock, a must-have here at roughly the latitude of Canada’s Hudson Bay. Out into the gloom and then back inside at every little sign that says, in the grunting Soviet style, merely Store or Products. Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev lamented that “Our rockets can find Halley’s comet and reach Venus. But our fridges don’t work.”

  It’s true. In every food store there are cans arranged in the defunct glassed-in meat coolers. Most everything is behind glass or behind the counter or on an unreachable shelf. I must first pay a woman in a cashier’s box like a tiny jail; she gives me a receipt that I trade to another woman for a box of tear-and-slurp tomato juice and a can of mystery fish.

  But the food is good, particularly the raisin scones I buy from a bakery where the women are outfitted in snazzy pink uniforms. Actually, it’s a bakery-candy-liquor store. Almost every store in this town of 15,000 sells booze, apparently the key to consistent sales and staying afloat in the new Russia.

  When the rain slackens the street vendors reappear, hawking newspaper cones of sunflower seeds. I take my scone to the town square. A dapper young man in a houndstooth sport coat tells me that a tourist in Zarajsk is a strange thing. He wonders, “Are you a capitalist?”

  Yes, but not a very good one.

  “There is a shoe factory in Zarajsk, but little else.”

  His name is Misha, and his polished loafers are beaded with raindrops. Born and raised in Zarajsk, he now works in Moscow for the “Russian equivalent of the FBI.” It was not his intention. He studied laser optics in Moscow but says, “There are no prospects in my specialty.”

  We’re standing in wet leaves outside the Kremlin—a church and its attending buildings behind a massive wall with pointy corner turrets. A Kremlin is any old ecclesiastical fortress built to withstand the Mongols or whoever happened to be invading that century—the French, the Germans, and even the Poles have all had a shot at Russia, a history that has left the country understandably skittish about foreigners. The hero of Zarajsk, says Misha, is the homegrown Dmitri Pozharsky, who rose to the rank of Russian general in the fight against the Poles in 1612.

  Misha’s history lesson skips over the last century. I ask instead of the future. He looks up to where the sun should be and says, “This is a difficult question. I cannot answer. In America you can say, ‘This is what I want to do tomorrow.’ In Russia you can no longer plan for tomorrow, because you have no idea what tomorrow will bring.”

  In the eyes of the Russians, there’s no telling. The old people, too, are perplexed—particularly by the sight of me strolling the town and taking pictures. For decades there were no tourists, and now there’s a foreigner with a camera and a goofy grin. One lady huffs outside with skirt flapping and shoos me away, yelling what I imagine is Get lost, mister—you’re scaring my chickens! Another invites me closer, to appreciate the flowers she’s carefully tended. When it comes to gardens, Russian have a very good idea of what tomorrow will bring.

  RUSSIA SOMETIMES seems a thoughtful place. Along the cornfield road to the city of Ryazan, the bus stops are prettied up with ornate steelwork. And in the city itself, the traffic signals are equipped with little beepers to tell the blind when they can cross the street, and a four-way red light that allows just the pedestrians to cross while the cars and electric trolley buses wait. When I find a hotel room and turn on the TV news, there’s a sign language interpreter for the deaf.

  But I’ve no explanation for the mirrored ceiling above my bed. Unperturbed, I sleep and head out the next day to find the dot on my map labeled “Ivan Pavlov.” Ryazan was the home of the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov, and I figure there must be a museum honoring his experiments on behavior in the early 1900s. Pavlov conditioned dogs to drool when they heard a bell that meant chow time, and I hope to see one of the drool-meters Pavlov used to measure what he deliciously coined “psychic secretions.”

  On the streets of the old city center, mothers on park benches knit while their pink-faced babes sleep in prams of wicker and chiffon. I ask one mother about Pavlov, and she shakes her head no and asks, Where are you from? United States. She nods, “Ahh . . . California. Santa Barbara.”

  It’s the same with the other ladies: nobody knows of the museum. I substitute another goal: a look at the Oka River, a nine-hundred-mile-long tributary of the Volga. Yet when I walk down to the river valley I find only a trio of thirteen-year-old boys throwing rocks at an abandoned floating hotel anchored in a slough. I show them my postcards of Arizona, and they become very excited, yelling in concert, “Cactus! Cactus
!” (It’s the same word in Russian.)

  “I want Oka,” I say to the boys in perfect Russian. Follow us, they motion. Down a path overgrown with thistles and pigweed, across gullies spanned by springy wood footbridges, and past the water-stained remains of discarded newspapers and magazines. Alexi, Slava, and Andrei are interested in everything, particularly a scrap of paper that looks suspiciously familiar to me. They’re reading aloud, One million rubles. . . . I look closer and sure enough, it’s a mailbox ad from Reader’s Digest announcing that You May Have Already Won One Million Rubles! Russians, too, throw these things away.

  My charming hosts march on, kicking dead birds. At a fence with a sign reading The Port Territory Is Closed, the boys sneak a look inside. The gate is open and they see nobody in a uniform, so they urge me inside and down a flight of mossy stairs. And there it is: a sunken dredge in a swamp.

  This is the Oka? They shrug, and in consolation offer me some of their sunflower seeds and take me to the Kremlin. Outside its walls men with scythes trim the weeds, a quiet slicing that doesn’t distract from the entrance tower and its sculpted angels honking on golden horns. Inside are several churches topped with dazzling onion domes.

  Meanwhile, my guides are climbing over old bronze cannons and yelling “Boom!” They could care less about the biggest church, Ospienski, so I alone enter the massive square building surrounded by cedars. Inside it’s dark and heavy with the sweet stink of incense, with a stupendous iconostasis: dozens of moody paintings depicting the hard times and miracles of Jesus.

  As churches go, Ospienski is a tad depressing, but at least it survived the Bolsheviks. Ivan Pavlov would have been pleased. He risked his neck defending both science and the right to worship, although he was himself an agnostic. As for the Bolshevik social experiment, he sassily announced that “We live in a country where the state is everything and the man is nothing.” If he had not been a renowned scientist in his seventies, Pavlov might not have survived his words.