Memorials to the Unmemorialized

Shirokorechinskaya Graveyard, just a couple of kilometers from the city center, is curious in that it is devoted to (a)gadflies silenced by Jozef Stalin's purges and (b) casualties in the 1990s Mafioso wars. The postmodern detail seen on each of these tombstones is amazing and eerie, with some of them lithographically posed in James Dean, Bing Crosby or Elvis Presley style. One memorial even potrayed a giant hand dangling an absurdly garguantuan set of BMW keys. Truly unique, though I felt that I may be two seconds from taking a bullet myself for snapping photos with all the thick-necked, sunglassed flatheads shuffling about.


The second notable sight today was a breathtaking memorial here in Ekaterinburg to soldiers killed in Afghanistan, often referred to as Russia's Vietnam. In a country obsessed with the military, especially in its art, the tragic figure shown, his sadness, is simply rare. Perhaps the most human war memorial I've seen, perhaps surpassing our own Vietnam Memorial in its gut-wrenching power. In the back, out of view, is an ancillary memorial to soldiers killed in Chechnya. I watched in awe as two workers prepared to install a new slate of casualty names, a fresh reminder that Russia itself is in the throes of internal conflict and terrorism.

Bloody Ekaterinburg

Nestled in the middle Urals, dividing Russian Asia from Europe, Ekaterinburg was founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1723 and named for his wife, the future Empress Catherine I. The legend says that, a year later, he punished her infidelity by beheading her lover and installing the disembodied bean in a jar on her nightstand. Fitting then, that Ekaterinburg, the city of many names [Ekaterinburg, Yekaterinburg, Sverdlosk], the capital of the Urals, the birthplace of Russian industry, has such a bloody, tumultuous history.

Americans addicted to the History Channel will know Ekaterinburg as the site of the assassination of the Romanovs, the last of the Russian monarchs. At the outbreak of the revolution in February 1917, Nicholas II was arrested and exiled to the Siberian city of Tobolsk. By August 1918, civil war was at a fever pitch, with the Red Army (Bolsheviks) and White Army (Mensheviks) capturing city after another. When the Mensheviks took Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks feared that Nicholas would be freed, so they opted to have him and the Romanov lineage eliminated. On July 16, 1918 the entire family - Nicholas, wife Alexandra and their five children Tatiana, Alexei, Maria, Olga and Anastasia - were murdered in Dom Ipatiev, a house in Ekaterinburg.

The disposal of the bodies borders on the tragic, the macabre and the messy. It has since been determined, after years of secrecy, what ghoulish bungling transpired in the aftermath. They were dumped in an abandoned mine 16 kilometers away, followed by a couple of grenades intended to collapse the mine shaft (which didn't). The bodies were yanked back out, and an acids expert was summoned, who transported 200 liters of a sulfuric/nitric acid mixture but, en route, fell off his horse, breaking his leg and rendering him useless. They then opted to distribute the bodies to several smaller mines and pour acid on them but the cart carrying them got trapped in the boggy swamps. Now desperate they opted to bury them on the spot, first trying in vain to burn the bodies, then poured acid on them which instead soaked right into the ground. The remains were finally uncovered 73 years later.

In 1977, then-governer and local hero Boris Yeltsin had Dom Ipatiev destroyed. Today the site is marked by the majestic, powerful Cathedral on the Blood as the Romanovs have now been canonized as saints.

During the Cold War, this was the area where US spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down, detained and exhanged for a Soviet spy in 1962. In 1979, an anthrax leak from a biological weapons plant killed 64 civilians in the city.

After being plagued by 1990s Mafia wars, the city now enjoys a major economic and construction boom. The Urals, being one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet, are not particularly impressive looking but contain some of the most important and valuable minerals on the planet. Indeed, while digging during the construction of the city's Metro system in the 1990s, enough gold was discovered to pay for the entire project.

Siberia in My Rear-View Mirror, Figuratively

The trek across Siberia to its Western edge was not particularly painful though I am happy to finally be here in the Urals, in Ekaterinburg. I hope to see some more of this intriguing city before my energy supplies run too low as I'm feeling a bit tapped out at the moment. And dreadfully homesick, for someone to speak English with, for some good music, for my friends and family. For my overworked empty life back home.

Slogging across vast Russia by train invokes a full ophthalmic-olfactive-aural inwardness that I cannot fully untangle. Chugging, rhythmic sounds, gutteral almost sensual, Russians yelling and talking, laughing and cursing. Living. The constancy of motion while nothing in your immediacy moves, save for a swinging baggage strap or a flower tippling in a vase. The greenery and the suburuban post-Soviet blight take turns whipping by the window. The smells, oh yes, the smells, of fish and beer and meat and coal and sweat. Of humanity. There is serious time bending, hours scream by and creep coetaneously. You look down at your watch, or cell phone, and whatever number pops up digitally is both nonsensical and easily swallowed. The mind shifts down into some other brainwave, like being in an isolation tank. Nightmares are more lucid and crazy and, for the first time, I found myself speaking Russian in my dreams.

My cabinmates were Katya, a very sweet twentysomething from Khabarovsk, on her way to a new job in Perm, though what she did I could not fully comphrehend, just nodding Da when there were words close to what I already knew. I taught her some new words in English and she taught me some in Russian (the word for "bat", for example, translates as "flying mouse" -- when the movie Batman came out here, they called it "Flying Mouse-Man", not the fear-inspiring dread that the directors were aiming for).
In Omsk, Yuri the jurist (pronounced "yur-eest") climbed on, took off all his clothes except his boxers (not an uncommon occurence), and told us dirty jokes, cackling loudly, wild hands gesturing. Of course I understood zero but I laughed, partly at the comedy of the situation but mostly because I did not want to endure the stretched out explanation that kills any joke, no matter what the base language. He could speak no English but we did converse in German, badly. Didn't make the jokes any funnier. After two hours he climbed up into his bunk, passed out, never to be heard from again, except for some funny-to-him noctural outbursts about Americans, requiring him to periodically nudge me with his barefoot, for reasons I never understood.

No, Here Ish Yourrr Bill, Sirrr

In Eastern Europe, the standard way of arranging accommodation is to pay for the room(s) ahead of time and then cover the balance [minibar, laundry, girls of the night, surgery] when you depart. It's a rather sneaky way of doing business because the consumer has no power, no way to withhold payment if something goes awry. For example, last year, in Bucharest, I was pretty much stuck with the demon flat -- to this day I can just mentally summon the cuisinart-ed fish-shake smell that came gurgling out of the faucets. Comes in handy actually if I need to expunge my stomach contents at a moment's notice.

One would need to travel in Mother Russia to truly understand that Lenin's real legacy here is that there is now no such thing as luxury or comfort in any hotel. If you have your own shower, comrade, you're living regally and if there is hot running water, then shut the hell up Mister Fancypants Foreigner from the USA. You pay ahead of time and you get what you get, all of which is highly variable.

Imagine my surprise, while checking out this morning from overpriced-at-$45-a-night Hotel Siber (but the only thing available to a foreigner who is not part of one of those annoying busloads of tourists), when Natasha, the white-haired thirtysomething dominatrix working the check-out counter, demanded payment for the night. I didn't exactly say "Hello!?! Shuh! I already paid!" [<-- said valley-girl-like for full effect] but my body language sure did. I said, approximately, I think, "No way dude-ette, I paid up yesterday when I dragged myself, my baggage and my intestinal tract back into this place." She said, in broken English, "No, here ish yourrr bill, sirrr." This carried on, back and forth, me demanding that I had paid, Natasha's steel blue eyes unwavering, "No, here ish yourrr bill, sirrr." Um, yes, I think I got that message the seventh time you said that. I believe that I even said, eventually, "Yes, Natasha, now please quit saying that. I mean it."

One of the strategies I've used here in Russia, a country in which the locals joke that everyone is a criminal, is that when I start to sense that I'm being ripped off, I switch from broken Russian into full-board English. That makes people turn around, putting the spotlight on the con-artist-to-be, and I usually get what I want. So I started ripping into this chick, proclaimingly that I was going to call the embassy, that I don't like being ripped off, that American Express was going to be called and their account with them would be terminated (almost no businesses, except the very prestigious, accept American Express here). Loud, big, fast, power-invoking English. Surely this maneuver would gain me the satisfaction that I, the American, richly deserved.

I might've just dashed but, since they had my bag in storage, I had to remain the single non-hooligan in this city. By this time my loud ranting had attracted white-haired Elena, she would be the fourth one I've met here (pronounced, in case you care to hurt yourself or sound like a buffoon -- Ylah-ylah-nyeh, but with a trill here and a muscle cramping y-glide there). Very sweet, speaks better English, and the whole charade is repeated. Yes, I see my bill, thank you, but I have already paid. Is it all the crazy letters that makes you people not able to use a computer correctly for anything? Silicon Revolution anyone? I have to say, I was being quite the jackass, especially as it donned on me midstream, that I in fact had not paid yesterday like I had been arguing so vehemently. I had one of those "I suddenly know that I'm wrong but do I just give in and look like an idiot or keep going out of pride?" moments. You know you're not having the greatest hour of your life if you start debating "Idiot or Asshole, Idiot or Asshole?" As is usually the case, I ended up having to embrace both identities with open arms.

So, I paid up, slunk away and, feeling so bad about my boorish behavior, I tried to make amends by purchasing each of them a bar of dark chocolate from the corner store. Judging from their ebullient O-faced expressions, you would have thought I was Ed-F'ing-McMahon bringing that giant uncashable check to the front door. Ylaylanyeh even blushed -- I could tell because her skin now had a trace of color -- and giggled. These Russian girls are so unaccustomed to men being the slightest bit nice that even the simplest gesture of kindness makes them nutty.

Early tomorrow, I shall wedge myself back into the Trans-Siberian humidor for another 26 hours of blood, sweat, toil, tears and desperate flippage through my shockingly incomplete English-Russian dictionary, as I meander ever so slowly towards Yekaterinburg.

Still looking for those Gatorade bottles.

Update: Probably a good time to be leaving Novosibirsk. Hope I don't share my compartment with any avians.

Thwacked by Lactose Goons

Most adults in the world, after the so-called "weaning period", have lost the ability to effectively digest milk sugar as the body produces increasingly less lactase, the enzyme necessary for proper metabolization. Some degree of lactose intolerance, carrying symptoms of excess gas production and diarrhea, will likely be experienced by adults, unless of course one carries that Northern European derived mutation on chromosome-2.

Which. I. Clearly. Do. Not. Have.

Feeling like my small intestines have been wringed tightly around the mangle that once served as my colon, I am desperate for a male version of Pamprin [Manprin?], anything to relieve these sweat-inducing man-cramps that besiege me. So explosive was the result of last night's eating of pizza at il Patio that I could not even make it onto the Yekaterinburg-bound train today, the very image of my clammy carcass spending all day and night on the rolling commode that opens directly to the tracks below making me dither with dread.

The exquisite violence erupting inside my gastrointestinal tract tells me that Yekaterinburg is now one, perhaps two more days away.