From Russia with Love

Dead Body

One of the most entertaining parts of Language School was Lindsey’s stories from her semester in St. Petersburg. They were full of crazy times in the land of the midnight sun, brushes with death and dead bodies. She explained to me that after even a semester in Russia, almost all students return to the States with at least one dead body story. She shared with me stories of ‘the dead body that lived under my bedroom window’ or ‘the dead body that was in the alley for a couple days before the paramedics came for him’. I envisioned my return to Middlebury’s campus and the wide eyes of my friends as I would tell similar stories of the corpses I became acquainted with in the Motherland. With less than two months left in Moscow, I was afraid that I would return empty handed…until last Thursday.
The past few months have been filled with limp bodies sprawled out on the street or in the Metro, but none of these unfortunate souls were ever confirmed as dead. More often than not, they were just incredibly drunk. I should have known that my dead body story would come unexpectedly, not in the wee hours of a weekend morning but exactly when I wasn’t expecting it.
Last Thursday, having finished all my finals and final presentations, Lindsey and I set out for the post office where we each had a package waiting for us. Being my first package here, I was overwhelmed with excitement and simultaneously terrified at my first experience with the Russian postal system (that day, I discovered that postal workers all over the world are generally disgruntle and hostile as a result of their thankless jobs). We left the university and made our way to Novoslabodskaia, the nearest metro station.
As usual, we got through the heavy doors into the markedly warmer air of the station and walked towards the entrance turnstiles where it was unusually crowded to get in. It was too early to be rush hour in the Metro yet, and I wondered what was keeping the masses of people from stamping their tickets and jumping on the mile-long escalators that carry passengers down to the eighth wonder of the modern world – the Moscow Metro.
After pushing my way through the last door to the turnstiles, I noticed a barrier in a place I had never before seen a barrier, right before the turnstiles. It was clogging the flow of traffic and making the trek to the escalators especially slow. At first glance, the only explanation for the out-of-place barrier was the policeman standing next to it. The Metro is often full of police on the weekends when there’s a football or hockey match, but three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon was quite a strange time to see one controlling traffic.
Then I looked down. Next to the barrier’s feet was a man lying on the ground. Seeing his unbuttoned shirt, untied tie and generally disheveled appearance, I assumed he was just drunk (while police are unusual for a Thursday afternoon, there is never an unusual time for drunkenness in Moscow). Then I noticed the sickly, green-grey color of his hand and the black plastic bag covering his face. I looked back to his hands and saw their stiffness. This man was not drunk; he was dead!
But what had happened? Was it a homicide? Had someone suffocated him while he was making his drunken way out of the metro that night/morning? He had obviously been there for a while as rigor mortus had already set in. So many questions filled my head as the crowds pushed me through the turnstiles and onto the escalator. I couldn’t believe it; how could they all just walk by and not realize that someone had died? Were they so concerned with their own lives, their own trajectories that they couldn’t be bothered to even notice, to give even one moment’s thought to the human being who was lying dead on the ground? I was shocked, shocked that I had just seen a dead body in the metro, that no on else but Lindsey and I seemed to care and that without realizing it, I finally had a dead body story!
While disappointed at my fellow passengers’ response to the dead man, I can’t say that my response was any better. In fact, it’s undoubtedly better to ignore a dead body than celebrate it as a great story that will freak out my friends at home. My classmates, who all went through that metro stop at some point during the day, had different responses to the corpse. Some, like me, were freaked out that Moscow once again surprised us is the most unusual of ways; others were devastated. My friend, Margalit, had a hard time that night celebrating her host-sister’s birthday because she couldn’t get the image of faceless body out of her mind.
All in all, Moscow is a tough city to live in, even without dead bodies to deal with. I think we all have our own ways of dealing with the never-ending emotional stress that Moscow presents us with. Personally, I try to laugh at it all (or, if you want to look at it a different way, make the best out of a dead body – turn it into a great story!); this obviously isn’t the most sensitive of methods, but it gets me by. I hope my last six weeks in Russia will be corpse-free.

posted by Misha Molodoi @ 2:48 PM