Best Women's Travel Writing 2010

There was Carson, who I knew I’d fall in love with. There was Bonnie, who ran away to perform puppet shows on Nevsky Prospekt. There was Alexei, eighteen and effeminate, with wide ears and an obsession with hand washing. There was Irina, the ecologist, who always wore heels and some oddly bright color. There was David, the Russian major, who knew everything, even more than the Russians.

There was Hostel Ostrovok, where a Russian I didn’t know dropped me off in a car like a tin can. Hostel Ostrovok was leaking things, dripping with disease, lust, and the smell of sweat. It was surrounded by two liquor stores, mud, a dead cat, a stillborn bird, lots of lonely-looking men, abandoned vehicles, chicken wire, and a playground with more crippled dogs than children. All the buildings looked like this one, hundreds stretching for miles.

There was the elevator we took to the thirteenth floor of Hostel Ostrovok. It was the size of a kitchen cabinet. There were usually about five of us in there sharing the same breath of cigarettes and booze.

I was second to arrive after David. He had thinning blond hair and suffered from a degenerative bone disease sure to leave him crippled and blind in ten years. I met the Russians, Alexei and Irina, downtown and hated them both for their sense of better days. I met Carson, heroin-eyed and hungover, in the pee-yellow glare of the hostel’s only bathroom. I met Bonnie sitting on the windowsill in my room, the dying green sky her backdrop, smoking with her eyes down.

“My mom forced me to smoke my first cigarette when I was thirteen,” she said with a languid movement, as if she had practiced saying this. “I’ve been chain-smoking ever since.” She sat on the bed and stared at me. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I just came to get the visa.”

Both Carson and I lied to get in the program, an environmental studies volunteer project better left unnamed. We found it on the internet on a website with photos of women catching fish. It said we could help Russia, and the Russians, and the elk and trees and especially the tundra. Neither of us spoke Russian.

On the third day I moved into Carson’s room. I wrapped a sheet around my body and left him naked on the bed. From the hotel balcony, I watched the world unfold thirteen stories down—the red soviet bricks, a babushka stretching, that pack of crippled dogs panting in the playground—and I waited for him, to come to me, to be aware of my movements; the way the sheet formed against my back. When I asked him a question, he nodded and turned his head toward the TV. The blue glare lit half his face, and I stood in the sun with nothing to behold me. That night, before bed, I turned off all the lights in the room. I didn’t want him to be an image anymore, just a feeling in the dark.

One morning, when the dogs were sleeping, we went to play on the monkey bars. As the air warmed and the dew dried, the dogs rose like corpses and surrounded us.

Afternoons we took the metro downtown where old ladies sold vegetables, shoes, clothes, guinea pigs, a piece of dried meat. In the corners were puddles of cigarettes, curled beggars, abandoned dogs, groups of amputees wearing camo and singing love songs.

The metro and the Russians became our daily routine: wake up early, go down the elevator, walk a mile over last night’s drunks, kick half-full beer cans, poke the dead cat, or check to see if it had been relocated (it had), stop at a kiosk and buy ten-cent beers. At the metro we’d find Irina, waiting. She was always alone in the middle of the metro clutching folders full of information about lead contaminated soil. David loved Irina.

Carson and I always sat next to each other on the metro, letting our eyes bulge in and out of our heads. An old man got robbed next to us and that was the first time Carson held my hand.

When no one else showed up, we took the overnight train north to the Kola Peninsula, above the Arctic Circle. It’s home to taiga forests, migrating peoples, man-eating pigs, Santa’s house, and men named Orlof. On the map it looks like something being born.

On the train a beer can rolled from one side of the car to the other, shaking with the rhythm of a screaming child, a curtain flapping, a drunk man hitting the wall, the roar of doors opening and closing between cars, everything followed by gasps of silence.

It smelled like everything Russian: a palpable mix of sausage, vodka, and musk. A smell like an untended costume store, a diner, a smoky but quiet tavern, a very old lady.

An overcrowded room of men sang and slurred Russian pop music. One of them raised a hand at me, decorated in gold rings, as if to excuse the behavior.

I went to the empty sleeping room and tried to fall asleep. I pressed my hand against the wall knowing Carson was on the other side. I knocked and the wall vibrated with a hollow echo. He returned the knock and I traced his imagined silhouette with my hand.

In the morning the windows opened for the smokers. I stuck my head out like a dog, letting the wind dry and water my eyes. We passed swastikas, graffiti that read Fuck America, a dog with three legs, piles of burning things.

I hung out with a Russian guy by the window and we talked, he in Russian and I in English. They never seemed to mind if you didn’t know Russian. They just kept on talking and you kept on talking. He handed me a coin. It was some keepsake coin celebrating the first Russian in space. He said America wasn’t first. He told me to bring it back and stick it up George Bush’s ass. They always knew a little English.

A woman named Sveta, beautiful and red-haired with blue eye shadow, met us at the train station and drove us into the nature reserves with a man named Roman who never talked.

There were no restaurants, no gift shops, no paved roads, no fences, no warning signs. To get in, we needed special permission and a passport. Driving through the entrance we got a salute from a ripe old Russian in an army hat, his eyes saying something else.

It was midnight but still bright as noon. We stayed in a cabin by a river called the Svir, as lifeless as a chlorinated pool. In the place where the waves broke was a halo of glittering vodka bottles and diapers.

Carson and I shared a room that was tiny and dirty and had two single beds. The green curtains cast a morbid hue on our skin. We pushed the two beds together under the window and sat there with our heads down. Irina and David shared a room. Alexei stayed in a room at the farthest end of the hallway.

The park ranger was Igor. The only man who would hire Igor was Vasili, the park manager, whose right arm was missing and whose left thigh was one big scar from the afternoons he spent whittling. Vasili lived in a yellow house with a wife who we only saw through the window on dark nights, sitting on the couch and staring.

Igor carried a knife, three packs of unfiltered cigarettes, an orange lighter, a notebook, a silver flask of absinthe, a walkie-talkie, and a pack of menthol gum. He arrived as a refugee looking for work after he escaped the Chechnyan military. At first I only saw Igor in the distance, appearing and disappearing like a strange fog. He always wore a mesh camo top, camo pants, aviator sunglasses, and a gold chain.

When it rained Carson and I went swimming in the Svir and everything smelled metallic. Things morphed behind the rain: oil tankers with their loud creaking moans, Carson disappearing and reappearing in the grayness. We would dive underwater and look at each other. Our hair standing on end, our cheeks puffed with air and leaking, our skin looking green, and our bodies swaying. Each time we dove deeper, holding hands, and our skin turned a different shade: green to purple to blue and then just black and two white eyes.

When it was hot, Igor tanned on the beach. He sat in a rainbow foldout chair and watched us. Carson and I talked about how no one we knew or would ever know would come here.

One time we had to help an ecologist catch fish. She lived in a small cabin on the edge of the river. We sat in two small fishing boats that smelled like moss, paddled out into the deepest part of the river, and threw nets into the water. Then we just waited, sat in the sun, and slept. We only caught two fish and then we ate them with salt.

We were there two months and the nights started turning dark in August. We could see the moon late at night. It woke us up. Carson and I would lie together under its light.

Sometimes Carson and I locked ourselves in the room. We drank warm beer and made serious plans about running away to Moscow or Helsinki or Prague and then immediately forgot them.

Sometimes I tried to make my breathing the same as his breathing so that maybe if he noticed he would think there might be some connection between us.

Sometimes I sat by the window looking at nothing and my fingers found their way into the dust on the sill and I’d start writing his name. When he opened the door, it all blew away in a quick rain of glimmery fly carcasses and blue wings.

One night when the sky was purple and the mosquitoes were thick, Carson and I went swimming and the water was gritty and pink like chalk. We tried to imagine where on a map the river Svir started and ended. Then we dove underwater, held each other, and let the current take us somewhere else.

We washed up on shore a few minutes later and sat down in the sand. Two rangers named Sasha and Sasha walked by and invited us back to their cabin. Along the way, three more rangers named Roman, Grecia, and Roman joined us. Igor was there pouring Russian Cocktails (vodka mixed with beer). The smoke was so thick that everyone’s face seemed to melt and wander around underneath it. They took a shot about every fifteen minutes. They played Rammstein.

We sat down next to Igor and with a thick accent and a voice too high for his looks he whispered, Russian extreme, really emphatic and slow-like. He told me about Russian extreme with hand movements and serious eyes and some description about a tiny boat in the sea and a not so tiny tornado. This was followed by long pauses, teary stares, and collapsing arms.

He said he was married four times but it didn’t work out. He said once he lived in the woods with just his knife, a picture of someone he loved, and that pack of menthol gum. He told us to be careful, how we should never leave the Svir.

The night continued like this: loud German rock music, smoke thick like butter, a lot of useless talk, everyone camo-clad, chain smoking, and slamming vodka.

The first Sasha was missing teeth and smelled like pond water. A stomach protruded from his body like a tumor. I watched him turn from happy to sad in a moment. He rolled onto the bed. We poured him a beer, took his picture, left him where he passed out—a sad heap of a man.

We wanted to let Sasha sleep so we headed up a blurry trail to another ranger’s house. It looked the same, smoke and camo and dark wood and lots of fishing supplies. When we ran out of alcohol we drove to a twenty-four-hour liquor store where I peed behind something I don’t remember.

On the way back we stopped at a bridge over the Svir and everything looked black and white, and everyone was smoking. The woods and sky and water took on a strange permanent stillness, the kind of stillness and silence and permanence that makes you feel alive in a sort of strange, sick way. I balanced on the edge of the bridge in the half-light, looked down and wondered what it would be like to jump into that water. The rangers danced and Carson’s feet hung out of the back of the car. We drove back to the cabin.

Carson made a bed on the floor, curled slowly into himself. The first Roman leaned against a window, closed his eyes and fell asleep, still smoking. The other Roman was missing. Grecia just stared at the wall. Igor was on the table, his face flat against the wood, one eye gazing up toward the ceiling.

There was me, just sitting there watching all this happen, not really a part of it, not really separate from it, just knowing that this was very fun and disturbing and sad.

I got up to leave and walked out onto the trail toward my cabin. Igor followed. He grabbed my arm and stood behind me. He let out a half moan, took off his shirt, and handed it to me. He set it in my hands where it hung slack and cold like a dead animal. I slipped it over my arms and let it fall onto my torso. Igor walked back into the cabin with the other rangers and lay among them.

I went to my room and lay across the bed, a cold sheet hung over one leg. I left my eyes open, glaring brainlessly into the moonlight. My body was loose and felt heavy and nothing was moving except for my hand that scratched at the shirt. I lay there in bed clinging desperately to this world, and thought of Igor in the cabin, hand clasped around a shot, clinging forever to another.

Jennifer Percy grew up in the high desert of central Oregon where much of her childhood was spent listening to Garth Brooks and eating T-bone steaks. Her most recent adventure took her to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina where she wrote about the influence of aphorisms on post-war identity. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, The Indiana Review, The Literary Review, and Brevity, among others. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Stanley Foundation, and the University of Iowa Museum of Art.