It was 1990. Things were changing fast in the Soviet Union. There weren’t a lot of tourists in Leningrad and there certainly wasn’t much infrastructure for us. Did we stay in a hotel that was mostly brown? Was the dining room full of hookers in the early evening? There was brown bread for breakfast, sour tasting, and I had to navigate a lot of rubbery meat. I was hungry a lot of the time. There were a lot of conversations that involved pointing at things and there were a lot of young men who wanted to sell us wristwatches that had the hammer and sickle on the faces, or Lenin. They asked us for things, too, cassettes, Levis, cigarettes, when we walked across the big plazas of Red Square or in front of the Hermitage.
Buying any kind of groceries was a continually confusing exercise — one of us would take a place in line, someone else would try to figure out what was happening — did we need to pay first, present a voucher of some kind, would the shopkeeper even sell to us? Facilities catering to outsiders were outrageously expensive, it could be 100 dollars for a burger, while Soviet facilities were so absurdly cheap as to make us question the bill, repeatedly. There were six of us, we had two bottles of champagne, caviar, blini, salmon… can it really be 12 dollars total? There was no English on the menus, often someone would take mercy on us and take us back into the kitchen to see what was cooking. Yes, it was 12 dollars, how much should we leave as a tip?
In Leningrad, there was a holiday of some kind — perhaps it was fleet week? Sailors were everywhere in uniforms, striding up and down the canals. There were fireworks, the evenings were long, it was summer. We went to eat dinner on a barge tied up to the banks of the Neva. Maybe we were the only ones there, maybe there were a few quiet couples. We sat at the back, we drank champagne. A band set up on a low stage at the front of the room. Did they have feathered hair and red leather jackets? Zebra striped tights? Probably they were dressed like an 80s metal band. I’m sure we had champagne, we were always drinking champagne in the Soviet Union, it was so cheap and it was summer. We got the expensive stuff, sometimes we’d spend five dollars on the bottle, forcing our total bill up to three dollars a head.
It was dingy, I remember, the light was yellow, there was a plush wallpaper on the walls of the floating dining room, gold and red. The band played Hotel California and we applauded, politely, from the back of the room. Then they played it again. Mirrors on the ceiling and pink champagne on ice. And again. We are all just prisoners here. And again. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
The Soviet Union I saw is gone now, but nothing reminds me of that time of change, of that trip, like Hotel California, especially if it’s delivered in through a muddy speaker and with a mouthful of Soviet accent.
Captain, please bring me my wine.
I like this. 🙂