I lived in Moscow, Russia for nine years in the 1990’s. It was a brief moment in Russian history that will probably never come again.
In February 1994, on a Saturday, I went to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping with my backpack and a cloth bag. In Moscow you always had to have your own bag. I took the metro as usual. I walked about half a mile from my apartment to the nearest metro station and rode it for five stops. February in Moscow is cold and often snowy and usually messy. The metro floors are wet with everybody’s boots tracking in dirt and snow and ice. My metro station was one of my favorites, Novoslobodskaya. It has thirty-two stained glass panels designed by a Latvian artist. When it was empty, I enjoyed sitting down and taking them all in.
Once at the store, I found pretty much everything I was looking for which didn’t happen that often. The store wasn’t too crowded, so everything was looking pretty good. I was thinking how great it was that so much stuff had fit into the backpack, and I only had to carry a couple of light things in my hands. As I approached the entrance to the metro, I felt the pack shifting as if something was not quite right. At the station I pushed my way through a huge crowd to get past the turnstiles and decided I should take the pack off and check it before I got onto the escalator. As I was taking it off it opened wide and everything fell out onto the muddy wet floor of the station. I dropped everything and chased a can as it rolled away from me and managed to gather everything into a pile. I hurriedly crammed my sugar, flour, juice and tomato sauce back into the backpack. The cheese and sour cream had been in a separate plastic bag, so I just shoved that into my cloth bag and proceeded to the escalator. Through all this, people were stepping over me and around me and somebody actually stepped on my sour cream, so it was smeared all over the inside of the plastic bag. Nobody had missed a step to even think about offering me any help. My bags were filthy from lying in the muck on the floor and my hands were also filthy from gathering everything up off the muck on the floor. I was cursing the metro, the Russian people, the Russian Federation, my husband and anybody else I could think of and I plotted all the way home that I would just pack my bags and get the next flight out of this god forsaken place.
When I got to my apartment building and entered the elevator that rarely worked properly, a woman followed me in with her dog who she had just been walking. After establishing which floors we were going to she commented on the fact the elevator was in such poor working order. I agreed wholeheartedly. She went on to say that I should really wear a hat because I might catch the flu in this cold weather. I said it really wasn’t that cold. As she got off, she smiled and wished me well. Continuing up the elevator all I could think of was what a country filled with contradictions.
I managed to salvage everything but the sour cream by transferring things into non-muddy containers. I set the backpack and cloth bag aside to be dealt with later and cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and washed all the floors. I felt much better when I was done.
