Machine Guns in the Afternoon

Travel Stories: Stephanie Carrie went to Russia to walk the streets that Gogol walked. She didn't plan on practicing her language skills at gunpoint.

08.17.09 | 11:37 AM ET

Photo of Kupchino, Russia by Stephanie Carrie

The bus took its final lurch towards my stop, quieting to an idling rumble at a corner of Balkanskaya Square. I squeezed myself through the foggy-windowed doors, exhaling the beer- and sweat-drenched air, and started down the dirt path home. It was the end of the second week of my summer-abroad program in Russia.

Before I left the States, I was slated to stay with Olga Semyonova and her grand piano at the center of St. Petersburg, just off the Neva River. Her home was 20 minutes from the university and seemed a safe and culturally rich location for a young woman with mediocre language skills on her first trip abroad. But her roof fell in and I ended up in Kupchino, an hour and a half bus ride from the city center, with the only host mom left: Svetlana Stepanovna.

Svetlana lived in a high rise, a dirty grey tower with cracked, spidery windows weaving cobwebs of clotheslines out onto tilting balconies. The foyer of my new home smelled like urine, still water and cement. Since its erection in the 1960s, this Communist monument to “equality through ugliness” had been self-destructing, unhindered by rehab or renovation. Svetlana, however, had grown strong and saucy with the years. She was a 62-year-old former sociology professor who loved ballet and trashy French novels. Through impromptu games of multi-lingual charades and evenings watching “Sex and the City” dubbed into Russian, we became fast friends.

That particular afternoon, I decided to skip my ritual after-school walk down Nevsky Prospect, to return home early. Everything seemed routine as I walked the familiar path, but when I unlocked the two security doors of our sixth floor apartment, I realized something was different: Svetlana wasn’t home. With extra lectures and cultural excursions, I usually wasn’t home before 8 p.m. I’d never realized it, but Svetlana’s presence was a constant in the apartment. The silence felt eerie. I calmed myself with the notion that Svetlana was a social pensioner whose life did not revolve around being home to make me kasha and chicken kutleti. I locked both doors and settled down with my homework.

I had barely begun curling the Cyrillic cursive of my name when the phone rang. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never been alone with the phone. Svetlana didn’t have an answering machine, and I figured it could be my mother or boyfriend calling, so I answered it.

Allo?” I said.

Svetlana doma? Is Svetlana home?” a gruff voice asked.

Nyet. Can I say who called?”

Ne nada.” The caller hung up.

Although I was proud of my newly discovered Russian secretarial abilities, a drop of apprehension made its way down my spine. Someone now knew that I, a young foreigner, was alone in the apartment. The stories I’d heard about Kupchino’s gang problems resurfaced in my mind. I could only imagine the tricks Russian criminals had for looting apartments and kidnapping foreigners. Something must have prompted the tenants to barricade their apartments with double security doors.

I buried my head in a Pushkin poem and tried to shake off the nervous energy pooling in my stomach. The phone rang again.

Allo?”

Svetlana, doma?” asked a different voice, more abrasive and searching than the first.

Nyet, can I ...”

Ne nada.” Click.

My mind now leapt into the realm of imagination usually inhabited by writers of B-horror films and National Enquirer articles. I conjured a pair of criminals who were either superiorly dense, or just liked to be thorough when staking out a hit. Perhaps a gang of delinquents had gotten hold of the university’s list of students. Foreigners have cash, iPods, digital cameras and, most importantly, American passports. Who wouldn’t want to rob them? The convicts were now making house calls with Kalashnikovs.

I tried to translate the words in front of me but the Cyrillic letters kept transforming themselves into little Russian mobsters with machetes hacking each other to pieces. I was about to surrender the last cash on my phone card to make a 6,925-mile call for help when the intercom for the building’s main door buzzed. I jumped out of my chair. Had Svetlana forgotten her key? Why would the criminals expect me to buzz them up? I decided to ignore the visitor. Whoever it might be was obviously looking for Svetlana, and she was ne doma.

The intercom’s buzzing continued. Stop! Stop!!!! It stopped. They had given up ... or been let in. I peeked from behind the curtains, but the balconies below blocked my view of the main entrance. It seemed ludicrous that the calls and the intercom’s buzzing could be connected. It was too much like an action thriller: the killer getting closer and closer.

A bang on the apartment door sent me fleeing to the furthest corner of the room. This wasn’t a caffeine-enhanced nightmare of coincidences anymore. They were here! Mobsters with their bazookas were here, and they were not shy about their intentions.

I crept to the door and screamed in adrenaline-pumped Russian, “Svetlana isn’t here. Come back later!”

“This is the police. Otkroyte dver! Open the door!”

Did they think I was born yesterday? I may have sounded like a 3-year-old to them in my piecemeal Russian, but in English I was a completely rational adult. They were obviously criminals dressed up as the police coming to rape and murder me.

I sank down with my back to the door, sobbing, snot-nosed. “Come back later,” I said. “Please. Please!”

My addled brain began flashing images. I saw my mother waving goodbye at the airport, my dorm room at NYU, my college Russian teacher, svelte with her fortune at escaping her homeland before its demise. I came here to improve my language skills, to haggle with babushkas at bazaars over the price of hand-made lacquered boxes. I came here to walk the streets that Gogol and Akhmatova walked. Sure, I came here to widen my world view, but pleading for my life through four inches of reinforced wood and steel was not how I planned to become a world citizen.

I heard one of the assassins fiddling with the lock. I pushed my body more fervently against the door, as if my small sum of bones and flesh could actually serve as further fortification. I was contorting myself into something resembling a vertical fetal position when I heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie, the kind police officers use.

A voice said: “Have you talked to the occupant?”

Now wait a minute. If the police were at my door, then there was a whole new reason to panic. Maybe Svetlana was injured and they needed my help. Part of me wanted to open the door and get this slaughter or rescue over with, whichever one it was. Part of me wanted to crawl under my sofa bed. I resolved to do the former. Quivering, I opened both the wooden and steel doors.

The door swung open to reveal two men standing in the graffiti-tagged hall, brandishing bulky machine guns pointed directly at me. They wore bullet-proof vests and looked like a cross between a S.W.A.T. team and a private militia. I was on the verge of passing out when I saw that they were my age and looked as perplexed as I was. Even with machine guns, these felons appeared a little too gaunt and green to provoke a complete loss of consciousness.

They barged past me. I expected them to start emptying the contents of my suitcase into the pockets of their fatigues. Instead they went into the kitchen and made a phone call. When I followed, one of the boys turned to explain that because of somethingicouldnotundersand, they had to wait for the apartment’s owner to return. I took this opportunity to request that since I was not being held captive, could he please stop pointing his gun at me? With a shrug, he lowered the barrel. I felt better.

My terror eased, and I was left with the uneasy apprehension of a doctor’s waiting room. I didn’t know what these men were expecting to find in the apartment, but they seemed relieved they hadn’t had to deal with anything more dire than a hysterical American exchange student. I wondered what the typical Russian host did when entertaining the toe-tapping militsia in her home. The slighter of the men stretched out backwards along the thin kitchen bench. The doughier one sank into a chair and began picking the tablecloth. I decided to break the silence.

Khotitye malini? Would you like some raspberries?” I had picked some up at the market to surprise Svetlana. They stared at me with tired eyes, then both burst out laughing. They began asking me questions with boyish quizzicality. I was the first American they had met. I learned that their names were Sasha and Dima. They had been with the local police for three years, since they turned 18. 

Soon the front doors slammed. A flush-cheeked Svetlana, hobbling beneath the weight of her groceries, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her reaction to seeing me with two men dressed for combat was one of surprise and fear. After an incomprehensible soliloquy from Dima, however, she found the situation hilarious.

In slow, coaxing Russian, with the help of props and a dictionary, Svetlana explained to me what had transpired. When she left the house to go shopping, she had set the security alarm. I had decided to come home early and did not know about the alarm or the code to deactivate it. A silent signal had been sent to the police. The headquarters had called to make sure it was not a mistake, but getting a foreigner on the line who was not the occupant of the apartment confirmed their need to investigate. It was then that Sasha and Dima had been dispatched.

Svetlana paid the small fine for the false alarm, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. In fact, she seemed oddly delighted. She flirted with the officers as she walked them out, and I realized that having two young men in uniform in her apartment under farcical circumstances was probably one of the most amusing situations she had found herself in since moving to Kupchino.

When I tried to reimburse her for the fine, she wouldn’t take the money. She said the whole adventure was worth it. At the time, I couldn’t agree less. But a few days later, when I stopped shaking every time the phone rang, I realized I had gained something from the incident too. I felt more at home in this rugged, unpredictable environ. Svetlana’s take on my terror had allowed me a peep-hole into the strength she brought to her daily life as a pensioner in post-Soviet Russia. I finally understood how Chekhov and Gogol exemplified the Russian ability to endure suffering through vital brush strokes of humor.

And besides all that, with such prompt and reliable police response as Sasha and Dima, I had no need to feel afraid in the apartment anymore. My own personal S.W.A.T. team was only a call away.