Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The night was sultry and vodka-filled, but the girl was from another world than my own.
Jul 13, 2000 | There was a pounding on my hotel bungalow door, followed by a sharp but powerful woman's voice in Russian.
"A towel is missing in Room 17! Who stole the towel in room 17?"
I jumped out of bed and swung open the door. A fat, middle-aged woman in a sweaty smock stood there wheezing, waving a frayed hand towel that had gone gray with grime. Her feet were swollen red and jammed into cheap sandals, her straw-colored hair like a Brillo pad and wrapped under an old scarf. "It looks just like this one," she said. "You Americans had better give it back!"
She stomped from bungalow to bungalow, shouting about towels. I was one of two Russian speakers in our group. I dressed and went outside, sensing that soon I would be called into service as a translator.
It was a warm, cloudy morning in Moscow in June 1985, and I was 24. Twenty days earlier my American tour group, riding Volkswagen minibuses, had crossed the Soviet frontier near the town of Vyborg, just east of Finland. Starting with the five-hour entry ceremony, little had gone smoothly. Soviet border guards had examined every orifice of the minibuses, peering into tailpipes and checking under the hoods, dismantling seats and pulling apart floors and doors and finally running the vehicles over mechanics pits to check underneath. They snatched every cassette in our possession and played snippets of them on their rusty old recorders; they perused every book and notepad in our luggage; they counted and recorded every dollar, franc and mark in our wallets. During their search they uncovered a stash of literature in Russian on God and alcoholism (forbidden); its carrier, a pleasant young woman with missionary inclinations and doe eyes, was taken away and strip-searched. After she returned, a volley of rude exchanges passed between the border guards and us (we were, after all, tourists -- was this how they treated tourists?), but they allowed us to enter. We headed south, stopping in Novgorodka, Leningrad and, finally, Moscow.
Our hotel was out on the edge of the city, in a suburb of six-lane avenues, gray bunker institutes and patches of poplar forest. It could have been a peaceful place.
Following the shouts about towels and Americans, I walked down to the office marked "dezhurnaya" (floor manager) at the end of the row of bungalows. The fat woman grabbed my elbow. Her eyes were small and mean, and I smelled sweat. "Tell your friends to cough up a towel just like this one, and fast!"
"This sounds serious," I said.
"It is serious," she answered, her voice somehow turning vulnerable. "Nadezhda Ivanovna will explain everything."
We walked into the floor manager's office. Seated behind her desk, Nadezhda looked to be in her mid-30s. Her face bore the narrow lineaments that aristocratic blood imparts to Russians, and her amber hair was rolled into a bun, loops of it dangling over her petite ears. Between her delicate fingers she held a cigarette, and a pack of Marlboros sat upright on her desk. Behind her on the wall hung a poster of St. Basil's Cathedral captioned with the bold words "THE SOVIET UNION -- LAND OF TOURISM."
Nadezhda got up from behind her desk and pressed flat the wrinkled folds of her strawberry-and-cream sundress. She looked at me and took a slow drag on her cigarette. The maid raved and waved the towel. Nadezhda puffed her Marlboro, smiled and asked if I knew who might have taken the towel. She was concerned, she said, for the maid: Everything in the hotel was registered as state property, and if anything, even a ratty old towel, went missing, the maid would have to pay for it out of her 90-ruble-a-month salary (the equivalent of $15 on the black market).
Get Salon in your mailbox!