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Rose was a big draw. The bar area was overrun with customers. People filled the barstools,
and others stood behind. This left the Russian staff at the bar totally confused. They
kept serving drinks to people standing, and asking Rose, “Where is that person sitting?”
Rose would say they weren't sitting. The staff member would say, “Then we cannot serve
them—there is no way to put their order in the computer.” Just like Rose's butter.
I cave to Sergei's wishes and we take a table beside three Russian men who are so drunk
on beer and cognac they're barely conscious. Sergei and I don't quite get to that point, but
after a few beers, we take our own crack at Russian politics. Sergei has listened closely to
my line of questioning. He knows that in Moscow there is an impression that Russians are
antigovernment, ready to take to the streets. That's not the case in the country at large.
“You know, David, I have a friend who likes Putin. He always says to me, if you want
to meet nice people, go to a rally in Moscow. But nothing's gonna change.”
We're on our third beers.
“But what kind of government do we have? Capitalism? No. Socialism? No.”
I do wonder what it's like to live in a country in such a state of uncertainty.
“Stalin, I would never support him. But he was the right man for the job in his time. No
one stole anything.”
Sergei, like me, is looking deeply at a country—its people, its problems, its future. The
difference is, this is his own country. We talk about the people we've met—Nikita's parents
mourning the loss of their hockey-star son, Alexei's mom staring at us as we walked down
the stairs away from her apartment, and tough Ivan, tearing up out of the blue.
It is almost lights out for me and Sergei. We wave down a cab in the bitter cold and re-
turn to our hotel. In the morning we need to buy train tickets for our onward journey, which
becomes a freshly complicated affair. I check out a map and notice that the southern route
of the Trans-Siberian Railway goes west to east through Chelyabinsk—good news—except
that when it heads east from here, it passes through a small section of Kazakhstan. We have
two choices: visit the Kazakh consulate here, apply for a transit visa and wait who knows
how long. Or take a circuitous route back up to Ekaterinburg, then eastward again. We
choose option two.
The train station in Chelyabinsk the next morning is far less welcoming than the city's
pedestrian mall. It is a concrete block of place with no signs to tell you anything—where
you buy tickets, where you catch trains, what time it is.
“This is strange,” Sergei says, as we walk around outside.
It's actually not. This kind of disorder no longer surprises me here. I've just come to live
with it. Accept it. God, I sound Russian.
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