In the underground interchanges, the kilometres of tunnels that connect the city’s train systems, women in long, bulky coats display wind-up toys. Cats chase their own tails. Squirrels and bunnies hop around. Plastic soldiers perform a commando crawl with their rifles at the ready. Selling toys here is like putting out a spread in the middle of a six-lane highway. This is not commerce, this is not doing the best with what you have – this is desperation.
An old woman in a headscarf, an archetypal figure, Russia’s equivalent of a semi-naked African child covered in flies, re-sells newspapers a hundred metres from the official kiosks. Her profit margin must be in the domain of nanomathematics. I wonder whether she is doing this so as not to beg.
As we shuffle along the crowded corridors, Billie’s eyes almost pop out. Close to the exit, a woman is holding a handwritten sign: ‘Diploma, Degrees, Certificates’, ready to fold her business at a moment’s notice. Forgery is rampant in Russia, but it is not legal. Not yet. You can buy anything here, I explain to Billie, a degree in Medicine, Architecture or Science, school diplomas, work history, medical certificates. In the West education is for sale too, more often than not through online virtual institutions, which promote their wares by urging us to ‘get a degree without those hundreds of hours wasted studying, attending lectures, doing assignments’. In Russia, you still get direct-to-the-public forgery so, if you are lucky, you will deal with Syoma or Igor, not some world-class university registered to a PO box in Columbus, Ohio. How reassuring that there are still real people you can deal with.
The Metro is swaddled with kiosks purveying everything from pirate DVDs to bread, theatre tickets, books, underwear and the sort of jewellery that falls apart within ten minutes of purchase. After a series of suicide bombings by Chechen terrorists a few years ago, then President Putin tried to outlaw these mercantile dens of iniquity, claiming that they made it virtually impossible to maintain control and security across the city’s transport network. Clearly, his plan did not work. The kiosks are everywhere, alive and well. As to control and security, they are more often than not subverted not by terrorists, but by appointed enforcers of the law – the police themselves.
In 2004, a nineteen-year-old student was travelling on the Metro when he witnessed a young woman rather crudely apprehended by policemen. Some newspapers subsequently claimed that the woman was his friend, others that she was a stranger, but the point was that German Galdetsky saw with his own eyes that the woman was taken away for no reason. Outraged, he decided to intervene. Thanks to Galdetsky’s insistence, the young woman was allowed to go, but it turned out that while in the hands of the police she had been sexually harassed and threatened. Galdetsky, who could not believe that something like that could happen in broad daylight in the heart of his city’s train system, embarked on an independent investigation. Which is how someone not yet in their twenties came to uncover a ring of Moscow policemen allegedly sexually assaulting young women travelling on the Metro. Unsurprisingly, after he had gathered a sufficient body of evidence to make his accusations public, Galdetsky was shot in the head by unknown gunmen; miraculously, he survived.
That same year a young man from Central Asia was shot in the face by a Metro policeman, who had stopped him for trying to jump over turnstiles. That the police in Russia are at least as dangerous as criminals is a well-known fact and, on so many levels, the Metro is a perfect place for the exercise of this institutionalised lawlessness. On reflection, it is hardly surprising that Billie and I would have the first and biggest fight of our trip right there.
Travelling inevitably involves friction. The rubber hits the road, and generates heat and aggravation. Given that Billie is a girl who can’t shut up, and that her mother is only marginally more restrained, it is not surprising that the question of speaking and not speaking emerges early in the trip as the main source of friction between us. Billie could rally troops with her English, but her Russian will not get her out of a bus. While she understands pretty much everything, her active vocabulary is tiny, and her accent may be charming but it grates on even Billie’s musical ear. Furthermore, in Russia there are all kinds of unwritten rules about children taking part in adult conversations. ‘Do not answer when grown-up officials ask us questions,’ I repeat time and time again. Customs and immigration officials, police, train conductors, Metro attendants. ‘But what if I know the answer?’ says my truly Australian child.
‘It is not about who knows the answer, Billie, please, let me handle the officials. And one more thing – don’t speak when we hail a car so they won’t smell any foreign blood and won’t feel tempted to rip us off.’
‘What am I supposed to do then?’
‘Why don’t you listen to your iPod? It may be better than pretending that you are mute or, even more unbelievably, very shy when it comes to strangers. On the bright side, you can speak on overnight trains. We cannot hide who you are for twelve hours at a stretch.’
It does not take long for Billie to feel overwhelmed. A few days in Moscow and she wants to go home. I do not quite know what I expected. ‘I always feel uncomfortable being with people I don’t know well who all speak Russian,’ she tells me, ‘but the whole country… the whole country speaks Russian…’
Well, yes.
Today’s trouble starts when Billie starts acting as if she does not know me. When I challenge her, she explodes. ‘Everyone on these trains is looking at us, Mum. Can’t you see? We look like freaks to them.’
‘No one gives a shit, Billie, come on! You are exaggerating.’
‘Mum, I want to go home. I want to be in a country where everyone speaks English, where I don’t feel like a total idiot, like an idiotic foreigner.’
‘But, Billie, if we stay away from countries where we look like idiotic foreigners, the whole world will become so unbelievably small.’
‘I don’t care. I want go home. I am not ready for this trip. I don’t want to go into the Metro again. I hate Moscow. I hate being here.’
At this moment, I could add ‘Me too.’ For some reason that I cannot quite articulate, Moscow, a city I have been to at least half-a-dozen times, feels distant and frenetic to me on this trip, but if I make any concession to Billie now what will become of the rest of our trip?
‘Moscow is an amazing place, Billie, and we haven’t even scratched the surface. Once we are out of the Metro, you’ll feel fine, trust me.’
Billie’s voice goes up a few thousand decibels. Her face is getting red and starting to crumple.