Red Ticket: The Three Cheeses
"I knew exactly why the woman was screaming. It was the cheese."
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s, Robin sees a lady come unglued over the selection of cheese. Also, I give her a T-shirt. And there’s the rainbow cars.
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, and 25.
Chapter 26: The Three Cheeses
by Robin Whetstone
One of the perks of working for the Guardian was that we had access to a company car. It was a tiny, blocky thing that looked like it had been drawn by a four-year-old, but its unsexy shape was offset by its cheerful rainbow paint job. This car was the least credible car a purported journalist could hop out of and drew ridicule wherever we went. Worse, the car’s high visibility made us a target of the GAU (pronounced “guy-EE”), Moscow’s traffic police. The GAU rarely bothered to issue actual traffic tickets; instead, they’d just flag us down multiple times on one trip and detain us until we paid a $5 bribe. Still, I was happy to have a car. The less time I spent on the street and the metro, the less likely I was to run into Lyosha.
I had settled into my apartment, a bright and cheerful six-room flat in a leafy neighborhood near the Sokol metro. It was on the first floor and had no steel door, but the owner and her family lived right next door, and the neighborhood seemed safe enough. I’d moved five times since coming to Moscow a dozen weeks ago, but this time I felt like I’d found my place.
At the Guardian, Jason gave me my first feature assignment: covering the massive street protests over the impending vote to impeach or keep Yeltsin. Most people I interviewed said that, although they hated the corruption, theft, and poverty that was life in Russia right now, they still supported the president. Khasbulatov, President Yeltsin’s rival, was an obvious fascist and a cretin besides – a “crocodile who will eat our freedom.” Most people still said they wanted freedom, and not just a more palatable autocrat, but the number of people pining for the good old days of Stalin was growing faster every day. There was no need to go to Chechnya right now. Something was about to happen right here.
Jason Stanford gave me something else, too, something even more important than a feature article. I was in the office typing in my Sadistic Couplets article when he came over, holding out a bag. I reached in and pulled out a T-shirt. On the front was a headshot of a man wearing a crown and smoking a cigarette. Underneath the man’s head, it said “icon.”
“Who is that?” I asked Jason.
“Hunter S. Thompson,” he said.
“Is this for me?”
“Yes. It belonged to Nicola Verico, the writer before you.”
“The one who ran off with Madness.”
“I thought you should have it,” he said.
I hung out with the Guardian staff at Casino Moskva, a place Lyosha never went, and sang Mack the Knife with Stu in Jacko’s Bar. I bought a boom box so I could finally listen to my tapes. There were rumors that Motorhead was coming to town. I sat in my sunny apartment and wrote.
For me, everything was perfect.
***
I was standing in line with the Russians in a Soviet-era grocery store when a woman near the front of it started screaming. The line was so long that I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t need to. I knew exactly why the woman was screaming. It was the cheese, she said. The cheese was what finally pushed her over the edge.
She stepped out of the line and turned on us, her fellow shoppers. “During Brezhnev’s time we had three different cheeses! Three different kinds!” Her voice cracked and she stood there, sobbing and heaving. We all stared at the woman, shocked. Russians, especially Russian women, were supposed to bear suffering quietly, with stoicism. These were people who used their bodies as weapons against Nazi tanks, whose whole families were swallowed up in the labor camps and mass graves of Stalin’s purges, who Ivan the Terrible and Genghis Khan took it out on. The number-one thing about Russians is, they keep going. They do not collapse over cheese.
It made the Russians in this particular line and in the country as a whole angry to see people debase themselves like this. After everything we’ve sacrificed, people said, to see soldiers begging in the streets and grandmothers sobbing in empty stores. To see Russian women so desperate to leave they’d marry themselves to strangers. What has all this freedom got us besides crime and poverty, and humiliation, they asked. There are no big ideas any more. And also, no cheese.
“During Brezhnev’s time we had three different cheeses! Three different kinds!” Her voice cracked and she stood there, sobbing and heaving.
Another woman in line, and it was all women in this line, approached the crying lady and put her arm around her shoulder, drawing her toward the exit doors.
“Step up,” said the woman behind the counter.
“Ten eggs, pojalista,” I said, holding out a ticket I’d just stood in line for 20 minutes to get.
“Sumka,” said the woman behind the counter. She had no expression at all on her face; to her I was just something asking for eggs without a bag to put them in.
“Oh no,” I said, pulling things out of my pockets. My keys, my cigarettes. Where was my bag? I’d learned long ago to always carry one. It wasn’t in my pocket. “I don’t have a bag.” The woman stared at me, not moving. This was the third line I’d stood in to purchase these eggs. It had taken me a long time to get here. “I’ll just carry them,” I said.
The women around me tsk’d and scowled as I slouched toward the door, cradling the ten eggs low in my arms. So unprepared, they said. I put two eggs in each pocket and distributed the rest in my coat sleeves. I would never get them home intact, but I headed for the crowded metro anyway.
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