Red Moon

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In Russia these days, nothing is easy.

I’m sure you could make the argument that nothing there has ever been easy, but the old order changeth, and now pensioners find themselves selling apples on the street while mafiyosa cuddle in restaurant doorways with six-foot-tall blondes all the while yelling into cell phones. You can walk into an office and see computers running Windows 3.0, but won’t find a toilet with a seat. Homemade garages sprout like mushrooms at the base of Khrushchev-era worker storage units while cars choke the inadequate streets. A McDonald’s gets built in two days as Red Square is swept by men with straw brooms.

My contact was an hour late. Had that happened to me at home in California, I’d have been thirty minutes gone. But in Korolev, formerly Kaliningrad, a grim industrial suburb an hour’s drive north of the Kremlin, an hour’s tardiness was expected, forgiven, hardly noticed.

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