The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  A few years later, Richardt's neighbor died and his widow—a Swede who was new to Christiania—moved into her husband's house. But residents of the district told her she was not welcome. Richardt stepped in and, in keeping with Christiania rules, called a meeting to resolve the matter. Three days before the meeting, a posse broke into the woman's house, piled her belongings in the street, and reclaimed the home for someone of their choosing.

  "Anarchy is a beautiful thing if people have very fucking high morals," he said. "If they don't, then it's lynch mobs. This was a lynch mob, I'd say. And the same with consensus democracy. You have to have very high morals to make it function. You have to have a very high level of energy as well."

  There were other stories of arbitrary law and violence in Free Town. Since the beginning, the community used thugs to enforce rules and chase unwanted residents out of the neighborhood. In the housing pool, preferential treatment was sometimes given to applicants who had friends on the inside. In 2005, residents offered a troop of gay actors a home, then kicked them out after determining that they didn't comply with the "Christiania lifestyle." In 2004, a television journalist was violently threatened when he tried to erect a small house in Christiania, against neighborhood rules. The following spring, the drug scene on Pusher Street made headlines when six masked men fired automatic weapons into a crowd to avenge one of their members who'd been thrown out of Christiania. Several people were injured, and a twenty-six-year-old man was killed. In April of 2009, a twenty-two-year-old man's jaw was blown off and four others were injured when an unknown perpetrator lobbed a grenade into a crowd outside Café Nemoland.

  The government blew many of the stories out of proportion in its campaign to close Christiania, but some of its base assertions were grounded in disquieting facts. While Christianians refused to recognize the government's authority, two thirds of the community received welfare and used city and state services like hospitals, schools, and roads. More than one hundred residents owned cars, and, because they couldn't park in Free Town, they clogged the streets of Christianshavn with them.

  One point almost everyone, including most Christianians, agreed on was the fact that Free Town's drug trade had become its Achilles' heel. On one hand, the $174-million-a-year business filled area shops, cafés, and restaurants and made the neighborhood the second-most-popular tourist stop in Denmark, after Tivoli. On the other, it brought violence and a power imbalance that diminished Christiania's community mentality.

  One night during my stay, I visited a former hash dealer some friends had introduced me to. "Andy" unlocked six deadbolts on two doors to let me into his apartment. He lived in Frederick's Arc, the largest timber-frame structure in Denmark and site of the 1979 heroin blockade. He'd put on weight since he stopped dealing and now went to the gym every day and played with the Christiania soccer club. His biceps and neck were well defined. He had a buzz cut and shifty blue eyes, seemingly aware of every movement in the room at all times.

  Andy's apartment was outfitted with nearly everything a twenty-something bachelor could want—and, seemingly, everything Christiania historically opposed. The living room was appointed with a leather wraparound couch and a pool-table-size wide-screen TV. The kitchen was equipped with a multitude of fancy stainless-steel appliances and granite counters. The hardwood floors were sparkling new.

  After starting as a runner on Pusher Street in the late nineties, when he was fifteen, Andy eventually set up his own stand in 2001. Individual busts were frequent leading up to the 2004 raid, he said, but the risk was worth it. When he was twenty years old, he was clearing $1,000 to $2,000 a day. He took extravagant snowboarding trips to Switzerland and spent $12,000 once on a two-week bender in Miami. He didn't work on Christiania's public projects or attend meetings. In a socialist country where income tax ranges from 43 to 63 percent, Andy was an instant member of Copenhagen's nouveau riche.

  Since he quit pushing, Andy had been trying to reinvent himself. He pointed out a painting he'd been working on that seemed like an interesting abstract until he explained that it was a depiction of an enraged dragon breathing fire. I asked about an assortment of electronic equipment in the corner, and he said he was also learning how to DJ. When I inquired what he thought of L205, he answered that he hoped it would pass over, that things would stay the way they were. "I do what the lawyers tell me," he said. "I just give them money and trust they will do the right thing."

  I went the following night to see Pusher Street for myself. The alley was empty, apart from three eidolic shapes crowded around a fire smoldering in a fifty-gallon drum. I approached a middle-aged woman reclining on a pile of wood chips and asked if she was selling. She nodded and asked how much I wanted. I told her I had one hundred kroner. She pulled a black stick the size of a small pencil from her pocket, and I handed her the money.

  I went into Woodstock—Christiania's first bar, which opened in April 1974—and was hit by a wall of blue smoke and blaring country music. The bartender was either very drunk or very strange and laughed every time I counted out on my fingers how many beers I wanted, which was one. I found a seat at a long pine picnic table in the back and rolled a joint. As I tapped the butt on the table, a woman at the other end spilled her hash on the floor and yelled at me. She circled the table, alternately pointing and screaming for the next five minutes. When I finished rolling, she slammed her fist on the table and yelled, "Remember that?!"

  I smoked the joint quickly and left. The clouds had receded for the first time since I arrived and there were a few stars overhead. I walked down Long Road, past the Raisin House and the stupa. The candles under the Buddha had been replaced and were burning, and a few lights were on in the surrounding homes. Less than a half mile from downtown Copenhagen, I couldn't hear any traffic or any noise at all. I thought of Emmerik and the original vision of Christiania and knew for certain that it was long gone. But walking into Mælkebøtten with blue moonlight reflecting off the courtyard, I still had to wonder whether that meant this place shouldn't exist.

  French philosopher Michel Foucault said that there are no such things as utopias. A true utopia, he said in his 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," is a figment of our imagination. It is merely a concept of society in its perfected state. What people refer to as utopias, he said, are in fact heterotopias, "simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space in which we live."

  "There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization," he said,

  real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted Utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.

  Heterotopias come in many forms. From sacred grounds of ancient cultures to military schools in the twentieth century to cemeteries today, they reflect a certain aspect of the society they reside in. They also typically occupy a certain era, Foucault said, when "men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time."

  In May 2009, it seemed Christiania's era was drawing to a close. The Eastern High Court ruled in favor of the Palaces and Properties Agency in the cases Foldschack had filed. Christianians decided to appeal to the supreme court. The court said it would announce a decision in January 2011, and the waiting game was back on.

  Four months later, Christiania celebrated its thirty-eighth birthday with a day of parades, free food, and DJs. Supporters showed up in Native American garb and tie-dyed T-shirts. The mood was upbeat, but in photos and videos of the scene it looked more like a historical reenactment of the 1970s—complete with dozens of tourists watching from a safe distance—than a celebration of a thriving community. "As time goes by, I guess people are getting more realistic and are less positive to the communistic ideas," Lionheart wrote. "There's nobody today who
defends communism. There's nobody who talks in the local paper at all. It's like everybody here just wants to have the right opinion instead of having their own opinion."

  The comment reminded me of an experience I had just before I left Free Town in 2006 that seemed to speak to both the neighborhood's resilient spirit and its conflicted identity. I'd spent the evening alone in the Moonfisher Café, contemplating the many faces of Christiania. Two ceiling fans pushed thick tobacco and hash smoke around the coffee shop. I bought an espresso and set it on a homemade steel table. A few drunks laughed loudly in the corner. Pool balls clicked in the back room. A lookout announced that a police patrol was approaching, and smokers quickly shuffled hash and rolling papers into their pockets. The cops arrived, young-looking Danes with blue eyes, blond hair, and padded riot gear. When they left ten minutes later, a woman at the bar yelled, "We got you!" and bowed in mock reverence. A few seconds after that, a massive bottle rocket exploded beside the patrol.

  In the bar, joints came out again and conversations continued with hardly a pause. I left and ran into a young girl and boy outside the entrance, cherub-faced Danes no more than six or seven years old. They'd rebuilt a snow barricade meant to slow police patrols. I smiled and waved. After ten days in Christiania, I was starting to feel like a local myself. They stared back, and the girl told me it would cost one hundred kroner to pass.

  "I don't have one hundred kroner," I said, grinning.

  "Eighty," she answered.

  "Twenty?" I asked.

  "Sixty"

  "Thirty?"

  The girl scratched her head, glanced at the boy. I gave her a pleading look and she said, "One hundred." I laughed and flipped her a twenty-kroner piece. She and the boy inspected it as I scaled the wall. When I got one leg over the top, they pelted me with two snowballs, square in the back.

  Stuck

  Keith Gessen

  FROM The New Yorker

  MOSCOW'S TERRIBLE TRAFFIC has been infamous for a while now, but in the past year it has come to feel like an existential threat. The first snowfall of last winter, in early December, paralyzed the city. Andrey Kolesnikov, the Kremlin correspondent for Kommersant and probably the best-known print journalist in the country, was unable to reach the airport in time to leave with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for Nizhny Tagil. Instead of detailing Putin's manly adventures in the metallurgical capital of the Urals, Kolesnikov's column the next day described his own epic, failed journey to the airport. The traffic analysis center at Yandex, the country's leading on-line search engine, reported a record-breaking worst-possible rating of 10 for six straight hours. That night, a popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making his way along the river in the center of town, encountered an ambulance driver standing outside his vehicle throwing snowballs lazily off the embankment; he'd been in traffic so long, he explained, that his patient was now dead.

  Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who takes everything that happens in the city very personally, perhaps because over the years he and his wife have come personally to own a good chunk of the city, reacted decisively: he blamed the meteorologists. They had underestimated the snowfall. If they didn't start forecasting better, there would be trouble. In the following months, though, snow wreaked havoc on the city whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law—both doctors—were killed.

  The accident exploded into scandal. The police claimed that the Citroën was at fault, but automobile activists quickly found witnesses who said that the Mercedes had crossed over into the central emergency lane reserved for ambulances and police cars, and then into oncoming traffic. Especially infuriating was the Mercedes itself, a black S500 with a siren: for years, these besirened black Mercedeses had been running red lights, using the emergency lane, and otherwise tyrannizing other drivers. Some of them technically had the right to do all this, since they belonged to one of the federal security agencies in Moscow, or to Duma deputies, or to Putin; but a large number simply belonged to wealthy and well-connected individuals. Now they were killing people. Within days of the accident, the young rapper Noize MC recorded a furious song, "Mercedes S666," in which he ventriloquized the innocuous-looking Lukoil vice president as Satan: "All those satanic costumes, that's just tomfoolery. / Dressing up like that they'll never look like me ... I'm working here on a whole other level. / I've got a suitcase full of cash to get me out of trouble." The song's chorus expressed the class conflict at the heart of the matter: "Get out of my way, filthy peasants. / There's a patrician on the road."

  On a Monday morning a month later, two young women from the Caucasus set off bombs during rush hour in the center of the city. The first blew herself up at Lubyanka, the metro station just beneath the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, and the other did so at a nearby stop, forty minutes later. Emergency services reacted rapidly, and since there could be no question of ambulances making it through traffic from the site of the bombings to the hospital, the badly wounded were helicoptered out. Given the forty-minute gap between the explosions, however, the press began to wonder why the metro hadn't been evacuated directly after the first bomb. The response from a metro spokesman was immediate. "You have no idea what would have happened if we'd closed down an entire branch of the system," he said. The city was so crowded, its functioning so tenuous, that it was better to risk another explosion than close off an artery. "The city is on the brink of transportational collapse," Mikhail Blinkin, a traffic expert, told me. "Moscow will simply cease to function as a city. You and I will be living in different cities. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won't be able to get from one neighborhood to the other."

  I first noticed the extent of the Moscow traffic problem in the spring of 2007, while drinking a coffee at the Coffee Bean, on Sretenka, just up the street from the Lubyanka and around the corner from the Lukoil headquarters. It used to be that you couldn't get a coffee in Moscow for love or money, so I didn't mind that it wasn't good coffee and that it cost four dollars. That is to say, I minded, but what could I do? So there I sat, sipping my four-dollar coffee and looking out the window, when suddenly my sister appeared in front of the coffee shop and stopped, trapped in traffic. She had recently bought a navy-blue Honda Element, which looks like a motorized version of Fred Flintstone's car, with the driver sitting curiously upright. Farther ahead, Sretenka intersected the giant Garden Ring Road, which runs around the Kremlin at a radius of about a mile and a half and marks the border of the historic city center. For much of its length, it is twelve lanes wide; at certain points, it's eighteen. Still, it is often clogged. At the Sretenka—Garden Ring intersection, a police officer hand-operates the light to try to ease traffic, to no avail. So there was my sister, just twenty feet away from me, sitting down as I was, almost as if she were at another table. The moment extended in time; I sipped my coffee. When, eventually, the light changed and my sister moved forward a few car lengths, it was as if she had merely moved to another table. If the coffee were cheaper, I would have brought her one.

  Several generations, even several centuries, had brought the city to this point. Its early rulers built Moscow as a concentric series of walled forts, with the Kremlin at the center. After the government abandoned Moscow in favor of St. Petersburg, in the early eighteenth century, the old capital developed haphazardly, like an enormous bazaar. In the post-revolutionary age, when the Bolsheviks moved the government back to Moscow to get farther away from
the Germans, various fantasies emerged to reverse all this: avantgardists imagined a socialist Moscow of clean right angles; others proposed simply abandoning the city. Many believed that the Kremlin, a church-laden symbol of medieval tyranny at the heart of the city, should be de-emphasized, or worse. By the time the Soviets were ready to do anything about it, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and under him the medieval character of Moscow was not fundamentally altered. Instead, the Stalinists built gigantic avenues that ran in all directions from the Kremlin like rays from the sun. There were few cars around to fill these avenues, but they provided a fine, broad line of sight for Soviet leaders during military parades.

  Then came capitalism. The registration laws that had made it almost impossible to move to Moscow during Soviet times ceased to be enforced, and meanwhile chaos, deindustrialization, and ethnic violence roamed the peripheries of the empire. Very soon it became clear that what Moscow had lost in political authority it had gained, and then some, in economic authority. By the end of the 1990s, there were more people in Moscow from all over the former Soviet Union than there had been when the Soviet Union was a single state. People from rural Russia, the Central Asian states, and Ukraine came to escape poverty; people from the Caucasus came to escape the war.

  All of them wanted cars. The city's plan with regard to this was not to have a plan at all. Planning was for socialists; under capitalism, the market would figure things out. In the post-Soviet years, Moscow filled up, first with kiosks, and flimsy freestanding grocery stores, and little old ladies selling socks. Eventually, these were replaced by office buildings and megastores and even luxury condominiums; the spaces once reserved for new roads or metro stations were given over to construction. Blinkin recalls a commission that he received from the Soviet government, only months before its collapse, to project the rate of automobile growth over the next twenty-five years. "We knew the trajectory of automobilization in many countries of the world, and so we predicted exactly what happened," he says. What happened was that the number of cars in Moscow went from 60 per thousand residents in 1991 to 350 in 2009. "And we were very proud of ourselves for being so smart. Then, a while later, I met some guys who sold foreign cars, who'd done a marketing prognosis, and without any of our international analogues or models they just thought, Well, restrictions are down, you can buy foreign cars as well as Russian ones, and they predicted the same rate of growth as we had! These car dealers predicted it." Blinkin was dismissive of the car dealers, but in the early 1990s they included some of the most brilliant minds in the country. The first great post-Soviet fortune, after all, was made not from oil or gas or nickel: that came later. It was made when Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and game theorist, started selling cars.