(part one)
And so here I am, back in Moscow. Okay, so it hasn't turned out to be my favourite city in the world, but it is a huge city, full of sights and sounds and parks and museums and galleries and libraries and so on. And on that last point, we all know that huge cities don't just have libraries; they are libraries. Someone famous undoubtedly once pointed out that every city is a living collection of stories – the stories of the people who live there now, of those who have in the past, and of events within its perimeters. In that respect, Moscow is truly a great city; it seems to breed stories as efficiently as sewers do rats.
Within days of being back, Moscow's unfolding narrative had started pressing on my cranial walls once more. It started on the day that Maya left. As it happened, I ran into a fellow teacher at the airport that day – a Scottish woman called Sarah – who told me about something quite incredible she'd seen just a few hours earlier. Approaching the bottom of an 'up' escalator in a Metro station, Sarah had noticed an opened but nearly-full beer bottle sitting on the ground near the end of the 'down' escalator. Then, before she knew it, a middle-aged woman dressed head-to-toe in a priceless fur coat and matching hat had swept off the escalator, leaned down, picked up the beer bottle, drunk its contents in a single motion, replaced it on the ground and kept walking.
And so, you might ask: what's her story?
On the way back from the airport to Rechnoy Vakzal (the station at the top of the Metro line), I found myself asking a similar question about a dirt-encrusted gentleman of Asian/Siberian appearance who sat next to me on the bus. Having boarded a few moments after me and paid his fare, he lurched about for a minute or so and then fell fast asleep on my shoulder. Which is normal enough I s'pose – it's happened to me on Sydney trains, and it isn't uncommon on the Metro. But when we arrived 30 minutes later at Rechnoy, this guy was still fast asleep ... and I couldn't wake him! He was out cold. I literally had to lift him from my shoulder and lay him down on the back seat before I could get out of the bus. He was breathing, but something definitely wasn't right there.
Then, when I finally got home that day, I was talking to my flatmate Craig about what I'd missed while I'd been away from Moscow. It was mostly the kind of news you'd expect – things that had happened at school, reports of more extreme weather and so on. But he also pointed me to another thread in The Moscow Tales which had me kind of amazed.
To summarise: one of the Top 30 "domestic lenders" in Russia is an Austrian-owned organisation called Impexbank. They have a vault on a city street called Ulitsa Berzarina – something like a huge storehouse to which couriers deliver hundreds of millions of roubles each day for counting, packing and delivery to bank branches.
Naturally, Impexbank performs regular 'sweeps' of the area around its vault. They do this using hi-tech, seismically sensitive equipment, similar to that which the U.S. military claim to have used when they were putting everything they had (or not) into smoking Osama out of his cosy little Afghani cave complex a few years back. During one of these seismic sweeps in February, bank officials discovered a hollow chamber in the ground beneath the vault.
Like many areas of town, the streets around Ulitsa Berzarina are full of free-standing lock-up garages. And as it turned out, the chamber found by Impexbank security was the final segment of a 50-metre tunnel that originated inside one of these garages, wound its way beneath the main road, and ended up directly under the bank's premises.
The tunnel was no mere rabbit-hole, either; it was lined by wooden planks, and electricity had been installed inside. Whoever was in charge of building it had put in a supreme effort to make this a workable subterranean passageway. The bank watched it for three days to try and discover the identity of the criminal mastermind(s) behind this ambitious project, but no-one turned up. Which leaves quite a lot unanswered, really – like, for example, having got this far, how did the diggers plan to get through the cement foundation of the building? And having accomplished that, what was their plan then? The completed tunnel would've brought them up in a changing room for security guards; did they know this? Were they planning to hide in the changing room lockers, leap out and surprise the guards in their underwear? On this and other issues, facts remain unavailable.
Possibly the best part of all, though: once the tunnel's builders have been identified by police, lawyers will have quite a struggle trying to find something in the Russian Criminal Code to charge them with. Tunnel-building isn't defined anywhere in the code as an illegal activity, and since the builders never actually connected their underground passage to the bank, charging them with an attempted bank robbery will be difficult. A 'crime expert' from Moscow University pointed out to the local press last week that anyone caught constructing such a passageway could easily say they were simply interested in tunnel-building for its own sake. They could feign ignorance about the bank vault, and this might be difficult to disprove in court. Funnily enough, the vault isn't terribly well-signposted; there are no neon signs saying "Impexbank City Vault: Millions of Roubles Delivered Daily" or anything like that. So maybe the accused will argue that it was all a coincidence. Unless the police investigation turns up a map with a big circle drawn on it, an arrow pointing to the circle and the words "BANK VAULT" next to said arrow, this 'crime expert' thinks our diggers might conceivably walk away uncharged. I'm finding it hard not to love that :-)
You might've noticed, though, that all of these stories are quite fragmentary – no tying together of threads, no satisfying denouements and happily/crappily-ever-afters. And this is the inevitable drawback, I s'pose, of participating in the unfolding tale of a great city. You rarely find out how the other sub-plots end, and you're left with a bunch of unrelated hairy scary tales that remain incomplete.
But since I don't like to disappoint, here's a tale whose ending you will find out about – and it's one of my own.
Last Wednesday as I was coming out of class, some of my students were standing around outside the school chatting. One of them – a very amiable guy called Denis – was heading into Moscow for some benzin, so he offered to give me a lift as far as Metro Prazhskaya. After doing my usual "guy from a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road" trick (where I head for the driver's side of the car instead of the passengers' side), I turned and went around the car, explaining to my giggling students why I'd made the error.
Any fellow English teachers reading this will know that talking to elementary students outside of the classroom can be an engrossing experience. As you spend more time with them, you become very aware of how native speakers incorporate sophisticated language into even the simplest conversations. You start to notice yourself doing it, and so you invent ways to 'grade' your language by avoiding, for example, tenses you know your students haven't studied yet, or conditionals (try not saying "if" or "when" or "unless" for half an hour), or the weird phrasal verbs that litter the English language and have to be learned one at a time.
This is quite an interesting mental exercise, and you do get better at it, but it takes a lot of brain power to maintain that awareness of every word and every grammatical structure you use in casual conversation.
So anyway, on this occasion I was so wrapped up in explaining my silly "wrong side of the car" mistake that I completely forgot about the treacherous conditions of that day. Which was a deeply stupid thing to forget, as it turned out. See, the upshot was this: there had been some rain, but it hadn't melted all the ice ... just made it extremely slippery. So, as I was heading towards the passenger door, rambling about how Australians drive on the left side of the road, I fell down flat on a patch of rain-slicked ice in the school car park.
Now, if the embarrassment of this situation was the only problem, it'd be okay. I mean, I've been spotted plenty of times being clumsy in public, so I'm more or less used to dealing with that. But no such luck this time; as I was falling, I felt my ankle twist violently one way and then snap back in the opposite direction. My immediate response was to get off the ice, pick myself up and try walking, just to assess the damage. And that's when I realised that I couldn't use my left leg at all. I think it was actually during the split second I spent falling forward into the arms of my student Sergei that it first started to dawn on me how serious this was.
The students phoned my local school organiser Giorgy, who was fortunately still upstairs in his office. Giorgy came outside, cast an eye over the situation and conferred briefly with my students. He then got into the back seat of Denis' car. As Denis turned the key in his ignition, I heard the word klinika pass between him and Giorgy in conversation. Unfortunately that left me in very little doubt as to what would happen next. I was clearly about to get my first look at the inside a Russian hospital.
... to be continued ...
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