Moscow and the morning after the night before

Tour Overture

The coldness of Moscow has a presence of its own. You could just imagine it walking around Red Square — well, somewhere along the miles of it — and weaving its snowy-white magic everywhere. Fifteen degrees below freezing. I feel like Batman in my anti-freeze attire: thermals, sweater, leather jacket, skull cap and gloves. I put on everything, except something to cover my face. That’s where the cold works its fingers: pinpricks of coldness do a number on my face and they are unbearable. Imagine your nose getting frostbitten. Where is that damn tour bus? Napoleon, contemplating his defeat by the Russian army in 1812 after his ill-fated attack on Moscow during the dead of winter, mused: “It wasn’t Russian generals that defeated me… It was General Frost.”

Several minutes ago, I found it amusing how tourists in thick fur and ski masks, which rendered them anonymous, were posing for pictures beside the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, one even garbed like Kenny from South Park. “Well, that’s me in Moscow during my vacation in 2009,” a caption in someone’s Facebook might read in the future. I laughed then, but I am not laughing now while trudging toward the bus, frozen without delight.

The Night Before

The night before, my companions and I went to Karma Bar in Kuznetskiy Most, Moscow. Dimitri, an ex-member of the Russian Army, accompanied us — a tall, baby-faced dude who could probably kill me within three and a half seconds. Using two fingers. Blindfolded. I’m glad he was on our side.

Going to the dance floor of Karma is like a descent into Hades. You go to the entrance. Pay a consumable fee of around 2,000 rubles for a table, walk through a dark alleyway, go down a steep staircase, check in your winter gear at the musky counter (B.O. and perfume create an indescribable yet unforgettable odor), go downstairs again, walk to the door of Karma and, in our case, get welcomed by the sweet strains of salsa. An Orphean trip is what it was. There were two adjacent bars and around five to six low tables with people drinking vodka, or smoking hookah, or eating Japanese food. Salsa and sushi, vodka with Red Bull… Ah, the bar called Karma, there’s nothing in the world like it.

Turned out that in another room was where DJs play the more contemporary music — electronica, house, even trance. There were a few stunning Muscovite girls (tall, blonde, blue-eyed), with “M2Ms” or male-to-male dancers forming zones around them, waiting to make The Move. It’s like watching lions and wildebeests on National Geographic. Half an hour later, two yuppies started fighting (over a girl, I suppose) — managing not to hit each other in the process. One guy threw a punch, missed. The other guy ducked, fell. The Keystone punch-up. Some of the people left the dance floor, some grooved on. I hung around and watched the non-fistfight as Daft Punk played in the background. Police came and that was it.

Back at the salsa area, our goal to finish mugs upon mugs of Siberian Corona got interrupted by the evening’s highlight. A European woman with curves in all the right places started dancing Coyote Ugly-style on top of one of the bars. She began to strip and the male barflies went wild. We were so enthralled with the show and deemed Karma to be the best place on earth to be at that moment, until a muscular guy resembling Machete — long hair, G-string and all — started doing the same thing on top of the other bar. Machete’s show climaxed with him holding up his underwear (blue-green, I was told) like a trophy or a dead animal, with a big smile upon his face, his privates dangling like a participle.

We left the Karma Bar and were greeted by a drug pusher outside the joint. “What country are you from?” he snapped in broken English when he found out we didn’t want any of his chemicals. Dimitri was in peace mode and knew well enough not to get us into some sort of mess with Moscow’s underworld characters. He hailed two gypsy cabs and told the drivers to take us to our hotel. Our driver looked like Santa Claus, so very appropriate for our winter wanderlust in Moscow. He drove so fast that I half-expected us to go back in time.

The Morning After

I love vodka. I hate vodka. I love… Hangovers give a person mixed feelings about being on a drinking binge. Russian vodka, even the cheap ones with unpronounceable names, tastes like nectar from the goddesses, but the hangover feels like a cluster of Jupiter’s lightning bolts to the head.

We are on a bus ride around the city. My seatmate is my hangover (since hangovers — like depression and coldness — have a presence of their own). We pass Fyodor Dostoevsky’s statue outside the Russian State Library. Dostoevsky is Miles while Tolstoy is Coltrane in the pantheon of the great Russian authors. I ask the tour guide how much trouble Dostoevsky got from his compulsive gambling, and how much of his writing was done on-the-run from angry creditors. She just shrugs off the question and proceeds to talk about Catherine the Great’s jewelry collection. She will do the same to my queries about Rasputin. All she could say about the mad monk from Siberia: “He had special abilities.”

Well, that’s an understatement. It would be like saying Alan Moore doesn’t fancy shaving or movies made about his graphic novels. Rasputin was born in Siberia, that infamous and crushingly dull landscape where the Soviets exiled the enemies of the state. Even as a young boy, Rasputin had mysterious healing powers — healing sick horses, identifying thieves, and receiving visions of divine forces every now and then. Years later he would find himself in St. Petersburg, having gained the trust of the Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra by healing their son who suffered from hemophilia. Rasputin had lots of groupies during his time, despite smelling like a goat and possessing those evil, dark eyes. Lore has it that he survived several assassination attempts. A prostitute without a nose stabbed him in the abdomen. He survived. Rasputin was given cream cakes and wine laced with cyanide, shot, bludgeoned with a metal object, shot again repeatedly. Still breathing, bizarrely. Finally he was stuffed into the trunk of a car and crammed into a hole in the icy Neva River. The next day villagers found him dead (the water in his lungs indicating that he was still alive when he was submerged into the river), the tsar and the empress would soon follow him to the grave. A fulfillment of Rasputin’s curse, perhaps. But no, no, Rasputin didn’t rise from the dead, collaborate with the Nazis, and fight an apocalyptic battle against a red devil child. Not history but Hellboy.

The bus moves on, and along with it the tour guide’s summary of Russian history — from the Slavs to the Mongol invasion to Ivan the Terrible to Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev to Glasnost. “Death makes angels of us all,” Jim Morrison once said. Well, not in the case of Ivan the Terrible whose name still has that resonance of evil. Like Rasputin.

As for Lenin, The Moscow News reported that the embalmed corpse of the Russian communist leader will be given a bath in a special embalming compound, as well as a wardrobe change. Lenin’s body has been on public display in a glass case since 1924. On the 84th anniversary of Lenin’s death, Moscow riot police detained some 30 people dressed as mummies who attempted to gather on Red Square calling for the removal of the embalmed body at the mausoleum and its transfer to a regular cemetery for burial.

In other news, a Georgian girl trio called 3G has a song initially earmarked for the Eurovision contest titled “We Don’t Want To Put In,” which is a sly dig at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. I don’t know what’s weirder, picketing mummies or the Putin song.

We get off the bus and walk to the Kremlin to see a tsar-size cannon and bell, enter the cathedrals, and get serenaded by a Russian Orthodox Church vocal group whose harmonizing was even better than that of Crosby, Stills & Nash (even with Young in the lineup). The vibrato of the guy who sings bass is astounding; I swear I am hearing a Hammond organ somewhere. On top of the bed of harmonies is the soloist’s lilting voice. Grace notes a-flutter. I could imagine cherubs sweeping down the mighty Moskva River with “clouds on their tongues.”

The following morning, we take the Moscow Metro with our Russian friend Anna Nekrásova to State Tretyakov Gallery (which boasts works by Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich) and the Pushkin Museum (with its Rembrandts, as well as plaster casts of famous sculptures such as Michelangelo’s “David” and “Moses”). The underground stations are visually appealing in themselves. Like museums for the masses. You go down a long (as in very long) escalator into another world of mosaics and murals and busking musicians… and, oh yes, trains. We pass two former guys in camouflage playing acoustic guitars. “Former soldiers,” Anna informs, “singing about war.”

Anna is such a warm and friendly person, like most of the Russians we’ve met in this beautiful city. (The exception would be her co-worker: at the start of the tour, guys fondly called her “Scarlett Johansson,” but before the trip ends she would be rechristened as “Boy George.” Karma, karma, karma chameleon.) At Tretyakov, Anna shares stories about some of the paintings on view.

She points to Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov’s “The Appearance of Christ Before the People.” Framed sketches and studies accompany Ivanov’s masterpiece. The painter, who spent most of his life in Rome, asked Italians and Israelis to sit for him. “It took him 20 years to finish the painting,” Anna explains. “And there were rumors that Christ was modeled after a woman.”

I learn more from Anna than from our Rasputin-avoiding tour guide. She talks about Bogatyrs, troikas, Ivan the Terrible, executions during the Russian revolution, and other topics of conversation that would go great with Vodka, which I love and hate at the same time.

One of the most important pieces in Tretyakov is Russian battle painter Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin’s “Apotheosis of War,” which shows a mountain of skulls surrounded by a murder of crows. Something that evokes the horrors of war past, present and future — the futility of it all. Well, according to the great historian George Alan O’Dowd (more commonly known as Boy George), “War is stupid.”

“I am sure that is your favorite picture in the whole museum,” Anna teases, pointing to the Vereshchagin painting.

With that, we walk out of Tretyakov and into the snowy streets of Moscow once more. Coldness follows us like another companion.