“We asked for child bear, but we got 11 years old woman bear. The trainer said this was ok because she was tired.”

On Monday, I went with Anne to get registered at the Post Office. On top of needing a visa to stay in Russia, and a migration card that you get at customs at the airport, you also need to be registered in your place of residence by the person that owns the apartment. It’s an obnoxious, tedious process, as most people don’t own the apartments they are renting, so they need to get their landlord to come to the post office with them, with several copies of all of their documents (passports, visa, etc.) and fill out a two page application on which no mistakes can be made, or else you need to start again. Obviously, Anne doesn’t own the apartment she is renting, so I was registered at her dacha in the countryside. Like most formalities in Russia, it’s an outdated process for letting the government know where everyone is located at any given time (technically, if you travel to another city within Russia for more than three days, even if you are a Russian citizen, you still need to register at the hotel in that city). And, like everything else involving the government in Russia, there is money to be made from corruption associated with registration forms – some Russian landlords register over 200 migrant workers to the same apartment, when in reality the workers are living in garages or in sheds or on the construction site they work on. And those are only the employers that hire legal or semi-legal labor…

After registration, I bumped into Simon, Jamie and Felix outside the Sokol metro station, which is close to our apartments. Simon had to run off to get some things settled before he and Anne left for England, so Jamie asked me if I’d like to come play Frisbee with him and Felix in the park behind our apartments (in an effort to tire out the highly rambunctious Felix before Jamie had to go on other tutoring appointments later that day).

Dressed in a nice blazer from his earlier four-hour consultation with a new student, Jamie explained to me how exhausting it is to try to teach British history to someone in the Russian school system. He explained that in the UK, everything in history books was based in fact and supported by documents, archaeology, etc. If in a British history textbook, they stated that the Queen signed a certain piece of legislation, they would always show a picture of that document with her signature on it to prove it to the schoolchildren. In Russia, most history is part of the national myth and probably can’t be supported by any type of evidence. Jamie asked his pupil that morning to research on the internet anything that proves that Peter the Great went as a spy to Europe to steal secrets of shipbuilding for Russia’s first navy. The father of the pupil frowned at Jamie, knowing that he could search for several days and probably not come up with anything concrete.

Jamie also complained of the new Russian law that is going into effect in 2014, which basically takes away the benefits of free public school. Besides Russian language, Russian literature and I think math, all other classes past a certain grade will be for a fee. So while all other countries are striving toward the goal of universal free primary education (a millennium goal), Russia is, in fact, taking it away. “What is the average Russian child going to do?” Jamie asked. “They are going to turn into a nation of vegetables!” Seeing Felix run by like a tiny maniac, Jamie quickly put a smile on his face and took the Frisbee out of his backpack. We played monkey in the middle in the park for at least half an hour until both Felix and Jamie were out of breath (Felix from running, Jamie from being a chain smoker).

Poster from "Nomer 13" feat. Sergey & Azamat

Later that day I arranged to meet with Sergey, my Russian friend who had previously been my tutor when I was in Russia in 2008-9. At the time a student at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, Sergey invited me to several of his shows for free, including his directorial and lead actor debut in “Nomer 13”, a British farce play, bizarrely translated into Russian, but ultimately hysterical. In fact, the play was so good that he got a lot of attention for it and ended up opening his own comedy theater company in Moscow. As we walked from the metro station to a coffee shop, the creatively named chain “Coffee House,” Sergey, blond, my height, with English graffiti on his shirt that read “Who Are You?” told me more about the difficulties of starting your own theater in Moscow. “The government is corrupt, our ‘two presidents,’ even when dealing with theater,” he said. “Can you imagine that? Theater! It took us 4 months to get our registration papers in to form our company, then they told us we did it wrong, so we had to spend ANOTHER four months redoing our application and getting it approved. And all that time we had to hire legal people to help us, which is very expensive. And now the taxes are killing us. We pay 40% taxes and the government says this is to fund the arts, but where is the funding? They lie, there is none.” It was so crazy to see my normally lighthearted, highly animated tutor/friend so worked up.

As we sat down and Sergey ordered a massive pot of tea (Russians drink tea constantly - At least 4-5 cups a day, more if you are visiting someone else’s house or going out to eat), I asked him about his recent travels to Poland, which I had seen on Facebook. It turns out a Polish director had seen his performance of “Nomer 13” and had asked him to come to a Polish theater festival in Warsaw. He went and had a lot of meetings with regional troupes, both sides talking in broken English since neither side knew Russian or Polish, respectively. Sergey has since been trying to set up workshops for Polish actors in Moscow at his theater, and has learned quite a bit of Polish, at which point I made the mistake of telling him I speak some Polish, as well, so he decided to use some Polish phrases in our conversation. Sergey also wanted to practice his English, so our conversation was a mix of Polish, Russian and English with no hint of upcoming linguistic transitions on his part. He kept emphasizing how much he loved Poland. “Poland is beautiful and great. Moscow is a toilet,” he said, pointing out the window.

Alla Pugacheva

I also asked him about his Kazakh friend who co-starred with him in “Nomer 13.” “Oh, you mean Azamat?” he asked, smiling, using his hands to subtly pull at the corners of his eyes, making them slanty like a Central Asian. I never know how to react when Russian people do this (which is quite often, when talking about Asians or Central Asians). Obviously Azamat is Sergey's friend and former roommate, but it's also a racist thing to do, with some racial slurs for Central Asians in the Russian language being references to their "slanty eyes." So, with me dying a little inside, Sergey continued, “Azamat is great. He doesn’t really work in my theater that much. He is having more success in TV. And it pays more.” “Who do you live with now?” I asked. “Someone from my institute in an apartment close to here. Just a friend. A friend,” he reiterated quickly. I'd always kind of wondered about Sergey, being a theater buff who was obsessed with Harry Potter (or Gary Potter, as they call him over here), the re-release of Titanic in movie theaters, and Alla Pugacheva, the Russian version of Cher (except way tackier and more scandalous). As if on cue, Sergey then told me about how he recently entered a song writing contest dedicated to ABBA in Sweden, and even made it to the final round of voting before the contest organizers realized he was not a citizen of Sweden, a condition for receiving the prize winnings. Well, whatever. I also love Gary Potter and romantic movies and ABBA. It’s probably why we get along so well.

Being friends for a few years now, I felt comfortable asking him about his time in the Russian army, which has a mandatory conscription for men after finishing university, unless your parents have a lot of money, and then you can pay your way out of doing service. The two-year stint is notorious for having extremely brutal hazing, or “dedovshchina,” in which new recruits are often beaten and/or tortured within an inch of their life, and there are many cases of people dying in the army, not in combat or even friendly fire, but at the hands of other sadistic second-years, the “deds,” or grandfathers of the units. “Oh, it was not bad, for I was in theater army,” he said. The look on my face of WHAAA?!?! made him elaborate further. “Yes, all of the guys who graduate from theater institutes in Moscow get put into a special troop where we put on performances and do stupid things like pour tea for Putin at events. Which I have done,” he said with a frown. “You see, this theater army is left over from World War II and Putin does not know about it and Medvedev does not know about it, but our Moscow major knows and keeps us so we can do things for him personally like repair his dacha or do work on his apartment. It is very frustrating, doing work for someone not because of duty, but because of corruption.” “It could be worse,” I remind him, “You could have been in the real army.” “This is true,” he conceded. “Also, theater army is only one year, so that is good. I was sergeant because I am known for being a good director, and everyone in my command was my friend from institute.”

 Just when I thought they story couldn’t get any more bizarre, Sergey mentioned, “As part of theater army, we planned parties for important people. I had to plan a birthday event for the deputy secretary of Moscow, a lady. So I called up my friend who is a trainer in the circus and asked him for child bear for the party.” “A BEAR?” I asked, just to clarify. “Yes, of course, a bear,” Sergey said continuing on with his story. “So my friend shows up and even though we asked for child bear, but we got 11 years old woman bear. The trainer said this was ok because she was tired.” I couldn’t tell if he meant tired sleepy or tired tranquilized, but I let it slide. “So this BIG BEAR was at the party, and I was very scared but the woman bear was ok until the deputy secretary who was very…um…” and flicked his neck under his chin, the Russian signal for very, very drunk, “she went up to the bear and tried to feed it and the trainer got very scared then, too, and pushed the deputy secretary away. It was a good party. A big success.”

Remembering that he had referred to Putin and Medvedev as “our two presidents” with large air quotations, I asked him if he took part in the protests at all. “You know, I did not. I hate Putin and I hate our parliament and I hate this corruption, but I think the protesters are… без направления,” he said, looking at me for a translation. “Without direction,” I answered. “Yes! They do not really know what they want. They have no leader. Navalny, he is not a leader. He is not. What do they think will happen?” he asked. “So I stayed home.” I told him that’s how I felt about Occupy Wall Street. “I also stayed home,” I told him. Occupy Wall Street got Sergey on the track of American politics. “So, what do you hear about Russia in America?” he asked. I told him about the protests and how Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for them (aka my namesake, as when I am introduced to anyone in Moscow, they all go “Ahhh! Hilary kak(like) Hillary Clinton! Kruta (cool)!”) and how Russia is blocking intervention in Syria. I also mentioned the Mitt Romney comment about how Russia is the USA’s number one enemy in the world today. Sergey said he had heard this too, as it was a big story in Russia news, and that it was embarrassing. “We are friends now, yes? Our countries? Why does he think we are the enemy?” he asked. “He’s an idiot. Don’t worry, I’m not voting for him,” I assured him.

As Sergey asked for the check, a crazy memory popped into my head. Once when he had been tutoring me, he told me about this child railroad by his hometown, where children work on the trains and run the railroad. I always pictured some bizarre combination of the Underground Railroad and child labor. Chalking it up to my poor Russian comprehension at the time, I asked Sergey again, in an attempt to get an explanation that made more sense, “Hey Sergey, remember that child railroad you told me about. It’s a real thing, right? I don’t think I understood the first time you told me about it.” “Yes, the child railroad is real. I myself took part in the child railroad. I will take you to see this sometime this summer! I have a car now!” he said, beaming. “So, uh, children work in the trains?” I asked. “Yes, they take tickets and run the stations and manage people on the trains. It is good fun. It makes them feel like they have accomplished something.” “Are they qualified to run a railroad?” I asked, incredulous, “I mean, they are kids.” “Well, yes, in the winter break we take a theoretical exam about rules of the railroad and how trains operate and then in the spring after school ends, we have training for a couple of weeks about how to run the train in real practice.” Momentarily speechless, I asked facetiously, “So children trains, what, are there children boats and planes too?” “Oh yes!” Sergey exclaimed, “We have children boats too! No planes, though. That would be unsafe.”