Red Ticket: Brokedown Palace
"It felt like something bad was coming, all the time."
This weekend in Red Ticket, the ambient misery starts to get to Robin. “It felt like something bad was coming, all the time.”
If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32.
Chapter 33: Brokedown Palace
by Robin Whetstone
It was May 9, the anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War, the holiest day on the Soviet calendar. I passed the perpetual metro line, which had grown now to include all types of people. I waited on the packed platform for the train, then pushed on to the car with the other passengers. I was leaning in a corner, watching the darkness flash by in the window, when an old man elbowed his way through the crowd. Old men were a rarity in Russia. The war killed most of them, and poverty and alcohol were taking care of the rest. The average Russian man’s lifespan was 53 years.
But this man looked to be at least 70 years old, and he bobbed like a stick in his too-large suitcoat. The coat’s greasy front sagged under the weight of the medals pinned there: stars and ribbons and badges. I watched him as he pushed his way toward the door I was leaning next to. He was probably coming back from the demonstration at Red Square, this next stop was probably his. I was not prepared when he stopped in front of me instead. “America!” he cried, grabbing my wrist and struggling to lift my arm. “Friend! Friend!” Tears creased his face as he laughed and sobbed, remembering that time back in Berlin. The other passengers watched us, expressionless. I felt like I should apologize for something. I did not know what to say. When the train stopped I got off, though it wasn’t my station.
***
The ambient misery around me began to coalesce into a constant sense of dread. The thing that was hardest to deal with was not the individual acts of violence or desperation, but the collapse of an infrastructure that in my country nobody even noticed. Nobody thought about things like roads and bridges in America, because they worked. But Russia was run by thieves and grifters. Oversight and regulation were replaced with bribes and threats, and money that once went to the public good now went straight to the government and their mobster accomplices. Because of this, every time you went out there was a distinct possibility that you’d be crushed by falling stones, immolated by exploding boilers, or sucked into the earth as the ground gave way beneath your feet, like the seven Armenians in the Lada. Their car fell through the pavement in a downtown traffic circle and tumbled 30 feet into a hole full of boiling water, where the occupants were scalded to death like crayfish. This was back in February, when everybody’s hot water went out for a week or two. Hot water was how Russian apartments were heated – the water ran through exposed pipes and radiators, so if a pipe burst, you not only lost water, but heat. In February. In Moscow. There was no one to fix it or even ask to fix it. No one knew what had happened to the hot water until the thin crust of asphalt gave way under the packed Lada. Only then did the city realize that a water main had burst, spewing boiling water for weeks and eroding the dirt under one of Moscow’s main thoroughfares.
“Russia’s just a little too interesting,” I thought
The exploding buildings, failing bridges, and fireballs in the metro tunnels were so much more terrifying than suburban sprawl. How do you plan for something like this, or guard against it? These were things that I’d never had to worry about. I began to have phobias, and attacks of anxiety. It felt like something bad was coming, all the time.
***
“That one,” the boy told the woman behind the Plexiglas window, “That one right there.” He pointed at one of the unwrapped condoms that was tacked through its tip to a piece of cardboard in the kiosk window. The woman removed the cardboard from the window, unpinned the condom the boy had pointed to, and handed it to him. The boy gave the lady some rubles and went away.
I stood there trying to process what I’d just seen. I’d thought the tacked-up condoms in the window, which were yellow and brittle with age in addition to definitely having holes in them, were for display only, so customers could get a good look at what was for sale. But no. I looked around at the other kiosks, the sparse metro crowd. Was I the only one who saw the problem, here? Nobody else seemed bothered at all. Maybe they think that trying to prevent unwanted anythings – births, deaths, dictators, floor shows in restaurants involving Queen songs and full-frontal nudity – is pointless. Maybe they believe that every gesture is just a symbolic one, because no one can really control what happens to them. Maybe it’s me, with my insistence on intact prophylactics, who has the problem.
I watched as the woman opened a new condom and pinned it to the cardboard, then replaced it in the window. “Russia’s just a little too interesting,” I thought, getting away from the kiosk. I felt dizzy, like I was going to start crying, or throw up. I felt like all hope was lost. I walked numbly to my apartment, let myself in, and went straight to my suitcase. The 500 condoms were still in there, waiting to be useful. I carried the bag out of my building and down the sidewalk to Nina’s. Maybe the family would sell them and become rich. Maybe Marat would know what to do with them. I left the bag on Nina’s doorstep and went home and locked the door.
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