Dear Brittney Griner: We Should Have Talked!
Russia Was Never Friendly to Tourists --Illegally Packed? Who Knew?
-a prequel-
I was young. It was my first trip to Europe. First stop was Stuttgart with my first woman lover. We picked up her cheaper-for-export Mercedes Benz at the factory. Then we drove toward a 1966 Moscow.
Why would a hippie like me do that? I was in love.
She, IZ, represented freedom. With risk. What could be better for tuning in, turning on, and dropping out than to go to the Soviet Union with her?
I even agreed to her insistence on camping that I’d never done nor wanted to. But who was I to question? I’d never been overnight anywhere except for my Detroit childhood Lake Huron cottages that were rented for the full gathering of my extended Italian family. So Europe, the Soviet Union? Then Finland, Sweden, Holland, France. . . I ignored the details. I let IZ who was a seasoned traveler, and still Dutch-family-connected “over there,” do the planning. It would be an adventure with her. And I was hungry for more of that molten emotion you get from your first homo love. The world glistened.
From Stuttgart we drove away in her sturdy blue Mercedes sedan (that I thought too conservative but, what the hell). I would get to drive that perfectly engineered machine at crazy speeds on the autobahn. But that was later.
We spent our first days in Prague with its architecture that was old, dark, and complex to my virgin Western eyes. The world seemed generally darker in Czechoslovakia but there was a gleam, too. It came from the people who sometimes met your eye, your stranger-ness, with a softness. Sometimes. With that bit of warmth, and my practice of comfortable capitalistic shopping that I learned from my mother, I felt ok. Prague had streets with shops and beautiful Czech crystal. I bought some for my Aunt Nancy, for my mom, for me. Everything was cheap with strong dollars back then.
Shopping was my learned skill. And there was that Mercedes to fill, no suitcases to lug to train stations. We used our rolling status symbol like a suitcase on wheels. It took us to the camping places near the cites where I grudgingly accepted the decent facilities. I’ve blocked most from memory. What I do remember is acclimating to toilets that were only holes, and their novel requirements. The toilet paper ranged from corrugated cardboard to slippery waxed paper, or was absent entirely.
But IZ knew all this and planned for my pathetic advertising-embedded needs. “Things go better with Coke...” and the plastic-packaged “I’d love to be an Oscar Myer wiener...” with the cans of imprisoned corn from “The Valley of the Jolly—Ho Ho Ho—Green Giant...” Mostly I was haunted by the “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” toilet paper that wasn’t anywhere there.
I was a slave, slow to stop those commercials that sung in my head. I was glad IZ brought supplies to this foreign purity of non-packaged, non-jingled food and accessories. I was grateful to not feel too cast adrift. I was glad IZ eased me into the Old World’s commercial bleakness. I came to appreciate the charm of people who used “hands and feet” to urge me to communicate. It was enchanting, all these people who weren’t steeped in mouth-wash and deodorants, and who weren’t clad in pristine clothing ironed by a smiling mom in high heels from some ad. Still, as a Detroit car snob, I couldn’t get over being smugly amused by the tinny Skoda cars that we dwarfed.
When we got to Warsaw I learned to say “wady piwo”(sp?) for cold beer, that never was. And I wondered in my narrowness why they didn’t have better refrigerators? But then I learned. I saw what I didn’t know.
I saw the Nazi documentation of the horrors of war in crisp photographs and precise record books. I saw the sickening proof for the first time. Real, with the aroma of dust and singed paper. Touchable. It was all in a small museum hidden off Prague’s main square. It made me cry.
To wash it away I punished myself for complaining about the food and for having stared foolishly at the dirty chickens that were kept preciously close to the worn homes we’d passed. I forced myself to eat the ubiquitous yogurt—so foreign to my grandma and grandpa’s raucous pasta and meatballs. I had to adapt.
Getting to “big city” Moscow was coming closer with every day that ticked off on our visas. Visas were sacrosanct. You had to go where you had been validated to go. Maybe that’s what those good people in Prague and Warsaw were smiling about: our itinerary.
We drank with friendly locals in each city. I gave them some of the ball point pens IZ had brought (but I refused to give up my extra Levi’s—prized and nowhere available in the Soviet orbit). And on these new foreign friends’ advice, I changed money. They insisted we shouldn’t wait to exchange dollars to rubles in Russia where it was legal only at official kiosks. The rate was much worse than what they, these citizens, were offering on the black market. So, I bought and hid those illegal rubles with help from their directions, translated sketchily.
The next day we drove to Brest, not a large crossing, to enter Russia. Good luck with that. Is that what those new friends were saying with their smiles? Not comradery, but caution?
The border crossings from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Poland had been easy. Because they knew—that’s my theory in hindsight. The guards knew from our visas that we were going to Moscow, so why waste their time with anything but a short search? We Americans were going to be in for it at the Soviet border. And they knew it.
Everyone knew. Everyone stopped at the Brest border knew it. And a few courageous Europeans risked casually walking by to whisper a few words to us.
Your. . .window.
What? You mean the wipers?
Don’t cross with them.
Subtle communications. The Aussies made us understand what they meant. . . About the windshield wipers, the hubcaps, and the Mercedes hood ornament.
You mean take them off?
They’ll steal them to sell.
A young Dutch couple walked past, pretending to stretch their legs. Their small anthill-looking car was waiting for their turn further ahead of us in line.
You should hide them, the woman said quietly.
What? (I thought dusty hubcaps were hardly notable western glitz.)
Still serious but in a casual pose if anyone were watching, she said, Cover them in the boot. Don’t leave them out, or the guards. . .
Nothing was natural anymore. Nothing was gentle in this land of supposedly better-than-our-wasteful-capitalistic consumerism. None of these European strangers waiting to cross the border was natural. It was quiet and tense. Worse, I knew what I was carrying. Every guidebook and rumor hinted that “economic crimes” were severely punished in Russia. —Prison? Siberia?
I wanted to turn around. Stuttgart seemed like it could have been fun. But you couldn’t change a visa so easily. IZ told me that, and to “just relax.” That made me angry—easier to admit than fear—and it was our first fight. I sulked against the car, smoking.
I puffed through a pack of Marlboro reds I’d brought with me but put aside in Warsaw. I wanted that pack because I was smoking too fast from the one I had now.
But never mind, it was finally our turn at the border crossing. I was not going to worry about smoking when they started searching.
Everything from the Mercedes had to be emptied onto two twenty-foot-long, and about four-foot-wide tables: for hers’ and hers’ possessions, evidently. The guards indicated to us everything in the car was to be spread out on those empty stretches of wood.
Those smooth-cheeked, young Soviet guards urged us with the subtle motion of their machine guns. And they voiced their “nyets” to personal items we didn’t unpack fast enough. . . But more was coming.
They unrolled our sleeping bags, inspected them, and shoved them aside in crumpled bunches on the tables. The pornographic magazines we’d bought in Germany made those young men’ cheeks go rosy before they ripped the porn in half—but not enough to make those explicit pictures un-ogle-able for them later. They tossed them into an official trash can that housed no garbage, only clean contraband.
They examined everything: our camera, the bread we carried for snacking, the new jewelry and the Czech crystal, the Warsaw-bought nesting matryoshka dolls that were really Russian but were cheap in Poland, slippers I bought for my grandmothers. . . All of it was exposed on those long tables. Everything in the spilled contents of handbags and backpacks, and all the evidence of our travel supplies and souvenir-collecting was on display. Our lives were splayed open for scrutiny.
In two hours, it wasn’t over. Added to the piles of our clothes and underwear and sneakers, and guidebooks there were new, carefully stacked and growing white mounds. The guards made hillocks of our projectile-like, white-paper-wrapped Tampax tampons.
The smooth-faced boys had never seen tampons, the women’s feminine hygiene product that was evidently absent behind the Iron Curtain. Now they were finding them everywhere: in the glove box, in handbags, in the trunk. . . Suspicious, they stacked them up. They pointed sternly: they wanted to know what those things were. We were silent. Who could figure out how to explain or indicate their use? This made those boys more suspicious. They carefully took a tampon to inspect, ripping off the paper.
No! No!
They stepped rigidly in front of our reflex of waving, protesting hands. These boys had no idea about tampons. They kept unwrapping them, pulling on the strings that I realized made these feminine sanitary devices look like incendiary weapons with fuses!
They kept unwrapping; we kept protesting. But they kept us at bay, away from their destructive inspection. Those machine guns were always there, close across their chests. I kept smoking while IZ uselessly complained, until she blurted the magic word “Intourist.” They understood. Calm, she kept saying Intourist and pointing at the tampons. By that time two guys in more ornate uniforms appeared to see what the trouble was with the Americans. They understood they had to get someone from the bureaucratic agency, Intourist, that approved visas and controlled tourists. They would speak English to untangle this impasse.
Two women traveling for two months mandated our own feminine hygiene supplies. We didn’t need these boys ruining anymore of our Tampax. From what I’d witnessed so far in Soviet detritus, modern women’s products did not exist here. IZ had thought of that, so the tampons so mysterious to Russian guards clicked up another two hours in our detainment.
I kept smoking. Let them bust us for tampons. I hadn’t heard that was any prison-worthy capitalist offense. But I knew I was holding what was.
And there was more. They motioned us to drive the car onto a lonely, feeble mechanic’s lift. There, a crew of older Russian men inspected everything. They stuck rods down into the gas tank and swirled them around. And they stuck shorter rods into every one of those battery cells, those compartments in car batteries. And from underneath, they used flashlights to illuminate the bottom of the still factory-new chassis. We watched from a distance.
I smoked. They wanted to find something to send us to prison for. I felt it. And that was was the feeling, the look from the Europeans who were at the crossing but coming nowhere close to us now, not anymore. Now everyone avoided eye contact with us even from a distance.
It seemed like a year before the Intourist guy showed up, finally, in a poorly fitting grey suit. He indeed spoke English. He was brusque and condescending. We explained to him what the tampons were for. As he reddened, I couldn’t resist telling him how to use them.
He glanced at the tampons that were still carefully stacked on those tables, shining like white bullets. The mechanic crew had finished with our car on the lift. They were done with the underside, the engine, the trunk, the glove box, the seats. . .
They watched the Intourist guy and milled around, seeming to indicate the Mercedes could be driven off the lift. Everyone waited. We weren’t going anywhere until those unknown weapons were cleared. So many of them had been pulled out of their cardboard tubes by the guards’ inspection and were lying there in an unruly pile, their fuse-strings dangling from them. Only the Intourist guy could clear this contraband. He was silent, looking down at what he was writing in a frayed notebook. Everyone was silent.
Then, like it was our fault, he stood up and pointed. He pointed from the tables strewn with our belongings to the car.
He shouted at us, Go!
The mechanic guys slammed down the engine hood, put the seats back inside, took the Mercedes off the lift. But there was all our stuff still laid out on those long tables. The young guards hadn’t moved. The Intourist guy was yelling, and they were transfixed.
He kept yelling at them, waving his hand at the tampon piles in disgust. The guards were motionless. Their faces reddened, their eyes cast down. And then, they quietly turned to the tampons. They picked up the cotton cylinders they had pulled out of their protective tubes and they tried to stuff them back inside.
“No, wait. It’s ok. . .” We tried to stop them, gently. Poor boys. Their embarrassment radiated from them and made them shy, coy, stealing glances at us. When I lit another cigarette, the guard nearest me perked up. His eyes asked, and I offered him one. When were they every going to get to smoke a Marlboro? And the young guard next to that guard perked up. His soft bright eyes asked, me too? And of course I nodded. Sweet guys, have a little western glitz!
It was the most dangerous favor I’ve ever given. As the other guards saw two of their chastened fellows smoking Marlboros, they brightened, faces expectant. Why not? But as I was about to take the pack to distribute the dwindling cigarettes in that pack, it left. Hand to hand, those young guards passed that soft red and white American pack around. Youthful male fingers groped inside for the next one. I couldn’t move, couldn’t stop them.
I watched in terror as the pack went from one guard’s hand to the other, pulling out cigarettes. I waited for the last of these now smiling boys to pull out the black market rubles from Warsaw I had stuffed against the farthest end of the pack. IZ wondered why I was so quiet in the face of this comradely change of events brought about by the brotherhood of cigarettes.
But I knew it could change in a heartbeat. No fleeting warmth of human sharing would stop these men from using their machine-guns on me. On anyone.
Russia was never friendly to tourists.
I wish I could have talked to Britney Griner. Before. —Why didn’t somebody?