Moscow Remembered – A Tourist at Home

March 7, 2008

When I walk through Union Square on an occasional sunny Saturday in San Francisco, I resent that the people around me might mistake me for a tourist. I make myself abundantly clear – I wear no fanny pack, carry no Macy’s bags and plaster a trademark sneer on my face at all times, punctuating it with an occasional roll of my eyes.
Maybe I go overboard, but seeing every other sneering local in my adopted city reminds me of the confusing, maddening and humbling time when I was, indeed, a tourist in the city of my birth.

Until I was seven, Moscow was my home. I spoke the language, rode my bike on the sun-mottled levee by the Moskva Reka (Moscow River) and climbed a willow sprouting from its banks to look out over the water and watch my reflection. That is, until unrest churned through the country and we had to leave. 1991 saw the August Coup march though Moscow with tanks in the streets and barbed wire that I could see from my window. Soon after, in October, it saw my family board a plane bound for Siberia, then Anchorage and then, finally, San Francisco.

Nine years later, my mother and I went back to visit – the first and only time. Since I’d sucked up English like a sponge, my Russian languished in unused areas of my brain. I spoke it and understood it, but my clumsy Anglicanized tongue couldn’t quite get the hard, guttural edge practiced by the people we found all around us in Moscow. They were true Russians, stout and potato-fed.

They laughed, giddily skewering a government I had no idea about over plates of sour cream, hard boiled eggs and salt-choked, cured sturgeon. They sneered at my mother and I as we took pictures outside of St. Basil’s at the Krastnaya Plashya (Red Square). When we went to buy tickets for the Endy Yuarhol (Andy Warhol) exhibit at the Pushkin Museum, I decided to ask for the tickets myself. I was sixteen and sick of my mother having to do it. I wanted to reclaim my identity.

“Two tickets, please,” I said, in Russian, to the woman sitting behind the Plexiglass booth. Two price lists hung next to her face. One, in Russian, promised visitors admission for a pittance. The English list, right next to it, advertised tickets five times more expensive.

“That’ll be twenty dollars,” she told me, quoting the American price.
“I’m Russian.”
She looked me up and down in my expensive jacket. “Are you sure?”
“Listen, we’re Russians and you’ve got a line of customers, so either take our money, or don’t,” my mother said, stepping in front of me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I couldn’t even pass and I’d only been gone nine years.
“Four dollars, then,” the ticket-taker said with a smirk. “For the Motherland.”

The rest of the trip was spent walking along vaguely familiar streets and visiting all the places that I’d known as a child. My sunny memories were replaced by the steel-gray reality: cars on cinder blocks on my street, feral cats following us out of alleys and garbage clotting the roots of my willow tree.

We had to drive an hour into the traffic-choked center of Moscow every single day of our visit to get stamps in our passports, a sinister tax for fleeing when the country was weak. On the last day of our trip, the woman relished in informing us that our passports were no good and that we’d have to wait three weeks for replacements. “Unless,” she said, “of course, you’re willing to part with some of those American dollars.”

Even though my country had forgotten me, I still have memories of a Russian childhood and I will still go back. No matter how conflicting it is to be of a place and yet so alien to it, I am Russian in my blood and bones. If I find a way around having to talk too much, someday I will find the part of Russia that will welcome me, an eager pilgrim, and finally feel like home.

About the author:Liv Archer is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. She writes for mostly children and young adult and runs the teen website ImGoingToBe.com that helps answer that ever-nagging question: What are you going to be when you grow up?