Red Ticket: The Sadistic Couplets
“You’re an American!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, Robin, in order to get Russian boys to recite schoolyard poems, fakes a marriage to sell pins to Americans. 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, and 22.
Chapter 22: The Sadistic Couplets
by Robin Whetstone
Little boy
Sits on his father’s knee
What a lovely red button, he says
Madagascar was a nice island
***
The kindergarteners avoided me as I lurked by a corner of the playground’s fence, murmuring snatches of poetry. I was trying to find a kid to ask about the Sadistic Couplets, the Russian version of the one thing nearly every culture shares: schoolyard rhymes celebrating graphic death. While little kid me was on a 1970s American playground chanting, “Glory glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler,” my Russian counterpart was reciting Couplets about the obliteration of small African countries.
I spent my first day of research on the street, walking up to one small child after the other and getting to “could I ask you” before the babushka holding its hand pulled it away, hissing at my ugly boots. Soviet Russia was not a country of free-speaking people. You could be taken down into the basement of your local police office and shot for saying something. So, talk to this frizzy-haired, American-accented, hunting-boot-clad stranger? Kashmor! I decided it would be easier to go to a kindergarten and ask the person in the office if I could speak to some children, but when I arrived, I was too shy to go in. I could not figure out how to explain what I needed without sounding unhinged.
“I need to talk to some kids about the Sadistic Couplets. What are the Sadistic Couplets? You know:
Two lovers lay
In a field of tall wheat
Quietly, quietly comes the combine
Grandmother spits out the cloth
She has found inside her bread”
It would be irresponsible to say yes to such a thing. So now I stood near the kindergarten’s playground for the second day in a row, hoping to flag down a kid as it ran by. The two women minding the kids watched me stare and mutter. What was I doing? The older lady leaned in and, never taking her eyes off of me, said something to the younger one. I decided it was time to go.
I made my way to my new apartment, a 2-room flat in a gothic building that sat across the street from one end of the Arbat, a pedestrian street where tourists bought matryoshka dolls and amber beads. I usually avoided this market, but today I needed to find a Russian who was used to talking to foreigners.
“Hey, devushka!” yelled a man behind a table full of military watches, “Special price for strangers!”
I stayed away from everyone who tried to menace me with commerce, but about halfway down the street, I stopped at a table displaying intricately painted, black lacquered pins. The eight boys behind the table were busy drinking beer and humming along to the guitar that the one in the middle was playing. They ignored me as I poked at the pins. After their song was over, the guy with the guitar stood up. He was probably 19, with feathered hair and a denim jacket. He was a 1970’s kind of handsome, like Shaun Cassidy. “You would like a pin?” he said, in English.
“Well,” I said, “I’m writing an article about something called the Sadistic Couplets. Do you know anything about the Sadistic Couplets?”
“Oleg,” said the boy to a guy near the edge of the table, “Do we know anything about the Sadistic Couplets?"
Oleg surveyed me for a few seconds and stood up. “Koneshno,” he said. The boys began talking to me all at once, peppering me with verses that I struggled to write down in the small notebook I was carrying.
“Quiet, quiet,” said Shaun, “Here come some customers. You” — he pointed at me — “come back here behind the table and we’ll finish in a minute.”
I stepped around the table and stood in the middle of the group as a fanny-packed clutch of older folks made their way toward us. When they were still a few tables away, Shaun Cassidy picked up his guitar and began to sing. The other boys joined in.
“Esli znali vi, kak mnye dorogi, podmoskovni vechera.”
They concentrated on their singing, ignoring the approaching group. It worked, just as it had on me. The small crowd bypassed the last few tables and walked straight over to ours. The boys continued singing as the tourists began discussing the pins. “Do you think Jennifer would like this one?” said one lady in an American accent to her husband. Without waiting for an answer, she held the pin out to me, the only non-singing, standing person behind the table. “How much is this one?” she said very slowly and loudly.
I did not know what the pins cost, but I had an idea of what this American lady might pay. “One thousand rubles,” about seventy cents, I replied.
The woman jerked her head back in surprise. “You’re an American!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
I knew that “trying to write an article about the Sadistic Couplets” would only confuse her, so I put my hand on the shoulder of Shaun Cassidy, who had stopped singing, and said, “I’m selling pins with my Russian husband to try to help finance his singing career. He is a musician, you see. And also an artist. Yes, he made these pins.” I smiled at Shaun and he smiled back at me.
“How darling,” said the woman, who was my grandmother’s age. “Everyone, everyone, did you hear this? This American girl is married to this Russian boy and they are selling pins!”
The group fawned all over the two of us, taking pictures of Shaun and me with our arms around each other, or with him kissing my cheek and me rolling my eyes at the camera like “Men! What can you do?” They patted me and cooed at me, a young girl so far away from her own grandparents. And they bought several pins each. When they departed, chattering excitedly about the story they’d purchased with their jewelry, Shaun and his friends looked at me in silence for a second. Then Shaun, whose name turned out to be Kostya, said, “What are you doing today? Would you like a beer?”
I spent the rest of the day sitting behind the table with Kostya and his friends, drinking beer, singing Russian folk songs, and exploiting our wedding vows to sell loads of pins for twice what the boys had been asking to tourists from all over America and Western Europe. Several beers into the experience I was slouched happily in the warm sun, listening to the boys sing, when I suddenly remembered why I was there. Even though it was my calling, I couldn’t just drink and lie and sell pins all day. I had to find out where the Sadistic Couplets came from. So I brought the topic up again with Kostya and his friends.
“We know some Couplets,” he said, “but if you really want to know about them, you need to talk to Ivan.”
“Who’s Ivan?”
“He is…bezdomni,” said Kostya, flicking the underside of his jawbone with his middle finger, the Russian gesture that meant someone was an alcoholic. “He sweeps this street.”
“Will he talk to me?”
“Sure he will, if you buy him some beer.” I handed some rubles over to Kostya and he handed them to one of the other boys, with instructions to fetch Ivan and Ivan’s beer.
Even though it was my calling, I couldn’t just drink and lie and sell pins all day. I had to find out where the Sadistic Couplets came from.
After a short time, the boy reappeared toting a plastic sack of green bottles and shepherding a very old, very dirty man. The man wore a padded canvas jacket and stained green trousers. He was hunched over in a permanent stoop, and his hands as they reached for the bottle were purple with frostbite scars. He smiled wickedly at me, the bringer of beer, and proceeded to lecture me for several hours about his past as a ballet dancer, his time in the army, the indignities of homelessness, the sorry state of today’s youth (“not you, Kostya”), and his favorite dishes from childhood. I’d had many conversations just like this with homeless people back in Jacksonville, minus the frostbite and the ballet dancing. “No matter where I go,” I thought, “I end up talking to homeless people.” And what were they talking about? Pretty much the same thing.
With Kostya translating, I was able to collect several pages of Couplets from Ivan, who knew hundreds of them. But like everyone else, he could not tell me where they came from or when he’d first heard them.
I realized I’d never deliver on the promises I’d made when I first suggested writing about the Couplets. But as I sat in the fading afternoon listening to Ivan recite the poems as if he’d written them himself — a little raised fist in defiance of his circumstances — I didn’t care. I’d found what I needed today.
An old man found a grenade in the field
He went with his finding to the party district committee
Pulled out the pin and threw it in the window
The man is old, for him it’s all the same.
***
Click here to read the next chapter.
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