Russian Affair, Part 15

It's been 50 years since I huddled under my desk at P.S. 8, worrying about the day when this would not be a drill but the real thing, when Soviet missiles would rain on New York and we would all be blinded by a flash of light moments before our incineration. I could never have imagined at that vulnerable and impressionable age that the world would survive for another half century with no nuclear warfare. And I could never have dreamed that I would spend so much of my time as an adult on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I doubt that I will ever return to Russia, our work being done. Our sister newspaper not only survived but is thriving. And Books for the World, like so many other small humanitarian organizations, is no longer welcome. But we are proud of what we accomplished: equipping the Chemal village school with books, furniture and school supplies; furnishing more than 17,000 books in English to Novokuznetsk's schools and university; and donating a 40-foot container loaded with clothing, diapers, sporting goods and sewing machines to 12 Siberian orphanages.
It's a big world, though, and there's no shortage of places that could use our help. In June, I'll return to Lithuania along with Alice and six members of the Washington Rotary Club. We plan to spend a couple of days in Obelei with Diana Kanciene helping out at Arteities Vardan in any way we can.
If you look at a map of Europe and zero in on the Baltic states, you'll notice something peculiar about Lithuania. In the southwest corner of that country, along the coast of the Baltic Sea at the border with Poland, is a tiny piece of Russia that's cut off and separated from the motherland. It’s called Kaliningrad. It's a little piece of Russia that won’t go away.
That map is like my heart. I have a little piece of Russia there that will remain forever. It is a pocket stuffed with joy and sorrow - the memory of my Russian affair.

THE END

Russian Affair, Part 14

(Diana Kanciene and two of her daughters)

Even before my "breakup" with Russia, I admit to "seeing" other countries on the side. My work for the newspaper and also as a volunteer for Books for the World took me to other places in the former Soviet Bloc. In Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania, I met people every bit as warm and hospitable as the Russians. I could go on for many more chapters telling their personal stories, but all tales need to come to a conclusion.
I need to tell you about Diana, however. We hear so much about greedy oligarchs, Kremlin bullies, criminals, xenophobes and communist backsliders in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and so rarely hear about the good and the unselfish.

You'd think with six children of her own, Diana Kanciene would have enough to do at home. But she and her husband, who have two other adopted children, are raising a village. Diana operates Arteities Vardan (For the Future), a community organization dedicated to improving family life and the welfare of children in Obelei, Lithuania, an impoverished town racked by alcoholism, where the unemployment rate is typically 60 percent. The heart of the organization is a safe house for abused and neglected kids. At any given time, between 20 and 24 kids come to the house for meals or to spend the night, whenever necessary, to do their homework after school, or to participate in games and other activities impossible for them in their own homes.

Diana's thin and frail appearance is deceiving; she is a woman of great strength and energy. A devout Catholic, she is as much concerned with children's spiritual health as she is with their physical safety.

Even while she strives to rescue kids from the dangerous environment of their homes, she also has launched innovative programs to form better relationships between parents and their children: a sewing club for mothers and their daughters; a workshop where fathers can teach their sons things like carpentry and bicycle repair.

Diana is tireless and is bothersome to many villagers. Still, her boundless love of kids has won her respect and a nickname: Saint Diana. It's a name that causes this shy and diminutive woman to blush with embarrassment. She likes to give credit to the teenagers and young adults that have come up through Arteities Vardan and now volunteer their time with the younger kids. They'll grow up to be good parents, and that's a future worth working for, she says.

Russian Affair, Part 13

How do you know when you've fallen out of love? I don't remember, because like pain and grief, falling out of love is difficult to recall. But I think one day you realize, much after the fact, that things are different.

It happened that June of 2004. One Sunday afternoon, some guys from the newspaper invited me out for the day. We'd drive to Mezhdureshensk to meet some of their friends, then have the banya – the Russian sauna - and eat shashlik (meat on skewers) in a park by the river.
We went to the office of their friend Victor, who had lunch prepared for us. I soon realized that Victor was the type of person who expends most of his energy trying to impress everyone else with his wealth and power. After lunch, we picked up Victor's mistress - a tall and stunning blonde half his age - and then to a computer shop, where he bought her a printer. Then we were taken to the mayor's office so that Victor could give the mayor a birthday present. The large and lavishly appointed office was crowded with hangers-on, who were there to give the mayor expensive gifts also. It was an ugly display of pomposity and bootlicking. I looked at the gifts - a laptop computer, leather briefcase, imported champagne and scotch - and thought about the orphanages that I had visited in the area in the past few days, overcrowded dumping grounds for Russia's unwanted, where there were not enough blankets to go around, and infirmaries without even aspirin. The largess of the mayor's office sickened me.

I saw other signs. Putin was proposing to halt foreign adoptions and allow work only by charitable organizations registered with the government – an impossibility for a small charity like our Books for the World. On a more personal note, the excitement and energy had gone out of some friendships, and my original Russian colleague had inexplicably severed our communication. I began to feel as if I had overstayed my welcome.

I had seen almost nothing of Julia that visit, save for a brief meeting for coffee on my last day there. To her, and to my friends at the offices of the Kuznetsk Worker, I said "da svidanya," even though that literally means "until later" in Russian, and I knew that there would be no later. I knew that I would never ride that slow, clattering trolley across the Tom River; never again see the clouds of orange, black and white smoke billowing from the stacks of those steel mills; never stroll along Kirova Street in the evening; never again, never. It was really "goodbye" this time.

Russian Affair, Part 12

Back when he was fresh out of university, Yuri was assigned to teach school in a remote Siberian village. Marooned there that winter by heavy snow, he and a couple of other teachers whiled away their time studying a book about rock'n'roll and listening to music.

Today, Yuri is just as passionate about that music, spending what free time he has fiddling with his turntable and stereo equipment and enjoying his collection of LPs, some of which he bought here in Washington when he visited in 2001, others of which I mailed to him - albums by the Turtles, Beach Boys and Atomic Rooster.
Yuri is dean of foreign languages at a state university in Novokuznetsk. He teaches English literature, and his favorite author and the subject of his doctoral studies is the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. He is, in a way, comically and typically academic. His speech is so influenced by British English that even when he's speaking his native language, Russians ask, "Is he Russian?"

He is as enthusiastic about art, good wine, whiskey and conversation as he is about music, and as ambivalent about politics as religion. As agreeable and laid-back as he is, Yuri has no tolerance for laziness or deceit.

I spent a couple of weeks sleeping on Yuri's couch in the early days of summer in 2004. I would commute back and forth across the river to the city on the street car, and for that short time lived almost the typical life of a Siberian city dweller. I bought food in the street markets and cooked dinner for Yuri, his wife and teenage daughter.

Since then, Yuri had divorced and remarried, to one of his former students, and now has another daughter, still and infant. Like their country, he and his former wife have started over. It has been rough, but life will be better, eventually. Hard times come like heavy rain, but always a few dry spots of hope remain in the corners.

Russian Affair, Part 11

(Misha and his mom, Novokuznetsk, 1998)

Some boys don't grow up. They go on making impulsive decisions and end up paying dearly for them. So it is with Misha.

He started out working for the police department in Novokuznetsk, and then became police reporter for the Kuznetsk Worker. He was a respected investigative reporter, but that wasn't enough. When a local television station offered him a job, he jumped at it. But a few years later, he found himself out of a job. Now he's working as a security guard and writing pieces on the side for an agricultural weekly.
Misha is no stranger to Washington, Pa. He came here for the summer of 1997 on an exchange program with our newspaper and fell in love with America. His first day here, he was taken to the Shop n' Save. Standing confused in front of the meat counter, with its hundreds of different cuts all shrink-wrapped, he asked, "Is this some kind of meat museum?"
He took a tour of the county jail and had lunch there. He said that he would be perfectly content to spend the rest of his life there in that jail.

Back in Novokuznetsk, his bedroom in his mother's apartment became a shrine to all things American. He wanted nothing more than to leave Russia for the U.S., and he did return for another extended summer visit. He made plans to emigrate. But Misha is a man torn between desire and obligation. His mother suffers from diabetes and other ailments, and there is really no one else to be there for her. And then there is Misha's foster son, the result of another impulsive decision.

The tone of his e-mails to friends here is miserable; he is in Purgatory, between duty and his yearning. Still, even though he's past 40, a boyish optimism peeks through. Someday, he thinks, everything will be better.

Russian Affair, Part 10

(Lera, left, and Lindsay in Moscow, May 1999)

I first met Lera 10 years ago, when she was 15 years old and interviewing for a chance to come here - to Washington, Pa. - on an exchange program. But I had seen her a couple of years earlier, while touring her school. It was hard to forget her - tall and such an uncommonly beautiful child with such a command of the English language at such a young age.

Lera was one of a dozen finalists for a program sponsored by the Observer-Reporter and the Kuznetsk Worker that would send two students from her city to ours for a couple of weeks, to live in American homes and attend school here, and to return and write about their experiences for the newspaper. In the interview, I asked her to tell me a little about her home life. It was April then, and snowing every day. She told me she had the most important chore in her household: to grow tomato seeds into plants. She said she had to be very careful to keep the seeds pots watered, but not too wet, and to make sure the plantings got sunlight but were not too close to the windows to freeze. She said that if she failed, her family would suffer dearly, so important to their survival was their summer garden.
Her parents were both medical doctors, who were, oddly enough, among the lowest-paid workers in Russia at the time. It makes no sense, but a worker in a fast-food restaurant could make twice the money as a surgeon.

Lera did come here, attended classes at McGuffey High School, went to the Homecoming Dance and a football game, experienced pizzas and malls. She was astounded at the deer that wandered in the yard of her hosts, the Logue family, my next-door neighbors. "Why aren't you shooting them and eating them?" she wondered.
When I took my neighbors Linda Logue and her daughter, Lindsay, to Russia in May 1999, we saw Lera in Moscow, where her parents had moved in search of better jobs. She gave me a copy of the New Testament in Russian, to sharpen my reading skills.

We never saw Lera again. Her e-mails to Lindsay stopped. Some friends in Novokuznetsk had heard that she was planning to immigrate to Israel.
She would be 25 years old now. I wonder about her; wonder if she was able to avoid being exploited or demoralized in the harsh environment that surrounded her; wonder if she is still the innocent, sincere and thoughtful person she was as a teenager.

Russian Affair, Part 9

"Starving artist" is a figurative term in this country. Artists struggle to make a living here, but they don't actually starve. In Russia 10 years ago, that description would have been more literal.

At a time when Russia's economy was in chaos, the crew at the morgue in the city of Novokuznetsk - about the same size as Pittsburgh - picked up, on average, 12 bodies a night, most of them victims of starvation or malnutrition. To be a painter or sculptor in Russia at the time meant pure dedication to art, because selling anything was out of the question. Few people had money enough to even visit the local art museum, let alone purchase paintings.

Alexander Popov (pictured) remembers when the mayor of Novokuznetsk pleaded with the arts community to paint large murals celebrating the city's 380th anniversary. The mayor grew angry when the artists, who agreed to work for free, asked for paint. "How were we supposed to buy all this paint? With what money?" Popov recounted as he filled cups with steaming tea in his 8th-floor studio in a high-rise on the outskirts of town. The building was occupied almost entirely by artists, "so that they can keep an eye on us," Popov joked. I think.

Complaints of artists in this city are so familiar. They feel unappreciated and marginalized in a society with vulgar tastes. But Popov, jovial and mischievous, has no time for whining. His canvases, thickly layered with slashes of primary colors, are youthful, exuberant and expressive. A hundred of them cover the walls to the tall ceiling in his studio.

I visited him again there two years later, when eight of us crammed in around a kitchen table meant for two for a whole night of feasting and drinking and joke-telling. On a hallway wall, we all signed our names in marker, adding them to the scores of other guests who had done the same.

I bought a couple of his paintings and gave them to my son and daughter, who are both painters themselves. I wish only that they could know the man who made them, know how difficult it has been for him to work in a place where artists have been pushed to the fringe.

Russian Affair, Part 8

Julia was a college student when this photo was taken and when she first met me and my colleagues from the Observer-Reporter on our visit to Novokuznetsk in 1998. She was a volunteer interpreter for our group, eager to brush up on her American English. So few of her teachers knew anything about the way Americans talked, she said, and she should know, because she had spent a year in Vermont as a high-school exchange student.

I felt a special bond with Julia - and still do - because of an odd coincidence: She and my daughter were born on the same day, actually just a few hours apart. Because in all of my trips to Russia I was never able to learn Russian well enough to conduct interviews on my own, I spent a lot of time with her and was a guest at her parents' table often.

Julia has always had a love for travel and has done much of it. Her Russian passport lists her nationality as Ukrainian, like her mother. Her father holds a Jewish passport, as hard as it is for us to comprehend that sort of discrimination and profiling.

After graduating, Julia took a job teaching at a business college in Novokuznetsk. Although she was grateful to have any work at all, she complained bitterly in e-mails to me over the years about the low and infrequent salary and the lack of motivation in her students. I think she very disappointed, too, that so many of her friends and classmates had moved on, away from the city to Moscow and abroad, leaving her - of all people - behind.

Eventually, Julia met Ralph, a German, and fell in love. (She is as fluent in German as she is in English.) They had a lengthy long-distance relationship and were married a couple of years ago. But Julia had to return to her job in Novokuznetsk to wait for approval to live in Germany legally, which finally occurred last summer. The separation of this only child from her parents hurt.

Here's a little of the last e-mail I received from Julia:
"We celebrated New Year with Ralph's friends in Berlin which was very nice too.
Shortly after midnight everyone went outside to make small fireworks, it lasted for about half and hour and then it was very quiet - in Russia you can't sleep for another week because Xmas comes after New Year and then comes Old New Year.
"Of course I miss my parents and friends but I can always pick up the phone and make a call. We can also watch Internet TV in Russian and Ralph has hundreds of CDs and DVDs with Russian music and films. And I can always speak Russian to him. Some of my classmates moved to Germany, so there are people around me who I can talk to. I can't say I feel myself at home but it's better than I expected."

Russian Affair, Part 7

How to get to Chemal: First, fly to the opposite side of Earth – Novosibirsk; then, get in a car and drive south all day, through Barnaul, Biysk, Gorno-Altaysk, following the Katun River toward the border with China. You reach the village of Chemal after the road turns to a rutted muddy track. It seems as far away as you can go without leaving the planet, an it is a place of astounding beauty and simplicity.
That is where I met Edvard and Nadejda Schmals, in April 1999. Then, and on another visit 13 months later, I spent several nights in their home and learned just a little about what life is like in rural Siberia.

Edvard and Nadejda live outside the village, along the dirt road that beyond their house gets narrower as it courses through the forest until it reaches the end of Russia. Across the road is a wide stream, a tributary of the Katun, that in the spring roars with the rush of snow melt. Along the boulder-strewn bank is a deep pool in which the couple bathe every day. Beside it, leaning against a tree is a heavy iron bar with which they use to break the ice in winter.
Every day, Edvard insists, regardless of the cold. It is the secret of their health, he says. He is a strong, broad-shouldered man with ruddy cheeks and hard, calloused hands. I went with Nadejda one day for a dip. I measured the temperature of the water at 42 degrees F. I could get into the water no farther than my knees, my bones ached so badly. She submerged, then shot up from the bottom, laughing hard at my timidity.

My hosts are the same age as my wife and I; their son and daughter are the same ages as ours. But oh, how different our lives are. Although they have electricity, their home has no running water. Well water is poured into buckets suspended above the sinks; push up on a plunger in the bottom of the bucket and water comes out. There is an outhouse beyond the extensive vegetable garden, and a banya, which Edvard fires up for weekly baths, and a cow barn.
A massive stove made of brick and rounded with stucco sits in the middle of the house and warms all the rooms. I can't imagine leaving that cozy warmth in winter, when it can reach 45 below zero, for a trip to the privy.
At that time, Russia's economy was in chaos, and there was no money in Chemal. Nadejda worked in the village museum and Edvard as a road supervisor - both government jobs - but neither had received pay for almost a year. They survived as did everyone - by bartering, and by taking firewood and wild mushrooms to Gorno-Altysk to sell on the street. Edvard owned a Jeep-like car, because of his work. Many others in the village got around on horseback or in carts pulled by horses or livestock. Life in Chemal was more like it was 100 years ago than the final moments of the 20th century.

But as hard as life was for them, it was simple, uncomplicated, pure. We have the clean water from the mountains, we grow our own vegetables, we milk our own cow and raise our own animals, Nadejda explained. This is why we are healthy, and it is why, when times are so difficult, that we are so happy, she told me.

Russian Affair, Part 6

Just shoved from the door of a bus and standing ankle-deep in slush on a strange street in St. Petersburg, I felt confused and afraid. I began walking toward the center of the city and passed an impromptu flea market. A boy ran up to me, waving a sheaf of mimeographed illustrations. I stopped and looked at them. They appeared to be of Kalashnikov machine guns, pistols and - possibly - grenade launchers. The boy pointed to a man standing in front of the open trunk of a Mercedes-Benz. I hurried on, wondering how this country had gotten so out of control.

Russia appeared to be going insane in 1994. The value of the ruble was tumbling dramatically, from one day to the next. Criminals and prostitutes seemed to operate freely and openly everywhere. I was alarmed, but I was also fascinated. Russia had gotten my attention, and soon I would be seduced.

Maybe it was the rhythm of their language; maybe it was the romantic severity of their weather; or maybe it was my roots in eastern Poland that caused me to fall in love with the Russian people. Sometimes I would find myself sitting around a table pushed up close to a warm stove, my ears still burning from the cold outside, sipping tea and listening to others talking in a tongue I could not understand, and I would be hurtled back in time and halfway around the world to the kitchen of my great-grandparents - my Babu and Jadgi - and I would feel I had come all the way back home.

In the morning in Novokuznetsk, the sidewalks flow with people headed to work. I liked to walk against the current and watch the parade of faces: some old, some gleeful, some tough, some drunk, some tired, each with its own story. The word Beauty conjures many images, the first of which for me is the oval of a woman's face, framed by the fur of her hat, her cheeks ever-so-slightly reddened by the cold. There may be no expression, but the eyes tell everything. I saw in so many of these eyes sadness and resignation, but also strength and perseverance.

I came to know many of the faces, and the stories behind them. I tell you about Edvard and Nadejda next.

("Olya," oil on cardboard, 1998, by Ivan Bacharev)

Russian Affair, Part 5

Few people at our sister newspaper, the Kuznetsk Worker, spoke any English, so Boris, one of the editors, asked his brother, Lev, to interpret for us. Like so many Russians, Lev was younger than he looked. Life expectancy for men in Novokuznetsk, a city the size of Pittsburgh and with air quality as poor as Pittsburgh's 50 years ago, is 59 years. Lev was in his early 50s then, but looked 10 years older. Tall and still athletic, Lev's craggy, handsome face was almost permanently cracked in smile. Within him was a much younger, more mischievous man.

No one could tell us what Lev did for a living. He would only admit that he worked as a translator for the government. Tom and I liked to think that he was once a spy for the KGB, as unlikely as that seemed. But he did enjoy some uncommon privileges, like his collection of guns.

During our first visit and another in September 1997, we went on manly outings: bathing in the Russian banya, gathering mushrooms in the forest, eatings chunks of meat on skewers and drinking vodka around a campfire, and target shooting with Lev's Kalashnikov carbines. Through all of these activities, Lev behaved like a social director on a cruise ship. Hard to imagine, but inside him was a schoolgirl striving to create the perfect party.

Boris and Lev invited Tom and I to their apartment one day for dinner, prepared by their "sainted mother." In addition to the food and drink, Lev planned a full slate of activities, including singing and target shooting. We took turns sitting at the head of the table and firing with a pellet gun at a target on the wall on the other side of the room. "Be careful, Mother!" Lev shouted several times as the poor old woman was nearly wounded carrying platters to and from the kitchen. Later, he hung medals around our necks that he had made from string and cardboard, carefully painted.

Lev's childish nature was magnified by alcohol. Clearly, he had a problem, like most Russian men, sadly. It must have gotten worse, because even though I returned to Novokuznetsk four more times over the next seven years, I never saw Lev again. When asked, his friends told me he was working, or living in another city. Finally, someone responded with that Russian gesture - a flick of the fingers against the side of the neck - that indicated he had surrendered to the bottle.

Everyone who has knocked around this life for a while has known a Lev. We are richer for it.

Russian Affair, Part 4

Almost three years later, in November 1996, I found myself back in Russia under cover of snow. This time it was with Observer-Reporter publisher Tom Northrop on a mission to meet the staff of our sister newspaper in Siberia. Arriving in Novosibirsk before dawn, we met Rita, with whom I had corresponded for more than a year, waiting for us on the tarmac, bundled in a hooded coat, buffeted by the blizzard, marching in time to keep warm in the sub-zero temperature.

Eight hours later, our car reached Novokuznetsk. We ascended to Rita's 9th-floor apartment in an elevator the size of a phone booth. She unlocked and swung open a huge steel plate covering her door. There were thieves everywhere, she explained.

Rita and her husband, Vladimir, had moved out of their apartment so that Tom and I could live there for a couple of weeks. She would come every morning to fix our breakfast, she said, and at night to make our supper. We had been traveling for 40 hours. Tom took the bedroom, I the couch in the other room. I woke frequently, bothered by the sound of the water running ceaselessly in the toilet tank. I thought about getting up to fix it, but didn't. (I stayed in this apartment frequently over the years, and six years later, despite my fiddling, the toilet was still running.)
Rita had heard that Americans are hearty eaters and consume huge breakfasts. We sleepily sat down to a tiny kitchen table covered in platters of baked chicken, boiled potatoes, pickles, tomatoes, cheese, bread and fruit. "What to drink? Beer?" she asked.

We pleaded with her to just let us have a little coffee or tea and a piece of toast for breakfast and no more, but she refused. We were just being overly polite, she thought.

In Russia, the heat is turned on in everyone's apartment in October and is turned off in April, regardless of the weather. The hot water comes from a central heating plant somewhere across the city. When the lines break or are shut down for repair, there is no hot water. When the heat is turned on, it stays on, and when the apartment gets too hot, you open the windows. Opening our window, I could see the waves of heat-distorted air rising from the many open windows of apartment houses across the street and beyond.

At night, we would return to the apartment, often walking up the nine flights because the elevator was not working, after having been guests of honor at huge and lavish meals, comparable to Thanksgiving dinners, that simultaneously seemed to be vodka-drinking contests. Rita would be waiting for us, with yet another meal. "Please, don't murder us with all this food," we pleaded, but she ignored us. She seemed to survive on cigarettes and tiny cups of strong coffee, boiled in a copper pot atop the miniature stove. The only way to make her stop feeding us was to clean our plates and then protectively cover them with our forearms, and threaten to leave immediately and go back to America if we were forced to eat any more.

Russian Affair, Part 3

No one at the hotel outside St. Petersburg could tell me how or where to buy a bus ticket so I could get into the city. I followed footholes through a field of knee-deep snow to the bus stop and waited with a dozen expressionless pensioners, bundled against the cold and clutching tattered plastic shopping bags. "Bilets?" I asked some of them, but they just smiled faintly and shook their heads.

The electric bus arrived. I made my way to the front and tapped on the glass, but the driver, never even turning his head, raised his hand and pointed to a hand-lettered sign on the window: "NYET NYET NYET."

I moved toward the back of the bus and found a place to stand by a pole. At every stop, more old people with shopping bags crammed aboard. A few took tickets from their purses and stamped holes in them at the canceling devices below the iced, opaque windows. Paying for bus rides was on the honor system, most of the time. But not this time.

A short, broad-shouldered man in a carmel-colored leather jacket boarded the bus at one of the stops, nodded to the driver and began working his way down the aisle. "Bilets!" he demanded. From everyone's pocket or purse appeared a canceled ticket, which the plain-clothes transit policeman wearily scanned. Everyone knows the system – everyone but me. Then his eyes met mine. His jaw tightened.
"Bilet, pashalusta," he said to me after a few tense seconds. I shrugged, pointed to the driver, opened my wallet, shrugged again.
"Bilet! Bilet!" he repeated. No one on the bus was talking; they were all watching this little drama. Miraculously, a woman stepped beside me and offered to interpret.
"I don't know how to pay," I pleaded. The transit cop looked straight into my eyes without blinking. I'm sure that this was not always his job. Perhaps, before the fall of the communist government, he was a KGB officer, or perhaps the managers of a chemical plant, and now he was checking tickets on a dilapidated electric bus, just to make ends meet.
"In your country, how do you pay for the bus?" he asked. I told him we put coins in a machine at the front of the bus.
"Here, if you don't have a ticket, you must pay a fine of 2,000 rubles," the interpreter offered. At the time, that was a little more than one U.S. dollar. I glanced into my wallet and was embarrassed to realize that I had only a 50,000-ruble note.

The cop tilted his head to one side and looked deeply into my face. I could almost taste the resentment in the air. I couldn't imagine what would happen next. Then the woman interpreter grabbed my arm and pushed my up the aisle, away from my tormentor. "You must buy tickets from driver," she said.
"This is your stop," the woman whispered before pushing me down the steps and out the door of the bus and into the slush of the street.

The doors slammed shut and the bus moved away, leaving me in the wind and dim northern light, wondering where to go and what next to do.

Russian Affair, Part 2

I tagged along with a group of Washington & Jefferson College students and professors touring what once was the Soviet Union in January 1994. My first look at Russia came in the gray light of dawn, through the sooty window of a train rolling slowly through frosted brownfields. The car rocked, its silent cruising punctuated by the clack and screech of wheels on track. Gray, white and brown clouds spewed from smokestacks. My forehead pressed against the cold glass.
"Gloomy, yet dirty," one of the students sharing my view joked.

A little later, we entered the Metro station and descended deep into the earth on a long, quick escalator. At the bottom were three-foot-thick steel doors, meant to shelter a population huddled underground in the event of nuclear holocaust.
Those doors are symbols of the philosophical divide between East and West. In America, we stocked our own private fallout shelters; each house has its own water heater. In Russia, the fallout shelters are collective, and hot water is piped to your apartment from a central heating plant.

I did a good bit of exploring on my own that January, which nearly proved fatal. Intending to visit the Moscow bureau of the Associated Press, I called and asked for directions and took the Metro to the suggested stop. But walking from there, I realized I had to cross an eight-lane avenue. There were no crosswalks or traffic lights to be seen, and the traffic was heavy and fast. I waited for a break in the traffic for a few minutes, then made my move. I sprinted onto the pavement but realized halfway across that I had miscalculated the speed of oncoming cars. I was caught in the middle, with no median. This was at night, and I was wearing dark clothing. Vehicles, blinding me with their headlights, flashed by so close as to buffet me, their horns blaring.
At last, I dashed for the other side, then stood bent over, hands on knees, sweating, thighs aching and shaking from the rush of adrenaline.

Later, after my appointment at AP, I faced the same problem getting back to my hotel. There has to be a better way, I thought. This time, I entered the stream of pedestrians that flowed a few hundred yards past where I had crossed the furious avenue. I followed people down steps and into an underpass, well-lighted and lined with kiosks. Emerging on the other side of the avenue, I realized my earlier stupidity.

I often think about that moment of terror, and how easily I might have been killed. Every experience since then seems like a bonus.

Russian Affair, Part 1

Fire sirens sent shivers up my back. Every time I heard one whining from a distance, I thought: Is this it? Is this the end? Is this a call for firemen, or is it a warning to find a fallout shelter?

I would anxiously scan the horizon for mushroom clouds. Too young to know the difference between real and imagined danger, too old to be oblivious of the news and what grown-ups were talking about, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time - hours, days, months - before we were all incinerated by nuclear bombs.

Back then, just about everyone in our neighborhood was stocking shelves in their cellars with blankets and batteries and cans of food and water.
One night, my parents had friends over for drinks. My sister and I lay on our stomachs at the top of the stairs, secretly taking in the conversation.
"It's all a waste of time, this fallout-shelter business, I tell you," the man from across the street said. "We’re 15 miles from the target, and the Russians have H-bombs. We don't have a chance."

The Russians were our enemies, we were told. But I had my doubts. Oh, sure, some of them were. Just about the only photos we'd see of Russians were of grim-faced officials in fur hats watching hundred of missiles parading through Red Square. But there were millions and millions of people there, and they couldn't all be like that. My grandparents and great-grandparents came from that part of the world, and they're not the enemy, I thought. There's got to be people just like them over there – people just like us. Maybe there were kids just like me who were just as terrified of being nuked.

A few years later, even though both sides were stockpiling enough nuclear weapons to destroy Earth many times over, things calmed down a bit. The poet Evgeny Evtushenko was reading his poetry about beauty and memory and love. Khrushchev seemed more and more like someone's merry old grandpa than an evil titan. Some photos surfaced in magazines showing young Soviets who looked remarkably like us.

I began to feel my skepticism had been justified, that it was never right to fear and hate people just because your teachers and your parents and your government encouraged it.

I could not have imagined then that I would someday not just meet "the enemy" but know him and share his food and sleep on his couch; that I would know many of them - good, bad, kind, cruel, passionate, indifferent; that the courses of their lives and mine would become tangled and snarled.