Open Mic Night in Moscow Read online

  Twenty-four hours earlier

  I didn’t plan on showing up in Kazakhstan severely underprepared for a yearlong journey through the former Soviet Union. But on the flight to Almaty, I discover that this is what happened.

  Sure, I’d illegally downloaded a guidebook with every intention of reading it, but then life, and more precisely the Internet, got in the way. I have kind of, sort of, looked into which countries require me to arrange visas in advance, concluded that the answer is most of them, and then mentally filed that information away under Problems for Future Audrey. I’d made one hostel reservation—for one night in Kazakhstan—and I’d booked that the day before I left.

  The one thing I did do was study Russian for approximately one hour a day for a solid six weeks. I feel extremely confident in my budding abilities right up until the flight attendant asks me what I want to drink.

  “Oh, um, nyet Russian,” I stammer, realizing, for the first time, that I have not learned how to say, “I can’t speak Russian.” Come to think of it, there are a lot of seemingly useful phrases I have not learned, including: “How much does this cost?” “Take me to the hospital,” and “Where are you going with my valuables?”

  Well, I guess I’ll just have to work with what I’ve got. The flight attendant is still standing beside my armrest expectantly.

  “Um . . .” I try to imagine what the word water might sound like in Russian. “Vater?” I guess.

  This is not correct. After attempting to pantomime the not-so-charades-friendly phrase bottled water, I reflect on some of the phrases Rosetta Stone did opt to teach me before tackling the nonessentials like “water” and “help.” I would never find myself in an emergency in which I was unable to tell a Russian speaker, “They are riding horses,” “Women swim,” or, “That is a man.”

  In other words, my Russian would be fine for the purposes of eyewitnessing a not-terribly-elaborate murder at a Russian country club, but definitely more wanting in all other scenarios.

  This is when I start to panic.

  I look around the plane. Most seats sit empty on the late-night flight from China’s capital Beijing to Kazakhstan’s former capital Almaty, which had its status stripped and transferred to a mostly empty plot of land in the middle of the desert. (The president, worried Almaty’s population of ethnic Russians could thwart his authoritarian ambitions, announced in 1997 that he was moving the capital from Almaty to a new city called Astana, which he intended to build from scratch. He did, and the results were . . . kind of like when you’re going for flashy but end up with a mall shaped like a tent.) The few dozen other passengers are mostly businessmen and the Chinese Olympic water polo team, whose presence somewhat calms me, because they are all extremely hot. I’m the only woman traveling alone, and I’m certainly the only twenty-eight-year-old following her heart and harboring vague aspirations of “finding herself.”

  I’m all for taking the road less traveled. But when you find yourself on a thoroughfare mostly used by people negotiating contracts or playing competitive water sports, it can make you wonder if you’re on a life path where you might get lost and starve to death only twenty feet from the trail.

  The TVs hanging over the line at passport control do little to quell my sense of impending doom. As we wait to have our passports stamped, they launch into what’s either a news segment or a commercial for some kind of baby swimming class. It’s hard to tell, because whoever was behind the camera went in for a few perfunctory, almost begrudging, shots of the babies and then spent the rest of his time time panning up and down the bikini-clad bodies of the women holding them. This segues into something about tractors. Finally, a brief clip of rapidly scrolling text explains Kazakhstan’s visa-free entry program.

  At some point, I read or heard that Americans don’t need visas for Kazakhstan, and I’d accepted that as truth that didn’t require further fact-checking.

  This video says that Americans don’t need visas for a trial period from July 2014 to August 2015. Which is troubling, because it is two days into September of 2015.

  The lusty swimming babies video starts up again. Wait, I telepathically implore the television, can we go back to that visa thing?

  Where had I even heard this visa rumor? Would “I’m pretty sure it said so on Wikipedia” hold up in immigration court?

  The man in the passport control booth is wearing what looks like full combat gear, but might appear to a less terrified person as more of a standard border-patrol uniform. He slowly thumbs through my passport as I try to maintain eye contact that’s aggressive, but not in an I’m trying to illegally enter your country but not on purpose way. He removes a few staples left over from visas that had been ripped out upon exit from other countries; I can’t tell if he’s trying to intimidate me or procrastinating work by cleaning. I have visions of being deported, although the question of where they would send me is intriguing enough that I almost want to see how it plays out. Will they put me on a plane to America, the country on my passport, or back to China, the country I’ve flown in from? Are there even any flights from Almaty to America? Would it be nice to just get a free trip home at this point and call the whole thing a wash?

  Before I can get an answer to this question, the guard is pounding my passport with one of those perplexingly hefty visa stamps that looks like it could also, in a pinch, make fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  The arrivals hall in Almaty is equipped with everything you’d need to walk straight through it and on to your final destination. There are a few small shops, a row of five adjacent ATMs, and something called “Caviar Palace.” The only thing that’s missing are the people from my hostel, who are supposed to be picking me up.

  It’s almost midnight, and I’m reminded that I’m alone in a country I’ve barely heard of, where, if my attempts to order water on the plane are any indication, my language skills are more likely to get me into trouble than out of it. I’m finally on the verge of tears when a loud group bursts into the arrivals hall. A man and a woman dressed in full-body animal costumes carry balloons and a giant sign, while a dreadlocked photographer follows.

  I smile. I may be all alone but at least I’m not walking into an embarrassing airport greeting.

  And then I squint at the sign they’re holding, because my name appears to be written on it.

  Newlyweds Almas and Kassya, freshly derobed from furry costumes, just opened Loco Hostel a few weeks ago. I’m the first guest they picked up from the airport, so they wanted to surprise me with the costumes and balloons.

  “Were you surprised?” Almas asks. “You seemed surprised.”

  I assure him that I was.

  We’re having drinks at a bar we stopped at on our way to the hostel. When we park outside, I ask if it’s safe to leave my suitcase in the car. Almas, Kassya and Darya, the photographer, look at me like I’ve asked if the vehicle works underwater. “I would die if I lost my beauty products,” I want to whisper, but don’t.

  Inside, it’s karaoke night, an event no customers seem to have attended on purpose. The manager has forced an extremely attractive bartender to perform a 20-minute set, which, to his credit, he’s nailing.

  “He’s so handsome,” I blurt out.

  “Yes,” Almas says. “I think he’s Korean.”

  I’m surprised. “Like, he’s from Korea?” I ask.

  Almas shakes his head. “Probably his grandparents were.”

  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought waves of Korean immigrants to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and ethnic Koreans still make up a small percentage of the population in many post-Soviet states.

  Our table is another reflection of the post-Soviet melting pot. Almas and Kassya are ethnic Kazakhs, and Darya is ethnically Russian. What are national borders today were more like state lines in the Soviet Union, and Darya’s family has been living in Almaty since before she was born.

  Kazakhstani and Russian both became official languages when Kazakhstan declared independence,
and so I ask Darya if she speaks Kazakhstani. Judging from the reaction this gets, I might as well have said, “Let’s go around at the table and talk about which members of our families were murdered by Stalin.” My three companions shift uncomfortably.

  “Maybe I would like to one day . . .” Darya replies.

  Almas quickly changes the subject.

  “So you do comedy?” he says. “I have a joke: yellow blue bus.”

  Kassya and Darya giggle, so I do too, because I don’t need to look stupid. But then curiosity gets the better of me.

  “I don’t get it,” I admit.

  “In Russian, it sounds like ‘I love you,’” Darya explains. “Ya lyublyu vas.”

  “What’s your comedy about?” Almas asks.

  “Strangers I meet at karaoke nights,” I say.

  This turns out to be a terrible choice of retort.

  “Do it now!” they implore. “With the karaoke microphone!”

  I ungracefully refuse, but Almas is insistent.

  “Could you make a show at our hostel?” he asks.

  “Do you have a microphone?” I reply, because the answer to that question is usually no.

  He nods. “We’re having, like, a meditative drum circle tomorrow night. So . . . maybe you can do your comedy before?”

  Oh boy. You don’t really see stand-ups, or, come to think of it, anyone, hustling for that sweet spot right between after people show up for a meditative drum circle and before the meditative drum circle goes on. And I say that as someone who ran a comedy show in the basement of a bookstore.

  But the show must go on! Or maybe that’s not the right saying, because it sounds like the show will go on, it’s just a question of whether I’ll be in it. But when in Kazakhstan . . . !

  “Sure,” I reply. And then, because this strikes me as something I should have checked before saying yes, I ask, “Will people speak English?”

  Almas laughs. “We’ll see.”

  Kazakhstan is the largest of the five Central Asian republics that became countries after the USSR collapsed. It combines with the other four—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—to form a region often referred to as Central Asia or, “the ’stans.”

  Stan can sound scary to an American ear or to anyone who’s heard Eminem collaborate with Dido, but it’s actually just Persian for land of. Central Asia has five major ethnic groups, which can be crudely divided into the traditionally nomadic herders (the Kazakh and Kyrgyz), the traditionally settled traders (the Tajiks and Uzbek), and the traditionally terrifying warriors (the Turkmen). The majority of Central Asians are Muslim, though they practice a form of Islam that incorporates indigenous animist and shamanistic traditions.

  Central Asia is marked by harsh terrain, expansive deserts, and precipitous mountains that can make simply moving around a challenge. Ironically, the region served for centuries as the overland trade link between Asia and Europe that most of us know as the Silk Road. When sea routes rendered the caravan obsolete, some parts of the region fell into decline, and much of the territory was gobbled up by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century.

  Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991, and one of its first official acts as a sovereign nation was to launch a cosmonaut into space. It did this before the country settled on a name. This was obviously a piece of political theater designed to demonstrate the new government’s power and legitimacy and it was thanks to a random coincidence. The Soviet Union’s version of Cape Canaveral was located in Kazakhstan, and when the USSR dissolved, newly independent Kazakhstan found that it owned a space center.

  But it was also a sign that, though the Soviet Union had ended, some things would be slow to change.

  Kazakhstan was luckier than some former Soviet Republics. Its land was rich in natural resources, which fueled steady economic growth that began in the early 2000s. Oil revenues brought foreign investors and Western brands and built some (legitimately) flashy skyscrapers in the new capital, Astana.

  But in other ways, Kazakhstan fared no better than other post-Soviet states. Many hoped that the collapse of the Soviet Union would bring freedom and democracy to the newly independent nations, but most countries simply swapped a Soviet dictatorship for a homegrown version. Kazakhstan has had the same president since the country declared independence twenty-four years ago. Kazakhstanis have neither freedom of speech nor freedom of religion, dissenters are often jailed, and the government shuts down organizations it deems threatening.

  For a while, it seemed like Kazakhstan’s leadership had convinced its citizens that they’d made the tacit tradeoff of political freedoms for economic growth that was trending in authoritarian circles in the 1990s and 2000s. People saw their standard of living rise and, the theory went, were willing to accept a more restrictive government in exchange for continued prosperity. But a worldwide decline in oil prices has hit Kazakhstan’s economy, along with that of its biggest trading partner, Russia. The pace of economic growth has slowed, and it’s unclear if the terms of this agreement will need to be renegotiated.

  The shopkeepers of Almaty do not enjoy making change.

  “No, no, no, no!” the woman at the grocery shouts while pushing me out of her store after I try to buy a 5-tenge loaf of bread with a 5,000-tenge note.

  If a sandwich costs 350 tenge, a 500-tenge note is unacceptable. Change is sometimes so hard to come by that it’s given in the form of similar-value goods. I buy a 150-tenge bottle of water and get packs of gum back as change. My purse slowly fills with Orbits where there’d normally be loose coins.

  The Kazakhstani tenge took a precipitous nosedive two weeks before I arrived. Kazakhstan’s central bank had announced that it would no longer set the currency’s exchange rate, and in one day, the tenge dropped 26 percent. On August 18, 2015, 1 U.S. dollar got you 188 tenge. By August 21, it got you 252 tenge.

  When I arrive in Almaty on September 2 of that year, people are still figuring out how to adjust.

  For the most part, life seems to be more or less carrying on as usual. Stores stay open. Smiling grandparents push baby strollers through parks. A woman sitting next to me in a Georgian restaurant uses a special stylus to send text messages, because her fingernails are too long for her to touch the screen.

  The only hint of economic uncertainty comes in the beauty aisle.

  Almaty has no shortage of cosmetic stores; in the city center, there seems to be one on every block. I feel underdressed in my tinted ChapStick.

  I spend an afternoon wandering the city, and behind each floor-to-ceiling beauty-store window, I see saleswomen hunched over merchandise with cotton balls and bottles of rubbing alcohol, scrubbing furiously. Sometimes the male security guards have been pressed into service too, and they perform their duties with significantly more resentment.

  I finally walk inside one to figure out what’s going on. The cotton balls and rubbing alcohol are being used to remove the price tags. All of the merchandise is being marked up.

  Almaty glows with the luster of something long coveted. I ogle each tree and trash can with the awe of a parent entranced by a newborn’s toes. This apple is from Almaty! This window was made in the Soviet Union!

  Almaty sits at the base of snowcapped mountains that hover over the wide, leafy avenues and enormous Soviet buildings. Much of what the Soviets built remains, a preservation perhaps aided by the fact that the city is no longer the capital.

  Almaty therefore retains buildings from each Soviet period. There are the regal neoclassical buildings painted bright colors and trimmed with casings that look like piped frosting, known, ironically enough, for Joseph Stalin, the man who popularized them. Stalin, I’m left to conclude, was a ruthless dictator in the boardroom, gingerbread-house man in the drafting room. Beside these sit otherwise ordinary structures with strange abstract flourishes from the Constructivist period, which sought to infuse public and industrial buildings with the avant-garde aesthetics of Russian Futurist art. Concrete lattices drape over facades
; supports and engineering fixtures protrude as if to highlight the buildings’ guts.

  The dominant architectural feature is the Soviet tendency to go big or go home, with buildings constructed on such a grand scale, I sometimes wonder if the builders accidentally doubled the proportions: the Hotel Kazakhstan, a twenty-six-story tower that looks like it’s wearing a crown; Ascension Cathedral, a colorful onion-domed church made entirely of wood and hidden in the middle of a public park; the Central State Museum, which has a look I can only describe as “Greek Pantheon meets the Space Age, also big enough to accommodate the entire population of Kazakhstan if everyone decides to visit on the same day.”

  Cyclists will tell you the best way to see a city is on a bike; subway enthusiasts espouse the virtues of experiencing a place as its commuters do. A couple once swore to me that you can only get to know a country by hitchhiking. After a series of mishaps, I’m exploring Almaty by hopping on and off of its public buses while they’re still moving.

  A visa errand has left me stranded on the edge of town, which is a convenient place to discover that I don’t know how to say Loco Hostel in Russian. I have also, in what I now realize was an unwise move, ventured out without a copy of the address. The facts of the situation are this: I’m standing on the side of a highway with no plan and a vague sense of the direction my hostel lies in. A taxi is linguistically out of the question, and my phone doesn’t have data. There are, however, a fairly steady stream of city buses rolling up to a station beside me to discharge and pick up passengers.

  It’s becoming clear that I’m going to have to jump on a bus headed in an unknown direction and try to get off somewhere that looks familiar. And I mean “jump on” quite literally, because the buses never come to a complete stop. Instead, they slow as they approach the station, and when the doors open, people jump out of and into buses that are very much still moving.