The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  I made it down to the last days of December. It was fifteen below zero and the snow squealed when I walked on it. Late in the morning I saw the pair of golden eagles flying high over the cliff, playing in the frigid air. It began snowing again and I decided I would try to get out the next day. The lane was half choked with snow. If I didn't go the next day I knew I could be isolated for a long time, jailed at the end of the impassable road. I packed the old Land Cruiser and fled to New Mexico.

  Moscow on the Med

  Gary Shteyngart

  FROM Travel + Leisure

  "MY HANDS ARE COLD, but my heart is warm," a tanned young Israeli girl coos to me in broken Russian at a Tel Aviv nightclub as we nod along to an incomprehensible ska beat. "Do you think I'm pretty? Are you a Russian billionaire? I only want to marry an oligarch. Like Gaydamak."

  That would be Arkady Gaydamak, the Israeli Russian billionaire, aspiring politician, owner of the right-wing Beitar Jerusalem soccer squad (its fans famously refused to heed a moment of silence in honor of slain former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), noted philanthropist, and fugitive from French justice for alleged illegal arms trading to Angola and the less glamorous crime of tax evasion. No book or screenplay has yet been written about Gaydamak's fantastical life, an omission that may soon have to be corrected. "I am the most popular man in Israel," Gaydamak once proclaimed (at least one opinion poll said as much), marking him as the most stunning representative of an immigrant group that has peppered the omelette of Israel's politics, society, and culture since the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and more than a million Russian speakers showed up in the Holy Land.

  In Tel Aviv, Israel's Mediterranean business and cultural capital, I meet the young, freckled, redheaded Masha Zur-Glozman, a freelance writer and Israeli-born daughter of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. "The Russians are now perceived to be cooler, more cosmopolitan," Zur-Glozman tells me. "They have connections to places like Moscow and Berlin [a city also home to a large Russian community] that the native-born Israelis do not."

  Zur-Glozman has written about the ten stereotypes of Russian Israelis. Among her menagerie: the bad-tempered veteran who puts on his World War II medals on Victory Day, can't let go of his memories, and constantly toasts "Death to our enemies!"; the quiet, intelligent one with very specific interests like Greek pottery or Napoleonic campaigns who speaks shyly with a heavy Russian accent; the very bitter former-Soviet-bureaucrat-cum-third-grade-sports-teacher who drinks too much, terrorizes his family, and is forever torn between over-patriotism and hating Israel; and the sexy math teacher with a white-collared blouse, spectacular cleavage, and leather skirt who abuses her students, ignores the girls, humiliates the physically weak, and openly cheats on her poor schmo of a husband.

  Walking down Tel Aviv's Allenby Street I seem to run into all of the above and more, the Russian language muscling in on the spitfire Hebrew and the occasional drop of English. "Worlds colliiiiiiding!" Zur-Glozman does her best Seinfeld imitation with a comic flourish of the arms. Allenby, like many streets leading in the direction of a municipal bus station, has something not quite right about it. The street exudes its own humid breath, its faded buildings sweating like pledges at a Southern fraternity. When the sun goes down, darkened nightclubs with names like Temptation and Epiphany entice the passersby. Russian pensioners, some sporting the beguilingly popular "purple perm," sing and play the accordion for shekels. Hasids try to snare male Jews with the promise of phylacteries.

  At 106 Allenby the Mal'enkaya Rossiya (Little Russia) delicatessen has everything you need to re-create a serious Russian table in the Middle East. There's vacuum-packed vobla, dried fish from the Astrakhan region, which is perfectly matched with beer; marinated mushrooms in an enormous jar; creamy, buttery Eskimo ice cream—a Leningrad childhood favorite of mine; tangy eggplant salad; chocolate nut candy; glistening tubs of herring fillet; and a beautiful pair of pig legs. "Israelis love these stores now," Zur-Glozman tells me, and the pig legs may be just one of the reasons. Russian speakers, Jewish or not, have an abiding love affair with the piggy, and it was the influx of former Soviet immigrants that brought a taste for the cloven-hoofed animal to Israel, much to the dismay of the country's religious conservatives. The wildly successful and ham-friendly Tiv Taam chain of luxe food stores came along with the Russian immigration; the aforementioned Gaydamak tried to purchase the chain and turn it kosher, but even his billions couldn't temper the newfound Israeli enthusiasm for the call of the forbidden oinker.

  Farther down on Allenby, the Russian-language Don Quixote bookstore—the Russian nerve center of Allenby Street—is full of curious pensioners and boulevard intellectuals feasting on a lifetime's worth of Isaac Asimov's science fiction, Russian translations of the kabbalah, and an illustrated Hebrew-Russian version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is presented like a Talmudic text with sweeping commentaries crowding the words. "To Nineteen-Year-Old Gaga—so that he won't be stupid," an old tome is helpfully inscribed.

  A few blocks down the street, the Little Prague restaurant is full of Russian boys hitting on Israeli waitresses, and young Russian women pretending to eat. Little Prague exults in a wonderful version of the Czech classic veprove koleno—a marinated and slow-roasted pork knuckle with a hint of rye, which in the hands of the chef is flaky and light. There is also a heroic schnitzel and excellent Staropramen and dark Kozel beer on tap. The interior is gloomy Mitteleuropean, but outside a nice garden deck beckons, fully populated by drunk, hungry people as late as 3 A.M. and at times bathed in the familiar sounds of the theme song to The Sopranos.

  Allenby saunters into the sea, where pale ex-Soviets take to the beach like it's their native Odessa and florally dressed babushkas offer me advice: "Young man, take your sneakers off, let your feet breathe." A right turn at Ben Yehuda Street leads to the Viking, a languorous, partly outdoor restaurant that joylessly specializes in dishes like golubets, a stuffed cabbage peppery and garlicky enough to register on the taste buds. As I tear my way though the golubets and lubricate with a shot of afternoon vodka, a mother in one corner softly beats her son, who is wearing a T-shirt that says READY WHEN YOU READY. Crying, beaten children, along with sea breezes and heavy ravioli-style pelmeni swimming in ground pepper, complete the familiar picture, which could have been broadcast live from Sochi, Yalta, or some other formerly Soviet seaside town.

  Off the Allenby drag, Nanuchka is what Zur-Glozman calls a neo-Georgian supper club, a place where one can order a cool pomegranate vodka drink, featuring grenadine juice from Russia and crushed ice, or a frozen margarita made with native arak liquor, almonds, and rose juice. The decor is mellow and cozy like a shabby house in Havana, complete with gilt-edged mirrors, portraits of feisty, long-living Georgian grandmas, and many charming rooms stuffed with sumptuous divans and banquettes in full Technicolor. The highlight of the crowded and raucous bar is a photograph of the former prime minister Ariel "The Bulldozer" Sharon staring with great unease at a raft of Picassos. At its more authentic, the Georgian food can really shine. Try the tender chakapulu lamb stew with white plums and tarragon, or setsivi—a cool chicken breast in walnut sauce, bursting with sweetness and garlic. Pinch the crust of the cheburek meat pie and watch the steam escape into the noisy air.

  On the same street as Nanuchka, the club Lima Lima hosts a popular Sunday night showcase for Russian bands called "Stakanchik," or "little drinking glass." Amid luxuriant George of the Jungle decor, young, hip, and sometimes pregnant people in ironic CCCP and Jesus T-shirts shimmy and sway by the stage. A young singer wearing an ethnic hat begins a song with the words "Now it has come, my long-awaited old age," a sentiment somehow both Jewish and Russian.

  I end my tour of Russian Tel Aviv at a much stranger place, the cavernous Mevdevev nightclub, located a stone's throw from the American embassy but occupying, until its recent closing, a space-time continuum all its own. As the evening begins, a birthday boy in his forties, dressed in a plaid shirt and sensible slacks, is paraded ons
tage by the MC and forced to sing seventies and eighties Russian disco hits.

  A young woman in a skimpy plaid schoolgirl outfit dances around a SpongeBob birthday balloon as the nostalgic Russian music, along with a detour into the early Pet Shop Boys, bellows and hurts. My friend Zur-Glozman meets an armed, cigar-chain-smoking Ukrainian, a graduate student of the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University who now lives in the occupied territories, as do many ex-Soviet immigrants. He invites Zur-Glozman and some of our friends for a ride in his car, which is the size of a school bus. We negotiate the gleaming white curves of Bauhaus Tel Aviv, looking for a nightcap. Over at Little Prague, the inevitable Israeli political argument breaks out between the right-wing Russian-speaking settler and some of my liberal Israeli friends. "You probably think our houses are built of Palestinian babies," the settler huffs.

  "Well, you're the one with the gun," an Israeli woman tells him.

  I worry for the sanctity of the evening, torn between geographical kinship with the formerly Soviet settler and political kinship with the progressive Tel Avivians, but as mugs of Kozel beer are passed around and the nighttime temperature falls to bearable levels, the passions cool. "As you can see," an Israeli friend tells me, "we aren't killing each other."

  A Head for the Emir

  William T. Vollmann

  FROM Harper's Magazine

  A BARE BULB WAS GLOWING from the ceiling of an olive-brown tent outside the city limits of Khanaqin, in the place called Mulik Shah Camp; and cigarette smoke and kerosene smoke were bitter on the tongue. Three little children sat in a row beside three men, the smallest child, a girl, watching me, her hands on her knees. They were Feyli Kurds from Baghdad. It was not safe for them anymore.

  And coming back late at night on the chalky road from the beleaguered camps of various transnational Kurdish insurgencies in the Qandil Mountains, hoping to avoid the checkpoints set up specifically to catch journalists, we saw the sadly glowing boxes of many refugee tents: Kurdish families who had fled Turkish shelling. Not far away, on the other side of Rania, were many more tents, longer established, testament to the earlier intentions of Turkish and Iranian fighter planes.

  All of these places hinted that Kurdistan, like a sunken land diked all around against high and hostile seas, might not last forever, which was why my fixer said that he would kiss the boots of any American soldier. He imagined that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, she might have built a military base to turn Kurdistan into a "second Israel"—the Kurds' best hope, he thought. The interpreter, who agreed with him that the Kurds had no friends other than the Americans, was more realistic about my nation's fidelity to her friends. For him the only comfort was that wherever else America went—Iran, for instance, or Somalia—terrorism would follow.

  The interpreter told me the tale of the three Kurds who, driving home from Baghdad, bearing atop their car the corpse of one of their fathers, whom the doctor had failed to save, reached the checkpoint of a certain militia—Sunni or Shia, the interpreter did not know—and were informed that one of them must yield his head to their prince, their Emir (this was the word used, as if the story were a fable). Money and persuasion finally impelled the highwaymen to behead the father's body; the Emir would never know the difference. But when they came safely back into Kurdistan, the mother was angry with the son who had permitted this.

  I wondered whether Kurdistan itself could be preserved by means of some similarly painless sacrifice, or whether Kirkuk must be given up, and who knows what else. What would be enough?

  Sulaimaniya was safe, and the fixer said: "Here in my city I don't take care for you. Why? Because even in market at two, three o'clock morning is no problem. But in Kirkuk I must watch for you." Indeed, Kirkuk was not especially safe, although it was safer than Mosul, where I could perhaps have manipulated the fixer into taking me had I not minded the possibility that I might then be informing his wife and children that he had been murdered for the sake of a few photographs.

  In Sulaimaniya, in a refugee camp for Arabs called Camp Qalawa, one was surrounded by blocky tents, laundry, and garbage, and across the highway dusty houses smeared into semi-invisibility in the bad air. We were standing next to a water tank from which the refugees shared a metal dipper; the tank leaked and the mud stank. The air smelled of manure from the cattle that came grazing there, human urine, and sweat: of the many people all around, the closest man, in sandals and striped shirt, squatting. The women were in a row at the rear, some in striped headscarves, a few of the younger ones naked-haired and even blonde with reddish highlights.

  They seemed to live by begging in the market, and perhaps (said the interpreter) by prostitution. A gray-bearded man said: "For what we do? Begging. Nobody like to do this, but what is the suggestion? I want to work. In Sulaimaniya the cold was very hard and we lived a horrible day. The Kurdish governor, he don't want anything to do with refugee here."

  "Why did you leave Baghdad?" I asked a man in a white headscarf, who answered: "Because of the violence between Sunnis and Shias. The Shia militia killed fourteen members of my family. All of the families here have same problem."

  He did not much like Americans, as you might imagine. I asked about George W. Bush's actions, and he replied: "When he come to Iraq, some things true and some things lie. If he say America come to make a good thing for Iraqi, now it is six years and there is nothing happen, no good thing!"

  "Should the Americans stay or go?"

  The gray-bearded man answered: "If he come just to make free, now Iraq is free. Better that he going. Why the soldier although he have a family in America he stay here until now?"

  I told him of a friend's son whose military tour in Iraq kept getting extended and extended. He said in an ugly tone: "This is not an answer."

  They all wanted money. I asked one man to take a few steps away with me so that I would not be mobbed. One of the younger men came regardless. When I reached into my wallet they all lunged, and an old woman spread the wings of her robe, shouting: "Money, money!" I gave the man twenty thousand dinars (not quite twenty dollars) and he spread his hands in angry disgust, pointing to all the members of his family. The fixer finally gave him twenty thousand more.

  Being a Kurd, the fixer disliked them; he thought they should be resettled outside the city.

  I asked a man what he thought about Kirkuk, and he said: "It is not my problem. I don't stay in parliament. I am simple person and I don't care if Kirkuk stay in Kurdistan or not."

  "What is America doing good for Iraq?" he shouted, and the crowd around him buzzed threateningly.

  "Maybe Kurdistan," I said. "As for the south of Iraq, I don't know what to tell you."

  Sometimes the dust was so thick in the air as we came down into the valley of Kirkuk from the second-to-last checkpoint that the world ahead became as dead white and blanked out as sea fog in Monterey; dust pricked my eyelashes and I breathed in the chalky smell. Then one day it rained, making the desert a trifle greener and the air clean enough to reveal a few red and blue tints in the pale dirt hills; and when we began to descend toward the last checkpoint, we could actually distinguish ahead, against the tan dirt darkly flecked with rubbish, Kirkuk's blue-gray sprawl. In spite of such variations, the drive always felt the same.

  To separate the safe from the unsafe, the Kurdistan Regional Government had in its wisdom established nearly half a dozen checkpoints between Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. Each checkpoint possessed its own character. Some installations were elaborate, such as Tasluja Checkpoint on the hill above Sulaimaniya; some were humbler, such as the traffic island in Sulaimaniya, where a soldier in a dust-colored camouflage uniform stood beside a concrete column. Across the street, a girl all in black walked beside a girl whose hair swung free.

  At every checkpoint our experience was the same: since the fixer's car bore license plates from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and because the fixer knew so many soldiers, we rarely needed even to raise our documents to the
window and already the sentry was waving us through, which is to say waving at us, sweetly.

  Taxis crammed with bearded Arabs or private cars with plates from outside Kurdistan got swept with a pole mirror. Occasionally we would see a car pulled off to the side in order to be more thoroughly searched, the driver and passengers standing in the road. If an Arab wished to come into Sulaimaniya, he had to wait at Tasluja until a Kurd arrived to vouch for him in person, and very likely it was such measures that had kept Sulaimaniya safe: only a couple of bomb blasts in the past two years.

  Aside from the checkpoints, there were other points of interest along the way, such as Chamchamal, near the thirty-sixth parallel, the southern border of Kurdistan, which at the end of the first Gulf War America had amputated from Saddam's zone of control. Some of the most ancient relics of humanity in all Iraq were found near this spot. The interpreter preferred to describe Chamchamal as "the front line between Kurdish and Iraqi forces before 2003." Kirkuk lay beyond, in the region Kurds referred to simply as "Iraq."

  It was ninety-four kilometers from Sulaimaniya to Kirkuk. Wherever there were roadside settlements there would be vendors with their rows of jerry cans yellow and red, the red being Iranian gasoline, which was stronger than the yellow Iraqi gas. The fixer liked to fill his hundred-liter tank with a "cocktail" of the two. The dust settled on the jugs, and on the fixer's windshield. The best sources of brightness amid the dust were women, who occasionally wore colorful clothes; the nearer to Sulaimaniya we happened to be, the more brightly clad were the women. The owner of a women's clothing boutique in Kirkuk explained to me: "Usually people here wear the veil for their own security. Since the old time it has been like that. It has not much changed until 2003. After that, more people are wearing the veil. Here and in Erbil, the majority of people put on the veil. Sulaimaniya is more like Europe." He had many slinky dresses of Turkish make, but those were for parties; in Kirkuk, women were well advised to cloak themselves before going out in public.