--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> and the Moscow subway looks like a blast. I don't
> know what the
> atmosphere is though...Chris can enlighten us.
>
I think Dolan described it pretty well:
A Hymn to the Metro By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )
The Metro. I love it. It's hard to write about love, but I want to try. So if lovesongs make you nervous, take your cowardly, cheap gaze elsewhere, because this is going to be pure paean.
I admire the Moscow Metro Imenno Lenina (in the name of Lenin) as the best urban transport system in the world. In nine months of taking the Metro every single day, I've been in one delay, and that one was about 30 seconds long. My awe for the Metro is heightened by the fact that I grew up commuting on the worst and most expensive mass-transit system in the world, BART. The Metro is to BART as the Soviet Army was to Pleasant Hill High's marching band. And in case that's not clear, PHHS's band sucked.
I give thanks to the Metro. The schematic map is in my dreams, and was on my office wall in New Zealand. I can find my way anywhere on that map, and even the times I've been lost have been dream-material -- I have these "waterfall dreams" about moving up to the lip of one of the perekhod escalators, the roar rising from below as I go over the edge to fall slowly with all the others.
I savor the Metro. Every station has its own feel, from the grim crush of Paveletskaya to the Blade-Runner babble of Kievskaya or the pathos of Belorusskaya's pitiful old public grandeur.
I need the Metro. The perfectly posed face-landscapes in every car are nourishment for me -- for every rider, I think. So many faces, each politely looking away from as many other faces as possible. On earlier trips to Moscow, my glance focused on the beautiful young women to be found on every train, imagining chance events -- alien attack or other cataclysms -- which would break the ice, and allow me to introduce myself without offense. Now, an old and blissfully married man, I can scan for a wider range of faces. Russian faces still impress me. The range of nose, chin, eye, neck, of every feature -- the whole history is there, from Rurik to Subotai, sometimes in a single family group rocking gently when the train picks up speed from Kitai-Gorod to Tretyakovskaya.
I steep myself in the Metro, especially its strange, unexpected quiet. I never guessed that Russians would be such quiet people. I know there are times and places when they get loud -- but the Metro isn't one of them. Yesterday two men were talking loudly in my car and when I turned to look at them I saw that everyone else was looking too. We were all shocked. You don't talk in the Metro if you can help it. If you must, you talk very quietly, with your chin leaning against your shoulder to muffle the words, keep them from reaching any strangers' ears. It's a gesture which makes perfect sense to me, a mix of fear and politeness.
If there's noise in a Metro car, we all look and go through a checklist of possible reasons for the breach of manners. (OK, I'm guessing here. Russian readers should write and tell me if I'm right or, as is likely, completely wrong.) Are the loudmouths teenagers? They sometimes break the quiet, and it's excused. Are they tourists? I never knew how loud Western Europeans are, Italians above all. One Italian couple can deafen an entire Metro car. It's amazing us expats aren't beaten and robbed more often. Or are they beggars? Beggars are allowed to be loud. But thank God, they're not allowed to harass. They can carry their cup, or cupped hand, down the aisle, but they can't crowd you. For which I give thanks, remembering the pampered, aggressive beggars of Berkeley.
I look forward to the Metro, to the magic transition when you duck out of the sunny street and go into a slower dream time.
I just plain enjoy the ride, especially the watching games. The cars are halls of mirrors, and we all play the mirrors tactfully, skillfully. We like to check each other out, but there are rules. Tact. Tact is a matter of angles: the person you want to examine is reflected in some window, and your job is to find that window and check out their reflection. To stare directly at them -- this would be the height of rudeness. Once you find the reflection you want to look at, you have to guess how the distorted image (because the Metro car's windows are funhouse mirror, warping and stretching people) actually looks. You get a shock, sometimes, when you see the person directly--which usually happens when either they or you exit, at which point you're allowed to look directly at them, provided they're not getting back in the car.
The exception is footwear. Metro riders, especially women, are serious students of footwear. My black boots, in particular, seem to confuse them. I bought these big Ecco boots because I heard they don't slide on the ice. They were as good as advertised, and helped me avoid falls and brain injury last winter. They're clunky-looking, kind of Eastern-Front tired-looking boots, but they were expensive. Metro riders seem to sense their respectable price, but can't reconcile it with the boots' slobby, dusty look. Several times a week I look up to find another Metro rider looking from my oxymoronic feet to my unequivocally slobby head, trying to place me in the footwear-demographic rankings. Of course, the looker invariably looks away, as do I -- we're equally guilty and equally regretting the eye-to-eye faux pas.
The Metro is a liturgy. It took me months to realize this. It's a Mass. There's the first genuflection, ducking from the noise and air of the street down into the passage. In our perexod at Kitai-Gorod, there are always musicians and beggars standing at the first turn. One day I was walking past when I heard someone singing, in perfect American English, "Strangers in the Night." I turned and saw a blind man, the kind of blind person whose eyes seem to have melted down their cheeks. He finished the song and switched to Russian, unaware of how perfectly he had mimicked New York circa 1961. Sometimes he's there with an accordion-player, a man of medieval face, long-nosed and gloomy. Together they make a sad impression, and as I walk past them I look at the faces looming up in the passage and remember articles I've read on the Russian birthrate -- as in there isn't any -- and feel a spasm of facile, sentimental grief. This people, who bypassed, at terrible cost, the suburban plumpening my fat face traces, are now doomed to go in one generation from isolation to extinction. It's briefly unbearable, till the blind singer and the accordion fade behind me.
Then comes the first test: the quickening squirm into the crowd, picking up your pace, swerving like a salmon among the oncoming commuters, dodging your way down to the ticket machines. Then another fine moment, inserting the ticket, being accepted--my ticket, just as good as everybody's!--and merging into the line at the escalator lip.
And those escalators! They may be the very best part of the whole Metro ceremony. They are the enforced contemplation phase of life in Moscow. Everybody knows so well how to space themselves: there must be an empty step above and below each rider. Once you find your step, you can look up and across. If you're going down, you look at those going up; going up, you look at those descending. It's an eye-joust.
This is the one time on the Metro you're allowed to stare as openly as you want -- because there's no chance you'll meet the people you're staring at. The faces are dreamlike, because they move without striding -- they glide into view and then on, out of sight. Each has a second or so at the center of your attention. In the drooling trance you enter on those escalators, whole vocabularies whisper around the people you're processing. One day I was seeing dog breeds: that woman is like a young Clumber Spaniel....
On my earlier trips to Moscow, when I was very much alone, I didn't waste time thinking up descriptions. Instead, I scanned the escalators, window-shopping for a mate: "Her, maybe...or her -- no, too mean-looking...Or that one, she might like me if she knew I have a US passport...." My imaginings were very humble, and came to nothing, of course. The few times a woman looked back, I looked down.
Some of the best escalator moments are the scenes I'll never understand: two Mitilia guys, earnestly facing each other as they descend, writing furiously in identical notebooks as if they were racing to see who could denounce whom first; a fat Orthodox priest carrying a huge paper-wrapped package with a terrified expression; a huggy trio of adolescents, two of whom are absolutely impossible to gender, even though I track them up the whole escalator.
As you reach the bottom of the escalator, you start walking with a jolt. It's such a fierce way of moving compared to the dream carriage of the escalator: step, step, step. The faces of people slogging to the escalators seem slack and worn, as if they left it all on the train. And you're walking hard in the opposite direction and style, stomping, ready to shove your way onto a train.
Moscow would explode without the Metro, and not simply because all city would be gridlocked instantly, for good. I think the Metro is Moscow's "Epideictic Behavior." That's a term biologists use for the way some species, especially flocking birds like starlings, gather at dawn and dusk in a few trees to look at each other, call to each other, and draw some strange sort of nourishment from the mere fact of the group's continued existence. The Metro is classic epideictic ritual: it takes place at morning and evening; it allows the entire population to see and savor and cherish itself; it's mute and easily ignored.The Metro is our display, morning and evening, that there are still so many of us, not extinct, still able to flock with this massed avian grace.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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