In the Countryside

Valentina and I left her apartment in time to catch the 9:30 bus to Suzdal. My host mother had laden me down with bags full of pie and chicken. We walked to the bus station, passing the spot where a former Russian Olympian had been killed by a drunk driver a few years back. With the summer solstice not long past, the morning sun was high already. Inside the bus the temperature was already mounting. We sped past old women selling cups of berries on the side of the road, wide open fields like the ones I’ve seen in pictures of the Midwest. Tall grass and wildflowers blanketed the smooth waves of earth with only the occasional grove of fir trees to break up the vast stretches of land. Bright bulbous church domes cropped up on the horizon and Valentina was trying to recall which centuries they were built in. In front of a couple of trailers a cluster of proletarians stood waiting for buses. Here we met Valentina’s friend, Marina, and Marina’s daughter’s boyfriend, Dima. Marina had been a coworker in the factory back in Soviet times. The factory had employed several thousand people before the collapse of the USSR, but now only a few hundred employees remain. Marina’s father was waiting on us in his old Lada. As we approached the car his face lit up in a metallic smile, gold upper incisors and canines shining out between a few greyed natural teeth, the less prestigious lower incisors mostly done in silver. The old man, Yuri Ivanovich, laughed and sang playfully as he drove down the rutted roads farther and father away from the town. Marina kept asking me whether I understood what everyone was saying. Even though I kept nodding in the affirmative, she demanded that her daughter’s boyfriend translate things into English. He spoke almost no English. They told me that Yuri Ivanovich had worked for the KGB in Soviet days. We had walked past the former KGB headquarters that morning, an imposing red and yellow building with a hammer-and-sickle crest on the main street in Vladimir. Across the street is a monastery, which had also been KGB offices. On the grounds there is a large cross, dedicated to the victims of anti-religious repression committed in the 1930’s. There are around 30 names listed, all executed near the spot. Yuri Ivanovich was born in 1933, which means that he was only 20 years old at the time of Stalin’s death. The KGB of the post-Stalin era was still surveilling the population heavily, but the late night arrests, interrogations facilitated by rubber truncheons and thumbscrews, and basement executions—one round to the cerebral cortex— were mostly coming to an end. The dacha, or summer cottage, sits half way down a dirt road. It is not much from the front, just a vinyl sided house with farm-style gables. Entering through the gate, cherries dangled down just a bit too red to be eaten. A few roughly milled planks supported an overburdened apple tree. Behind the house an enormous garden was being tended by a central-Asian man. Beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, peas, dill, basil, cucumbers, radishes, horseradish, cabbages, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, all growing in neatly tilled rows. Dima told me that the forecast called for rain. We all looked up to the sky, but the clouds were puffy and white and didn’t seem in the mood to rain on us. Pairs took turns playing table tennis beneath a veranda built in a log cabin style. Hanging in the rafters of the roof was a portrait of Lenin, on the wall a kitschy souvenir from Cuba with Che gazing out above some cartoonish palm trees. The two teenagers, Marina’s daughter and her boyfriend, were glued to one another and kept their conversation to private whispers. After the table tennis we went to swim. I waded out into the gently flowing river while everyone else watched from the beach. Thick aquatic grass grabbed my wrists as I swam. One of our host’s friends picked us up in his car along the path and drove us through the fields to a spot where two rivers met, creating a gentle whirlpool. Our new friend showed me a spot to jump from and I climbed up the steep embankment through a patch of stinging nettle (which, when you touch it, feels like a bee sting and leaves a rash). With a running start I jumped down into the river, 15 feet below. Back at the house, I laid down in a hammock and was taking a little nap when a little girl, Sonja, Yuri Ivanovich’s granddaughter, came up and started talking to me. The eight year old told me about how many times she had been to Turkey and Egypt (seven and four, respectively) and how she was learning English in first grade. She recited the numbers 1-5, dog, yes, no, mom, dad. After a while she went and fetched her pet rabbit and dangled the scared critter over me. I was drifting off a bit when I started hearing the sound of one of those small sparkling cone fireworks that comes in the big value packs and is never very impressive. I opened my eyes and saw Sonja looking off into the field. I stood up and saw a fire blazing at the foot of the neighbor’s property, the neighbors running to and from the house with buckets of water. Something about being in a foreign place dulls one’s responses. There is the feeling of being a spectator watching a bunch of actors playing out “Russia.” It is a combination of language barriers, cultural differences, and an unwillingness to stand out or do something foolish that creates this detachment. Anyway, I evidently succumbed to this as I stood rooted to the spot watching the neighbors scrambling to put the fire out. Sonja was much more decisive and ran to get her father who emerged a minute later with a fire extinguisher and a look of total indifference. The gardener came running behind him with a shovel. At this I snapped back into reality, grabbing a shovel and chasing after them. Sonja’s father sprayed the blaze down with the cloudy discharge and the rest of us took to stomping out the little licks of flame with shovels. The flaxen wild grass had been burned into a charcoaled mess. Yuri Ivanovich started laughing with the neighbors and told them that they “didn’t need to be smoking.” After fighting the blaze, Marina decided it was time for a bike ride. I was handed a clattery Soviet model from the 1950’s and we took off down a rutted path into the forest. Marina dismounted beside a grove of pines and started surveying the undergrowth. Before long she found what she was looking for and dug her hand into a patch of thick undergrowth. She surfaced with three small red berries and handed them to me. They were like strawberry miniatures and much sweeter, the kind of strawberry flavor in a lollipop except not artificial. We hunted around for the baby strawberries (they call them zemlyanika, which translates into something like “earth berry”) with mosquitoes swarming every step of the way. The trouble with these tiny berries was that they were so delicate that digging them out through the thick grass with one hand while smushing mosquitoes with the other often left nothing more than smashed pulp and juice. I picked a few handfuls of berries and killed a few handfuls of mosquitoes before we moved on to another patch of forest. Along the way Marina pointed out wild raspberries and some poisonous red berries. An asphalt road bisected the forest and led to a derelict campground with cabins and a dining hall. Marina explained that this had been a children’s camp during Soviet times and had recently been abandoned for lack of funds. She lamented the fact and began telling me that things in the country had really fallen apart after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the house Yuri Ivanovich had been cooking and he was happy as a lark when he saw us coming back through the gate. He ran inside and emerged a minute later with a handful of Soviet-throwback ice cream bars. In the kitchen he danced around, talking about the tomatoes that were going into the borsch and telling us why potatoes in the city were lacking in vitamin content. Over dinner we talked light politics and Yuri Ivanovich insisted that I would become president, and that once I had done so I must not forget him! With time to kill before heading back to Suzdal to catch the bus, I sat drinking tea and watching Marina’s daughter do the dishes. Yuri Ivanovich drove us back to the bus station but we were a few minutes late and would have to wait for the next one. I took a walk with Dima around the old bus station complex and asked him what he thought about the Soviet Union, since he had been born after its fall. He told me that there were good things about the USSR, things he had heard from his parents, but that things weren’t so bad now. The last bus of the day pulled into the lot and everyone started loading on. By the time we got on all of the seats were taken and there were about fifteen other people behind us. Everyone crammed in with just enough room to stand in the aisle, lined up back to back. We stopped along the way to pick up more people who wedged themselves into the space between the steps and the door. I was encircled by people, all 98.6 degrees of their body heat radiating and all sorts of interesting personal odors issuing forth. The last rays of the day’s sun were beating through the un-tinted windows of the bus. The temperature inside was rising and sweat was already pouring down my lower back. Up front, the driver was lighting a cigarette. Russians have this really bizarre fear of being cold and it extends even into the summer months. Rolling down the road in this oven the Russians sat stonefaced with sweat beading at their brows. Finally, some guy next to me reaches up and opens the roof hatch to let some air in—I almost turn to thank him— but no sooner does it open than the whole bus has an absolute fit. An older man stands up and slams the hatch shut, yelling “if you wanted to open the windows, you should have taken a taxi not a bus.” There was a toddler on board and apparently they were all concerned that the breeze would be the death of him. The kid’s mother was visibly angry that someone would be so reckless with her child’s health. Of course, no one said a word to the bus driver whose cigarette smoke was wafting back over the heads of the passengers. Walking home from the bus station it started raining, and then it started pouring. Valentina’s leg was hurting so we had to walk slowly through the torrents that filled the streets as the water came rushing down the gradient towards our house.