Most people sent to Siberia have started out with a bad feeling about it. How many thousands have watched the endless snowfields pass from a railroad car and thought, "I am far away?" I wasn't any different. Siberia is on the other side of the world from my home in Vermont. I wasn't exactly sent there, not entirely against my will, and I didn't have to stay for that long. Nonetheless, as I watched out the window of the train from Moscow, I felt a vague dread.I stayed for seven months, and when I got back home, I slammed some kind of door in my mind. I was tired. I got a job and put all my attention into that. I stepped right back into life as I had left it, and I thought almost hourly, "Thank God, I'm not still in Russia." I had hated it there.Maybe I didn't understand the culture, but that's what I tried to do. I went all the way to Tomsk, Russia, to find the real Russia. I wanted to get away from Moscow and St. Petersburg. They're international cities, now. They have McDonalds. They're inundated with western goods, culture, tourists and businessmen looking for the New American Dream --to get rich in Russia. I went into the dead center of the country to see what life was like, to see this so-called historical time of change up close and for myself. I always tried to imagine that I lived there. I tried not to hold things at arm's length. I wanted things to get to me, and they did.

I worked in a television studio in Tomsk, TV-2. It was one of Russia's first independent stations and had been on the air for almost three years. I was the "Koordinator Public Relations." TV-2 was young, energetic and progressive, a great place to be, but a difficult place to work. The time I spent there was a stagnant period for the station. Close to fifty people worked in four small offices and four even smaller production rooms. Employees who could find nowhere else to sit worked in the lobby with clipboards on their laps. There was always a line for the phones, of which there were three, and whoever was talking usually had to shout over the noise of the lobby and to make up for bad connections.Appropriately enough, TV-2 was housed in the city's Hobby Center, a sort of daycare. Children regularly swarmed just outside the office doors. Every so often one would wander in looking for the bathroom.

I worked in a small cluttered office with at least ten other people. We took turns on four computers and in half a dozen chairs. There was no desk space at all. There was a full-sized mural of a tropical beach on the wall, and the room was overheated. In the middle of the Siberian winter, minus 30 degrees outside, the air conditioner rattled along in the window, warming the air from outside. The place was infested with cockroaches, which sometimes fell into and died in the tea cups next to our electric samovar. Out of those chipped old cups, we drank beer, vodka and champagne almost as often as tea.

Most people in the office had known one another since grade school. Once I got to know everyone, and they got to understand my broken Russian, I became part of the family. There were some real characters in that office. Uncle Sam, for instance, had a pony tail, kept a bottle of vodka in his desk and could open a beer bottle with his eye socket. He had had four wives and had a beautiful little daughter who looked just like him. Sam did computer graphics and occasionally co-produced and starred in a comedy show called The Yellow Tie. In Russian, "yellow" is slang for insane.

Sergei, who managed the station's computers, lived in Tomsk 7, a restricted nuclear city. He'd lived there his whole life. His Mom and Dad made nuclear bombs. There'd been an accident at Tomsk 7 plant a year before. I once asked him what he'd done on that day. He said he'd gone to work as usual, and everyone had made fun of him. "They told me I'd better get a pair of lead underpants." Seriosha was into the metal group Nazareth. We'd get drunk and play air guitar to "Hair of the Dog."

TV-2 moved in mysterious ways. Everyday at 11 a.m. the cleaning lady arrived and threw us all out. Work easily came to a halt, even meetings adjourned, and everyone fluttered out into the hall to smoke and wait for the cleaning lady to mop the floor. It took ten or fifteen minutes. She'd leave with her rag mop in one hand and and her plastic bucket of black water in the other and snarl, "Wait for it to dry!" Another fifteen minutes, another cigarette or cup of sweet instant coffee.

Often, employees stuck around the station until late in the evening. It was better than anywhere else they had to go. Lena, who did computer graphics with Sam, lived in a one-room apartment with her mother and father, her husband and her grandfather. The old man slept in the kitchen. Yuri, the Director of Advertising, lived in an apartment with his ex-wife and two kids; though, he often stayed at his girlfriend's place. One of the editors had no place to go at all. He slept on the couch and bummed showers off of friends.

I worked independently for the most part. My supervisor was a Tartar named Rinat. He was the Director of Marketing. He was a good-humored guy, and I often went over to his apartment for dinner, prepared by his tragically meek wife. We played chess and drank beer, usually. The problem with Rinat was that he was the worst kind of liar. He was incompetent but had a way of making you believe he knew what he was doing. He'd promise to do this and that, but never did any of it. Rinat's false promises were a constant obstacle to my work. I thought his lying might have had something to do with me being an American, but I eventually found out that it was his usual way. Last time I heard, Rinat had been fired from TV-2. He had a new job at an insurance company, and was making lots of promises.

I should back up a bit and tell the story of TV-2. Arcady Mayofis, the president and founder, was 29 years old and had started his television career as a journalist for Tomsk's state-run station. It had been a constant frustration. Every time he tried to implement even minor changes, he'd bump into brick-wall bureaucracies, he told me. When the government deregulated the airwaves, Arcady set to work forming his own station. He had to do it secretly. He couldn't afford to lose his state job; he had a family to support. After six months of wading through paperwork and flying back and forth to Moscow, Mayofis was granted a license.He and his small crew of friends took a loan out from Tomsk's first independent bank. It had to be payed back within a year. The interest rate was 100 percent. To take care of the debit and earn additional funds, they devised to sell vouchers for decoders, which would unscramble TV-2's transmissions once it got on the air. Nearly 80,000 people showed up to buy vouchers. Arcady was overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the factory he had commissioned to make the decoders was too, and could not fill the order. The decoders that were made didn't work; they made reception worse as often as not, and the so-called coded signal could be picked up by almost any TV.

"That was it, I thought," said Mayofis. "I was sure we'd go bankrupt." Tomskers thought they had been deceived and that Mayofis was a crook. Once around that time, Arcady told me, he was stopped in the street by an old woman. He had just bought an expensive sturgeon and was carrying it under his arm. "You rascal," she shouted, "you bought that fish with money you stole from us!" As other passersby realized who he was, a small crowd gathered to deride him. Arcady hated being thought of as a con artist, but "We could not return their money," he said. It would have killed the station.

You could say TV-2 was public television, the New kind. Within months of going on the air, however, TV-2 got to prove its worth. The summer of 1991 saw a putsch attempt in Moscow and President Gorbachev taken hostage. While state TV stations were forced to transmit anti-democracy rhetoric, TV-2 was on the air with live updates. Though the Moscow conspirators had imposed an information blockade, TV-2 got through to the BBC, Radio Freedom and The Voice of America. They also smuggled information out of Moscow by calling friends and family there. One Tomsk viewer, who was also the owner of a useless decoder, told me, "It was a kind of opening night for TV-2. It became very popular after that."

Nevertheless, TV-2 had a long way to go before it was either financially stable or professionally run. Most of its equipment was home video stuff, and the quality of its original programs was not much better than American cable access --except for the computer graphics, which were top-notch. Few of the employees were professionals, but they did their best with what they had. A Hungarian journalist who once visited the station as an advisor told me that TV-2 reminded him of a passage by a Czech writer: You can't make a whip out of shit. And even if you could, you wouldn't be able to crack it. "What they have done here," he said, "is make a whip out of shit."

TV-2 was all the best of what's going on in Russia right now. It was young and ambitious and eager to learn how to do things better. Mayofis was interested in making money, of course, but he was also committed taking care of his employees and to improving Russian journalism.

The world outside TV-2 was less pleasant. Most people were committed only to getting by.

Walking through Tomsk, it was hard to tell if the city was crumbling or rising from ruin. There were lots of new businesses and lots of old wreckage, but the new wasn't always what you'd call growth. There were more goods, more clothes, more specialty foods and liquors. There were kiosks on every corner. There were new banks and real estate firms and investment firms and insurance companies, but the schools and hospitals were falling down. Professors and doctors didn't make enough money to live on and had to leave their jobs and go into business.

Many, if not most, of the buildings on the main street in Tomsk were dilapidated. There were drunks and beggars on the sidewalks, and old ladies out collecting bottles and selling their belongings --silver and china, books and little knick knacks. The times were especially grim for the elderly. It hurt everyone to see Babushkas on the street like that.

I always thought Tomsk must have once been a nice place to live. It had universities, libraries, recreation centers with swimming pools, research centers, health clinics, hospitals, concert halls, an art museum, a botanical garden. Tomsk had had everything a city could want, but now it had no money, and everything was crumbling.

Crime was one of the biggest problems. Nearly all businesses in Tomsk, I was frequently told, are connected to the mafia in one way or another. They either pay extortion or hire a gang to protect them. TV-2 had been able to avoid organized crime, but as the station grew and made more money, it was clear that that status would be hard to maintain. In my last month at TV-2, Mayofis received extortion demands, which he refused to pay. As he walked up the steps to the Hobby Center's front doors, two guys in black leather jackets came up to him and said, "You've got money. Give us some."

Everyone is afraid of crime. The legal system is impotent, and the police are under-funded, like everyone else, and can't keep up with crime. Anyone who can afford it has their apartment fitted with an iron door, and, if you live on the first floor, bars on the windows are an absolute necessity. My landlord was a successful entrepreneur. His apartment was rigged with more security devices than a bank. He had an iron gate and a steel door, both of which had sensors; the windows were barred and had sensors, and his car was parked in a steel garage, a necessity for any car. The horror stories about crime abound, about people getting robbed, getting killed, getting swindled out of their apartments.

One day, a man arrived at my door, my iron door, and told me that he was there to fix the electricity. I told him the electricity was fine and wouldn't let him in. When I mentioned it to a friend, he told me that it was a common scam.

Many people I knew, including myself, carried some kind of defense spray or a gas gun, a .25 pistol that shot gas capsules. Both were legal, but you had to get a permit for the gun.

People on the streets scowl. The clerks in the stores treat you with contempt. Sometimes, it seemed like a concentrated effort to be nasty. At first, I'd just laugh. The women working in the stores looked so much alike, they must have been bred for the job, fat, bleach-blond-black-roots hair and steel teeth. I once read that an American Embassy official had described Russians as "Connoisseurs of Rudeness." It's true, but there's another side to it too. Russian scowls are like American smiles. Americans smile because they have to on the job --"Can I help you?" Russian's scowl because they have to wait in three different lines just to buy a loaf of bread. You can't tell anything from a stranger's face.

The rudeness is just a shell. It's not too hard to break. One Saturday I was at home in my apartment, doing laundry and cleaning. Suddenly someone started pounding on my steel door. Gong! Gong! Gong! Gong!. I thought it must be a friend fooling around. "Who's there?" No answer. I looked through the peephole. It was some old lady. She must have the wrong place, I thought. I opened the door, and she flew into a rage. She jabbed her short thick fingers at me and shouted, "What have you done to make water come through our ceiling?" Pushing me out of her way, she barged into my flat and ran around checking my drains. "Water is pouring in from our ceiling," she yelled as she looked around the base of the toilet and underneath the bathtub. She ran into the kitchen and turned on the tap. I tried to calm her down. I was very polite. In my broken Russian I suggested, "Maybe a pipe broke in the floor." Then we spotted a wet spot on the cement on the ceiling above my refrigerator. The water was coming from one of the upper floors.

I told her that I hoped that nothing in her apartment had been damaged. I was trying to save my life. She softened right up, turning from a grimacing punisher into the sweetest grandma in a single breath. She asked, "Where are your parents? Who cooks for you, dear? You look so young. Who takes care of you?"

I saw her outside the building a couple days later. She held and patted my hand and asked if I was eating properly.

* *

Like most Russians, I lived in a pre-fabricated concrete-slab apartment building. I had an apartment that would commonly have housed a family of four or more, two rooms. I paid $60 dollars a month, more than the salary of most doctors and professors. Nonetheless, my flat was far from luxurious. It was unfinished and all but unfurnished. It had creaky, paint-splotched wooden floors and was always dusty from disintegrating cement. It was a new building, but it was so sloppily put together that it was already crumbling.

I had plenty of heat and hot water because I lived only a few blocks from the city's central heating plant. Most of the time, even when it was minus thirty outside, I had to keep a window open.

The hot-water plant provides most of Tomsk, which has a population of more than 500,000, with heat. Buildings close to the plant are over-heated. Those farther away are cold, especially the upper floors. The plant pumps super-heated water around the city in often-uninsulated pipes, which run both above and below ground. Huge plumes of steam rise from manholes on almost every corner. The trees around them are coated with frost and look like coral. Stray dogs and flocks of pigeons huddle around manholes to stay warm. Drunks sometimes escape freezing to death by making it to a manhole before passing out. All winter long, crickets sing down in the holes; you can hear them from the sidewalk. Moss grows around edges of the holes. In the spring, the first grass grows above where the pipes run.

Every summer, the city goes without hot water while the streets are torn up and the pipes replaced. Minerals clog them up. Every few years, all the radiators in every building are taken out and cleaned. Throughout the summer, numerous buildings in Tomsk had huge stacks of iron radiators on the sidewalks in front of them.

Soon after I arrived in Tomsk, I learned to recognize Soviet absurdity. It's in everything, big or small, from the heating system, to the phone network, to where they put the light switches on the wall (behind where the door opens). Everything seems to be designed to be as wasteful and inconvenient as possible. What a pleasure it was when I first caught on to the joke. Every day my stomach ached from laughing. There were shortages of everything except absurdity. You just had to step out on the street to find it. But you'd better look where you step...

"Watch out for the manholes!" was one of the first and best pieces of advice I got in Tomsk. The manholes are right in the middle of the sidewalks. If you step on them, sometimes the lids flip up and crack your ankle, but most of the time the lids aren't on at all.

The manholes were best in the winter. The steam from the hot water pipes would melt the snow around the holes, and form a perfect trap, an icy-sided funnel in the middle of the sidewalk. I never saw anyone fall down myself, but I damn near got swallowed on numerous occasions, particularly at night after 11 o'clock when they turn the street lights off. I always thought that it was just a matter of time before I'd go down one of those holes; someday I'd be a little bit too drunk to catch myself. Everyone I knew had a story about falling into a manhole --kids falling in them, old people falling in them.

While I was still laughing, the manholes were one of my favorites. Everyone knows it's a needless hazard. As often as not, the lids lay right next to the holes. "Why don't the workmen ever put the lids back on?" I once asked a friend. He shrugged, "Their lazy." Nothing unusual. What about the people on the street, don't they care? Sure, they look where they're going and tell their companions to watch out for the manhole.

People seemed to regard things within their own city as one would something in nature, something that was totally beyond their control, like a mountain. The manholes were just a silly little thing, of course. There's so many things like that. It's not important. There are much more significant problems to focus on --Ecological disaster, for instance, or health care or education. But on all fronts, I think, Russians bear more than they have to. They're resolved to suffer whatever might happen, rather than determined to do something to avoid it. Friends of mine in Tomsk told me not to drink the city water. It was poisonous, they said. The chemical factory at Kemorova was upstream. God knows what could be in that water. But they drink it. Their kids drink it. "I've been drinking it my whole life. It wouldn't do any good to stop know," friends would say. I did know one guy, however, an entrepreneur, who brought all his family's drinking water in from a village. There may be a wide gulf between the inconveniences of everyday Russian life and the major problems facing the country, but the fatalistic Russian outlook seems to apply all around. "Nichevo Ne Mojna Delat." There's nothing to be done. Russians suffer.

On several occasions when I'd express disbelief at some particularly astonishing absurdity, a friend would tell me with a detectable note of pride in his voice, "You're not in America anymore."

After a few months in Tomsk, my perspective changed. I lost my sense of humor about certain things. Once I got to know people and got a sense of their lives, I started to see that the whole unbelievable bloody mess wasn't so funny. Ludicrous, but not laughable. I should have gotten it right from the start, but most Russians act like their just used to it, like they're immune to it. They shrug it off and say, "This is our ridiculous system. This is what 70 years of totalitarianism did to our country."

I laughed like a Russian now, as much out of bitterness as humor. I started understanding Russian humor: The pessimist says, "Everything is a mess. Life is misery. Things can't get any worse." The optimist says, "Oh, yes, things will get a lot worse." You have no idea how funny that is.

* *

ghosts and drunks

Russia is huge and sad.

Looking west across the Tom River, I watched a tractor plowing clouds of dust. Beyond, the river the land was as flat as the ocean. Way out there is Moscow, I thought, the rotten heart... the retarded brain. Like so many of my friends, I had gotten to hate Moscow. It was Moscow that fouled everything up. I remember being in a train station. It was a miserable place. People had to wait for hours to get their tickets, literally having to fight like dogs to keep their places in line. Travellers sprawled out on top of their luggage on the dirty floor. The bathrooms were too disgusting to use; even rats wouldn't go in there...even Russians. When the kiosks were open, they sold spoiled food and warm over-priced beer. I was stuck there for six hours.

There was a giant old Soviet diagram on the wall of all the main connections on the railway, each city represented by a cheap-looking tin coat of arms. All roads led to Moscow. From Vladivostok to Murmansk to Kiev to Novosibirsk, everything and everyone was chained to Moscow. I remember staring red-eyed at that diagram, wishing I could tear it down and hating Moscow.

This place makes you want to drink and smoke and try to forget about how messed up it is. You don't care.

I had a friend who played drums in a restaurant band. It was a rough place. Once in a while someone would request a song by putting a gun against his head. The night after the Tomsk 7 explosion, a woman came in with a wad of money. She threw it down on the stage and said, "Take what you need and play me something happy, boys. I don't care about money. I'm going to die." She told people at the bar that she'd been near the explosion that she'd been exposed and was going to die. She danced the night away and never had to ask for a partner. She smiled and laughed and sang along, but just as often, she wept.

Sometimes I was the perfect observer. I watched with the eyes of a ghost. I was untouched by the lives of those around me. It wasn't my country. Their problems weren't my problems. I shouldn't have even been there.

One day I found a dead man in the foyer of my building. He was dead or dead drunk. I was coming home from the store with some chicken and bread and was hungry. Drunks freeze to death all the time. On cold nights, the cops snatch anyone staggering down the sidewalk, bring them somewhere to sober up, keep them from freezing to death.

The man lie there collapsed in fetal position, his fur cap down over his face. He wore a thick cow-skin coat. If he freezes, I thought, his fatal mistake was to pass out just far enough away from the door so that I could open it and squeeze through. If I had been at home, I would have woken him, or I would have called the cops. But didn't have a phone. I didn't speak the language. I thought, let the Russians take care of their own drunks. Somebody else would come along soon anyway. Maybe the next person would take the man back to their apartment and give him black coffee. I doubted it. I wasn't being so different from the Russians, after all. They seem pretty immune to others' problems. They take care of their families alright, but they act like the people on the street are a different species.

Once I got up to my apartment, I felt a little guilty. All that you do to the least of my brothers, you do un to me. Hmph, pretty words. I'd go check on him...but after dinner. I figured that if the guy was alive when I stepped over him, he'd probably still be alive after I ate. I could have checked on him while the chicken was in the oven, but if he was dead, it would have spoiled my meal.

Sometimes I just couldn't get up in the morning. Walking back from the store and from the bus stop to my front door, my feet were heavier than lead. I just wanted out. "It's just tonight," I'd think, "this self-pity."

It was after midnight and cold. The last bus had run, and I'd already walked four stops. I was cold and walking fast. The ice on the puddles was thickening and the mud was turning stiff. Two women were up ahead. I was catching up to them steadily. One was an old Babushka, tiny and hunched. She walked slowly on the icy sidewalk with a cane. Each step was a risk. There was a woman between us, a big woman with a heavy coat. As she passed the Babushka, she seemed like a mountain. The frail granny called out to her, "Do you know how far it is to Komsomolski Prospect?"

"What? Komsomolski?" the woman nearly snapped, but then answered sadly, "Oh, Babushka, it's a long way." The old woman gave a slight cry. "What are you doing out so late?" asked the woman. "Babushka, how did you get so far from home?"

I passed them on a corner and crossed the street. Then turned to see what would happen. I expected the woman in the big coat to help, but she didn't. She gave the old woman directions and then turned down a different street. I turned away, too. I could hear old woman mumbling to herself, maybe crying. I should have given her money for a taxi. The money would have been nothing for me. The other woman perhaps couldn't afford it. I don't know why I turned away.

One day on the way to work I came across a crippled old man. I helped him home. He explained that he had set off to buy a bottle of vodka but couldn't make it to the store. He asked me to go. No, I said. I took him to his building, but he didn't want to go inside. His son would be very mad at him, he said. I gave him some money and left him on a bench.

They love to see you drink, the women too. They watch you gulp down the vodka, smile and say Malidets, good boy. And then they put some more food on you plate, some liver and mayonnaise salad, fried potatoes, meat and gravy.

Alcohol is a totally different thing when you drink it the way Russians do, shot after shot. You get an almost-poisoned drunkenness. You loose track of how many you've had, and you just drink till the booze is gone or you are. It makes people go crazy. I knew a guy who killed his wife one drunk night. He hit her so hard, it broke her neck. He woke up in the morning, found her dead on the floor and couldn't remember a thing. The police tortured him until it all came back to him, so I was told. He was an elementary-school music teacher. He played the accordion.

On holidays, everyone seems to be inebriated. Sometimes I'd sit out on my balcony and watch people stagger by; almost everybody would be staggering. On holidays, almost every bench in the city would have a drunk sprawled out on it, some had bloodied faces, others wet pants and puddles beneath them.

On time, on the way to work, I saw a well-dressed man in a suit and rain coat fall into a deep, muddy puddle. I often saw drunks in the morning on my way to work. He was so drunk he could hardly move at all. He labored up onto his hands and knees and stayed there, soaking wet and covered with mud, on his hands and knees. The people walking by hardly gave him a look. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good image for the whole country.

One morning I was woken up just before daybreak by somebody throwing up beneath my window. I laid there listening to him cough and spit and then scuff his shoes as he began to walk away. I think he fell down then. It was quiet for a moment. Then car came fast down the street and skidded to a stop. The doors opened. I thought it must be the police and jumped out of bed to watch. From the window I saw a shiny new white Volga. Even in the pre-dawn halflight, it was sparkling white. Two men in black leather coats laid somebody out on the back seat of the car. I couldn't see him. They closed the doors, then got in and drove away. I don't know how they picked him up and got him into the car before I got to the window. Who was that drunk, I wondered, a mafia boss, a politician? I imagined him in a ragged tuxedo, tie missing, his shirt unbuttoned and stained with drink and sweat. My mind was still half-asleep; everything seemed a bit like a dream, and I had a thought: The drunk had died. He had thrown it all up a moment too late. The stunningly white Volga was his chariot, coming to carry him home. The men in the leather coats were Angels. Yes, it is in the back seat of a white Volga that God takes Siberia's drunks to heaven.

* *

TV-2 occasionally got assistance from an American organization called InterNews. The Hungarian journalist who visited the station was an InterNews advisor. His name was Yanos Alek.

Yanos had been a correspondent in Moscow for three years in the mid-eighties. He had traveled widely in Russia and had written numerous articles and co-authored a book about the country. I met Yanos about the time I stopped laughing and was beginning to realize that I had little fondness in my heart for Russia. I was eager to talk to him.

Yanos spoke Russian and English excellently. Everyone at the station liked him and was a little afraid of him. He always had a let's-go-let's-go-newsroom-deadline sense about him. He chewed gum incessantly, never took coffee breaks and didn't eat lunch. He worked late and got started early. He had the tense authority about him of someone who was used to being in charge.

Yanos had a week to help TV-2 do a story for a nationally-broadcast TV news magazine. The last two stories TV-2 had submitted had been poorly done, which is why InterNews had sent him. He was rushed for time and had to work with the stations substandard equipment.

I asked Yanos if he considered himself a Russophile, if he was very fond of Russia and Russian culture. I thought it was probably a stupid question. I imagined that he must have been fond of Russia to have spent so much time there and was now back trying to help establish a free press.

He answered me simply, "No, not at all."

I was relieved. I had been beginning to think that I was missing something. I knew four other Americans who had lived in Tomsk, and they all loved it. What's the matter with me, I had wondered. I had an interesting job and a decent apartment; I had good friends, but I did not, by any means, love Russia. I was interested in it. There was a lot to write about.

Yanos said that even having grown up in an Eastern Bloc country had not prepared him for Soviet Russia, for the bizarre levels Soviet anti-logic had been taken to here. "Dali didn't know the first thing about surrealism," he said. "Surrealism is here. Russia is surreal."

I asked him why he kept coming back to Russia. "The people," he said. "I've met some of the most remarkable people here." Beautiful and soulful people, he said. I didn't have to ask what he meant. I knew a few people like that. But one stands out more than any of the others.

I knew a woman named Lubamira, which means "laugher at the world." She was a short, plump older woman. Though, as most Russian women, she was not as old as she looked. I first met her at TV-2. She was translating for an InterNews advisor. I introduced myself. "Oh, well, you'd better come up to the department so we can all get to know you," she said with a sort of authoritarian friendliness.

Lubamira was the head of the English department at the Tomsk Academy of Sciences. She invited me to meet the other English teachers in her department one evening after work. When I arrived, a full home-cooked meal was waiting. Three other women taught in the department. Each had taken English names and, within the department, insisted on going by them. There was Sally, Lucy, Blair, and Lubamira's English name was Miriam. We ate in a room reserved for special meetings. Everything --the wall paper, the linoleum, the cushions on the chairs-- was mismatched plaid.

We made a deal. I would help out in their English classes from time to time, and they would act as interpreters for me when I needed one.

The department was an odd place, and took some getting used to. Lubamira and her staff were devoted to maintaining a relaxed and uncritical atmosphere. It seems silly to me, at first. Everyone was so nice to each other in there, it was like Sesame Street. Their students were not children, however. They were scientists and researchers from the Academy, many of whom were prestigious figures within their fields. I was always amazed at what Lubamira could get her full-grown, highly-educated students to do. They'd do anything for her, including make complete fools of themselves, by normal standards. Sometimes, her classes organized independent projects just to please her, usually funny skits and plays. The best one I saw was musical based on a childrens' book called "Buzzy Wuzzy Busy Fly." They made up all the songs and set them to the tunes of various pop songs. I remember the guy who played the evil spider, whose English name was Steve McQueen, dressed up in a red suit with black foam rubber legs singing with a heavy accent, "Buzzy Wuzzy's blood to spill. Buzzy Wuzzy for to Kill."

Another time, while local elections were taking place, the English department organized its own political party, "The Beer Freedom Party." Members of the class gave speeches on the inalienable rights of beer drinkers, and then unanimously elected Miriam to be their representative in parliament.

Whenever Lubamira heard of English speakers visiting Tomsk, she would search them out and invite them up to the department for a party. Once she invited two British businessmen. They were looking into investment opportunities in Tomsk, and they both seemed very reserved and stuffy and British. Before the end of the evening, however, they were laughing and singing.

Unlike most Russian parties, nobody ever drank much up at the department. There was always some vodka, beer or wine on hand, but it was rare for anyone to have more than a few drinks.

Lubamira's English department was sort of a wonderland. It may sound a little new-agey by American standards, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Lubamira was anything but a flake or a fruitcake. She was devoted to making her department an oasis of kindness. "I want people to come in here and feel at ease," she would say. "They need that. Their lives are hard."

Lubamira was the best scientific translators in the city and had been offered many better-paying jobs, but turned them down. She was devoted. All the teachers in her department had been offered better-paying jobs, at one time or another, and they all desperately needed the money. Sally took care of her sister's children and had a son of her own who was always ill. Lucy had never married and, though she was over forty, lived in her parents' apartment along with her sister and brother-in-law. Her father always watched TV, she told me, and she hated the noise. Blair lived in the worst part of town. It was where the impoverished immigrants lived, and it was dangerous. The area was known locally as the "Negro District." Despite all their troubles, they were committed to what they had made of the department, and they were always cheerful and kind.

Lubamira occasionally told me that she almost wished that some of "her girls," would take other jobs. "I wish I could do more for them," she'd say. "I wish I could get more money for them." She could have used more money herself. She lived on the outskirts of town, too far from the hot water plant; her cement-box apartment was always cold.

That's what I hated most. Those people deserved so much better. But it was their lives that made them who they were. Their lives had always been hard. Lubamira was an exile. She had been born in the Ukraine. She came to Tomsk with her mother and younger sister after her father had been sent to Siberia for a trifle. He and his family lost everything because of an argument over a barrel of pickles. Her father told a neighbor with whom they shared a cellar to move his barrel of pickles over to his own side of the basement. The neighbor told the police.

Lubamira was eight years old when she traveled with her mother and sister to Siberia aboard a prison car. They slept in freezing cells with more than a hundred people, a barrel in the corner as a toilet. Once in Tomsk, they lived in a drafty cement room. She remembers vividly how her baby sister always cried because she was cold. Lubamira and her mother took turns rubbing the little girl's feet and hands.

I met Lubamira's mother. She was eighty. I asked her hesitantly about her exile. She didn't want to talk about it. "It was horrible," she said. "I try not to think about it. If I thought about it, I would never be happy."

I took constant comfort knowing I that could always rely on Lubamira. She'd always ask me matter-of-factly if I was having any trouble and if there was anything she could do. I once mentioned that I was having a hard time finding salt and rice. "Yes," she said, "those things are hard to find sometimes." The next day she brought them to me. I had to watch what I said around Lubamira. If I mentioned something I had to do, she would make sure it got done. For instance, if I ever mentioned that I needed to get in touch with someone, she would call whoever it was and tell them to call me.

To me, Lubamira embodied the Russian spirit. She had learned how to live. She had endured difficult times and learned painful lessons, but instead of hardening her heart, she became all the more kind and generous. I know what my father would say; he'd say that she had found God. I'm still afraid to say things like that.

*

Russian life was strange to me, awful in some ways.

Life was heavy, even good times. There's little lightheartedness in Russia. Conversations usually turn to the country's worries. The feeling that the country is unstable -- politically, economically and socially-- permeates everything. It was like the weight of the atmosphere. At first, I couldn't figure out why I felt so low all the time. I had a good situation. I wasn't just homesick. It was the seemingly constant and endless struggling and uncertainty that Russians had to live with. Few people my age expect things to get much better in their lifetimes.

Who can even envision solving problems as monstrous as Russia's. Everyone feels it. It's a smothering heaviness that everyone lives with it.

It really struck me one time when I spent an evening with a couple other American guys who lived in the city too. Just before I left, we got together, had a few beers, told stories. We were laughing and joking around, and it occurred to me how free we were, how lighthearted. Deep down, all three of us were happy and secure. We were far away from home, immersed in another culture, but we were always comforted by the fact that we were Americans. Each of us could have left Russia anytime we wanted, gone home. No matter how long we might live in Russia or how much we sympathized with our Russian friends, Russia's problems would never be ours, and we couldn't help but be tremendously glad of that.

There are many indescribably fine things about Russian culture. There is an intensity of emotion and intellect within Russian life. Friendship and family are devotions. They are real and powerful bonds. The life of the mind is something very tangible to most Russians. Literature and philosophy are a religion. After the family photo album, the most important thing in a Russian home is the bookshelf.

During my last few days in Russia, I visited the relatives of a friend in Moscow, a couple in their fifties, Uncle Vanya and Aunt Mariuska. They both worked at a defense plant. They had a nice flat and a datcha. They were two of the kindest and happiest people I'd ever met. The couple seemed to have found a way to be lighthearted. Uncle Vanya once asked how long I'd been in Russia. "Almost seven months," I replied.

"Oh, so you've gotten used to life here by now," he said, helping his wife prepare a special meal for their guest.

"I guess I have."

"Russian life is wonderful, isn't it," he said heartily.

Embraced in their warm hospitality, in their strength and love of life, I felt strongly that it was, that nothing could be better. "Yes, it is," I said. I loved it there.