The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 4

  The city was changed, as I had expected—full of glitzy boutiques, and women with tan legs and towering heels—like Miami Beach of the Steppes. In the Soviet era, even young women plodded through Moscow’s grim streets with their backs hunched over; now it seemed they all stood eight feet tall, their shoulders back and breasts pushed forward.

  On the third morning I stopped in to see Lenin in Red Square. It had once been among the safest places on earth, patrolled by army troops and teeming with militia. Now, parts of it felt like a seedy theme park, with kiosks selling balloons and overpriced lemonade. It never seemed possible that Lenin, the tiny gray figure whom one network correspondent I knew referred to as Dead Fred the Head Red had overthrown the monarchy and set his nation on its course for almost a century. But in 2010, it seemed ludicrous. I was sad as I left the poor old fellow in his depressing permafrost.

  My Russian was slowly coming back, and there were glimmers of recognition—the lady at the bakery, for one—but I otherwise felt disconnected, rudderless, like I might feel in any unfamiliar European city. The place didn’t feel like mine anymore. I was a stranger now, in spite of years of work there, the love affairs, and mostly, the great trove of Russian books that had sustained me, and to which I returned again and again and again.

  That afternoon, I hired a taxi which came with a driver called Pavel to take me to the Novodevichy Cemetery, to visit another grave—that of the only dead man I have a crush on. He knows my mind as if he were inside it, and grasps the confounding equation of marriage more than any writer living or dead. I hesitated before plucking two sprigs of jasmine blossoms from an overhanging tree. Then, I tossed one flower on the soil above Anton Chekhov’s body, and stuck the other between two pages of a notebook in my bag.

  The sky darkened and without warning split wide open—thunder, lightning, a curtain of rain that in an instant washed the poplar seeds clean off my shoulders. I took shelter against a low building, beside gravedigger tools. After about a half hour, the sky turned a blinding blue. The storm had passed, leaving puddles that I waded through in flip-flops.

  As I walked towards the exit, I saw a crowd of people gathering in the main courtyard, along with eight or so television cameras. A man wearing an officer’s cap and gloves stood in front of a bulky red funeral arrangement. He held a framed black and white photograph, and I recognized the image as that of the poet Andrei Voznesensky, who had died earlier in the week at age seventy-seven. I had stumbled upon his burial procession. Though I was drenched from the downpour, I decided to join it.

  He was one of the great poets of the Soviet era, introduced to me by my college professors, who had the wisdom to convey that a literary tradition perseveres even—especially—when a writer is at risk, which they so often were throughout the history of the Russian, then the Soviet, Empire. With the exception of a nasty run-in with Krushchev, Voznesensky managed to preserve his humanity and his voice and not run afoul of the Soviet literary watchdogs. In the 1960s he gave readings in stadiums packed with fellow citizens who needed poetry like we in the west needed the Rolling Stones.

  As the crowd of mourners swelled to the hundreds, it grew hushed. I took my place as we began to march down the tree-lined alleys, past silhouettes and gravestones and little manicured patches of grass. It was a long shuffle to the burial site, in and out of shadows, as the sun baked away what remained of the storm. His resting place was obvious—the area was festooned with a thousand bouquets draped with ribbons bearing condolences in golden lettering. Finally, the crowd, still silent, watched as the poet was lowered into the ground. Andrei Voznesensky took his place alongside Gogol, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and of course, Chekhov.

  After the service, I found Pavel, the driver, at the appointed meeting place outside the cemetery gates. As I slipped into the passenger seat of the car, I asked him, “Who were all the mourners?”

  “Just Russians,” he said.

  “Do you think he was a great poet?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he stopped. “But he was our poet.” And then he said, with a low flourish as if he were alone on stage, “Life like a rocket flies/Mainly in darkness, Now and then on a rainbow.”

  Late-afternoon sunlight poured through the open window and landed in my lap. Moscow sparkled from the thunderstorm, and Pavel drove gingerly through pools of rainwater. Finally, I broke the silence.

  “Voznesensky?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Pavel the cab driver replied. “The Parabolic Ballad.”

  Back at the room, I looked up the title and the line of the verse my cab driver had recited by heart. I remembered it. I had read it in college. I cracked open a $20.00 mini-bar vodka and stood by the window. The cupolas of the Kremlin were shining as they have for hundreds of years on June evenings like this one.

  Finally, it made sense.

  Marcia DeSanctis spent years traveling the world as a network news producer and is now writing a memoir. Her work has been in Vogue, Departures, The New York Times Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, More, Princeton Alumni Weekly, and the Huffington Post. She loves to travel alone and her idea of heaven is arriving at a new place, opening the hotel room door, checking out what candy is in the mini-bar, and then heading outside to explore her new, temporary neighborhood. She tries to pinpoint a place to have her coffee every morning and always ducks into a pharmacy. She loves to bring home toothpaste or a jar of vitamins as souvenirs.

  KEVIN McCAUGHEY

  How I Promised Anusha the Smile

  Finding the Mona Lisa—there’s nothing to it.

  “THERE’S THE EIFFEL TOWEL AGAIN,” I SAID. IT KEPT popping up outside the window as the tour bus bounced us around Paris.

  “Tower,” Anusha said. “I say that only one time, Kevish, Towel. Now you must every time say Eiffel Towel. English words sometime very same.”

  We had arrived the evening before, after twenty-seven hours on the road, fifty Poles from Gdansk and one American. The year was 1995, so for most of the Poles this was their first time in the West, first time in the City of Light. And they were willing to punish themselves to see it all. In less than twenty-four hours we’d already done the Towel, Versailles, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou Centre, Notre Dame, Les Halles, and some street where paintings were sold. My twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Anusha, had more defined ambitions. She wanted to see the Eiffel Towel, the Mona Lisa, and if possible, find some Polish food.

  I just wanted coffee. Much of the previous night I’d spent in the hotel bar. It was afternoon now and I was flagging a bit.

  “There’ll be a café at the Louvre,” I said.

  “Eiffel Towel was my first big dream. And now, Kevish, Mona Lisa.”

  She brightened a bit, leaving her own tiredness behind. Her sunglasses were pushed atop her head, in hair that was blonder than it had any right to be.

  “And you will have it. I promise.”

  “And after Mona Lisa I want eat something.”

  A flock of Poles and one hungover American stood in the Louvre’s reception area, looking high up into the apex of a glass pyramid with its chain-link-fence pattern of panes.

  Everybody’s feet hurt. A hike through woods is fun; a hike through crowds debilitating. And all day we’d dodged humanity. Our pilot—that’s what the Poles called our bus tour guide—announced that we would go directly to the Mona Lisa.

  “That’s kind of embarrassing,” I said to Anusha. “It’s not like the Mona Lisa is the only painting here.”

  “Yes, but it’s big museum, and he close in two hours. So maybe we go with pilot.”

  “That pilot drinks too much,” I said.

  “So why you sit all night with him in bar? Why you didn’t come to room? We are in Paris—Love City—and I am wait in bed. But you, Kevish, you in bar with pilot.”

  “I know. That was dumb. Look, Anusha, you don’t need a pilot to get to the Mona Lisa. It’s easy. I’ll take you. I’ll be your guide.”

  “You are certain?”

  “It’
s the most famous painting in the world. And I’ve been here before.”

  She watched the pilot lead off this flock of Poles, from the central atrium to a wide stretch of stairs.

  Two overpriced espressos at the museum café gave me a boost, and though Anusha couldn’t find any pastries that looked Polish enough, her Earl Grey pleased her. So I led the way into the museum—the opposite way that our Polish comrades had gone.

  “I have a plan,” I told Anusha. “We’re going to wander around until we find it.”

  “That’s not plan,” she said.

  But it was precisely how I’d done things fifteen years beforehand. It had all been really simple. I’d made my way to the Louvre, on foot, after spending the night in bushes near the Eiffel Towel. I’d found the entrance—which back then wasn’t all that easy, it being in one of the many archways—and I’d wandered around until I and the Mona Lisa came face to face.

  What I didn’t know in 1995 was that I was leading Anusha into the Richelieu wing, which, in 1980, was not even part of the museum, but the Ministry of Finance.

  “Where we are going?” Anusha said.

  “Mesopotamia,” I said, reading a sign. We were on a marble stairway, white statues in the open area below. It was crowded down there; everyone seemed to be moving along, executing their own game plans.

  Anusha was patient in Mesopotamia. There seemed to be a lot of statuary, and broken stuff, pieces of walls or pots with designs on them. These were undoubtedly rare and wonderful to those who understood the context, artistry, and what not. We didn’t.

  “Kevilenko,” Anusha said after some time. “I want Mona Lisa.” She sunk her hand into her purse and pulled out some lipstick.

  “Hey, I got you to the Eiffel Towel.”

  “Tower,” she said. “Eiffel Towel is part of bus tour. You did nothing.”

  “Tower,” I said.

  “To wel,” she said. “Now I want see Mona Lisa. Then, oh, Kevish, after Mona Lisa, we will find Polish food. Please, please.

  “We can probably find, uh, that shninki.”

  “You mean naleshniki! You promise?”

  Some promises are easy. Naleshniki, though I couldn’t pronounce them, were just like crepes. How hard could crepes be in Paris?

  But when things grew less definable, that’s when it got hard. Like about the future. Anusha came into my life during a two-month summer language course in Uppsala, Sweden, just months before. We spent the first month falling in love and the second worrying about what would happen come August.

  I followed her to Poland. That at least was a step towards our future, a pretty sufficient one, I thought, since I had no job and not much money. But I lived for a month in a rectangle of guest room between her and her mother’s bedrooms.

  Our last fling, before I would return to America, was Paris.

  We moved faster through Islamic Art. People skirted to and fro, their shoes tapping, their clothing swishing.

  Two girls from our group, Magosha and Kasha, found us.

  Anusha asked them in Polish: Did you see the Mona Lisa? Of course they had. Well, where was it. They didn’t know. Somewhere that way.

  “Kevish,” Anusha said to me, “how to find Mona Lisa?”

  “Don’t worry, we can’t miss it.”

  She looked at her watch. “Kevish!” She showed me. It was 5:05 P.M.

  We still had nearly an hour, and it took just a minute or two to look at the painting.

  “O.K., let’s find the Mona Lisa.”

  We left the Middle East and entered Europe: those darkish paintings of the eighteenth century, with thick light seeping into shadowed rooms. We didn’t stop to look at paintings that caught our eye. We just took them all in so that our scanning glances turned a whole room into a montage.

  Anusha said, “My feet.”

  In a small corner, she plopped down onto a bench and slung out her legs on the herringbone floor. People stepped around her.

  “All this people went to see Mona Lisa first,” she said.

  “The Louvre seems a lot bigger than it did in 1980,” I noted. “I mean, it was easy. I just found it, the Mona Lisa, in a room by itself, in a kind of box on the wall. It’s actually really small.”

  She made a dour face, a skill of which Poles are the unchallenged champions.

  “Don’t worry. We’re close,” I said.

  I really felt we were. Because I noticed that I was now staring at Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait, the man coming out of a smear of shadow, angling the right shoulder toward us, his black eyes like raisins.

  “I’m boring,” Anusha said. “I want sleep. Polish food,” she said. “And, Kevish, you promise me Mona Lisa.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. I left her resting on the bench, and checked out two neighboring rooms—Rembrandt all over the place, but no Mona Lisa. I came back to Anusha, stood looking down at her, thinking. And a big, fairly embarrassing question climbed up in my throat.

  “O.K. Did Rembrandt paint the Mona Lisa?”

  “No. Da Vinci,” she said.

  I knew it had been somebody in-ignorably famous. But I was tired and these were, after all, the pre-Dan Brown years.

  “Well then the Mona Lisa isn’t going to be here. But we’re O.K. We’re in the Flemish lands,” I explained. “Da Vinci, see, that’s Italy. All we’ve got to do is cut south through Belgium and France, and we’re there.”

  “You tell me you were here before,” Anusha said.

  “I was.”

  I helped Anusha up. “Come on. We’ve still got time. I’ll get you there.”

  “Why you don’t ask that man who works?” Anna said. “You knew French last night in the bar.”

  “I was drunk when I knew French last night.”

  “Ask someone, Kevish!”

  I knew I had to do it, although the embarrassment of such asking such a question still stings. I was an art imbecile. First, Mesopotamia and Islamic art had bored me. Then confusing Rembrandt with da Vinci. Now, to ask “Which way to the Mona Lisa?”—that was degrading. I could have cheerily asked for Titian’s Man Smelling Eelgrass or something esoteric, but not the most annoying FAQ in the history of the Louvre.

  “Kevish! You promise,” Anusha said.

  I approached a blue-suited watchman, and did it: “Excuse me, where is the Mona Lisa?”

  He said, “You’re in the Richelieu wing, not the Denon wing.” He didn’t go out of his way to be encouraging.

  “So…how do we get to the Denon wing?”

  “The museum is closing in twenty-five minutes.”

  “So the Denon wing, how do we get there?”

  He pointed. We scooted, weaving through the crowd. At the Denon Wing, plaques on the walls showed a miniature Mona smile and an arrow. But now a current of bodies moved against us. Announcements came over the loudspeakers: “Closing in fifteen minutes.”

  We reached an elbow in the corridor. Stairs going up. On either side two escalators. Everybody was coming down, towards us. Not a soul going up.

  A blue suit stopped me.

  “We have come to see the Mona Lisa,” I said in French. “By da Vinci.”

  “You’re too late,” he said. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  “There is no tomorrow,” I said. “We’re bus tourists.”

  “On descend,” he said again, looking away. “Come tomorrow.”

  “Tell him I am from Poland,” Anusha said.

  “She is from Poland,” I said in French.

  “I understand English,” he said.

  “We have ten minutes left. Plenty of time.”

  “You see that man?” the French guy said, nodding up the escalator. Another guard stood at the top of the escalator, between two waist-high poles with red laser light eyes on them. “If I let you go, he will stop you.”

  I didn’t care. I took Anusha’s hand and dragged her forward, the blue coat coming after us. We started up the un-moving escalator. The top man came down. The other came up from
behind. It was a face-off half way.

  “Look,” I said to him. “I promised her. The Mona Lisa. O.K.? We don’t want to examine it. We don’t want to admire it. We just want to have a glance and escape.”

  Back in the reception area we gathered with the rest of the bus-tour Poles. They came up to us; girls offering their wrists to let us sniff the mix of perfume samples they’d sprayed at a gift shop. Some showed us postcards. Some told us they’d found a soup in the café not unlike Polish noodle soup.

  And they all asked the same question: “Did you see the Mona Lisa?”

  I put on a superior expression, conveying: As if the Mona Lisa is the only reason to come to the Louvre. But no one paid attention.

  Anusha said, “No. We did not see the Mona Lisa. We saw Islamic Art and Mesopotamia.”

  When we were alone on the bus, she was quiet. After some time, she said, “Kevish. You promise.”

  “I’m sorry, Anusha.”

  It was really just bad planning. Or no planning. Which was usually how I traveled. But I should not have played by my own rules when it came to someone else’s dream.

  Our bus disgorged us somewhere in Versailles, in the vicinity of our hotel, and the entire group poured into a McDonald’s.

  “We’re not eating here,” I said. “Let’s walk back to the hotel and find something really delicious.”

  Just up the street was a café with outdoor tables under an awning. I ordered Anusha a crepe with two scoops of ice cream and strawberries. She didn’t call it a crepe though. She said, “Naleshniki.” She ate it with a fork and knife, concentrating. The ice cream was white on her red lips.

  It was probably against her will, but soon she got a trace of what might have been a smile.

  I have seen the Mona Lisa, long ago, as I mentioned. Her smile is small, nearly flat, sly. It tells of something that has just happened, and of something that is just about to happen.