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with their mouths. They even stomp their feet on the ground once or twice, to see if some wheels might
magically pop out from their heels. Perhaps this feature was always there, in every pair of shoes, and they
simply hadn't been informed?
After a minute or two, one of the boys gets frustrated and pushes the other. They start fighting. I think
mostly they're just trying to forget what they can't have.
OUTSIDE, it's ninety-degree August heat, with stifling humidity. (Not how I'd imagined Moscow.) Having
no hotel reservation, we death-march through the city in search of lodging. Eventually we stumble on a
little guesthouse tucked in an alley. The young woman at the desk says she has one room left and guides us
upstairs for a tour.
It's a tiny, hovelish chamber, with no air-conditioning. A rabbit-eared TV gets three grainy stations. The
wall-to-wall carpet doesn't actually reach the walls, and instead peters out a few feet short, unraveling into
a fuzzy, ragged fringe. We take the room.
Back outside, blissfully unleashed from our packs, we explore the city. After walking through a few con-
struction zones, we almost accidentally arrive in the middle of Red Square. It's a shock to stumble upon the
kaleidoscopic, Technicolor onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. The church's familiar visage is recogniz-
able from every on-location-in-Moscow TV news shot you've ever seen.
Sadly, most of the tourist destinations we'd like to see here are closed—and for no clear reason, as it's
the middle of the week and not a holiday. Lenin's tomb? Nope. Kremlin? Nope. There is one historical
museum open, though, and we're pleased to discover it includes an exhibit about the history of the Trans-
Siberian Railway. One of the displays is a detailed drawing of a disastrous and bloody train derailment.
This is sobering, as we'll shortly be riding on a lot of Russian trains. Further reason for concern: Just as
we arrived in Europe, someone detonated a bomb that derailed a train traveling between Moscow and St.
Petersburg, injuring about sixty people. We saw footage of the wreckage on TV when we were in Antwerp.
News cameras focused on a pair of trench-coated Russian investigators casually lounging in front of the
twisted metal. One detective was smoking a cigarette. The other was eating a floppy sandwich wrapped in
wax paper. They seemed in no hurry, though they hadn't yet identified the perpetrator (and still haven't, as
best we can tell). The whole scene did not inspire a ton of confidence.
The next morning, we attempt to take a midmorning stroll through Gorky Park. But a wrong turn gets us
lost in some kind of dilapidated Moscow hospital complex—all peeling paint, cracked asphalt, and wilting
chain-link. A bandaged man wheeling his own IV drip stops in a third-floor window to silently observe us.
When at last we emerge from the maze of crumbling buildings, we find ourselves directly across from the
New Tretyakov Gallery—a museum of twentieth-century Russian art.
Outside, in the museum's sculpture garden, there's a collection of Lenin and Stalin statues. They were
ripped down in the days after Communism fell. The statues look naked and vulnerable without their pedes-
tals beneath them.
Inside the museum's lobby, there is a line of at least twenty-five people waiting to buy admission tickets.
This line is not moving. Like, at all. We wait fifteen minutes without advancing an inch.
The situation offers a study in glacial Russian bureaucracy, and also in comparative patience as a factor
of nationality. Consider: The laid-back German guys standing in front of us in line are cheerfully patient.
The granite-faced Poles in front of the Germans seem gloomily, fatalistically patient. And the Koreans in
front of the Poles are yelling and waving money in the air.
My own instincts are probably closest to the Poles', but Rebecca's fall squarely in the Korean camp.
Accordingly, she makes an antsy reconnaissance mission to the head of the line to figure out what's going
on. The deal is, she informs me upon her return, the museum's ticket-printing machine has broken down.
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