in Moscow

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I gain new respect for the art of suitcase making every time I travel. It takes a hell of a lot to make a suitcase that will survive even one journey – especially if it’s large and falls into the hands of a grad student who is too cheap to take a cab. I was mentally apologizing to my husband’s plastic Samsonite as we made our way down a flight of stairs in the Moscow subway. In the 1930s they didn’t entirely understand what escalators were good for and the two of us were paying the price: the suitcase mournfully counted steps with its plastic corner and I made futile attempts to lift it out of its misery.

Relief came in the form of a short Georgian man who lifted my long-suffering green monster as if it were a feather… Well, no, he didn’t. He actually grunted and asked me where I was going with such a heavy piece of luggage. It was seven in the morning, I was high on sunshine, crowds, and exhaust fumes, so I gave him my sunniest smile and said that I wasn’t going anywhere, that I had arrived and was planning to stay here for a while. And right away I knew the story he’d tell his wife in the evening: girl from the provinces, so naive, came to conquer Moscow with a suitcase she could barely lift, wonder where she’d end up waitressing.

Funny thing, I really did feel like a girl from the provinces. Moscow looks very different from Ekaterinburg. The shops are shinier and more expensive. The streets are wider. The buildings are taller. Men dress better. Women dress more boldly. There are sandwich shops, and outdoor cafes, and English spoken in the streets. And there’s nothing new about this, and there’s nothing Moscow can offer that New York cannot beat, and yet there I was, squinting suspiciously at ornate buildings (“is it 18th century or a 50s fake?”) and thinking about how shallow it all was, the worst of pretentious consumerism, built on the backs of real people who do real work on the wide stretches of real Russia. Hating Moscow is a hobby of mine, but this was a new sort of hate.

And then I went into a bookstore and wept, because it’s not right that only one city in all of Russia has decent bookstores but oh how nice it is to be in that one city.

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