Red Ticket: Where Shopping Is a Pressure
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, Robin buys her boyfriend a birthday present. 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, and 17.
Chapter 18: Where Shopping is a Pressure
by Robin Whetstone
“Put out your cigarette.”
I was sitting at the dinette table with Lyosha’s dad. We’d been sitting there in silence since 7:30 a.m., about 45 minutes. At nine I’d make the first of my three daily fruitless calls to the Guardian. Until then, I’d smoke and write. Alexander sat there with me every day. He never spoke to me, but he seemed to tolerate my presence. Until now.
“Shto?” I said, looking up from the notebook I’d found on the old-lady line.
“I said put out your cigarette.”
“Why? I said. I was confused. Alexander was right then smoking his very own cigarette. Why couldn’t I smoke one, too?
“Valentina Fedorovna does not approve. She believes only prostitutes smoke.”
“Oh,” I said, intrigued. I’d had many total strangers buttonhole me on the metro and go on about the tenants espoused by one or another healer, mystic, channeler, natural-foods advocate, past-life reader, UFO contactor, supplement peddler, nationalist apocalyptic cult leader, and/or yoga teacher. The failure of Communism had plunged Russian society into an existential darkness. People stumbled around, grasping at anything, trying to find some way to orient themselves. Perhaps this Valentina Fedorovna, writer of sensationalist pamphlets about the evils of hot-water baths, psychic vampirism, and smoking, had given Lyosha’s dad something to believe in now that everything else — from his national ethos to his job as a photographer — had evaporated.
“Who is Valentina Fedorovna?” I asked Alexander. “An author?”
“An author? An author?” Alexander stared at me, eyes bulging. “No, you idiot, Valentina Fedorovna is not ‘an author.’ Valentina Fedorovna is Lyosha’s mother. And she says that only whores smoke. So put out your cigarette.”
I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up from the table. I had to leave anyway. I had a very difficult task to complete, one that might take several days. I had to find Lyosha a present for his 21st birthday. His party was in two days, at a fancy restaurant. His family was invited, and they grudgingly agreed to bring me. This would be the second time I’d seen him since the night he’d gone to jail. Were we still, you know. Dating? Were we still even friends? I didn’t know.
What I did know was that gift-giving in Russia was a big deal. If I gave Lyosha an inappropriate gift, it would dishonor him. The gift I chose would say something not only about him, but also about America. Whether or not it said something about me seemed immaterial.
The problem was, Lyosha and his friends were rich, way richer than I was. They grew up on the black market, and now they worked in construction, oil, and banking. They obsessed over status markers, discussing brand names like they were football teams. Lyosha by himself was sensitive and insightful. But when he got together with his friends and their sleek girlfriends, they talked about who had the money and where they got it, and who was going to have the money and where they’d get it. They wanted monogrammed ostrich-leather luggage and Mont Blanc pens, not homemade cookies.
What I did know was that gift-giving in Russia was a big deal. The problem was, Lyosha and his friends were rich, way richer than I was. They wanted monogrammed ostrich-leather luggage and Mont Blanc pens, not homemade cookies.
Where was I going to find a gift that wouldn’t embarrass everybody? The USSR had for decades been an almost completely militarized state. Most of the country’s resources were funneled into production of weapons rather than consumer goods. Soviet Russians knew how to prepare for war, not birthday parties.
But maybe I could find something here, at GUM (pronounced “goom”), the old empire’s flagship shopping destination. GUM was a huge mall that bordered Red Square. Its boring name —Glavni Universalni Magazin, Main Department Store — did not deter me. Red Square was the holy center of the Soviet State, a place of pilgrimage for millions. GUM was where they’d put their best stuff.
I stepped into the lobby of the glass-roofed building and looked around. Gray metal letters, blocky and industrial, spelled out the single word over each shop. “SHOES,” said one. “FABRIC,” said another. I did a circle through the building, looking inside the stores as I passed. Most were shuttered and dark. In one of the open ones a woman in a kerchief and a scratchy-looking dress stood behind a counter, staring at an empty room. A few bolts of rust-colored cloth sat on tables that had been randomly placed throughout the room. That was it. I left the building and walked away from Red Square, down a side street that ran next to GUM.
“Shoes,” I thought. “Fabric. That’s it?”
Soviet Russia didn’t just have a shortage of consumer goods. It had a shortage of adjectives. How hard was it to throw in a modifier here and there? Not “sexy” – that’s too far, too fast. But “comfortable,” maybe? It’s like they weren’t even pretending to try. I was irritated over how mad I was that nobody here cared about my needs as a consumer. Back in America, there were ads on everything. Babies, and cars. Fruit, even. It was ridiculous. Wasn’t that one reason I’d left? To get away from people ceaselessly trying to sell me things? But then, on the other hand, where were you supposed to buy birthday presents?
I picked my way down the icy sidewalk, muttering like an old man. After half a block I passed a store that hadn’t been there the week before. Cashmere blankets and sterling-silver desk sets gleamed behind the plate glass windows. Inside, women in black darted around, arranging and rearranging things. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the slushy street. The store’s name was emblazoned on a snappy yellow and white awning. “Christian Dior,” it said. I continued down the sidewalk, head down. I thought about how, in a city of nine million, barely 1 percent of Muscovites could afford to shop here. The collapse of Communism had made billionaires out of eight people, but most Russians were barely surviving. Most were like Lyosha’s dad, or the old ladies holding up single shoes in front of the metro. They were unemployed, poor, and angry. Christian Dior on Red Square was just rubbing it in.
I came to an intersection. Across the street, a long line of people rounded the corner and disappeared down the block. I walked across the street and got at the end of it. Would it end with lipstick from Poland? Oranges from the brand-new Czech Republic? It didn’t matter. When you saw a long line in Moscow, you stood in it, because if someone else wanted it, it was worth having. Of course, I remembered. This was how you bought things here. You stood in line.
After more than an hour, I crowded to the front with the clutch of Muscovites who’d been waiting with me. We clustered around the old man at his upended cardboard box, watching him demonstrate the item he was selling. He grasped its small wooden handle and spun the dimpled metal wheel at the other end. Back home, this was something used to put decorative designs in pie crusts. The man held up a paper cup, the opening of which had a pair of nylon pantyhose stretched tight over it. “Oooh,” said the crowd as they watched the man drag the small wheel over the stockings. The metal snagged the nylons as it rolled across, leaving a pattern of small tears. Several people produced rubles from somewhere and held them out to the man.
“Well, that’ll come in handy if a line ever leads to pantyhose!” I wanted to shout. My shopping had left me feeling uncharitable, bitter about the hour I’d just wasted standing there in the 18-degree weather. Lyosha did not want a stocking ripper for his birthday, and now I was hungry, and exhausted. Why was it so hard to find something nice? I was disgusted with what I was about to do, and angry at the Communists for making me do it. I turned around and walked back toward Red Square, to the brand-new Christian Dior.
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