“You can’t send it back!” I shrieked. Even if I could buy a new MacBook in Vladivostok, which I wasn’t sure I could do, it would have none of my documents, passwords, data, and photos. I needed this laptop, and it had made it all the way here to Vladivostok, and now they were going to send it back? “Please, please, please,” I said. “Is there anything I can do?” And then it was as if she were reciting Russian customs regulations in the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher—wah wah wah waaaaaaah. I took her number, begged her not to return the package just yet, and said I’d call back.
And then I called—who else?—Lusya. Not only was she the fix-it person, but she also, incredibly, happened to work for a shipping company, so she knew the ins and outs of Russian customs. I told her what had happened, and as I’d hoped, she immediately said, “Give me the number. I’ll call her.”
What followed was three nightmarish days of back and forth with DHL in Russia, DHL in Los Angeles, Russian customs, and the mom-and-pop store in downtown Los Angeles from where Randi had sent the package. We were instructed to write (and rewrite) letters declaring the package had been misaddressed, obtain new invoices indicating that I was the actual recipient rather than the hotel, fill out numerous customs forms, and be prepared to pay another $200 or so in tariffs.[7] And it still wasn’t clear whether they’d actually release the package. The USSR had been gone for nearly 25 years, but Soviet-style bureaucracy was clearly not dead yet.
I set my alarm to wake each night at 3 a.m. so I could talk with Randi in L.A. and tell her what we needed before she went to work. There was only a two-hour overlap when businesses in Vladivostok were open and those in L.A. hadn’t yet closed, so that window—10 a.m. to noon Vladivostok time—was inevitably filled with frantic Skype calls and e-mails, as Lusya, Randi, and I tried to coordinate what the Russian side wanted with the American side. During these three days, I almost never left the hotel—though I did have to go to the train station to change my ticket to a later date. I’d brought a small stash of Xanax in case anything truly stressful happened on the trip, and as I started popping them, I wondered if I’d brought enough.
After yet another mad flurry of calls and e-mails, Lusya told me that it appeared customs would release the package. I was instructed to go to the Vladivostok DHL offices at 10 a.m. the next day, Friday, September 11, to start a multistep, multiple-destination process. I’d have to get everything done before the offices closed, or I’d be stuck in Vladivostok over the weekend—so when Lusya told me she’d take the day off work to drive me, I nearly wept with relief. That evening, she sent what became my favorite text message of all time: “Hello. 9 a.m. by Lenin. Bring your passport.”
The next morning, I learned that Lusya drives like a bat out of hell. We raced to the DHL offices at the old Vladivostok airport—or at least, we thought we did, until Google Maps mistakenly sent us down a dirt road into a little village. We asked directions from a scruffy guy in a van, and he said, “Follow me,” which in any other circumstance you couldn’t have paid me to do. But he led us to the right road, and we finally parked and then hiked up four flights to the DHL office, where Oksana, the woman who’d called me at the hotel, gave us a stack of paperwork to fill out and then carry to the Russian customs office—which was at our second destination, the new airport.
This was like the classic Soviet purchasing system: you stand in one line to point out what you want, in another line to pay the cashier, and in a third line to hand the receipt to a saleslady and get your item. But these lines, unfortunately, were miles apart. Lusya and I sped to the airport, parked, and hurried in, and when we managed to locate a uniformed customs official, the woman walked us up to a sliding-glass door leading into a secure area.
I expected her to whip out a magnetic keycard, but instead she wedged her fingers between the doors and forcibly pried them open, in a pose reminiscent of Samson knocking down the temple columns. This was twenty-first-century Russian airport security? We followed her in, and I filled out another ream of paperwork while the official declared that I needed to pay “Fourteen thousand, two hundred twenty-nine rubles and thirty-six kopeks. No credit cards. Exact change, please.” Fortunately, Lusya had warned me this might happen, so I’d brought a stack of bills and a pocketful of change, from which I now carefully counted out the exact amount.
We raced back to the DHL office, and finally—finally!—I had my new laptop. I told Lusya I wanted to take her and her family out for dinner as a thank-you, and also as a farewell, as this would be my last night in Vladivostok. But I had one more task to complete before then.
There was no point in lugging the broken laptop all the way across Russia, so I decided to destroy it. One rarely gets such an opportunity, so I thought it would be fun to get creative—throw it off the top of a building, or toss it into the bay, or pour a cup of coffee over it, filming everything in slow motion. Back at my hotel room, I opened it up and pressed the “on” button. I wanted to photograph that infuriating flashing question mark for posterity before the orgy of destruction began.
Except… the laptop booted right up.
I sank onto the bed, dumbfounded. How could this be? I stared at the screen, then started clicking on documents and web pages. Yep, everything worked perfectly.
I never told Lusya; how could I? We went back to Anya i Dobrynya that night and toasted with that rocket-fuel Chinese vodka, and I just kept saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” my gratitude mixed with a terrible twinge of guilt for what I’d put her through.[8]
The next morning, Lusya, Valya, and Katya came to the train station to see me off, each bearing gifts: from Valya, a plastic container of home-picked plants for potpourri; from Katya, a giant 3-D refrigerator magnet with tigers, and a whistle made out of a conch shell (“in case a man tries to mess with you on the train”); and from Lusya, a plastic bottle filled with samogon. I hugged each of them, unable to believe it might be ten more years before we saw each other again. But the Great Laptop Debacle had put me behind schedule, so it was already past time to get to my next, very different destination: the “Jewish Homeland” of Birobidzhan.
THREE
Birobidzhan: Stalin’s Jewish Homeland
At one-thirty in the morning, 15 hours after leaving Vladivostok, my train pulled into Birobidzhan. Lugging my bags onto the platform, I looked up at the sight that had so surprised me back in 1995: on the station building, the word BIROBIDZHAN was written not only in Russian, but in Yiddish too.
I glanced for just a moment, as I was nervous to be arriving alone in the dead of night. Fortunately, a few other people had straggled off the train, so I followed them toward a parking lot where, to my relief, there were a couple of waiting taxis. I climbed into one and told the young driver, “Hotel Vostok.”
“You have a reservation there?” he asked, eyeing me in his rearview mirror. “That hotel is expensive.” And it was, in fact, one of the most expensive in Birobidzhan, at 1,250 rubles a night. Which, at the current exchange rate, was about 20 U.S. dollars. Which tells you everything you need know about how fancy the town is.
The boxy, six-story Vostok sits in the center of Birobidzhan, just a few blocks from the train station. I carried my bags up the front steps and into the lobby, and an older woman seated behind the front desk took my passport. Then she looked at her computer and said, “You booked your room for the twelfth. But today is the thirteenth.” She tsk-tsked, shaking her head. “You should have booked for the thirteenth, saved yourself some money.”
7
At one point, the Russian DHL rep chastised me, saying, “You should simply have had the package sent to your name, in the city of Vladivostok. No street address.” As if.
8
Later that night, still racked with guilt, I called an L.A. computer-guru friend to ask if I was a complete idiot. She said that even though my old laptop booted up, it was unstable and probably would have conked out again on the trip. I still felt dumb.