The Treasures of the Czars
January 19951. East and West
The wall’s come down and the curtain’s gone up. The Soviet Union has become the former. Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Reagan don Stetsons for a Rancho del Cielo photo op. This is how the West was won, and we should know about the West, being the gateway to it and all: the beginning and the end of so many trails, the Pony Express and Joseph Smith, cattle and stockyards, Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Calamity Jane and Belle Starr. We grew up in a town where Jesse James robbed the bank, where Bloody Bill Anderson and William Quantrill rode and raided, where our football teams vied for the honor of displaying a pair of flintlock pistols in their trophy case.
I wondered if we were all cowboys to them, the way they were all heavily accented spies for us, the way they were cosmonauts for us. We’d grown up drinking Tang, we’d grown up with Boris and Natasha and the Nutcracker every Christmas and Tetris and the Ukraine girls really knock me out. When I was twelve, two Russian foreign exchange students stayed with the neighbors. When asked what their first impression of America was, they answered, A lot of food. The year I was fourteen, Goldeneye came out. That year shook Neftegorsk to the tune of 7.1. That year, the Space Shuttle Atlantis docked at Mir. (Hear me out, what if spies vs. cowboys, but like in space?) That year, the Unabomber’s Manifesto. That year, we suffered a heat wave, thermometers everywhere glaring red.
But it was early yet-- in the year, in the day. One of those dreary January mornings in which dawn never quite breaks, where the sky overhead doesn’t feel like the sky but the shadow of a sky; even the yellow school buses looked muted beneath the weight of it. Five hundred teenagers still half-asleep staggered aboard and got settled in for the long drive through sleet and darkness, conversation further muted by the roar of the heater, melted ice blurring window panes, presenting us with yet another myopic vision of the world. Sometimes, you have to go west to go east.
2. The Exhibition
Topeka is an indigenous word, meaning “a good place to dig potatoes.” The building an old Montgomery Ward, renovated for the occasion. (See, comrade, capitalism welcomes you!) We arrive, just one fleet of field trippers among many, a yellow caravan. If you’d asked us then, I’m sure every one of us would’ve told you, our future lies beyond an Elton John lyric. Yakov Smirnoff was headlining in Branson. He also did the TV ads for this exhibition. Smirnoff is a vodka made from potatoes. I read a UFO book that hinted strongly that Gorbachev was involved in an alien baby conspiracy.
Three hundred years of Romanov rule distilled into these makeshift galleries, not quite an artifact per year: crowns, jewels, (I remember a particular bauble, topaz gems as big as my fist), sable, a throne, tapestries, icons, shrines, toys, weapons, a carriage. There were Faberge eggs worth unimaginable sums of money. We had to view them from behind velvet ropes, six feet away, kids in letter jackets and winter boots filing past, unable to grasp the enormity of such riches, of occupying such a stretch of time, barely over a decade old ourselves, a dynasty older than our country, older than anything we've ever come near with the exception of the earth itself. (For which we have no real appreciation either.) Our idea of wealth was and still is a McMansion in an upscale subdivision, a country club membership, a BMW, maybe a lake house. The eggs were the grand finale. (Does that make anybody else want breakfast? Let’s stop on the way home for latkes.)
In the gift shop, they sell the obvious nesting dolls, as well as dolls with delicate, porcelain faces in traditional dress, beaded kokoshniks over embroidery thread hair. They sell T-shirts and flattened pennies, posters and postcards, refrigerator magnets and shot glasses, tea in fancy tins. I seem to remember the gift shop better than the rest of it, perhaps because we could handle those items, and tactile memory, but also, Western materialism. I already had a job and had been saving a little from each paycheck, hoping for just the right memento. I walked around and around the glass cases and spinning racks, searching, but in truth, what I wanted was magic. I thought it was possible to find magic on a par with a Faberge egg in a discount bin, scratch-and-dent wish fulfillment, that I might be the one to recognize a grand duchess languishing in an asylum. And Rasputin isn't dead but immortal, and Elvis isn't dead but hiding out from the mob. He and Gorbachev were spotted, delivering an alien baby in Brooklyn. O, Anastasia. O, Alexei. Dancing bears, painted wings. (See, comrade, we embrace you!) If Mikhail can dress like a cowboy, I can rock a sarafan. I settled on an enamel ring, Finift style, pink roses on pale blue, a setting of filigreed silver. O, Ingrid Bergman, and things I almost remember.
3. Year’s End
Christmas shopping at the mall, where a new and improved Montgomery Wards is all a-bustle, Electric Avenue holiday sale, thirty percent off camcorders and compact discs, and outside the Orange Julius, Santa holding court in his Coca-Cola suit. I browse a new kiosk where they’re hawking Russian items, liquidation from the gift shop, everything on extreme markdown. My enamel ring already has a chip in its face. Should’ve gone with the flattened penny. A Russian Orthodox friend takes me to Liturgy and feeds me their brown communion bread. How I wished I was in Moscow. How I craved onion domes and cathedrals, chamomile and lady slipper orchids. When most people talk of desires, this is what we mean: tea and flowers. If I didn’t understand the Romanovs, I understood the Bolsheviks less, Lenin and Stalin not at all. But I understand Hot Topic. I understand Forever 21. I understand RadioShack. Then came Yeltsin. Then came Putin. When they talk of Ukraine, I see in my mind’s eye a sunflower state, a pot-holed parking lot, gems like a fist, a chipped rose, freezing drizzle. I see Khrushchev crying outside Disneyland. I see twelve-year-old boys wearing out-of-date sweaters and corduroys, talking about empty grocery store shelves back in St. Petersburg, I mean Leningrad, I mean Petrograd, I mean the Window to the West.
That Christmas, not a single flake of snow, and Christmas is only getting warmer. Every season, the red line rises. Cue the Sugar Plum Fairies in daisy dukes. Cue the Rat King. It’s okay, I’m told there are no cats in America. Everywhere is just denim and dust. A topaz is nothing but a trinket when the shelves are empty of bread, and what will we do for a host? Pushkin’s at Starbucks, drinking Frappuccinos with John Wayne, talking manifest destiny. Our very own Genghis Kahn, Rooster Cogburn, Marion, lost duke. Happy trails, my comrades. Proshchaniye, little dogies, it’s your misfortune and none of my own. The future is fighting over dueling pistols. The future is an outgrown letter jacket. The future is a reconstituted Monty Wards, littered with broken electronics. The future is on sublet. The future is a pale rider galloping into the sunset, and there’s nothing for us to do but follow.
This poem originally appeared in Meat for Tea, Volume 16, Issue 1, The Russian Caravan Issue.