Chapter
Twelve:
Welcome to Russia. Have A Nice Day.
"But now I am the undergrowth and how I would prefer
To
be leaving hell than traveling far away.
In
short the village ignorants are plundering my town
It’s
a savage heart that beats them on their way”
-Julian
Cope
Shortly before we were to leave my mother-in-law’s for JFK Airport, Daniel went out to a nearby shopping mall to get some books to read while we were in Russia, where we fully expected to have very little diversion for the ten days it would take while the adoption became official.
He bought Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, Lawrence Schiller’s account of the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation; and M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker, the basis for the movie and long-running TV series. Along with The 13th Juror, a legal thriller in the John Grisham vein which my mother had loaned us for the trip, our reading had an odd focus on death as a subject or theme. Another omen.
He also bought some chocolate chip cookies from a well-known chain store, figuring he wouldn’t have the opportunity to enjoy such a thing again for a while.
While it’s possible, eating them doesn’t quite explain what came next.
We were watching a tape of that season’s premiere episode of The X-Files — back at the time when it was still good — when he came down with a serious anxiety attack.
I had never seen him have one. He lay on the bed, pale and sweating, unable to breathe normally.
I was standing, looking at him thinking, “I can’t travel for the baby by myself! He’d better pull himself together.” Nice wife I am.
Daniel has never had such an attack before or since. Was it another sign?
We have never watched the end of that X-Files episode, and we don’t think we ever will (it’s the one where the Cigarette-Smoking Man tempts Mulder with a vision of blessed domesticity, a la The Last Temptation of Christ, ironically enough).
After a few moments with his
mother’s help, he recovered and watched me load the car with our suitcases
filled with clothes and supplies for Cyril, given to us by our parents and
friends. He was going to be one of
the warmest, best-dressed babies in Perm and in Moscow.
At long last, we arrived at JFK and began our video of us sitting in the lounge, looking harried and anxious. Almost right away, our flight was called.
The flight itself was nice; Daniel’s father had donated some of his extensive Frequent Flier miles to get us first-class tickets, so we spent a pampered trip eating and watching movies, and catching a few winks of sleep (something Dan said he had never done before on an airplane), and taking in one of the newer features of international air travel, the GPS-based display which shows you where, roughly, you are.
Nine
hours later we landed safely in Moscow at Sheremetyevo
Airport.
As soon as we deplaned, the fun with our visas began. Instead of Nov. 17, the date of our arrival being printed in
the visas, Nov. 20 was printed instead, since we had applied for them before
we knew our court date
We knew we were in trouble when the older Russian woman in the customs booth whom we handed our passports and visas stopped stamping and told us to step aside.
Wonderful. We played dumb.
Eventually we were escorted into a small, windowless room off to the side among a couple of dozen women in green uniforms. They had us sign some documents in Russian that we didn’t have the time to look over, but seemed to be admissions of guilt.
Our first encounter with the New Russia was not starting off at all well. Was the entire visit going to be like this? We had no idea what we’d just signed away.
We hadn’t even cleared customs, and already we felt like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole. We could have been forgiven for thinking nothing had really changed since the demise of the Soviet Union.
Two other men, older, one very tall with a ski jacket and cowboy hat, also stood aside.
Eventually an airline employee came around to see us and asked if we were the ones who had visa problems. When we all said, yes, he escorted us back upstairs.
All four of us stood, worried if we would make it into the country or not. We had all come so far and to be turned back now would be almost a criminal act.
The Russian who worked for Delta came up and took all our passports and visas. We were all led to small anteroom where we could hear a television and a man speaking on a telephone in an attached office.
Although I had been studying my Russian, I couldn’t make a word out of what he was saying. The two men and us stared at each other.
None of us knew our fate. I felt like we were being rounded up by the NKVD to be sent to Siberia.
Indeed, the whole situation wasn’t unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of arrest:
Oh, you citizens who love to travel! Do not forget that in every [train] station there are a GPU branch and several prison cells! ... The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren't guilty, how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by your collar, and you still keep exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things straight and let me out!”
After a few minutes, we were called in. It turned out the man was speaking on two telephones, a common practice dating from Soviet times where multi-line phones were rare. The television show was a Russian current-affairs program. He kept on saying “Tak, tak! ... Da, da!” into the one telephone, reading off numbers and writing them down in a fancy black notebook.
He conducted himself as a person of some importance, and it was obvious that he was, although we never learned his name, much less what his authority over us and our visas was. Was this one face of the corruption we had heard and fully believed was rampant in this country?
Finally he hung both phones up. He asked for our passports and the Russian Delta Airlines employee handed them over.
He opened them up, looked at our visas folded inside and told us in bad English, “$125 each to update your visas.”
God, it was already beginning and we hadn’t been on Russian soil for an hour. There went $250. Were we to be dunned for cash every ten feet? How long would our money last?
At least he was sanguine when we explained how we’d gotten our visas before knowing what day we’d have to be in Perm. It happened a lot, he said, and we believed him.
All the same, we somehow don’t think that all the money we paid him went directly to the treasuries of the Russian Federation. Cash in hand, no questions asked.
We went back out into the anteroom while the other two men were called in to learn their fate. There being nothing else to do, we got acquainted with them, and it gave us some perspective on the situation.
Both were Americans also. One was quite memorable, the man in the cowboy hat.
His offense? No visa — his travel agent had failed to mention that he needed a visa to go to Russia, and when he had checked in at Santa Fe, the ticket clerk had failed to ask to see his, in clear contrast to our experience at JFK. He was an artist traveling to meet a dealer in Moscow to sell his work, and fretting about the fate of $100,000 worth of art in his luggage on the other side of customs.
The other was a businessman from Massachusetts. Not only had he no visa either,
his passport had expired.
We were led back to the visa entrance of the airport and had to sign a statement saying that we would pay.
A few minutes later, the other two gentlemen who were having visa difficulties came and joined us. Their visa problems, it seemed, could not be solved by $125 each.
The artist was told he would have to pay $200 for a temporary visa (two days I believe) and the other man was not being allowed into Russia at all because of his passport.
The artist said he couldn’t do it as he had to spend a lot longer over there than two days, not without a guarantee of getting to spend more time. He fit the image of a Westerner in manner as well as in appearance, soft-spoken but firm. It was obvious as we talked at our parting that despite his relatively calm outward demeanor, he was justifiably angry.
He was already planning to sue the airline and his travel agent when he got back, and it was hard to say that he didn’t have a case.
Both men would be on the next flight out of Moscow airport right back to JFK. The artist was fretting about his canvases, which could be seen piled near the baggage claim.
Things were not looking up on our first hour in Russia. But
at least we would be allowed in.
In order to have our own visas updated, it turned out that we had to pay $18 each in rubles as a fine of some type for our early entry. So, we were escorted past customs to the Obmen Valuti window, handed our American dollars in for exchange, and gave the woman who escorted us the money in rubles.
Now we were out exactly $286. Pozhalovat v Rossii! Schastlivovo dnya! (an expression, also the title of this chapter, which an American living in Russia had told us via email before we left was shorthand for “You are about to get screwed”).
All the money was paid and we were issued the appropriate receipts. In return an
extension was stamped in our visas allowing us to enter legally.
As luck would have it, our translator Julia and Moscow rep Dmitri Krutov had been standing there waiting for us the entire time.
They were very friendly to us and asked us how we had been treated, even paying the man who carried our luggage from the baggage pickup to where they had been waiting all this time.
I said well, and we attempted to speak in Russian. They seemed impressed that we knew any Russian at all. They led us to a ticket window – Permsky Aviyalinii – where we were instructed to pay $200 for our tickets to Perm.
We were led outside to Dmitry’s car and were subsequently driven around Moscow for a few hours. The plane to Perm didn’t leave until the evening, so we saw some of the sights.
It was a typical day for Moscow in late November — cold and cloudy, with wet snow falling fitfully along as we drove in along the Leningradskiy Prospekt.
There was a highly armed and visible police presence along the road, with officers looking more like soldiers in camouflage and semi-automatic weapons. This was understandable, as Russia had renewed its war against the Chechen rebels in the wake of the terrorist bombings of two Moscow apartment buildings just two months earlier.
Indeed, almost everywhere we went in Moscow at that time, there was a sense of heightened vigilance. It reminded us that things had long been different in this part of the world (And who knew then that, two years later, things would be similar in our own country?)
Our visit to Moscow excluded a lot of the first-time tourist faves like Red
Square as we had already seen them. We got the impression that Julia and Dmitri
were relieved not to have go through that spiel again.
Daniel purchased a Cyrillic keyboard at a store, and later on, we were taken out to eat near the Arbat.
We also found some hiking boots for Dan, since he had been so busy in New York getting Anguel’s documents apostilled the day before we left and had forgotten to bring his usual pair. To walk around in Russia at that time of year without boots is insane, and we found a nice pair of Eccos (very popular in Moscow at the time, it seemed to us), black like the clothes so many people were wearing.
Dmitry pointed out the Hotel Belgrade, and explained to me, in Russian, that it was a three-star hotel. I told he and Julia that Moscow had changed quite a bit since the last time I had been there, nine years ago, and it was quite a walk down memory lane seeing how the city had been brightened (and crowded — there were actually traffic jams, something unimaginable under communism) up by capitalism.
Indeed, the vibrancy of the streets of Moscow put us in mind of nothing so much as New York, still very fresh on our minds from all our visits to the apostilling unit.
Julia had not been the translator designated on our itinerary that BBAS had sent us prior to traveling. Nor was she the happiest translator we had encountered.
She was certainly pleasant and courteous enough, especially since our knowledge of the language made her job a little easier than usual, but we got the impression that she wanted to be doing a thousand other things than escorting ignorant Americans around Moscow.
She
told us that she had taken the job as a temporary position because her previous
company, which dealt in frozen chickens, had been temporarily shut down. Moscow was an expensive place to live, and she had an elderly mother whom
she was taking care of.
After dinner, at a real Russian restaurant, we were driven to Vnukovo airport for the flight to Perm. Once parked, Dmitry turned to us and asked us for the $1,200 he was going to need for the paperwork process.
We handed
that over to him in $100 bills as we had been instructed to on our itinerary. We then got out of the car and waited in the airport. While waiting, Dmitry showed us the paperwork he had. It was for Cyril, Yekaterina and the Ellingtons’ boy.
Fifteen minutes went by, and finally our flight was called for Perm. Dmitry and
Julia walked us to the gate and we went through the metal detectors. Since we were comfortable with Russian being spoken around us, we were
not perturbed to be on our own at last. We waited in the departure lounge and
read on the walls, “NO SMOKING.” Then
our flight was called for Perm.
The flight itself was short — I think. I fell fast asleep.
In no time at all, we landed on the tarmac in Perm, with a heavy snow falling. It would be the only time that we were there that snow would fall.
We were met at the gate by Lena, the translator, Gennady Vasilchenko, the
facilitator, and Sergey the driver. Lena
had in her hands, flowers, a Russian tradition of greeting and friendship.
Once inside the vehicle, a Toyota SUV-type vehicle, the radio was playing.
I said to Lena, in Russian, that the accents of the people in Perm were
different than the accents of the people in Moscow.
She seemed delighted that I had picked up on that — and that Daniel and
I knew a good bit more Russian than the folks who had come before us.
We were driven to our hotel, the Mikos, and quickly booked in our room. I kept in the back of my mind that the fees were $10/hour for the driver and $7/hour for the translator. (Much later we were told that these fees were double the going rate).
Gennady, a man both strikingly handsome and impeccably dressed, told us that we could talk about finances the next morning after we were driven to the orphanage to see Cyril.
Although he appeared
kindly and treated us with respect our entire time in Perm, we could tell that
beneath the kindly and respectful façade, this was a man you didn’t mess
with. Not even on a good day.
They left us, and before we knew it, both Daniel and I were fast asleep. We had to be up early the next morning and then we would meet our son for the very first time.