
Desolationgrad, Russia
July, 2000
So there I was in Desolationgrad. They dropped me off in my grim and dirty little apartment in a huge Soviet-style industrial block. The refrigerator didn’t work. The stove didn’t work. There were no bars on the windows, despite the fact that it was on the ground floor. The toilet leaked. The bathtub was filthy. There was no place to sleep except a musty old sofa. The enclosed balcony was full of generations of garbage and old lumber.
“So what do you think?” asked the owner of the school, smiling through his bad teeth.
“It’s big,” I said, wanly. Looking on the bright side. What a pussy.
I was taken to the “Office” which was located down the street. My street consisted of a row of identical Soviet-style industrial tenements and a few small shops that sold bread and canned goods and potato chips and a huge selection of alcohol and beer. A few battered and shriveled old women lurked on street corners selling vegetables probably laden with toxic waste. The people I saw lounging around the streets drinking beer on the hot summer evening were lumpy and unwholesome looking, mostly shaved-head men wearing cheap rayon or polyester track suits. The air was palpably gritty from all the factories and the cheap local cars coughing out emissions that would never be checked.
The office was located behind one of the little shops that sold groceries for alcoholic factory workers. It had no windows. A hole in one of the cheap plastic-panelled walls was covered up by a map of Europe. There was some kind of poster related to English, I recall, something they probably got free with some text books they’d ordered. There was a computer. There was the school manager, a fat middle-aged woman who spoke no English whatsoever. There was the secretary, a skinny woman whose awful make-up job didn’t conceal her bad skin, who also spoke no English whatsoever. They offered me a beer, but I declined – I was exhausted and already buzzing from the three I’d already had. They gave me some cheap salami and some stale bread to eat.
Wow, what a welcome party.
“Okay, I’m going back to Vodkaberg now,” said the manager. “Anything else I can help you with now?”
“Food,” I said. “Detergent, I need to wash my clothes. I’ve been on trains for three days now. I don’t have any sheets or a pillow.”
They took me to some kind of spartan-looking market and bought me some polyester sheets and a huge uncomfortable foam-rubber pillow.
Then they dropped me off at my apartment. A group of teenage skinheads were getting drunk outside the front door. Fortunately they didn’t kill me. “What about food? Detergent?”
He smiled emptily. “Tomorrow, okay?”
I was too weary and shell-shocked to disagree. I just wanted to lay down.
I went home and ate the rest of the salami and the stale bread. I took a shower, in water that smelled like bleach. It was pretty hot, and I didn’t sleep too much, sweating on my foam rubber pillow. The kids getting drunk outside my window stayed there until about three singing, as I recall. Lots of mosquitoes too – nothing like screens on the window.
I got up the next day and walked around a bit.
The streets were laid out in a big grid so it wasn’t too hard to find my way around. I went down the adjoining street, which consisted of identical Soviet-style apartment blocks with a few shops selling beer, alcohol and canned goods. Then I went down the next street, which consisted of identical Soviet-style apartment blocks with a few shops selling beer, alcohol and canned goods. Turning right, I walked down another street that consisted of identical Soviet-style apartment houses with a few shops selling beer, alcohol and canned goods.
Disappointment began to turn to despair. I was overjoyed when I found a parking lot, just for the architectural variety.
I located the bus that went to the riverside embankment. The embankment in Vodkaberg had been so lively and festive, with volleyball players and roller-bladers and cafes full of people. The owner of the school had assured me that the embankment in Desolationgrad was comparable.
I walked down a path past an area with some trees and eventually found the river and the beach. It stank. The water was green with algae and scum. There were discarded hypodermic needles laying in the sand and on the concrete. A café or two seemed to exist, but none of them were open. There were a few people wandering around – not many. A few people were laying on the beach, mostly fat men in g-strings and old women in similarly skimpy outfits. It wasn’t so much as sand beach as a dirt beach.
I made it back to the office by two to “meet the other teachers.”
The first thing I did was get on the Internet and send a message to the owner saying that I couldn’t accept this position. I had been offered a position in Vodkaberg, not in Desolationgrad, and the two clearly weren’t comparible.
Then I met the other teachers.
One was a fat little lumpy woman. The other was a big fat lumpy guy.
The guy was an experienced teacher, middle-aged and married and traveling about working with his wife, who was English like him. He was the type who was simply too eccentric in appearance and behavior to do anything other than prowl the world talking to students, who had no choice but to listen.
He lived in the older part of Desolationgrad, and immediately began talking about the high crime rate there. “Oh yes, you should never carry more than a little money on you. I haven’t been mugged yet, but the students tell me I probably will be.” He then went on to explain the huge rate of heroin addiction in Desolationgrad and the occasional wars that broke out among rival gangs over control of the various factories.
“A lot of AIDS here too, so wrap that rascal!” he said, cheerfully. He’d been there for months, and quite liked it. He’d worked in a number of industrial cities in places in China and Mexico. He seemed to dig industrial cities. “This place supposedly also has the highest level of ground-water and air pollution of any city in Russia.” He said it like he was proud.
To each his own, I guess.
The other teacher was Russian. She spoke English well enough but seemed to understand nothing that I said. She was as pale and soft and lumpy as if she survived on pure pork fat. (She might well have.)
The owner got back to me in an email the next morning. He apologized for the confusion, but hoped I would cooperate until they found a replacement and could put me back in Vodkaberg.
As beaten as I was at that point, and nearly broke, I agreed I’d stay in Desolationgrad for a few weeks until they found a replacement.
I did some classes. The students seemed friendly enough, a few teenage boys and a lot of young women. They were all level one, however, and I spoke no Russian, so it was very difficult to communicate with them. Classes were held in a public school that was empty for the summer. It was ancient and delapidated. The blackboards were equipped with chalk that crumbled into dust in your fingers as you wrote. By the end of the lesson I was covered with it. (I have heard teachers bitch about whiteboards and whiteboard markers – you don’t know shit, punks.) The students sat at little wooden desks, I stood in front of the class. Often the lessons were interrupted by a group of teenage kids practicing their break-dancing outside.
I had a lot of free time so I explored a lot, looking in vain for something interesting or attractive. Designed as a Socialist workers paradise, Desolationgrad hadn’t weathered the fall of Communism too well. There were a lot of rich people there, mostly gangsters who’d assassinated their way into ownership of the majority of the various chemical factories in Desolationgrad. The rest of the population were mostly transplanted factory workers and their juvenile delinquent offspring. And of course the drug dealers and sellers of beer, vodka and cigarettes, who would never lack customers.
There were a lot of places that had been designed as pleasant plazas with fountains and gardens, but these were all a wreck now – concrete cracked and pitted, fountains drained and full of garbage, gardens trampled and brown.
I liked to wander down by the river. There were some wooded areas that were nice enough, although littered with empty plastic bottles and plastic bags. Occasionally you’d run across a little family of gypsies or assorted other ethnic minorities living in a small camp by the woods. I always wondered if some family would try to kill and eat me, but they never did.
The owner finally came to see me. We talked about the situation and how it could be solved. He wheedled and cajoled and promised.
Finally he offered me a job in St. Petersberg in October, if I stayed in Desolationgrad until then. They were going to open a new school there at that time.
I agreed. I spoke no Russian and had no other job prospects, and knew no one in Russia. I was practically broke, I had only about $400 to my name, and though my parents would probably have helped me out I had a stubborn streak that could survive even this kind of nonsense.
Besides, it’s all about adventure right?
Finally I went down to the cafes by the embankment at night, though I had been warned it might be dangerous. There were lots of people, and they were mostly shit-faced roaring drunk. The scene there reminded me somewhat of a cross between the pier scene in the film THE LOST BOYS and a high-school dance. Loads of skinheads and skateboarder types bounced around to Russian pop music under tents and stalls did a brisk business in beer and gin-tonics and barbecued meat. A good number of slatternly looking teenage girls tottered around on high heels. Huge security guards wearing camouflage jumpsuits occasionally tromped over unruly clients.
I kept a low profile. I didn’t get too drunk, but I had a few. Finally I sauntered into a crowded dance floor and kind of shuffled about a bit. Amazingly a good-looking girl with long blonde hair and a tight white top with no bra came up to me and started dancing with me. I carefully gauged the crowd for potential skinhead boyfriends ready to crack my spine.
None.
I’m no great dancer, but I can fake it pretty well with a talented partner. Particularly if she’s got breasts like the proverbial honeydews and nipples like .22 bullets. We danced the night away.
Hey, maybe my luck was changing for the better.
Maybe. . .
NEXT: ENGLISH TEACHER X STRIKES BACK