Joking with strangers
Let’s be frank. Moscow isn’t always the friendliest place on earth and it can sometimes be difficult to find somebody with a smile on their face.
Year after year, it ends up in the lowest ranks of best places to live and visitors quite often run away and pledge never to set foot again in this grey and unfriendly city.
And yet – as most foreigners should know by now, Muscovites mainly show their sense of humour in private.
You can have the best laughs with friends or family, yet not with strangers in public. Although I’ve learned that quite soon, I always kept trying.
When border guards in their nicely ironed shirts at the airport asked me where I came from, I always answered by pointing to the plane behind me, just to see if they might grin.
In most case, they’d write down “airplane” on a form somewhere.
The first year I lived in Moscow, I did my daily shopping in a Perekryostok supermarket just off Mayakovskaya. It took the girl behind the counter about a month to recognise me, and even after that I still didn’t catch her smiling.
I tried everything, from juggling with fruit to paying with Chinese currency. Not even a grin.
But Alexander, a gypsy taxi driver, was different. “Watch this, we’ll have some fun,” he told me one time when he stopped on an empty and deserted road at 6 am.
He bowed for a rather large and unattractive woman and made it clear he had stopped especially to let her pass. When she did, he pulled down the window and I heard him hissing, “Hey, blueberry! I’ve been dreaming about you for years! You’re a gift from God!’ With that, he hit the pedal and we were gone.
“Can you imagine?” Alexander laughed till he was on the verge of tears. “Nobody’s said that to her in 100 years, the fat cow! And now she’ll be smiling all day!’
And Alexander is serious about his jokes. “You know, I used to do all kinds of things,” he said. “I’d give the old ladies at the bottom of the metro elevator a kiss on the cheek, congratulate random strangers on their birthdays or throw a football into a random office or government building.
But I’ve grown older now.”
Yet there is more to Alexander’s mirth than sheer mischief.
Just behind his left ear, he has a tattoo of two Ethiopian letters. “Guess what it means,” he said. “Laughter.”
He put them there after his younger brother died in a car accident, he said. “It took me a long time to get over that, and I realised the thing I remember best is him laughing. It’s a tribute.”
“When people laugh, I’m happy,” he explained. “My nine-year-old son’s school called me in for a talk a while ago – they were complaining that he cracks too many jokes. But I’m very proud of him!”
When I finally paid him for the ride, Alexander handed me my change in worthless Belarussian roubles.
“Just a joke!” he said. “Keep smiling!”
Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev
