Soap Opera Sunday from Brillig and Walking Kateastrophe - find the other participants on their blogs today, and join the fun!
For part one of this tale, go here, and for part two of this tale, go here
We walked down the same gray tunnel that we’d entered all those months ago. This part of Sheremetyevo airport reminded me of the innards of a whale. The wide, concrete, ribbed arch folded down to a scarlet red carpet and was interrupted periodically by windows that showed the dreary tarmac. Despite the fact that it was morning, it was unbearably early, and so we shuffled along feeling the chains of the Soviet friends we had left behind, along with the sorrow of our goodbyes.
I was perpetually on the verge of tears. Despite Tanya’s being there with me until the last second, it was the full week of farewells and ceremonies that had left me in rags, emotionally.
We had one more stop to make before stepping through the security doors and out onto the tarmac and up to the waiting Pan Am jet. We could see the plane through the windows and the taste of freedom was palpable. My U.S. passport was resting in my back pocket, ready for inspection. My ticket was in my hand. I was devastated to be leaving my friends, but the promise of independence, of being back on familiar ground, of embracing family and friends on the other side of this flight was tantalizing.
While my entire experience in Russia had been life-changing, it had also taken enormous concentration and energy for almost every second of my time there. Being a diplomat is not easy, and this was, in fact, what we’d been. For those of us in the cities far from Moscow and Leningrad, it had been even more difficult, as we were anomalies and carefully scrutinized in each bit of our daily routines.
And I was sick of Soviet rules.
And I was sick of behaving.
And I was sick of living inside the lines and trying to do everything within the boundaries of what was acceptable in Soviet society.
So, at the last moment, I had chucked the visa that I had used to travel to Pyatigorsk on that last field trip with the kids. I figured it would only hold me up at the airport, and if there was one thing I wanted, it was to get out.
We’d reached the end of that whale-belly tunnel, and one by one we were being processed through a series of three customs/passport control booths.
I’d remembered from the initial trip that these officials made the guards at Buckingham Palace look downright friendly. My first contact was a series of grunts and pointing, despite my passable Russian. For all I knew, these guards didn’t speak Russian.
I was among the last three of our group of American teachers, and we were among the last passengers to go through passport control. Our group had been held back and given a last "debriefing" by a final Soviet apparatchik. I could see Frank, John and Allie on the other side of security. Allie was doing a happy dance, and John was making faces at us, trying to get us to crack up. We, on the other hand, were trying our best to remain solemn and passive – the best way to fly under the radar in any official situation.
Finally, Mary, Jackie and I were called forward. We each stepped into identical booths. I shoved my passport through the appropriate slot and raised my eyes to look at the guard who would be my key to the other side. He looked at me, and looked at my passport and looked at his computer.
He looked at me again, looked at my passport, rifled through my passport and looked at his computer.
He skipped through my passport, looking at every stamp I had accumulated during my five years of its ownership. He must have seen the stamps for East Germany and Czechoslovakia, among others.
He stared at his computer.
He stared at me.
“Vwee,” he barked at me and pointed to a chair to my right. “Seedeetzye!” (You, sit!)
I sat.
He left.
I felt the moisture collect around the back of my neck.
To make things worse, I could see my group through the glass barriers. And they were beginning to board the plane.
I wasn’t.
I was beginning to imagine what would happen if I were thrown in a Soviet jail. What would things be like there? Would there be a special jail for foreign prisoners? There were so many levels of niceties in this classless society, would I be saved as a result?
I waited. I could feel the sweat trickling down my breasts now.
My guard came back to his booth, accompanied by another, poker-faced drone. They whispered intensely, pointing at me and pointing at my passport. They looked at the computer screen and shook their heads.
I noticed the departure lounge was empty with the exception of two, bored-looking Pan Am counter staff. I didn’t dare sneak a look at my watch. I looked down at the floor, trying not to draw attention to myself.
“Vwee!”
I looked up. My passport was shoved back through the slot. “Iditye!” (Go!)
I went. I picked up my passport and walked through those doors and was met with “Hurry!” by the Pan Am folks and I walked through their doors and I walked out on the tarmac, and up the stairs to my plane, and a lovely flight attendant met me at the door, and showed me to my seat, and when my fellow teachers saw me they broke into cheers.
And I sat down to an International Herald Tribune and a glass of orange juice. It was the sweetest orange juice I’ve had before or since. And the news was from a Capitalist source and uncensored.
And I just wanted to kiss my fellow teachers, kiss the Soviets on the plane, kiss the seats, the arm rests, the carpet and my newspaper. But I didn’t.
I sipped my orange juice and read my paper and wallowed in being on an American plane.
And we took off and began to soar into the skies, leaving the Soviet Union, with its beauty and its terror, behind us.
Showing posts with label KGB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KGB. Show all posts
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Soap Opera Sunday - The KGB and Me - pt. 2
Soap Opera Sunday from Brillig and Walking Kateastrophe - find the other participants on their blogs today, and join the fun!
For part one of this tale, go here.
Part 2:
It was about a week ago, and it was one of the weirdest things yet. And that’s saying something in a country where each day was made up of “weird.”
“Why was my phone changed?” I stood in front of the “reception,” which was misnomer if ever there was one. The two regulars behind the desk still flew from me like pigeons whenever I approached. They were clearly still frightened of being stuck with an American guest for three months.
The shorter, stouter one looked up from behind her magazine. “Shto?” “What?”
“Why do I have a new phone?” I said this calmly. Quietly. I wasn’t trying to draw attention.
She did the Soviet shrug. “Neeznayoo.” She ran the word together – Idon’tknow. “You don’t have a new phone. Why would you have a new phone? There is no new phone.”
Okay, so that was an answer. Of sorts.
“Well, when I left for school this morning, I had a gray phone in my room. And it worked perfectly well. Now, as I return from school, I have a bright red phone and there are odd clicking noises and I can hear bits of other conversations occasionally.” I placed my hand on the counter and leaned in. The smooth wood felt cool and comfortable and I leaned more fully against the counter. I was tired, my feet were aching from the walk home from school, and I wanted to get out of my teaching outfit and into my jeans.
“All our phones are red. It must be your old phone.” She ducked back behind the magazine and leaned against the back counter, putting more distance between us.
“Um… right.” I looked at the bank of gray phones sitting next to her on the back counter. She jumped a bit.
“No, our phones are grey. It is the room phones that are red.”
Umhmm… I gave up and went back to my room.
And then there was the student, who wouldn’t identify himself and had a much deeper voice than the usual, reedy teenaged voice that I would hear when a student called to ask for help or to issue an invitation. And, of course, this particular, unidentified student was only interested in my selling audio tapes I had brought and then setting up a black market sales thing in partnership with him. Which I was clearly going to do. Because my exchange meant nothing to me, right?
So, yeah, I kinda knew I was being watched by someone.
***
But if Tanya wasn’t ready for this information, I certainly wasn’t going to push it. We walked along the boulevard under the glorious sun, lifting our faces like sunflowers.
***
It was very different weather the day this all came to a head.
Tanya and Rimma and I were the accompanying teachers for the field trip for the November 7th vacation. Another anomaly in the Soviet school system – students usually took several-day “field trips” with their teachers during “holidays.” When the children actually did get holidays was still unclear to me. This was our second field trip and I had fought hard to be able to go. The upshot was that the buses we took and the youth hotel we stayed in were safe enough for Soviet children, but not for the American “guest”. This had left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.
But here I was, up in the mountains of the Caucasus, in a fairly lovely, if simple, youth hotel in the middle of a blizzard. It was around 9:30 at night, and Tanya and I were comfortably lounging in pajamas and keeping snug against the raging weather outside. We were talking about Pink Floyd, one of Tanya’s obsessions. I’d brought The Wall and we were listening to it on my portable cassette player, which I’d donate to the school at the end of my run there.
Tanya was. obsessive. with. Pink. Floyd. And I’d been listening to all her thoughts on Pink Floyd for about an hour. And we were having a real, girlfriend-bonding time. And this must have sparked something in Tanya’s conscience because all of a sudden she grabbed my wrist and tried to drag me off the bed where we were sprawled. Given that I was 5’3” and probably 125 or 130 and she was 5’1” and maybe 100, made this an interesting endeavor, but she did, in fact, pull me off the bed and out through the balcony door with such force that I was astounded.
We stood there, on the concrete balcony, in bare feet. Snow swirled around us and there were drifts already appearing at the corners of our 6’ by 6’ space.
“Tanya, what the?”
“Shhh… let me talk quickly. This is the only safe place.” She grabbed me close and whispered in my ear, her breath warming against the winds raging around us. She held me by the elbows, intimacy in her every gesture.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “It’s true, what you talked about at that café.”
Now, we’d had so many café conversations at this point that all I could think about was my chattering teeth. I shook my head.
“The KGB – I’ve been questioned!”
Oh my God.
I stood back from Tanya and searched her face. Her eyes had grown pale and glassy. I wondered if she’d start crying.
This all came out in a rush in that same warm breath against my ears and face. Almost like a lover’s embrace: “At my last Komsomol meeting they grilled me. They wanted to know where you’d been, what you’d done, whom you’d seen. They wanted me to go back to the beginning. They wanted… everything.”
She leaned away from me and the frigid air came swirling between us.
“We can go back in now,” she said, and she took my hand as she opened the door back into the room.
We dried off with towels made warm from the rack in the bathroom and said nothing for a bit. The Wall had run out on the cassette player and the room was silent.
I was unsurprised, but it was clear that Tanya had gone through some sort of transformation, both through her experience and through her confession.
“All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.”*
*From Pink Floyd’s “The Wall pt. 1”
For part one of this tale, go here.
Part 2:
It was about a week ago, and it was one of the weirdest things yet. And that’s saying something in a country where each day was made up of “weird.”
“Why was my phone changed?” I stood in front of the “reception,” which was misnomer if ever there was one. The two regulars behind the desk still flew from me like pigeons whenever I approached. They were clearly still frightened of being stuck with an American guest for three months.
The shorter, stouter one looked up from behind her magazine. “Shto?” “What?”
“Why do I have a new phone?” I said this calmly. Quietly. I wasn’t trying to draw attention.
She did the Soviet shrug. “Neeznayoo.” She ran the word together – Idon’tknow. “You don’t have a new phone. Why would you have a new phone? There is no new phone.”
Okay, so that was an answer. Of sorts.
“Well, when I left for school this morning, I had a gray phone in my room. And it worked perfectly well. Now, as I return from school, I have a bright red phone and there are odd clicking noises and I can hear bits of other conversations occasionally.” I placed my hand on the counter and leaned in. The smooth wood felt cool and comfortable and I leaned more fully against the counter. I was tired, my feet were aching from the walk home from school, and I wanted to get out of my teaching outfit and into my jeans.
“All our phones are red. It must be your old phone.” She ducked back behind the magazine and leaned against the back counter, putting more distance between us.
“Um… right.” I looked at the bank of gray phones sitting next to her on the back counter. She jumped a bit.
“No, our phones are grey. It is the room phones that are red.”
Umhmm… I gave up and went back to my room.
And then there was the student, who wouldn’t identify himself and had a much deeper voice than the usual, reedy teenaged voice that I would hear when a student called to ask for help or to issue an invitation. And, of course, this particular, unidentified student was only interested in my selling audio tapes I had brought and then setting up a black market sales thing in partnership with him. Which I was clearly going to do. Because my exchange meant nothing to me, right?
So, yeah, I kinda knew I was being watched by someone.
***
But if Tanya wasn’t ready for this information, I certainly wasn’t going to push it. We walked along the boulevard under the glorious sun, lifting our faces like sunflowers.
***
It was very different weather the day this all came to a head.
Tanya and Rimma and I were the accompanying teachers for the field trip for the November 7th vacation. Another anomaly in the Soviet school system – students usually took several-day “field trips” with their teachers during “holidays.” When the children actually did get holidays was still unclear to me. This was our second field trip and I had fought hard to be able to go. The upshot was that the buses we took and the youth hotel we stayed in were safe enough for Soviet children, but not for the American “guest”. This had left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.
But here I was, up in the mountains of the Caucasus, in a fairly lovely, if simple, youth hotel in the middle of a blizzard. It was around 9:30 at night, and Tanya and I were comfortably lounging in pajamas and keeping snug against the raging weather outside. We were talking about Pink Floyd, one of Tanya’s obsessions. I’d brought The Wall and we were listening to it on my portable cassette player, which I’d donate to the school at the end of my run there.
Tanya was. obsessive. with. Pink. Floyd. And I’d been listening to all her thoughts on Pink Floyd for about an hour. And we were having a real, girlfriend-bonding time. And this must have sparked something in Tanya’s conscience because all of a sudden she grabbed my wrist and tried to drag me off the bed where we were sprawled. Given that I was 5’3” and probably 125 or 130 and she was 5’1” and maybe 100, made this an interesting endeavor, but she did, in fact, pull me off the bed and out through the balcony door with such force that I was astounded.
We stood there, on the concrete balcony, in bare feet. Snow swirled around us and there were drifts already appearing at the corners of our 6’ by 6’ space.
“Tanya, what the?”
“Shhh… let me talk quickly. This is the only safe place.” She grabbed me close and whispered in my ear, her breath warming against the winds raging around us. She held me by the elbows, intimacy in her every gesture.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “It’s true, what you talked about at that café.”
Now, we’d had so many café conversations at this point that all I could think about was my chattering teeth. I shook my head.
“The KGB – I’ve been questioned!”
Oh my God.
I stood back from Tanya and searched her face. Her eyes had grown pale and glassy. I wondered if she’d start crying.
This all came out in a rush in that same warm breath against my ears and face. Almost like a lover’s embrace: “At my last Komsomol meeting they grilled me. They wanted to know where you’d been, what you’d done, whom you’d seen. They wanted me to go back to the beginning. They wanted… everything.”
She leaned away from me and the frigid air came swirling between us.
“We can go back in now,” she said, and she took my hand as she opened the door back into the room.
We dried off with towels made warm from the rack in the bathroom and said nothing for a bit. The Wall had run out on the cassette player and the room was silent.
I was unsurprised, but it was clear that Tanya had gone through some sort of transformation, both through her experience and through her confession.
“All in all, it was just a brick in the wall.”*
*From Pink Floyd’s “The Wall pt. 1”
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Soap Opera Sunday - The KGB and Me - pt. 1
Soap Opera Sunday from Brillig and Kate - find the other participants on their blogs today, and join the fun!
The KGB and Me - pt. 1
I sat across from Tanya, swirling the coffee dregs in my cup. The sun was astonishingly brilliant, the sky was blue and cloudless, and the boulevard below was covered in flowers and darting shoppers. Everyone was smiling. It was that sort of day.
Tanya and I had stopped for an after-school snack of Turkish coffee and ice cream, the two edible café items. The ice cream was delicious, if vanilla, vanilla, and vanilla, and the folks in Krasnodar were justly proud of their ice cream factory. “Is our ice cream not delicious?” was a question I was asked with some frequency.
“There was one thing I didn’t understand. Don’t understand,” Tanya slouched a bit. Her cheeks became vaguely rose. “Why do you Americans think we spy on you whenever you come here? Why would we care what you do? You’re Americans. You’re our guests; we’re happy to see you. It’s as simple as that.”
I had scoured the Soviet bookstores for a gift for Tanya. We were becoming really good friends and I wanted to share some of my favorite authors with her. Unfortunately, the foreign language literature selection at the Tsentralnaya Biblioteka was slim. Jerome K. Jerome was one of the most popular authors, and at that point, I hadn’t even heard of him. I did, however, find I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes. Hughes had visited the Soviet Union during the height of its industrial glory in the early thirties. He was extremely impressed by it all; he hadn’t been taken to the bread basket of the Ukraine, where between 2.5 and 5 million people were slowly starving due to Stalin’s policies and ineptitude.
He did, however, mention the tracking that took place by the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), and he complained of it in the book. Tanya was puzzled by this.
“But Tanya, it’s true! We’re always followed here. Maybe not each tourist, but an important poet like Hughes, or Paul Robeson when he came here, or someone like me on a new exchange.” I put my coffee cup back in its saucer. The cheap china screeched as I did so.
“Oh don’t be ridiculous.” Tanya leaned back as far as she was able to in her uncomfortable, straight-backed chair. She crossed her arms and looked petulant. It was an odd sight, as she was wearing her usual, blue polyester, “teaching” suit. Given how stiff the fabric was, parts of the suit stood away from her body, as if trying to divorce themselves from what she was saying. “Why would anyone follow you? You’re a teacher. What do they think, you’d be carrying state secrets?”
“I have no idea what they think, but I know I’ve been checked on.” I traced the lace placemats with my forefinger. I tried to make my voice light. I’d already managed to offend Tanya in other settings; there was information that was simply kept from the general populace, and some things I’d said in the past had challenged her sensibilities.
Tanya leaned forward and gripped the edges of the front of her chair. “How do you know?” She almost hissed this. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or frightened.
I looked at the street below. A well-dressed woman was having an altercation with one of the “babushkas” (grandmas, pensioners) whose job it was to sweep the streets with tiny brooms. Possibly the babushka had swept up some dust toward the official’s bags or clothing, as certainly, only a high level official, or the wife of one, would be dressed as she was. Another contradiction in this “classless” society.
“Well, there was the day that a woman called across the lobby, loudly, and asked if I would bring letters to the U.S. in my luggage. And you know that’s illegal.” I looked at Tanya. She was still pressed forward in her seat.
“But that doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she was incredibly stupid.”
“Maybe, but the desk folks didn’t look shocked. Or anything. It was like it was expected. And we’d been warned during our orientation that this sort of thing would happen.”
“It still doesn’t prove anything.” Tanya’s arms and legs crossed. “So what did you do when she did that?”
“I called back, equally loudly, that I couldn’t possibly do that because it was illegal and I certainly wouldn’t break any laws in the wonderful country that was hosting my exchange.” I smiled.
“Oh, you’re learning, alright.” Tanya laughed. “Yes, we’ll make a good comrade citizen of you, yet. Come on, let’s go. It’s a beautiful day for walking the boulevard.”
We gathered up our things and started for the stairs to the street level. I was looking forward to getting out of the café and off of this conversation. I still hadn’t told Tanya the real reason I knew I was being followed.
The KGB and Me - pt. 1
I sat across from Tanya, swirling the coffee dregs in my cup. The sun was astonishingly brilliant, the sky was blue and cloudless, and the boulevard below was covered in flowers and darting shoppers. Everyone was smiling. It was that sort of day.
Tanya and I had stopped for an after-school snack of Turkish coffee and ice cream, the two edible café items. The ice cream was delicious, if vanilla, vanilla, and vanilla, and the folks in Krasnodar were justly proud of their ice cream factory. “Is our ice cream not delicious?” was a question I was asked with some frequency.
“There was one thing I didn’t understand. Don’t understand,” Tanya slouched a bit. Her cheeks became vaguely rose. “Why do you Americans think we spy on you whenever you come here? Why would we care what you do? You’re Americans. You’re our guests; we’re happy to see you. It’s as simple as that.”
I had scoured the Soviet bookstores for a gift for Tanya. We were becoming really good friends and I wanted to share some of my favorite authors with her. Unfortunately, the foreign language literature selection at the Tsentralnaya Biblioteka was slim. Jerome K. Jerome was one of the most popular authors, and at that point, I hadn’t even heard of him. I did, however, find I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes. Hughes had visited the Soviet Union during the height of its industrial glory in the early thirties. He was extremely impressed by it all; he hadn’t been taken to the bread basket of the Ukraine, where between 2.5 and 5 million people were slowly starving due to Stalin’s policies and ineptitude.
He did, however, mention the tracking that took place by the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), and he complained of it in the book. Tanya was puzzled by this.
“But Tanya, it’s true! We’re always followed here. Maybe not each tourist, but an important poet like Hughes, or Paul Robeson when he came here, or someone like me on a new exchange.” I put my coffee cup back in its saucer. The cheap china screeched as I did so.
“Oh don’t be ridiculous.” Tanya leaned back as far as she was able to in her uncomfortable, straight-backed chair. She crossed her arms and looked petulant. It was an odd sight, as she was wearing her usual, blue polyester, “teaching” suit. Given how stiff the fabric was, parts of the suit stood away from her body, as if trying to divorce themselves from what she was saying. “Why would anyone follow you? You’re a teacher. What do they think, you’d be carrying state secrets?”
“I have no idea what they think, but I know I’ve been checked on.” I traced the lace placemats with my forefinger. I tried to make my voice light. I’d already managed to offend Tanya in other settings; there was information that was simply kept from the general populace, and some things I’d said in the past had challenged her sensibilities.
Tanya leaned forward and gripped the edges of the front of her chair. “How do you know?” She almost hissed this. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or frightened.
I looked at the street below. A well-dressed woman was having an altercation with one of the “babushkas” (grandmas, pensioners) whose job it was to sweep the streets with tiny brooms. Possibly the babushka had swept up some dust toward the official’s bags or clothing, as certainly, only a high level official, or the wife of one, would be dressed as she was. Another contradiction in this “classless” society.
“Well, there was the day that a woman called across the lobby, loudly, and asked if I would bring letters to the U.S. in my luggage. And you know that’s illegal.” I looked at Tanya. She was still pressed forward in her seat.
“But that doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she was incredibly stupid.”
“Maybe, but the desk folks didn’t look shocked. Or anything. It was like it was expected. And we’d been warned during our orientation that this sort of thing would happen.”
“It still doesn’t prove anything.” Tanya’s arms and legs crossed. “So what did you do when she did that?”
“I called back, equally loudly, that I couldn’t possibly do that because it was illegal and I certainly wouldn’t break any laws in the wonderful country that was hosting my exchange.” I smiled.
“Oh, you’re learning, alright.” Tanya laughed. “Yes, we’ll make a good comrade citizen of you, yet. Come on, let’s go. It’s a beautiful day for walking the boulevard.”
We gathered up our things and started for the stairs to the street level. I was looking forward to getting out of the café and off of this conversation. I still hadn’t told Tanya the real reason I knew I was being followed.
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