My Surreal New Year's in Russia
Apparently the
event for New Year's Eve in the environs of Vladivostok every year is the
bash thrown by the mayor of Nakhodka, Vladivostok's sister city and yet
another Russian port overlooking the Sea of Japan. It was said, anyone with
the slightest importance (or self-importance) from the entire Russian Far
East usually showed up at this event. So, there I went, with my fiancée (who
actually received the invitiation to go). The approach
from the street to this concrete banquet hall was naturally like a rut-filled
dirt mountain goat trail, with a quarter-mile hike through muddy snow and
spikes jutting out of the ground to get to the closest place that a car could
be left. The dramatis
personae: mayors of sundry towns, villages and cities; the thug who calls
himself the governor of Primorskiy Krai; the chieftains of the nearby
oblasts; Korean businessmen; some New Russian tycoons (i.e., gangsters);
sundry local politicos, grandees and apparatchiks; diplomats and
functionaries from the consulates in Vladivostok, Nakhodka and Khabarovsk;
plus a few North American and European anthropologists studying the
indigenous peoples and languages in the area. It looked as though every
foreigner from within 500 miles of Vladivostok, as well as any Russian from
within 500 miles of Vladivostok who wanted to chat with foreigners, managed
to squeeze themselves into the dilapidated hall, which was graced with what I
can only call bordello decor. (Viz.,faux-satin and lace-ruffled curtains,
floral wallpaper and hideous plastic chandeliers that looked like mutant
flowers. The only thing missing was a tiger-striped couch.) The
entertainment was bizarre. First, a string quintet (composed of four Russians
and an Inuit-looking gentleman) materialised to render Tchaikovsky's Violin
Concerto in D-major -- except that a concerto requires an orchestra, and this
most un-Russian substitution had the paradoxical effect of adding molasses to
Tchaikovsky's syrup. But before I could throw up, the music ended and there
arrived an elaborately costumed couple waltzing to various Viennese
compositions. But just as suddenly as these Fred Asterov & Ginger
Rogerovna showed up they disappeared and gave way to...a bunch of boys and
girls doing routines to rap music. The finale was
quite an event -- they had fire breathers, and pythons, and a woman dressed
in Egyptian head-dress and baggy trousers of leopard print fabric gathered at
the ankles, danced with flaming hulahoops. (The man next to me said,
"Now I see whyshe has such short hair".) And the men who did the
fire and snake routines also did some things with knives -- one would lie on
the floor, and another would drop a knife point-first onto his chest from
about seven feet up. They broke several bottles and danced and jumped on the
glass in bare feet. They lit fires and ran the flames up and down their bare
arms, chests, and backs. Although none
sat and all stood around them, we had all been assigned tables. Next to mine
and my friend's table stood a Polish couple who claimed to be Australian
citizens but who could speak at most ten words of English,
"citizen" and "Australian" included. Then, in a drunken
mixture of Polish, Russian and German, the Polish man for some reason pointed
out the North Korean consul in our midst, who was standing about a hundred
feet away from us. "Aha! My first Stalinist! So many riddles wrapped
inside mysteries wrapped inside enigmas to inquire about! Would he be the
stereotype ofthe dour Stalinist? Or would he be the ironic stereotype of
theStalinist with the Zorba-like zest for life? Let me go have a chat with
him". (My formative experiences do not include contact with live
Stalinists, despite occasional appearances to the contrary.) So I raced across
the length of the banquet hall after my North Korean. But my advance
was repeatedly balked by the duty to toast the New Year's. Within the hour of
my arrival I had already toasted at least 40 times, probably with only 25
different people. One such inveterate toaster, a member of the Nakhodka city
council, had already so trapped me three times. At any rate I
kept my eye fixed on my prize, who apparently took notice of me because I
kept on staring at him. Just as I thought I might finally get to interrogate
him, I was cornered into a toast by the mayor of Nakhodka. After denouncing
Moscow and St. Petersburg as centres of parasitism, he kept on talking about
Al Gore and Madeleine Albright, to whom he referred as "Yivrei
Gore" and "Yikreika Albright", equivalent in English to the
phrases "the Jew Gore" or "the Jewess Albright". I
thought of correcting the misimpression that Gore is Jewish, but decided
against it. I resumed my
advance toward the North Korean, but upon arrival in his vicinity found him
speaking with the Vice Consul of Hindoooostan, one N. K. Sharma. I had been
warned by several guests that night that he was exceedingly boring and
unaware of how much he speaks, but I was not vigilant enough, for when I
introduced myself to the North Korean, the Sharma fellow lept to chat with
me, and my North Korean exploited this chance to abscond. This Sharma fellow
spoke of little else besides his inability to find fresh vegetables in
Vladivostok. (He was a strict vegetarian.) So instead of
delicately questioning the exotic Stalinist, I was stuck with as
uninteresting a specimen of humanity as an Indian. After a while his yearning
for tomatoes and onions began to take its toll on me, and he wouldn't release
me. So, out of perverseness I took to feigning ignorance of vegetarian ways
and pretended to discover "salads" in our midst. "Eureka,
here's a salad", I exclaimed, and proffered him a truly repulsive bowl
of "mitation lobster" (made of fish pulp) in sourcream mixed with
carrots and berries(?). "No, no, no, I can't eat that. These salads
contain fish". I feigned excitement at yet another discovery and
presented it for his inspection: what looked like 10 partsmayonnaise, 1 part
shrimp and 1 part beets. After showing him the bowl, the Indian, looking
rueful and homesick, released me from his conversation. I began looking
for my North Korean but unable to find him I started asking after him. I sidled
up to someone reputedly a trade representative from Vietnam, who had spotted
some 'croissants' at the buffet table and was wolfing them down. I told him
that these things could not possibly qualify as the genuine article, because
they failed the fundamental test of a croissant: it ought to disintegrate
under the slightest tactile pressure. These "croissants" on the
contrary exhibited an alarming resilience. (Had Mr. Sharma opened a Dunkin
Donuts franchise in Vladivostok?) I inferred from his spiked hair and Italianated suit that
this young Vietnamese longed to be stationed rather in New York or Paris than
in Vladivostok. Next I ran into
one of the anthropologists, a post-graduate student from the University of
British Columbia doing field work on...the Chukchi of Chukhotka, a province
deep in the Arctic Circle. By this time I was rather drunk from the
innumerable toastings, fortifying against the Hindoooo, and the like. So I
launched into what for me passes as drunken braggadocio: "I wager I can
identify more nationalities simply on the basis of their appearance than you.
I am an unacknowledged world expert in this regard." The Canadian
anthropologist replied, "I bet not." me: Let's start with the basics. Can you
tell Poles and Russians apart? Koreans and Japanese? [Then ensued
half an hour of machistic mutual interrogation of each other's grasp of ethnic
physiognomy, mostly by asking each other, "Alright, what's that bloke?"
and then going over to verify what he or she actually was.] CA: Do you see that [indigenous] person
over there? And that one? He's a Yakut and he's an Evenk. Well, this
Canadian neo-phrenologist was right, though I suspected he had spoken with
the two earlier. All the same, we ended up drinking and chatting with these
two wigs (wily indigenous gentlemen) for an hour, as the Canadian jabbered
away in some broken version of an indigenous language. All I remember from
that hour is that the Canadian and the two wigs regaled each other by mordantly
speculating whether the Russians or the Koryaks might be the first to resort
to cannibalism this winter to stay alive. (The Koryaks are apparently a proud
indigenous people living in Kamchatka who in the late 18th century repelled
the first Russian explorers under the Czar's commission by cooking them alive
and eating them.) By the time the
Yakut invited me to visit his village (of which he was mayor), it was time to
leave. Alas, I thought, I didn't get to chat with my North Korean. But
opportunity loomed again. Outside the banquet hall, as everyone was streaming
out into the parking area, I noticed that my Stalinist was transfixed in
salivating admiration of a BMW. I struck a conversation: me: Vam nravitsa etot BMW? [Do you
like this BMW?] Lada is a crap
Russian car, no longer made, whose body design was copied from Fiat but whose
insides were all too Russian. Then he grimaced
and walked away, apparently offended. |
Return to Travel Page
Return
to Pseudoerasmus's Homepage