#31 | March 5 - 12, 1998  

by Mark Ames

My ideal woman has no womb. No tubes, no ovaries, no womb. The rest is negotiable.
- Mayakovsky

Just under a year ago, we published a piece about the woes of eXpat women in Russia. Almost the entire female American community came clamoring to our offices like an angry peasant mob, with torches, rakes, and pitchforks...

We escaped, but a year later, as the guest editorial (I swear it's real) and comix prove, nothing has changed and no one has learned anything. Expat women are still growing anger lines around their mouths, stuck in a situation they'd never dreamed of: like consumer goods that cannot compete with the locally manufactured products, they wind up collecting dust on the shelves, marked down five times over, and finally dumped in overstock or returned to the manufacturer to be melted down and sold for scrap...

But instead of rehashing the sordid truth, I'd like to dedicate a Women's Day column to some of the women I've come to know over the last year.

Alyona. For some reason, she still calls me. She tried pulling the oldest stunts in the book last spring. When a woman claims she can't have an abortion because her alleged doctor allegedly told her that if she does, she'll never have children again, call her bluff. Tell her you'll fly to France, pick up an RU-486 pill, fly back, and pop it in her mouth over a nice dinner at Horse and Hound. You'll accompany her to the toilet when Junior squirts out like a bowl of borscht; you'll even flick Junior's sardine eyes off her thighs, because U care.

That's when she changes her tact-she tells you she can't kill a living baby. "Kill what?!" you demand. "It's not a baby-it's a fucking larva!"
"But at two months, it already has hands and feet," she protests.
"And a tail!" you reply. "And sardine eyes!"

But she won't give, so you're left with no choice: you threaten to kill her. That's what I did. And it worked. At 5:30 the next morning, Alyona quietly got out of bed and left my apartment, acting like a martyr.

On a brighter note, Anya, the 15-year-old pregnant girl who thought she'd had a miscarriage at the Duck a few weeks back, finally did the Right Thing. I guarantee that her fatherless child would have grown up to be one of those elevator rapists-he had the "really stupid criminal" icon written all over his translucent forehead; now, thanks to Anya's sage decision, his fetal membranes are getting boiled down in some sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of town, and believe me, folks, it's better for all of us. I'd suggest sterilizing Anya now, for the good of society, like what the Swedes used to do to their degenerates. As far as I'm concerned, this Women's Day, Anya deserves one of those cheap trophy cups with the inscription: "World's Greatest Mom!" Signed, Junior.

Which leads me to two truly heroic women who are linked not just by their prison experiences, but by their determination to live life in that massive, depopulated continent beyond the pale of society.

Lena is insane, which is why, as much as I like her, I've been trying to shine her. She still has everything she owns in my apartment: two cheap duffel bags packed full of whore's clothes. Evidence of a big, drunken, horny mistake on my part. She had just been deported from a Western European country after serving three and a half years in jail. You had to figure... a young attractive Russian girl who hasn't seen the light of freedom in three and a half years, and you're the first guy she's going to spend the night with... as the black guy says to Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, "I gots to know..." Christ, I gots to know too fucking much for my tastes.

You don't meet too many women like Lena. It's as if each day is her last. Most people don't experience in a lifetime the kind of savage adventures she falls into on a daily basis. Since I've known her, she's been raped, robbed, beaten, detained for heroin possession, nearly murdered... In the scariest incident, a pair of flathead pimps who mistook her for a deadbeat whore (Lena briefly moved into a kommunalka with two teenage whores when I told her to split) beat her in the kidneys to extract what they thought was their rightful protection cut; they dunked her head into a bathtub full of water until she nearly fainted. They eventually let her go, having squeezed her for every last ruble she had, but the other two girls weren't so lucky; they were driven out to a forest, stripped naked, and left to walk back to the nearest road, two hours away. There are other, worse things that happened to Lena that she said she couldn't even tell me about.

Lena had some great prison stories to tell me. Like how she raped a Bulgarian girl, age 19, in the showers; and how said Bulgarka became a sort of willing slave after a few weeks. "It's strange," she observed. "All the girls I raped became that way."

The other heroine I want to honor is still sitting in jail. I'm speaking of Alina Vitukhnovskaya, the poet jailed for allegedly selling seven-bucks-worth of LSD to a pair of junkies. The junkies have already retracted their forced confessions, and all the evidence collapsed; the judge ordered her moved to Serbsky Psychiatric Ward, an infamous sanitarium where dissidents were interred during the Soviet days.

Last week, they shipped her back to Women's Prison #6, where she sits awaiting more trials and hearings. Her bogus case goes back to 1994, and no one knows if or when it will end.

Alina and I have been in correspondence recently. Her letters are really impressive: you can tell that the physical confinement has driven her already hyper-detailed inner world to develop entire cities, underground railroads, population transfers within that hyper-aestheticized mind of hers... There is a serenity in her written voice, reflecting a strength you don't expect from a petite poet/prisoner. I nearly grew envious of her intense focus, made manic by her confinement. When you think about all the brain cells wasted out here in civilian life, worrying about money and food and meetings and work, you get envious... until you remember that she's in a Russian prison. These aren't nice prisons. These are Midnight Express prisons. And yet, Alina seems to be growing stronger. "I don't want to be and will not be a victim," she wrote me.

Alina and Lena are two women who deserve to be celebrated on Women's Day because, in their own ways, they are both heroines-in the guerrilla war against blandness and ordinariness.

One thing Alina asked me was to publish her address in our newspaper so that you, readers, might send her letters to relieve her boredom. This Women's Day, why don't you write her a letter, to someone far more deserving of Women's Day accolades than any of us civvies. Her only request is that you write the letters in Russian. And please, don't bore her with maudlin do-goodie letters of how bad you feel for her. Tell her horrible stories about yourself or your neighbors or your ex-lovers. Send her naked pictures of yourself soaping down a llama. Whatever you do, just don't bore her. She deserves better.
109383
Moscow
Ulitsa Shosseinaya, dom 92
CIZO 48/6, kamere 313
Aline Vitukhnovskoi