Guest Blog: We Keep Our Promises

As promised, a guest blog by the always lovely and supportive Ben and Sarah Pfeiffer, my second guests in Russia. Learn more about Ben and his writing here.

We promised to visit our friend, and we keep our promises. So we arrived after sixteen hours breathing recycled air and eating prepackaged airplane food and watching movies in the back of the headrests and reading Crime and Punishment. One stop in New York City and then hours suspended over the Atlantic. Kara met us at the airport, Sheremetyevo International (SVO). She met us outside of customs where a single, bored looking Russian waved us through without inspecting us. We took the train into the city and walked to the subway station. Kara pointed out the feral dogs, and, even though we wanted to, we didn’t pet them.

We rode the subway to Red Square and walked past the Bolshoi Theatre (Большóй Теáтр) to our hotel, a Marriott across the street from the Historical Museum of Gulag (Музей Истории Гулага). We couldn’t check in for a few hours and so we people watched in the lobby and paid the equivalent of $30 for two glasses of iced tea because we weren’t used to the currency. We went up to the room, a plain, clean, red-and-white space, plugged our iPhones into the strange two-pronged outlets, and fell asleep.

Kara met us that evening after work and took us to dinner and afterward we walked to Red Square. We took pictures of the cathedrals and the State Historical Museum. In the morning, we went back alone and stumbled around until we found the entrance to the Kremlin. Inside we passed the office buildings and the gold-white cathedrals and went on along the river. We took a tour of the Armory in the afternoon, peered through thick glass at the tsarist treasures, pressed the audio tour headphones into our ears to keep from dropping them. Then we went out again and went looking for something to eat. We found a London pub and ordered Pepsi (Пепси). That night Kara took us through a part of town called Clear Ponds (Чистый Пруди) to a hip and excellent restaurant where they wouldn’t let you take pictures. We drank beer and took a picture anyway when the staff wasn’t looking.

The next day, Wednesday, we rode the subway by ourselves. I took Russian in college and some of it returned to me in Moscow and I could sort of sound out the places and we didn’t get lost like we thought we might. Kara met us at the subway stop and we walked past an enormous abandoned fortress complex to the university where she teaches. The New Economic School is in a tall office building with a sculpture hanging on the front, a gray concrete platelet of epic proportions, or some kind of flattened doughnut ring, a piece of modern or soviet art. We ate in the cafeteria. She showed us the damaged sheetrock outside her office where a man who works in her school’s building shoots an airsoft gun into a paper target. He just stands on a balcony and smokes cigars and fires his toy guns down the hall or into the open air above the city. We met Olga, Kara’s boss, and we met her friends, who we would see again that night at dinner.

Another short subway ride brought us to a sculpture park filled with broken monuments to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Lenin’s head. Stalin’s head with the nose chiseled off. Hammers and sickles, a cage of poured concrete heads. Angels, rabbits in a boat, a soviet worker woman, a cartoon statue of Albert Einstein (Альберт Эйнштейн) and Neils Bohr (Нильс Бор). We walked through the park to the river and gazed at the enormous statue of Peter the Great. Russians hate the statue. Urban legend claims at the statue—the eighth tallest in the world at 98 meters—was ordered for America as a statue of Christopher Columbus. That’s why Peter is on a bunch of ships and has a golden map. When America rejected the design, apparently they just knocked off Columbus’s head and put Peter’s on, which involved changing the features to have fashionable mustaches and crazy eyes. The statue supposedly commemorates 300 years of the Russian navy, which Peter started, and was designed by a Georgian named Zurab Tsereteli. Peter the Great hated Moscow so it’s strange that his 15-story-tall statue should appear in this city that he abandoned to start St. Petersburg. Apparently this same Tsereteli did design a statue of Christopher Columbus called “Birth of the New World,” and the U.S. did in fact reject the design, so there might be something to those legends about the origins. People think Tsereteli’s designs are pompous and self-important. We didn’t care. Then to kill time we went to Gorky Park and bought more Pepsis. In line, a kid asked us, “Are you Americans?” Strangely enough, he turned out to attend the same small college in Missouri that Kara had gone to, a coincidence strange enough to appear in a Charles Dickens novel. We were over 5,000 miles from Missouri, after all, so maybe he was lying.

There’s so much more to tell. We ate a wonderful Georgian meal with Kara’s friends, we rode a night train to St. Petersburg, and we spent an evening at the ballet, Swan Lake. We drank liquor made from small red berries of a kind not seen in the U.S. and we stayed up late talking. We went to Peter the Great’s palace, now a museum, the Hermitage. We bought playing cards with tsars on them; we bought a furry Russian hat with earflaps from a man whose nose was dripping snot down his chin and onto his chest. We spent hours walking among the St. Petersburg canals and we rode the deepest subway system in Europe if not the world. We took a day train back to Moscow. At the train station we ate cheese pastries and watched Russian music videos, including one with a sexy bellhop who falls in love with a socialite and one with a rock star who dresses up like Spider-man and drives a tank and one with a fat American who turns into a vicious beast that eats the sun and plunges the world into darkness. Kara took us to the airport the next morning. We passed through customs without speaking to the Russian guards who examined us. On the flight home, before we landed in America again, before we came back to our lives and our jobs, we spent sixteen hours breathing recycled air and eating prepackaged airplane food and watching movies in the back of the headrests and finishing Crime and Punishment. We had promised to visit our friend, and we always keep our promises.