Black Like Me

I wrote this post on May 12th, just after my return to Moscow and a string of sketchy incidences with the police. I was bitter about my treatment here - I'm a russophile, for God's sake - and that tone certainly comes out. As soon as I wrote it, I decided to hold off from publishing; perhaps I was worried about thumbing my nose at fate. More likely, the act of writing was cathartic enough not to necessitate posting a bitter rant. Much later, and much calmer, it seems interesting enough to warrant a post - but with this explanatory note about context.

For a short time, I was just being a bit lazy and a bit cautious. Then, I decided that it was turning into an interesting social experiment. The result was a wildly different experience of Russia. And all of it from simply not shaving.

It started in the Far East (as Russians call their Pacific provinces) on a couple of overnight trains - attempting to shave on a lumbering train is probably suicidal. Then, it continued in a couple of Soviet-style hotels. In Vladivostok, I had a mirror but no sink - it was necessary to straddle the toilet to get in front of the mirror. I decided not to shave. Another overnight train. Another Soviet-style hotel where I couldn't see more than a small portion of my face in the postcard-sized bathroom mirror.

By that time, somewhere around Ulan-Ude, the act of not shaving became the act of growing a beard. Still passive, mind you, but no longer unintentional. I decided, also, that I looked quite dashing and rugged with some growth on my face.

I'm a white man of European heritage - of that there is absolutely no disagreement from even casual observers in the US. But the interesting thing is that my dark hair and - the part of it that isn't coming in white - beard further distinguish me from a lot of Russians. Guesses on my nationality have begun to stray way off the mark. Usually my accent (I think) leads people to guess either German or English. I had heard nationalities like Serbian once before, but for the first time I was being pegged as Spanish, Moldovan or Caucasian (ie Georgian, Armenian).

This is interesting, but it's not necessarily a good thing in Russia. The population here is almost universally, stridently racist when it comes to what they call "the blacks" - people from Central Asia and the Caucausus. In 9 months of living in Russia, I was checked for documents a total of twice. They were perfunctory, mandatory stops.

Since I started growing the beard a month ago, I've been checked 4 times. And they have been markedly more aggressive and probing in nature.

The director of my Fellowship program is a former chief of police in Moscow. He warned me when I first arrived last summer that I was likely to be stopped by the 'militsia' with some frequency. When he asked me at the end of the Fellowship program last month how many times I had been stopped, he registered surprise. He looked at me and considered it.

"You're dark," he said, "but you have a very American face - open and smiling."

So it seems that the beard has covered some of the openness of my face. I'll take the credit - or blame - for that. But if I'm smiling less - well, I know exactly what to blame for that.

Home Again, Home Again

A spring day in New York City is a wonderful thing. The air is full of warm promises of summer with lingering hints of cool winter. The parks and trees are deep, lush green well before the searing heat introduces sun-burnt browns. Spring in New York is a far cry from the concrete gray of dismal winter. For me, just arriving from Moscow, New York looked different in a lot of ways.

I headed out to the local bagel shop for breakfast. There’s always a line, and the happy chaos of shouting countermen and ordering patrons. But in my new, post-Moscow idiom, I could see the differences right away. The New Yorkers formed a well-defined line that snaked single-file from the cash register. Any questions about the line were handled with proper deference – Excuse me, is this the end of the line? – in an effort to seek out the least offensive way to join the queue.

But in Moscow? Ahh, now that would be a very different scene. There would be no discernible line, and folks would march right up through the gathered crowd to shout questions at the clerks before milling around and then asking some follow up questions. They would stand right next to you, stare into your wallet, and impatiently wait for you to pay; their proximity, however, blocking egress. But they barge forward at your sign of having completed the transaction and cause the awkward situation of one person forcing a way in while another forces a way out.

And all of this would take place without any of the rich polite vocabulary in the Russian language. Not an excuse me, not a thank you, and more than just a little bit of personal physical contact. As I stood in line and marveled at the behavior of these natives, the person in front of me carried on a conversation with the person behind me. When the counterman shouted “Next”, I sensed the opening and a little brusquely asked the woman in front of me if she had ordered. In retrospect, it was perhaps more than a little bit brusque and it was certainly lacking in all the niceties of our language – please, excuse me, etc.

After I ordered, the person behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry if we held you up at all,” he said. And he meant it. I was shocked.

I got several more “excuse me’s” and a couple of “thank you’s” before I could get out of the store. Where were the famously short-tempered Manhattanites? The cutting comments one should expect from the sharp-tongued residents of a city so storied? My head spun from the coffee and the bagel and the crashing reality that the hard-boiled New Yorkers of American lore don’t hold a candle to the Muscovites.

I needed a walk to clear my head after that scene of unimaginable civility.

New York’s orderly grid of streets is patently rational and easy to navigate. Their regularity means that none are so large as to prohibit walking across them – the highways are banished to the edges of Manhattan. In Moscow, however, the antique and random arrangement of some roads – enlarged into huge highways – forces pedestrians to cross most intersections underground.

I walked toward Central Park, crossing Park and Madison Avenues – imagine! - on the surface. Add the tree-lined side streets in Manhattan and I couldn’t help get the feeling that New York was a sleepy little town compared to Moscow.

Most parks in Russia are best described by our word “forest”. Perhaps in recognition of their short growing season, Russians generally refuse to trim nature back into an orderly scene. Trees grow where they want; lawns quickly become high weeds, etc. Central Park, in contrast, looked like the world’s largest, most immaculately tended garden. Absolutely every path, lawn, bench, pond, and streetlight was in top condition. It rivaled the condition of the royal parks at the Peterhof and Catherine Palaces outside St. Petersburg.

I underestimated, however, how hard it is to get around the city during a weekday. I left what I thought was plenty of time to get to Penn Station from the Upper East Side. Shortly into the cab ride, I realized that traffic was so bad that I was in danger of not making the train. So, I asked the driver to get me to the subway on the Westside and I’d continue the rest of the trip on the metro. No luck – somehow we ended up going further and further east.

I missed the train by 5 minutes. Of course, the next departure to my destination was an hour late leaving the station. More about Amtrak at some other time perhaps.

Everything in New York seems kind of strange and new to me. After something like 10 years here, a brief 9 months is all it takes for the landscape to change – new stores, new buildings – to make a little bit of discovery necessary. But I love that about New York.

And it makes me a little nostalgic for when I first moved here. A little bit of wide-eyed wonder when walking down the streets may just roll back a bit of the jade screen the city helped me erect over all that time.