Red Ticket: My First Million
"I burst into tears. The Russians did not seem surprised."
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin becomes a millionaire three times over. There’s a catch.
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, and 29.
Chapter 30: My First Million
by Robin Whetstone
It was the end of the Guardian’s weekly staff meeting, and Brad and I were discussing the Snickers Index. The Snickers Index — how much that particular candy bar cost at any one moment — was a concrete way of tracking the ruble’s fall. On the way into the office that morning, kiosks had Snickers for sale for 1,200 rubles. But by the end of the day, they’d cost 1,550. The minute-by-minute rise in prices was terrifying, and the recent introduction of a 50,000-ruble bill promised that more trouble was coming.
“Soon there’ll be a new Russian party game,” I said to Brad, “Guess how many rubles are in the jar and win a jellybean.”
It was easy for us to laugh. We were mostly insulated from the chaos because the Guardian paid us in dollars. The Russian people, on the other hand, were adrift. More than the collapse of their economy, it was the collapse of their whole identity as an empire that unmoored them. “What is a Soviet?” they asked, “That thing doesn’t exist anymore.” The response to this overnight erasure of their place in the world was to latch on to a mess of conflicting notions about how to make sense of things. Conspiracy theories and dangerous health fads proliferated. Faith healers, soothsayers, and health-food gurus vied or partnered with Slavophiles and Stalinists to create a confusing bunch of assurances about how the world worked. Today, Stu, Stephanie (the Guardian’s photographer), Julia, and I were going to visit one of the purveyors of these new ideas: a man who promised health and fortune through walking on hot coals. As we drove out of the city, my excitement about the assignment grew. It seemed like walking on coals might cause more problems than it would solve. Why would Russians spend what little money they had on something like this? Was I going to walk on them? How would that be? I had so many questions.
Forty-five minutes later, we turned off a small paved road onto a muddy track. We drove through marsh grass and sickly birch trees for miles before rounding a bend and coming into the parking area, a cracked asphalt pad. Our rainbow car was the only one on the lot, and we climbed out of it and stood close together, looking around. It was barely noon, but the light out here in the forest was burnished and indistinct. Out here we were much closer to the fires that burned all night and day during the spring and cloaked the city in a perpetual sunset.
“What is this building?”
“This is rest home for retired truck drivers.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know.”
I’d asked Julia about these fires days ago, when, overnight, the air in the city turned thick and acrid. Smoke was everywhere, and a dust of ash coated the snow in the city, turning it a sour yellow. Julia explained that as the snow melted and revealed the trash underneath, Muscovites sprang into a spring-cleaning frenzy, burning the previous fall’s flotsam in metal dumpsters. I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, hoping to filter out some of the smoke that was stinging my throat and making my eyes run.
We followed Stu across the lot and up the stairs to the building’s front entry, two large wooden doors. As Stu pounded on the locked doors, I looked around for some indication of where we were. What was this building? The only sign was a small, tarnished brass plaque next to the door, which read “Profilaktika #4.”
“Julia,” I whispered, “What is this building?”
“This is rest home for retired truck drivers,” she whispered back.
What was Julia seeing that I wasn’t? A logo? An inscription? But there was only that sign. Profilaktika #4. “How do you know?” I whispered.
She leaned her head toward me again and whispered her response. “I don’t know,” she said.
After several minutes of pounding on the door, a pale girl in a nurse’s cap and dress poked her head out. She pointed at a narrow drive on the other side of the parking lot. It led to a gate, she said, which led to a road, which led to the coal-walking building. We set out down the path and came to the gate, which was locked. We could see the dirt road on the other side of the fence, but after that, only forest. There was not another person in sight. The eight-foot fence had spikes at its top, and was too tall to climb.
“Let’s go this way,” said Julia, pointing to the right of the gate at a stand of spindly trees. “We’ll walk along the fence and see if there is place to get through.”
We walked for a long time through the scrub that ran alongside the iron fence, looking for a place to cross. It was April, and our boots cracked through the crust of snow on the ground and sank in the mud beneath. I watched my feet as I walked behind Julia, concentrating on not slipping. The water that seeped into Julia’s footprints in front of me was rainbowed with greenish yellow oil. Like most areas on the edge of Moscow, this place was polluted, poisoned, and the trees we walked through showed it. They were twisted and slight, with weeping black patches in their bark.
Like most areas on the edge of Moscow, this place was polluted, poisoned, and the trees we walked through showed it. They were twisted and slight, with weeping black patches in their bark.
The iron fence we’d been following tapered off into a much flimsier wire fence, and we decided to climb over it. We slogged through a small field of waist-high brown grass until we came upon the road we were supposed to take to get to the workshop. Standing on this road with their backs to us were four women in nurses’ uniforms. They watched us clamber up the side of the ditch, as surprised to see us as we were them. As they turned to us, I saw what it was they were looking at.
This was the first dead person I’d ever seen in real life, and it was nothing like the ones on TV. There was no music, no lighting, no voiceover; nothing to mediate it, or give everything a context or a tidy ending. There was nothing except this man lying on the muddy road at our feet, a problem with no solution. There was no telling what happened to him, no sign of injury or violence. He lay there in his dirty street clothes, a homeless man who had frozen to death. An alcoholic who had died from the tainted vodka blinding hundreds in the city. A retired truck driver who’d had a heart attack while out walking. Whoever he was, he had been there for a long time.
I stared at his swollen face and hands, at skin the color of the water in Julia’s footsteps, and all I could see was this man as a baby. I thought about his mother, because he had one, and how she took his hand and put her lips to his palm, blowing on it to make him laugh. Where had the person he’d been disappeared to? Did anyone miss him? Did anyone even know?
Julia finally broke the silence. “We are supposed to walk on hot coals,” she told the nurses. They told us to walk a bit further down the path to a small outbuilding, and we said our goodbyes to the man and his charges.
***
Hours later I was walking home from the Guardian’s offices, trying to figure out what to write about the coal-walking workshop. The day had been interesting in a way I wasn’t expecting, and the workshop hadn’t really registered with me. I was walking along a small street when I came upon a group of people. Like the nurses earlier in the day, this group of six or seven Russians was huddled together, looking intently at something on the ground. “Don’t look, keep walking” I told myself, but when I got even with them I couldn’t help it. I stopped and stood on my toes, peeking over their shoulders.
“Isn’t it pretty?” said one of the Russians.
“So beautiful,” agreed a person on the other side of the small circle. They were staring at a skeletal bush, upon which fluttered a tiny green leaf. I looked at the single leaf and the smiling, softened faces of the people admiring it, and burst into tears. The Russians standing around me did not seem surprised. After a Russian winter, it was normalno to become sentimental over spring. I turned from the group, wiping my dripping nose on my coat sleeve, and walked the rest of the way home. When I got there I made a cup of tea and sat down at my table with my spiral notebook. I picked up my pen and wrote…nothing. This wasn’t my story. This story belonged to that man. Writing anything about it felt like stealing.
I stared at the blank page for minutes, until my nose began running again. I put the side of my hand up to my nose, wiping at it, and when I lowered it back to the table it was bright red with blood. I thought my nose was running because I’d been crying, but I was wrong. The hundreds of dumpster fires in Moscow had been too much for me. I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, my cheek and chin a crimson smear from wiping my nose on my coat sleeve on the way home. I went back in the living room and laid down on the couch, waiting for the bleeding to stop.
***
The next day at the Guardian, Jason told us that the magazine’s owner had decided to pay us in rubles, not dollars. This meant that instead of the $400 I was expecting to collect at the end of the month, I’d instead be carrying home 3.4 million rubles.
I was 22, and I had made my first million.
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