1 hour ago
"Bring your own condoms for the party tonight. See you soon,” said the text message on the Nokia my Russian friend lent me. I bite my tongue, trying to avoid laughing. That’s when I realize how hungry I am. I’m sitting in the very center of a metro station, on one of the four marble benches where my friend, Vladimir, told me he’d be waiting. He’s twenty minutes late. Four uniformed officers march in unison, patrolling the station. A German Sheppard prowls beside them, on a leash. I start counting the number of times I’d been warned not to look any officers in the eye and just look at the dog. As the guards turn the corner, I lose track and peer back across the platform. It takes some time for me to realize there are only university students around me and that I have a backpack on and blend in.
Vladimir is shouting a blonde joke at the top of his lungs while I jet through a metal detector, past two Russian soldiers with assault rifles. The plan is one we came up while walking over to Vladimir’s campus. He would enter first, put my backpack through an x-ray machine, and then I’d storm through, flash his student ID card, and avoid making eye contact. My chest is puffed up fully, but I’m scared to death. It’s not the first time I’ve walked by a Hulk-sized soldier. As I pass by, I start thinking about the terrorist attacks on campus a few months before. Better than getting an assault rifle held next to my head, I think, smiling. Somehow, we both sneak in without rehearsing.
Vladimir has no idea where he is going. He guns down an opulent, dimly lit corridor. Then he stops, turns around, and slowly begins tracing his way back to the front entrance. It’s his first week of school.
“Dude, how come they didn’t give you a map of this palace,” I ask him as we pass a fridge students share in the middle of a hallway.
“This is the one. I know it. We will eat soon,” Vladimir replies, not looking back at me, “I will get us a few things from the room. Then, we eat.”
“And then it’s party time!”
“Oh. I forgot…” Vladimir says in a level tone, now looking back at me.
“Yeah?”
“The girl who will drive us to party… she is at dacha already. Tonight she has a friend who will drive us back.”
“OK. But how will we get to the party?”
“The dacha is far outside the city. We will need to leave when we stop eating. It is one hour away by metro. Then we find taxi to drive us to dacha.”
I start to wonder why I risked my life to sneak into the empty campus.
It is raining lightly when we get out of the metro and I’m thinking about how everyone in Moscow wears blue jeans, black suede shoes and tough, leather jackets.
“Here,” Vladimir says, handing me a flask sized vodka bottle.
I take the last shot and a half and toss into a trash can on the side of the street. It clings a lot of other glass bottles inside.
“Cody, there is one thing I get,” Vladimir says, eyeing a supermarket across a parking lot.
“What,” I respond softly, not sure if he can hear me or not.
A few teenagers walk in before me and I hold open the door for one of them.
“Spasiba,” she says, avoiding eye contact, strutting in front of me.
I’m flipping through a Russian GQ at the end of a long line of people with full grocery carts. There’s an old man in front of me who has about 35 bags of frozen berries, mushrooms and a small Pepsi. I see Vladimir sneak up behind me silently. He’s holding onto a box of condoms in one hand and has two cans of red bull stacked in the other. Slightly embarrassed, I step out of the line, and walk back over to the magazine rack to look at all the cover girls. The old man with the frozen food and Vladimir start to chit-chat. Out of nowhere, I hear the old man make an announcement to everyone in the line. I look up from a picture of Camron Diaz in a Christmas bikini and see Vladimir’s face go from pale to a Soviet red. He cuts up to the front of the line quickly. Completely unsure of what just happened, I slowly sneak out of the shop.
What’d that dude say to everybody,” I ask as Vladimir opens the door.
“He said,” Vladimir replies, pausing takes two long gulps of red bull, “that my girlfriend is waiting.” He hands the other can to me and starts walking down the street in front of me.
Snickering while cracking it open, I see Vladimir start making crazy hand gestures at cars.
“Vlad, what the fuck are you doing,” I ask him.
An orangey Volkswagen Golf pulls up next to him and he leans inside the open window. A dark black Volga pulls up behind the Golf. I walk up to Vladimir and notice he’s asking for directions. The driver behind flicks his high beams on and off a few times in a row. The Golf driver starts to yell at us in Russian. Vladimir sticks his head out from inside of the passenger window, opens the door, points straight ahead down the road and then leans back inside without saying a word. The driver stops yelling and says something to him very faintly. Vladimir backs up slowly and drop kicks the door shut as hard as he can. The Golf revs down the road. The driver of the next car pulls up to us and opens his car door and says something to Vladimir.
“I found taxi,” he says to me, “get inside!”
We both hop inside. The driver turns on the radio. He is listening to some Armenian music, I believe.
“How far away are we,” I ask Vladimir.
“It will be a long time. It is far in wilderness. 20 minutes – maybe more. It is not much.”
As he finishes speaking, I notice that only dirt roads trail off from the highway.
Inside the dacha, the rooms are packed and high pitched voices bounce off the high ceiling and the sounds of glass cups clanking amplifies somewhere far away but fade when the base guitar of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song blasts away. Everyone looks somewhat familiar to each other even though most are nineteen and are probably from a part of Russia that nobody else has ever heard of. I’m hoping that Vladimir will surprise me and another one of our friends will pop out of nowhere, yell my name and give me a high five. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I see this girl who looks like some musician whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head. She smiles at me very nervously while looking around the room. She’s a young girl, really, and much younger than the ones I party with. Some dude lights her cigarette while another kisses her left cheek and whispers something in her ear. Vladimir hands me a clear plastic cup that’s full of something. I take a swing while he’s taking in Russian to some guys he hasn’t met before. It happens to be decent whisky for students. My phone starts vibrating and I look at it and see that I missed a call that I couldn’t hear.
A shadow moves across my body while I’m lying down on a bed in some kind of veranda that overlooks the front yard and is lit up by rouge candle lantern. I sit up and see the tanned, bare back of a brunette sitting upright next to my feet, across the bed. She turns, breezing her hair to the side and I start laughing. She just stares at me, smiling, somewhat slyly, maybe buzzed, maybe wasted. This is the kind of girl who is so beautiful that she would usually make me nervous, but her green eyes are wholesome and warm and inviting. I feel like I’m wildly exotic to her. And she just won’t stop gazing at me from across the bed, as if it is one big dare. So I turn it into one.
What would you do to have this girl…” Vladimir asks me, putting his hand on my shoulder, “World War Three?”
“Why not? ”
“What Russian has she taught you?”
“One language is not enough.”
“Very good, very good… I told her earlier you are my friend she was supposed to drive home.”
“You what?”
“She was our ride back…”
“She..?”
“Yes. Well, she is no longer our ride anymore,” Vladimir tells me as my heart jumps up and then crashes down again.
“Why? Why not?”
“She has a lot of vodka. No man can drive home from a dacha party. It is forbidden in Russia.”
“What’s the plan then? Are we going to stay here?”
“There is nowhere to sleep here.”
“Where are you thinking of sleeping then?”
“I will find taxi on a main road. Trust me. If not, we can walk to taxi. Or we walk to metro. It is not much – maybe one or two hours?”
“What,” I reply hesitantly, “so I have no chance then, huh?”
“No…… well, maybe with World War Three…”
On her iPhone, there’s a picture of a tiny puppy that I’m trying to look at, but I can’t focus and my eyes keep glancing past the dog and phone, down the straps of her black dress. There’s something about no tan lines that makes it hard to avoid. Neither of us can move. We’re standing on a crowded stairwell. She’s just resting her on my stomach and she’s telling a long story about her dog in slightly broken English. I take another sip of vodka and spill some of it on my sweatshirt, so I put the cup up in between two stairstep spokes to the right of my head. And when I look back down at the phone, there’s a pink bow on the forehead of a puppy right in between her breasts.
RUN!!!” Vladimir yells out while standing beside me. There’s a wild beast with shark-size teeth in front of both of us who’s growling and a pack of spotted, stray dogs behind.
“Dude, don’t move your feet – stay put and be quiet!” I yell back, kind of worried about the obstacle on our walk back to the main road. One of the dogs brings an arm-sized bone with him and there’s a heap behind. “Just wait,” I tell Vladimir.
“Wait,” he asks me.
“Yeah,” I quickly answer. The dog with the bone is now barking incessantly and I can feel the slobber spray on my right leg. “Pretend like they don’t exist.”
“OK.” Another two dogs start to circle around Vladimir, snaring menacingly.
“Good, now – when they calm down, we can walk again. Just be calm and walk slowly. If they get in front of you, just keep walking slowly,” I tell Vladimir hoping he’s able to do that.
“Do you have any vodka?”
There’s only one thing between me and the road- mud. I’m standing at the edge of a lake of it. I walk around to some pine trees towards my left and notice it only gets swampier. The alcohol is in high gear now and I’m unable to focus on anything other than the road. I have no clue where Vladimir is in the soundless landscape and wonder how long it’s going to take to make it back to my bed, all the way across the city. To my right, there’s some truck tire marks and I tight-rope walk through them. The mud is flatter but the edges are over ankle high. And it’s hard to see where they are in the darkness, so I pull out my phone and try to use it as a flashlight. But I know that it’s useless and there’s really nothing I can do about it except to walk, one step at a time.
Do you really think we can make it,” I ask Vladimir, gazing across the highway as trucks and cars zoom by toward the just-rising sun.
“Yes. When there is no car lights, that’s when to run,” Vladimir explains to me, as if he has a lot of experience running across highways while being completely worn out.
“Are you fucking with me? Why don’t we just pay a driver to take us to the next exit and walk over to the other side,” I ask him, thinking of a logically.
“I have four hundred rubles. How much do you have?”
“A couple hundred more…”
“See, it is not enough,” Vladimir says, “the drivers on the highway will not stop. If a driver stops, he will know we are desperate and want more money.”
“If we get to the other side, then how the hell will we get to the subway?”
“It will be less, maybe five hundred Rubles, since it is not far… maybe 20 minutes…”
“Well, when in Rome…” I tell Vlad, peering down the bend of the highway and lining up as close to the yellow line on the side as possible.
“Next Car, NO, NO… OK. OK. OK. Next Car… NOW, GO, GO, GO, GO” Vladimir screams.
At the gas station there are pancakes and even though it reeks of fish, I’m in a good mood, just floating through it all, still somewhat drunk, and I just keep checking my phone for messages. I look over at Vladimir and ask myself, is he going to ask me for money to get more Red Bull? And I can’t stop laughing.
“You look like you are in a good mood,” he tells me.
“I am”
“I see that,” he pauses, “I don’t think I want to know why…”
“No?”
“You think of this new girl too much,” he tells me, the way a brother would.
“Well, Vlad, we have a saying in English, "Every dog has his day,” offering him some water.
“What does it mean,” he asks, “you are a dog today?”
“No. When I call her later tonight, you’ll find out.”
