7
Picture our fellow passengers on the bus: dead-eyed apparatchiks in drab silk shirts; a young man with spiked blond hair and a videocamera fixed to his face; a stripper in hot pants doodling vacantly in her notebook; a motley assortment of local Interested Youth, many of whom, despite the name, looked to be pushing at least thirty-five; eight or nine Polish students dressed identically in international safety orange; and Dancing Natasha, wiggling rhythmically in her window seat.
Maybe the stress of the situation distilled otherwise complex psychological states into strong and simple passions, or maybe I was having some kind of despicable Orientalist reaction to the Other, but I knew as soon as I laid eyes on her that I hated this Dancing Natasha. I hated the way her name-tag sticker clung to her fluffy pink sweatshirt. I hated her entourage, yukking it up across the aisle, as if our plight were a laughing matter. I hated her liters of juice — the OJ, the pineapple nectar — and the way she drank them like a starlet in her bus seat: head thrown back, tresses afloat, kissing the carton spout camera-style.
Such details so consumed me that I barely noticed when the bus engine churned to a stop on the side of the road. We disembarked into a dusty crevasse and were beckoned onward by the alpha apparatchik toward a pit in the ground, a hundred meters from the road's edge — a massive pit, meteorically massive — which, he explained in Russian, was the source of the cement factory's chalk. Standing on its edge, we peered in: Dumptrucks ferried loads of white rock up an access road on the perimeter. A stray dog covered in ghostly dust ran circles on a ledge. Dancing Natasha climbed atop a rust-covered backhoe claw on the rim and posed. The video man, our official minder, smiled and taped it all.
8
I haven’t even mentioned the Man in Shorts.
He was a silver-haired fellow, fifties probably, who seemed all too comfortable around the apparatchiks. He wore bright blue nylon shorts — short shorts, with side vents — that showed off the telltale orange of his (waxed?) legs.
In fact, all his clothing was suspiciously expensive and new: the T-shirt tucked into the short shorts looked pressed, the gleaming sneakers could have been factory-fresh. A wide black utility belt, slung low on his hips (over the shorts), carried a late-model cell phone and ostentatiously small iPod. All around the chalk pit he moved in vectors from conversation to conversation, eyes alight — calculating, politicking, socially maneuvering — like a caged orangutan, without the pathos.
The Man in Shorts could not be trusted.
9
But it wasn't until we reached the cement factory that he truly leapt into action, barking stern encouragements while herding us off the bus — Why are we back at the cement factory now? — almost as if he were obeying a deep instinct, something bred through generations of sheepdogs and gym teachers.
First stop on our tour (hey why not?) was the facility known among workers as The Raspberry (origin of name completely unclear), a room so filled with heat and toxins that it was originally operated only by prisoner-laborers whom Stalin had already condemned to death. A machine in the corner dispensed salt water, for drinking. The apocalyptic roar of two adjacent rock tumblers, processing hundreds of tons at 3000 degrees F, drowned out our tour leader, who dutifully continued to mouth his script anyway. Next door there was mission control, where foremen presided over consoles of levers and buttons, tempering the molten proto-cement to its ideal consistency. The word they used was сметана (sour cream). On the wall behind their consoles hung two public-service notices: one discouraging drug use (cartoon man without a face chained to a syringe), and another promoting environmental stewardship (cartoon man clutching a globe stuck to his head).
The stripper turned out to be a journalist.
10
And then, ahead: an oasis among dunes, a mantis among dung beetles: the cement factory museum, in its buff stucco splendor! Standing out front was none other than Denis, the most eligible bachelor in Krasnaselsk, czar of the museum, looking hungry and wielding the telescopic metal wand whence his powers of seduction flowed.
As our crowd approached the building, we cunning intellectuals slipped to the rear, and when the moment struck, we broke off completely and made a break for the bus. Much as we esteemed our scholarly comrade Denis, we'd already been on the cement factory museum tour once that week, and no way could we last through another. (The cement factory museum tour is interminable, even if it does cover only one room.) Instead, crouched beside the rear wheel well, hiding, we tracked the tour's progress on our wristwatches: here was the part about the sister factory in communist Vietnam, here was the part about the directorial power struggles, here was the squid fossil, here was the ashtray, here was the case of rocks that looked like things other than themselves ("parrot," "banana," "man falling over").
Time passed as expected, and as the last seconds fell away we looked up to see our Youthful companions emerge from the museum's double doors. They wore stunned zombie faces to the last, with a single giggling exception: Dancing Natasha, draping herself across our Denis, thanking him so much for the depth of the tour.
Burn.
11
Back on the road. One PM?
Our driver took us half an hour down the highway to an unmarked country lane, where he turned the cumbersome vehicle's nose ninety degrees into the woods and pushed until trees blocked all progress. A wooden sign rotting to our right said BUS STATION NO. 5, surely a joke, and something extra in the engine's sigh of defeat told us this ex-place was our final destination. The Man in Shorts confirmed it: Off! Off! YOUTH SUMMIT must begin!
Through a opening between birch branches we could see a moldy brick building, square, three stories — by all evidence abandoned, with a glass observatory on top (panes broken) — on the near shore of a marsh. Its doorless doorway had nothing but hinges, with an unmarked black box as big as a minifridge sitting alone in the empty space. Between it and us lurked a red Eurobus, parked as if to hide in the bushes, behind which loitered a handful of special-forces soliders, armed, with even more weapons in the van. They were smoking unfiltered cigarettes and looking bored. One whistled through his teeth and ran his hand up and down his AK-47's shoulder strap. Beyond their van stood a cluster of fairytale cabins painted primary colors, and a brass bell on a post with a pile of thick rope beneath it.
12
Naturally we'd been under the impression that what we'd been doing all morning was the Youth Summit, and we were pondering this very conundrum when the Man in Shorts appeared from behind, applying his palms to our shoulder blades and shoving us down a path toward a pavilion by the water. En route he called out to tree, and off to our left an apparatchik poked his head from behind the trunk to give a thumbs-up. Moments later a small truck, clattering from lack of suspension, came rolling to a stop before us, as the Man in Shorts — somehow now far in front — nodded intense approval, then disappeared.
The back hatch of the truck's camper trailer sprang open, and four women clad in tattered skirts and headscarves emerged with 70-liter steel grenade barrels containing lunch: pink soup, pressed meat, potato sludge, sour cream. They pried open the hinged lids and slopped out rations to the waiting line. We, at its end, ate reluctantly but thoroughly, bummed at the reality of this worst last meal, while Dancing Natasha encouraged a nearby male to help clear the dab of potatoes clinging to her chin. Back by the moldy building, two men in tracksuits consulted a clipboard and pounded stakes into a tree.
Their mallets' echo had barely subsided when the Man in Shorts appeared from nowhere once more — this time circling our pavilion in a side trot, blowing his whistle, hiking up his utility belt, clapping and crying like a sorcerer: Move! Move! Move! It's time!
And that's when it got surreal.
PART 3 coming VERY SOON
return to PART 1
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