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 Bag People 

  The idea came to me one day that it would be interesting to chart the lively trade links between Russia and Turkey. I left Moscow and the snow and landed three hours later at Adler airport, the gateway to Sochi, the so-called ‘pearl' of the Russian Riviera.

      I was happy to see palm trees again, let me tell you, although the winter storms - which can be extreme round these parts - had thinned out each stringy thatch, leaving them like the prematurely bald. I took in the sea air and set off along the boulevard.

      It was warm for the time of the year. Moneyed gentlemen from the capital amused themselves in the hotels with girls in tight leather trousers, harvested from the provinces by train or by plane, like the servant girls by sleigh a hundred years before, destined for the palaces and mercantile mansions of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

      I took the ferryboat to Trabzon at ten in the evening. During the crossing, I met an engineer from Tula who had given up his original profession and now travelled from Central Russia to Turkey three times a week to buy jewellery, watches and gold tiepins for the luxury market that had blossomed like a tulip in his homeland.

      ‘The nice thing about this business,' he rasped, ‘is the fact that I can carry everything in my pockets. I've done a sight better than many of my compatriots, thank God. None of that drudgery for me...'

I should explain. One of the disastrous consequences of communism was naturally the almost complete lack of just about everything for decades on end. For the average citizen, there was no peanut butter, no sherry, no washing-up liquid, no clotheslines... the list goes on and on. When the communist grip disappeared at the beginning of the 1990's, millions of Russians hustled across the nearest border in search of trade. Before long, Istanbul was crawling with Russians bent on a bargain. The same goes for the Baltic countries, China and Poland.

I left my tiepin Russian friend to snore under his threadbare ferry blanket. Turkish men with enormous black moustaches had gathered around a TV on the forward deck to watch a football match. An orchestra played Russian songs, among them the lovely ‘Pozovi menia s soboi' (‘Call me!') by Alla Pugatchova, the Russian Edith Piaf.

‘Make sure they pay up front,' a chubby Russian lady grunted from behind her table. ‘Don't let those bastards fuck you around.' Her lips had been dunked in lemon juice. She was surrounded by a huddle of girls whose expressions radiated receptive curiosity together with gormless innocence. They were called Natashas, a familiar label these days in just about every corner of the planet.

The moon above the sea was like a paper lantern. The doors to most of the cabins were wide open. Men and women snoozed on their beds or sat hunched on their berths. They played cards, read books and chewed on bread and garlic sausage.  These were the chelnoki - from the Russian word ‘chelnok', which means shuttle.

They scuttled back and forth between Russia and Turkey with boxes, bags and hampers full of merchandise for sale on the home market. Leather jackets, shoes, fake perfume, nail varnish, fireworks, gold, silver, lingerie... even sex toys. You name it, they hauled it. This anonymous army supplied the millions of street kiosks that had overrun their fatherland like a parasitic fungus since the end of the last century. Once back in Russia, they began their often-exhausting journeys by car, train, plane, helicopter, and even the occasional snow scooter, in order to reach the smaller towns, villages and rural communities.

The price of their merchandise spiralled logarithmically (customs, backhanders, mafia), meaning that the poor buggers who had the misfortune of living in a hick town above the artic circle often had to pay ten times the original price for a pair of jeans. I call this category of Russians ‘bag people'.

 

The passengers were already a hive of activity early next morning. On deck they exchanged the names and addresses of the shops and warehouses in Trabzon where the best bargains were to be had. A loudspeaker announced in Russian that those who were not yet in the possession of a visa could obtain one in cabin 23 on the upper deck next to the bar, cost price: sixteen dollars.

      A couple of bag people from Orjol - where Turgenev used to own a country estate - waited next to one of the lifeboats. They had come to Turkey to stock up on chocolate, liqueurs and luxury underwear in preparation for the New Year festivities. The lady with the lemon juice lips fluttered around them, her girls like geese in her wake.

      The rocky coast with its marine-blue minarets slowly came into view. Once we had docked, a ramp opened beneath the bow, juddering like an earthquake, and our ferryboat - the Karden - disgorged its cargo of people, cars and trucks onto the teaming quayside.

      The customs people don't bark here, they laugh, especially when it comes to womenfolk.

      Shortly afterwards, I strolled along the upward meandering streets and alleys, past stalls with aromatic explosions of fruit, spices, oven-fresh bread, hotplates sizzling with meat and fish, which the eateries recommend in Cyrillic script for homesick Russians along with pelmeni (Russian ravioli) and borsht (beetroot soup). Fashionably dressed Turkish young men hovered around the doorways of their extravagant stores, fidgeting with their prayer beads.

      I stepped into a basement where oriental carpets were stacked in immense piles. In the middle of the establishment there was a table with a telephone. A portrait of Joseph Stalin graced one of the walls. Not a photo or a painting, but a striking likeness, creatively constructed from different types of veneer.

      ‘My father,' a salesman announced as he appeared from behind a curtain. ‘You're not Russian, are you?'

      ‘A fine portrait. Has your father been dead long?'

      ‘Who said my father was dead?' But then he smiled: ‘You're right, our father is dead. Surely you've heard of Stalin?'

      His name was Alik, a Georgian who had fled the Abkhazian resort Sukhumi  to escape the dreadful consequences of the war.

      Two pairs of female legs briskly descend the stairs into the shop.

      ‘Ah, Ladies. How are you?' The shopkeeper rushed towards the pair, his arms open wide. They were fashionably dressed, gaudy Russian style, one sporting red hair the other a moustache. 

      ‘Did we arrive by boat or by plane this time?' the refugee Georgian inquired.

      ‘By plane, of course, Alik,' said the redhead. ‘You won't catch me on that grimy boat again. Think big! So what are you waiting for, young man? Don't you have anything new to show us?'

      The salesman climbed a pile of carpets, hurled a couple to the floor and exhibited them with salt-and-pepper charm to his Russian customers.

      ‘Look Masha!' Alik tossed open a peacock-blue rug with saffron-yellow trimming in the blink of an eye. ‘Just arrived, fresh from Iran. This one's called "Esfahan Nights".'

      ‘How much?' asked the redhead in a flat voice.

      ‘A Hundred dollars.'

      ‘We'll take twenty. What else do you have?'

      Humming to himself, the salesman disappeared into a murky corner of his shop and returned with a large carpet, which he rolled out on the floor. ‘This one's called Masha, "The Mirror of the Soul".'

      ‘How much?'

      ‘One hundred and forty.'

      ‘We'll take twelve.'

      After ‘The Tears of a Betrayed Lover', ‘A Morning in Istanbul' and ‘The Goodness of Allah', the refugee Georgian trotted out a magnificent carpet: sky-blue, embroidered with gold filaments and ivory-white threads, which he had baptised ‘Summer of the World'.

      ‘I've known them for more than two years,' he informed me after the customers had left. ‘The merchandise will start its journey tomorrow and everything should reach Adler by the following day.'

      He was well aware that they retailed the carpets in Russia for hundreds of dollars more than the asking price, but he had his part of the cake and he was satisfied.

 

In the evening, I decided to explore the world of the Natashas in the alleys full of eateries and stray souls that give the harbour district of Trabzon an almost Parisian appearance.

      ‘Hello, sir.' The flame from a cigarette lighter illuminates the face of a broad-shouldered bouncer in front of a door upholstered in white artificial leather. ‘Drinks, girls... Russian girls...'

      I went inside, descended a flight of stairs and arrived in a room full of Turkish men with open-necked shirts gathered around large tables, their hairy chests adorned with gold. The tables were decked with fruit, lamb, oval Turkish bread, tomatoes, aubergines, cucumbers, and salads. A collection of twenty Natashas looked down on the dining gentlemen from a podium, clapping and crooning along with a singer dressed in a pink shirt with silver embroidery. With the exception of a wink here and there, the diners seemed to pay little if any attention.

      When I asked a waiter to explain this unusual behaviour, he responded in nimble German: ‘If a Turk is enjoying his meat dish, he's not thinking about desert.' Words well chosen I decided to write them down before I forgot them.

      It was chilly outside. I quickly made my way past black facades to my hotel. Eyes like fireflies beckoned me from shapeless doorways: ‘Psst! Hey, honey!'

      Back in my hotel room, I was reminded of the other Russian men and woman I had met on the ferryboat: unemployed biologists, former opera singers, linguists struggling to make ends meet, earning their living as human beasts of burden, sixty kilos of merchandise every trip.

      I fished out my fountain pen and started to write.

 

Two days later, I made my way to the harbour to buy a ticket for my return journey to Sochi. A man behind a desk with a telephone and a whirling ceiling fan in his otherwise empty office shook his head pityingly. All the ferryboats from and to Russia had been pulled out of service for tomorrow and the day after.

      ‘Why?'

      ‘Bad weather.'

      ‘A plane then?' The man shook his head pityingly for a second time. There had been a storm at sea that night and it was still blowing a gale in the vicinity of Adler. The airport was closed indefinitely.

      ‘All I can offer is the hydrofoil, but it's not very luxurious. The bloody things are always crammed full of Russians and cargo.'

      ‘When does it leave?'

      I was standing on the quayside at four in the afternoon. The lurid yellow hydrofoil Kometa looked like one of those constructions that cruise the canals of Amsterdam, only three times bigger, streamlined like a bullet and virtually windowless.

      Turkish boys in dungarees were hard at work loading the vessel with boxes, jute sacks and balls of clothes. After a while, a Russian boy appeared in a blue and white striped sailor's shirt. ‘The passengers for Sochi can board now! Have your passport and tickets at the ready please!'

      Sudden doubts about the hydrofoil's seaworthiness were dispelled by a Russian with green sunglasses who could apparently read my thoughts. He made the same trip twice a month. It was much faster and a lot cheaper than the ferry. I was reassured. I didn't happen to come from Estonia did I?

 

Forty or so, mostly damaged seats had been squashed together in the bowels of the Kometa. My safety belt refused to close. The boat was packed to the gunnels with bails, bags, rolled-up carpets and other bits and pieces of merchandise, which also blocked the aisles. A middle-aged woman to my right, her face drawn from exhaustion, stared at a calculator and muttered sums to herself.

      A Georgian with the facial features of an actor flapped onboard just before we left the harbour.

      ‘Afternoon, afternoon,' he spluttered apologetically over the heads of the passengers and set about stuffing his merchandise into an alcove above three faded orange life jackets.

      Beside them on the wall, a sign painted in pale-blue letters read ‘The party is concerned for your safety! Soviet citizen, be ready to do your duty when the time comes!'

      Before long, we were drifting calmly out of the harbour. The sun tinted the sky dark red with dashes of green - the colour of Tuscan olives. Someone on my row needed to visit the toilet and I had to lift my feet onto my chair like a monkey to let him through. A chubby Russian to my left immediately fell fast asleep. The woman to my right finally put her calculator away, wriggled her puggy nose settled into a vacant stare.

      After a while, the waves started to dash against the boat with increasing frequency and intensity. My neighbour glared anxiously at a wobbly pile of boxes in the front, which had been bound together with broad packing tape. Two bald men in the middle row guzzled on a bottle of Turkish whisky, drinking it to the dregs. The effect of the alcohol on their faces made them look like newborn mice.

      My neighbour suddenly spoke. ‘I've invested all my money in this trip. Thirty pairs of leather trousers. You can't even give away leather jackets these days in Kazan.'

      And she gave me the abbreviated version of her life's story.

      She used to be happy with her husband. He worked as a grammar school gym teacher and she as inspector in a radiator factory. One day her husband was demonstrating a manoeuvre on the gym rings in front of a class of girls. The rope snapped and he broke his neck. He died on the spot. I didn't mind her telling me all this, did I? Her divorced daughter - Mila - had run off some time ago with an older man from Moscow, leaving her to look after her two grandchildren. Young people these days. Selfish to the last of them. What business was I in? Good heavens, what was that?...

      A wave crashed against the right side of the boat, as if an invisible giant had kicked it hard with his boot. Boxes tumbled to the floor with the sticky crackle of packing tape, barely missing the legs of a group of bag ladies on the front row.

      They screamed.

      ‘Stay calm, ladies!' one of the mouse-faced drinkers announced. ‘Have no fear! We're hale and hearty Russian men!'

      The boy in the striped shirt wormed his way to the front, cursed under his breath and groaned from the effort as he tried to restack the boxes.

      ‘Hey, people!' he then shouted. ‘Does anyone have a bit of bloody rope to spare?'

      ‘Here, friend!' A pale little man with horn-rimmed spectacles stood up and made his way to the front with a reel of fluorescent-green nylon rope. ‘Use as much as you need, brother!'

      The boy lashed the boxes firmly together and disappeared behind an aluminium door. A voice on the loudspeakers then announced: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! The buffet is open! Payment in cash only. I repeat: cash only!'

      A group of Armenians wrestled their way with difficulty to the back, dollars in hand. They immediately complemented the girl behind the buffet on her fulsome figure and blond hair. They were also the worse for the drink.

      The buffet turned out to be a reconstructed gents toilet. The only wc that still functioned as such was the ladies. They sold vodka in half-litre bottles and in no time the entire boat was following the example of the baby mice, drinking themselves into oblivion from the neck of a bottle.

      ‘There's bad weather on the way,' a man declared with a giggle. ‘So, if you ask me, we might as well make the most of it."

      Bottles clink behind my back.

      ‘Booze, booze and more booze,' my neighbour muttered. ‘You're not Russian eh? My husband never touched a drop. And he of all people had to fall to his death from the rings, poor bugger. He was only forty-three.'

      The fat guy to my right snored away to his heart's content.

 

After a couple of hours, the Turkish oxygen that had once filled the innards of our floating suppository was reduced to a couple of molecules. The Kometa scuttled across the swirling inky brine with increasingly violent bangs and crashes

      My stomach started to act up. A man had been vomiting on the floor of the ladies toilet for the best part of fifteen minutes. The giant booted us once again in the side. The boxes, bags, bottles stacked beside the buffet - everything was hurled to the ground.

      First there was silence.

      Then there was panic.

      The boy in the striped shirt dashed red-faced towards the wheelhouse. My neighbour stared at her squeezed together knees. The hydrofoil's synthetic hull creaked and groaned. The sea bellowed and roared.

      The blind-drunk mice, who had looked round in amusement at first, suddenly fell silent. I read the absurd text next to the three faded orange lifejackets for a second time.

      It was like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. Everything blared, quivered and blustered. The lights went out and some of the passengers started to scream hysterically.

      Then a voice resounded over the loudspeakers: ‘In a moment, the façade of the Winter Palace, better known as the Hermitage will appear to the left. To the right...' The announcement was abruptly cut short. ‘Jesus Igor, what idiot put that bloody cassette in the machine?' someone rasped. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! Passengers! Your attention please! This is your captain speaking! We are encountering extreme weather conditions. Please sit upright and fasten your safety belts. From now on alcohol is strictly forbidden. Further instructions will follow where appropriate. Stay Calm and enjoy the rest of your journey.'

      The wc door to the buffet slammed shut and the blond girl made her way with difficulty to the front, a cashbox pressed to her belly. She could barely stay upright from the pitching of the boat.

      An Azeri sitting close to the aisle stopped her in her tracks. ‘Hey, honey, give me another bottle of Kubanskaya!'

      ‘The buffet is closed,' she said. ‘Didn't you hear the captain?'

      ‘Who gives a shit about that idiot of a captain! If I want to get plastered that's my business. Understood? I'd rather get some warmth inside me before we hit that icy water out there! D'you hear?

      ‘He's right! If we're going down then let's drink!' shouted a hedgehog-faced man I had noticed already at the gold market in Trabzon. ‘I still have a full bottle of Turkish Johnny Walker.  People, you who are about to drown, help yourselves.' He ostentatiously removed the top of the bottle.

      The boat crashed and juddered like a rollercoaster.

      ‘Is it really that bad?' asked a young Russian woman. ‘Are we going down?'

      ‘What do you think? You heard the announcement. This piece of junk is a reject tourist boat from Saint Petersburg. Fine on a river, but not worth a penny at sea. It's a disaster waiting to happen. A floating coffin.'

      ‘They screwed us!'

      ‘I want my money back!' someone else yelled.

      ‘What use is that, citizen?' slobbered one of the baby mice. ‘They don't accept dollars in the hereafter, or roubles for that matter!'

      ‘People, we're heading for the bottom...'

      Another crash followed, and another.

      An ash-blond woman juddered to her feet, removed the sunglasses from her trembling face and treated the man beside her to a stream of verbal abuse. ‘I knew it. It's all your fault! We should never have bought those infernal carpets. "The Wrath of Allah". Who would by a carpet with a name like that? We brought this on ourselves...'

      ‘Superstition, citizen. Pure superstition!'

      ‘Let's grab the captain!' the man who had supplied the rope to secure the boxes suggested. ‘He's the one who cheated us. Him and his river cruiser!'

      ‘You knew it already before you boarded,' sneered a man at the back.

      ‘Maybe, but they should have told us,' the rope supplier chimed back. ‘I worked thirty years at the ministry, brother. It makes a big difference from the legal point of view, believe me!'

      ‘Then I wish you every success with your court case when they open the pearly gates!' grumbled one of the baby mice. ‘But count me out, if you don't mind.'

      A second passenger demanded the captain's neck.

      I looked around the room.

      Was I scared?

      Jesus, what a storm!

      My neighbour lunged between her knees, rummaged in a bag, and surfaced with a silver-coloured hipflask in her trembling hands. She took three modest gulps. Then she offered me the flask. ‘It's good Armenian cognac. Ararat label. Have a drink...'

      The Georgian with the actor's face got to his feet, beaming with self-assurance like a presenter in an old-fashioned Soviet newsreel.

      ‘You want to wring the captain's neck, eh?' He turned out to have an impressive voice. Everyone fell silent. ‘Fine, but then we're definitely heading for the bottom! Are there any other experienced sailors on board we don't know about? We might be screwed, people, but it's not the captain's fault. Moscow's to blame. They've squeezed us for all we're worth, humiliated us. Why do you think we're sitting here like pack mules on this wreck?'

      ‘Absolutely right!' one of the mice interrupted. ‘It's not the captain's fault, it's that shower of scum in Moscow.'

      An immense wave hit us front on and everything was tossed into the air. I thought for an instant that our time had come and took three quick gulps of cognac. The Azeri was right: if we're going down, then rather warm than cold.

      The Georgian held onto the handle of a spatula shaped door for balance. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, try to stay calm. There's no need to start a revolution. We're all Russians, aren't we? So, brothers and sisters, let us pray...'

      A moment later, half of the passengers had joined their hands in prayer, like a cluster of good old-fashioned Dutch Protestants.

      ‘Lord God, heavenly Father, all seeing and all knowing, you look down upon us like an eagle enthroned on high. Merciful Lord, have pity on us! Merciful Lord, have pity on us!'

      The Georgian's prayer was abruptly cut short by the captain's voice over the loudspeakers.

      ‘Ladies and gentlemen! This is the captain speaking! The worst of the weather is behind us. If you look carefully, you will see the lights of the city of Batumi coming into view. We should be arriving in Sochi in a couple of hours. The restaurant will reopen shortly. Thank you for your attention.'

      Half an hour later, the buffet was crowded with passengers. An Armenian with a Hitler moustache tried to chat up the ash-blond woman, but her husband suddenly got to his feet and gave the Caucasian the sharp edge of his tongue. The mice and the rope supplier laughed. In the meantime, the boy with the striped shirt secured the boxes for the umpteenth time.

      My chubby neighbour had slept through the whole thing and suddenly woke up with a pig-like grunt.

      ‘Would you excuse me,' he said. ‘I need to pay an urgent visit...'

      When he returned, he gazed outside through the black raindrops on the tiny portholes. Isn't that Batumi in the distance?'

      I smiled and nodded.

      He had taken a Polish sleeping tablet and had slept like a log. The trip had never seemed so short. Fantastic stuff!

      My chubby bag man neighbour yawned and dosed off again. He told me later on the quayside in Sochi that he still had a three-day journey ahead of him before he could shift his consignment of ladies shoes, somewhere in a small town far beyond the Siberian city of Omsk.

 

Это тестовая русская новость.