Complaint Department
Now, here’s a memory….
Technically, it’s about a complaint about the bright yellow Hertz brochures in Post XI. We have had several commenters post serious frowns about the brochures left in the park. Sorry.
Why the secrecy in taking the brochures?
I goofed. I think I need to continue the story and see if the frowns turn either to smiles or at least into looks of amazement.
Back to our hotel. During the third or fourth breakfast there was a buzz quietly moving from table to table. It was the kind of buzz that had it happened in Boston or Chicago would have resulted in pounding on the manager’s door, but in Leningrad it only resulted in a buzz, a frightening buzz, but just a buzz. People were certain their luggage had been searched. Nothing had been taken, but there were clumsy attempts by the searchers to leave things as they had been found.
Talking together, the group agreed to be more guarded but that nothing positive could come out of any complaints. Still it was unnerving. Eventually, one of the men from Texas said his Bible had gone missing.
Now for a wonderful experience. It was our final full day in Leningrad, and we were bused into the countryside to visit a monastery and two grand estates from the pre-Revolutionary era (pictures will be in an upcoming memory about Russia) and after a final Leningrad diner in our hotel we were bused to the train station to take the night train for Moscow.
The train trip to Moscow (11 hours) was one of the best travel experiences of my life. Even now, after 40 years, I feel that I can recall every moment.
Did Deed enjoy the trip? She got on the train and slept like a baby.
So much for shared experiences.
We left the Leningrad station around 7 pm.
Oops! Before we go any further I need to explain something unique about Russia. All 36 of us during our entire stay in Russia were time disoriented. For example, in Texas, even in July when it’s nighttime it gets dark. Remember that story about God separating day from night. He forgot to tell the Russians. In Leningrad at 1am you can sit in the park and read, but finally around 2 am it’s pretty dark, and by 4 am the sun begins to light the heavens.
Back to the train. I found a small single seat in the passageway near our compartment. The seat had a window view and was close to a gigantic vintage samovar that was attended by a jolly old man masquerading as a bag of bones. His night task was keeping my teacup filled and a plate of black bread and butter at my side. When not filling my teacup he acted as my Baedeker naming each and every village we passed and at the same time offering what I believed to be a full history of Russia since Peter the Great. Somehow he seemed to have concluded that I understood Russian, and so I kept smiling and nodding and learned what it was to love being Russian. And he continued to ply me with incomprehensible stories in a wondrous voice until we arrived in Moscow.
What a good kind man he was.
Here’s where we return once more to the bright yellow Hertz brochures but now I was “working” Moscow. Same story in the parks of Moscow, but with an added twist.
You may have heard of Gum a long-enclosed 19th century mall-like collection of stores near Red Square. Gum was constructed primarily of steel with an arched roof made up of thousands of small panes of glass that covered more than 1,200 shops. It reminded me of Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace built for the 1851 London Exposition. Even in the dead of winter Gum’s offered Czarist Russians a mercantile world to discover the wonders that civilization had to offer in a mall setting and of glass and lights and free of the snow that in winter covered the streets and roofs of Moscow.
However, when we went to Gum’s, long after Lenin and Stalin had done their revolutionary thing, it was a sad shadow of its pre-Lenin glory days when all the world’s luxuries were on display in beautifully decorated shops. Now like everything in Russia Gum’s was grey.
When we entered Gum’s through the giant unpolished brass doors the first thing that greeted us was a battered table supporting a mountain of unpackaged, unlabeled, black pantyhose. As the women fought through the mountain of pantyhose it seemed like a Black Friday sale at Walmart only notched up as we observed very dedicated, determined, and borderline furious women claiming what they could grab.
I told Deed to get ready to give her best impression of WOW and get in the scrum with my bright yellow you know what’s.
I was never more proud of my little champ. Later as she licked her wounds we retreated to observe the effect of Deed’s heroism.
There was a bit of a lull as women grabbed first the brochures and then the pantyhose.
That night I carefully sought out Sergey one of our new guides. He was a young economics major and like our other guides in Leningrad spoke not only English but French and German. He also said he spoke Polish but somehow I doubted that anybody really spoke Polish, but I’ll let that pass and take him at his word.
In my suitcase I had a large jar of peanut butter, extra chunky, and offered some to Sergey as a way of breaking the ice and moving our relationship forward.
Sergey had heard of peanut butter but had never tasted it.
It was the first time I had ever seen a grown man eat a large jar of peanut butter in one sitting. The vodka helped.
The time seemed appropriate so I pulled out the bright yellow Hertz brochure and told him what I had been doing in Leningrad and Moscow.
I asked Sergey, “Why do Russia secretly rush to take them and just as quickly hide them?
Licking his chops he took the brochure and looked at it. He seemed puzzled but after a couple more spoons of peanut butter and a chaser he asked me to explain what it meant.
But I was persistent. “No you tell me what it means.”
The “bright” and “yellow” were easy. Sergey said that such glittering-colored paper in big bold letters was beyond rare for a Russian to see. “Plus,” he said, “it is written in English and French, and German. Most unusual.” Sergey said that it was even more rare to be found on a park bench, and the odds of finding them in a pile of pantyhose were astronomical.
“But what is this Hertz?” he asked.
I then preceded to explain to Sergey the rental car business model.
I need to be brief otherwise this will start to unravel so let me offer this summation of our conversation.
Sergey was a brilliant young man --- he had more marbles to play with than I had.
“So Sergey,” I said, “Suppose you wanted to rent a car to go from Moscow to Leningrad.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“So you can visit your friends.” And what did he say to that? Right! He has no friends in Leningrad.
Skipping ahead because I think I’m about to lose you.
I was forced to agree, reluctantly, that he would need maps and that he didn’t have any; that he would rather take the train; that the train was quicker and cheaper; that being alone in the car was frightening and where would he sleep, and he didn’t like Leningrad, and most troubling was how would the car get back to Moscow.
But Sergey, “It doesn’t matter how, or if the car ever gets back to Moscow, because someone in Leningrad will rent it to drive to Minsk.”
He shook his head and returned to the peanut butter and vodka.
The next morning on the bus, Sergey arranged to sit next to me as we began our tour into the country.
He had thought about the brightly colored Hertz brochure.
He was firm as he listed his thoughts from our late-night discussion.
In conclusion he said:
He loved peanut butter.
Advertising was exploitive. The people in Russia own everything in common so it would be wrong to advertise.
Renting someone’s car was bourgeois.
Private companies were run by thieves.
I thought to myself the stores in Russia are empty but said nothing and just looked out the windows at greying Russia.
By the way, for those of you not familiar with the womanly sport of wrestling the WOW is the splendid organization --- Women of Wrestling.