Did you hear the story of how my grandmother took LSD?” Yulia asked me once. “It’s a quite funny one – give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you.”

I’ve always loved kitchen stories, and as in Russia the kitchen table is the epicentre of conversation, if you’re lucky you’ll hear some truly remarkable tales. This one seemed too weird to be true, however.

“I was 18, I guess, and I was in the hospital,” Yulia said. “They did some kind of surgery on me and I had to stay there for a couple of days. My father-in-law found the LSD I had tucked away in a little box, hidden somewhere in my room.”

Even though I’m from Amsterdam, LSD to me is something that was going on half a century ago. But in Moscow, apparently, a hideously cheap and high-quality variant of the hallucinogen has been enjoying quite a renaissance amongst youngsters lately. Drip the fluid over bits of sugar and you’ll enjoy a deep trip around the outskirts of your brain for half a day.

Illustration – as always – by the magnificent Zhenia Vasiliev

“Oh, and it was my mother’s birthday,” Julia said as I lit the cigarette for her. She took a deep draw and continued: “Can you imagine? He threw the sugar cubes on the table and said: ‘Look what a daughter you have – she’s doing amphetamines!’

Now my grandmother always liked me and protected me. ‘They aren’t drugs,’ she said angrily. ‘And I’ll prove it to you, you bastard!’”

With that, she ate one. Which was obviously not amphetamine, but LSD.

“I had to discharge myself from the hospital,” Julia explained. “I signed a paper that I was responsible for what I was doing, and we quickly read up on Wikipedia to find anything that would ease that horrible trip. The poor woman – we bought her a big bouquet of flowers and tried to comfort her.”

“When granny opened the door, she was crying and laughing all the time. It was very strange to see,” Julia said. “She would sob and whimper, and then suddenly break out into a huge smile and be very happy. A few seconds later she’d be crying again, then smiling – and so on.”

I tried talking to her, but she was away with the pixies. ‘I have amazing dreams – amazingly beautiful dreams.’”

No matter what Yulia said, her grandmother didn’t believe her. The vivid trip continued: “‘And you, Julia – you are very beautiful,’ she told me, spaced-out, stroking my hair. ‘Very beautiful. So beautiful, it’s amazing. Stunningly beautiful. Who made you so beautiful?’

“And what happened afterwards?” I asked.

“Nothing much,” Julia said. “It’s not something we talk about a lot anymore. Just another strange family story. Do you want me to tell you another one? Just roll me another of those cigarettes…”

We never really shook hands or were introduced, but I think his name was Roman. He was a young, rather aggressive fellow who had an angry look in his eyes. Like me, he spent most of the day at home. We met occasionally when he was smoking cigarettes in the hallway.

During a house-warming party we threw there, one of our guests walked in pale as a sheet and crashed on the couch. Not being able to speak much, she spluttered that there was a guy pointing a gun at her in the hallway. As I opened the door to see, the gun was pointed in my face, and my neighbour pulled the trigger.

Unlike a Hollywood movie, my life didn’t flash by before my eyes. But I remember thinking that it seemed somehow very inappropriate to die before meeting my story deadline.

The sound of the hammer hitting the empty slide resonated in the hallway. Roma laughed. “Just to say,” he suddenly observed, very seriously, “your music is kind of loud. We’re trying to sleep, so turn it down a little bit.”

I unplugged the speakers from the laptop and somehow the party continued.

As the other people in the building knew, Roman had been to Chechnya. To most, that explained his behaviour. Some say he was running around the block naked looking for Chechens. Others reported he was handling his war trauma much better these days, not yelling as much as he used to.

Calling the police on him was not an option, however. He came from a family of respected militia men that went back generations.

Sometimes in the morning he’d leave the apartment in his MVD uniform, while other days he just hung around the place wearing not much more than jeans.

It’s hard to believe that this dark force ruling the capital will soon be renamed the police and will consist of friendly, honest officers who help tourists find their way. At least they won’t stick guns in innocent people’s faces, I hope.

We never spoke again about the “gun incident”, and in general Roman wasn’t very talkative. One day I saw him smash all the locals off the rink in a game of ice hockey on Patriarshy Prudy.

“On the ice, you’re free,” he said. “And you’re much stronger if you can dance.”

About the war he witnessed, he didn’t say much more than that it was “bad” and the whole of the North Caucasus should be bombed to pieces.

Yet in one respect, having a gun-crazed war vet for a neighbour actually turned out to be useful.

As our rental apartment was put up for sale, we’d tell potential buyers all about the lovely area, the structurally sound walls, the nice bathroom – and the little problem with Roma.
Back in the Moscow real estate boom, we managed to stay there for over a year.

In the end, the apartement was sold for half a million dollars to somebody with over 30 years of experience in counter-intelligence. He would have no troubles with Roma, he assured us.

“Every asshole fits in a jar,” he said. “You just have to show him who’s stronger.”

For days afterwards, I scoured the pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets to see who would survive the shootout.

Sometimes I think I should pay Roma a visit one of these days.

He might be missing that loud music by now.

Anyone’s who ever been on a flight from Russia to Western Europe or North America has seen the following process unfold: While Westerners sail through the queue flashing their local passports, Russians and most other former Soviet citizens have to produce piles of papers before entering.

Before stamping Russian passports, the British, American, French and especially German migration officers require people to turn their suitcases upside down and fish out bank statements, hotel reservations and other official documents.

Last week in Cologne, I saw an old man standing in one such long line. He looked very tired, and I called him up front to pass through customs in the fast lane. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been standing in line half my life.”

He and his elderly female companion slowly moved alongside. They smiled at each other and looked terribly in love – even the hard-hearted people at passport control couldn’t help but notice. The couple spoke Russian but carried mixed passports. I figured that they, like millions of others, had probably left Russia in the early ‘90s.

“Not quite,” 83-year-old Heinrich explained later. “I was born in Germany and my Jewish family lived there peacefully for generations. When Hitler rose to power we fled in time to escape the pogroms and find a better, peaceful life. But we made a great mistake.”

The mistake was not in leaving, he said, but in where they went.

While many refugees from Nazi Germany went to the United States, Western Europe or even South America, Heinrich’s parents put their faith in the Soviet Union. They moved to Moscow, learned Russian and found work in the buzzing Communist metropolis during the rapid economic growth that Stalin dictated.

“Then came 1937,” Heinrich told me while we were standing in another line later, buying railway tickets. “I probably don’t need to tell you any more.”

Seventy-three years later tears still well up in his eyes. “My father was shot by the NKVD and my mother passed away during the war. I was alone in that goddamn city. It was terrible.”

Yet, like many others, Heinrich obtained Soviet citizenship and managed to survive in Moscow.

“I guess I became Russian,” he said. “I had a job, got married, travelled around the Soviet Union and spent my holidays at the dacha. But somewhere in my heart I always knew I belonged to a different place. It always felt like being in prison. And when things finally opened up, I was one of the first to get away.”

Twenty years of fresh sea breezes and a return to the Heimat turned out well for Heinrich. These days he still runs up and down stairs, lifts heavy bags and looks pretty good for his age.

“I even have a girlfriend again,” he said, smiling and discreetly indicating his companion. “She’s from Kiev, it’s so wonderful – I really love her.”

Now Heinrich and his long-distance lover meet up by flying on low-cost airlines on terrible time-slots, enduring visa problems and multiple layovers.

It’s all for love, he says, adding: “I waited for this all my life.”
As Heinrich bids farewell, he wishes me luck.

“I hope Moscow became a bit better now,” he says. “But it’s covered in smoke again, just like it was in the war. May the Lord take care of you over there – Poka!”

Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev

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

There’s weird business and there’s weird business. Sometimes you don’t believe it actually exists, until you meet the guy doing it.

Alexei trades souvenirs. Not just matryoshkas and little replicas of St. Basil’s Cathedral – oh no. He deals in souvenirs from all over the world. For people who weren’t there, yet still want to impress their friends.

When I exchanged the Moscow heat for the cool breeze of Rio de Janeiro last week, I suddenly found a little souvenir that seemed very familiar. I’d seen the little wooden miniature of the enormous statue of Christ that hovers over Rio before – in Alexei’s crammed Moscow apartment.

“It sells for 1,700 rubles each. Brazil is far away and Aeroflot doesn’t fly there,” Alexei once told me, explaining why something that costs next to nothing can set you back quite a lot of money.

Little plastic Eiffel Towers are cheaper, and cost only 500 roubles, Alexei says. “Other sights and souvenirs for Europe are around that price – I buy most of it in China anyhow.” Wearing a cheap suit and dark shades, Alexei is the personification of the Russian word “biznesmen”. Only he pronounces it without any vowels at all, more like “bzznssmn”.

Some of his clients work so hard they don’t have time to travel, he says, while others forgot to buy souvenirs in places they visited. But by far the biggest number are people cheating on their loved ones.

“It’s easy. You say you’re on a business trip to France, while in fact you’re with your lover in a rented cottage outside of Moscow. The little Eiffel Tower is the perfect alibi,”
he says with a smirk.

To complete the tale, Alexei teams up with an international company selling and sending postcards from all over the world. You can order a blank postcard from any place on earth, fill it in and send it back. The recipient gets the card with a postmark from that country.

“In same cases it takes a bit too long for the cards to arrive, but in Russia you can always blame the slow postal service,” Alexei says, laughing.

It is, however, a business with risks. “Sometimes it gets out of hand,” says Alexei. “Once when I tried to buy a carpet from Iran, I transferred a lot of money to Tehran and never got anything back.”

“And what about the wrecked marriages?” I ask.

“Not really my business,” he says. “That’s the funny bit – once people start lying, they get hooked on the service. It’s almost impossible for them to stop. It’s honesty that kills my business.”

The hardest part is getting your hands on the souvenirs, it seems. “Capital cities are easy, but try getting something from deepest Africa or some remote Pacific Island,” he says.

But with the help of eBay and a network of people around the world involved in similar undertakings, he tries his best to deliver. And if there’s no other way, Alexei even gets on the plane himself.

“Last year somebody wanted coral from the Maldives, but I flew to Egypt to get it instead. It looks more or less the same,” he says. “I mean, if your bzznss is lies, it’s alright to employ a little dishonesty yourself once in a while.”

Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev

“Olas? Olad? Oleg?’’ It’s always hard to introduce myself in Russia – but one man could only laugh.

“My name is even funnier,” he told me when we first met, years ago. “I’m Charlie, nice to meet you.”

It goes without saying that “Charlie” is a hard-to-come-by name around here, especially when you’re Russian and not British or American, like most Charlies.

The story of Charlie’s name is as tragic as it is beautiful. Charlie’s father was imprisoned by the Germans during the First World War. He managed to run away and get caught several times, eventually teaming up with a Latvian inmate by the name of Charlie on his last escape. Running from gunfire, that Charlie got shot and passed away in the woods. My Charlie’s father survived – and named his son after his fallen friend.

The stories 80-year-old Charlie tells are better than fiction. I once found the horns of a saiga, a type of steppe antelope, lying around in his house. I thought the little ribbed horns were a weird fashion item, but it turned out that Charlie shot the antelope in the 1950s. “Somebody took me along in a car as a mechanic, and we went hunting in Kalmykia. It was very quiet there.”

I laughed. Obviously, it’s quiet in the steppes. “You don’t get it,” he said. “The Kalmyks were forcibly relocated; there was nobody there.”

Charlie is a piece of living history. Though what he mostly likes to explain to me is complicated mechanics, I try to get him to talk about the past. He remembers the Second World War – how he jumped different trains between Moscow and Sverdlovsk, how food was in short supply and how he managed to climb a network of roofs to get a panoramic glimpse of the original Victory parade. “It was a good view,” he laughs. “But the hardest thing was not getting arrested while getting there.”

When he told me he exercised daily to stay in shape, I expected early-morning Soviet-style gymnastics. But Charlie is a fan of a Tibetan fitness regime, and I frankly wouldn’t be surprised to find him standing on his head one day. He still repairs cars, easily moves blocks of concrete around; he can fix everything that could possibly get broken in your house and was once observed single-handedly pulling a car out of a ditch. Needless to say, his granddaughters call him “the hooligan grandfather.”

When a friend named Charlie the deputy director of a firm that made musical instruments, Charlie found the ideal Soviet job – one in which he only had to sign papers to make a living. “It was boring,” he tells me. “So I asked them to show me how to make a balalaika. It’s not that hard, anyhow.” Soon, he was traveling the world with his hand-made instruments and even winning awards for them. When he saw me gazing at a map of the Atlantic Ocean some time ago, he said: “It’s a nice place, I once sailed over there.” In fact, he swapped his self-made boat for a new car last summer.

Last winter, when he was driving me in said new car on a busy road outside Moscow, a Mercedes began flashing its lights behind us. When we didn’t move over, the driver started honking and shouting all manner of obscenities through a built-in megaphone. Charlie kept it cool and didn’t give an inch. I, however, started to worry. Charlie is 80, after all – maybe his eyes and ears were failing him.

“I see him, don’t worry,” said the hooligan grandfather when I started freaking out as the Mercedes threatened to run us off the road.

“I see him,” he repeated. “Let’s keep the fucker waiting.”

The only time I’d get into bad arguments with Vitaly was on the railway crossing next to his dacha.

I could bear his stubbornness, alcoholism, hooliganism and excessive use of drugs, but crossing a railway line in your car blindly just by telling the time from your watch – that’s too much for me.

“Don’t whine, I know the timetable in this place,” he would say. In his little Oka, the Soviet version of the unbeatable Fiat Panda, I felt as if we were driving in our coffin. At any given moment a Moscow-bound train could kill both of us, but Vitaly somehow managed to avoid this by checking the timetable with his cheap Chinese wristwatch.

He’s a weird fellow anyhow. His friends moved him out of town after he once again shot the windows out of his little apartment on Kutuzovsky.

By day, Vitaly heads a small but tough PR agency. By night, Vitaly is high on Moscow’s nightlife. He’s a tall, blond and handsome young man who, despite using all drugs available on the market and drinking more than a gang of sailors put together, still looks in great shape. He bursts with energy, sleeps three hours a day and is the type of person who manages to get married and divorced again over the course of a weekend.

At his old dacha, however, he cools his energy down by repairing the roof, floor and walls and building a banya. Like most Russian men, by dint of DNA, he’s able to build the house of his dreams with his bare hands.

“Most importantly, I can do whatever I want here,” Vitaly explains. He runs around naked in the fields and just last week brought an old motorcycle back to life. Using mobile Internet, he somehow still manages to run the PR firm.

It’s bizarre, but in a country where nothing really works, trains actually run on time. Not only do they depart on the very second they’re scheduled to, but they arrive with the same punctuality. Like a perfect clockwork in a ruined house.

When I once stopped in an idyllic little village not far from Murmansk, I asked the driver of the train how long we’d stay. “Ninety seconds,” he said. “You’ve got 85 left.”

The view was amazing: further down the road were a couple of little wooden barracks, and I think I even saw a herd of moose running by.

“Can’t we stay a bit longer?” I asked.

“Are you mad?’ he shouted at me. “Can you imagine what happens when we run late?”

I never could. In the most of the western world, trains run hours late (in Italy, for example, I once managed to get on a train that was delayed 37 hours). It’s acceptable to say you’re late on a meeting “due to public transport”.

But when you board a train in Murmansk, your friends in Moscow know exactly when to pick you up – even though its two days later.

So now, whenever Vitaly and I cross a railway line, I close my eyes for a second and think of the 1.2 million employees of Russian Railways. Vitaly, Moscow and in fact this whole country depends on them.

Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev

“You, where are you from?” A tired, bored and maybe half-drunk Kyrgyz soldier flags me down on Osh’s main drag, Ulitsa Lenina.

In the past days, the city has been transformed into a war zone. Burned-out cars, tipped-over buses and sawn-down trees are makeshift blockades.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the soldier says.

“I’m a journalist from Moscow.” As long as I stick to short phrases I can hide my very un-Russian accent.

I guess in a way, I am somehow a Muscovite: I say ‘malako’ for milk and even feel at home there while stuck in an endless traffic jam.

“He’s from Moscow!’ the soldier shouts to a shifty group of army men sitting around an old Mercedes on the edge of the Kyrgyz part of town.

Some of them are wearing uniforms, but others just shorts and T-shirts that bluntly say “FBI”, or armed vests that have “Shanghai Metropolitan Police” in yellow letters on the back. The clowns of war. They try to cook rice on a fire of rubbish and keep complaining that Uzbeks are better cooks.

“How much does it cost to buy an apartment in Moscow?” he asks while reloading his gun and slowly aiming it in my direction. “Are girls nice there?” he asks. “How much do they charge to sleep with you? You have a metro there, right? How much do you pay for gas? Why are you not sending any Russian troops? Could Putin not rule Kyrgyzstan? Are the streets clean?”

His friends call him Belek, I have to write down my phone number for him. In the end, they let me pass to the Uzbek area of town. Chances are that he and his mates drove through these streets a couple of nights ago in armed vehicles, fired at anything that moved and burned down the whole street except for the mosque.
The Uzbeks about 200 metres further down the road don’t have any guns – just sticks and kitchen-knives. A mob of men appears out of the rubble. Only men are left. Women and children have fled, trying frantically to cross the border into Uzbekistan.

“If you guys are really from Moscow, you’re a bunch of liars! Stop telling lies and do your job!” an older man shouts.

Like many others he brings his mobile to show the slaughter the Uzbeks managed to film while it happened. “And you in Moscow only show Kyrgyz victims,” he continues. “Your Channel One is lying to us!”

At this point, the Russian photographer I’m with snaps. “So why the hell are you shouting at me? Do I work for Channel One? I’m a photographer! Russian television always says bullshit. Now they’ve fucked you once, but you forget they fuck my whole country every day on TV.”

Then Belek calls.

“Did the Uzbeks kill you yet?” he laughs, but abruptly stops. “There is a problem,” he explains. “We are watching Russia’s Channel One here, and they’re only showing Uzbek victims! You’re a bunch of liars!”
Because war is complicated enough already I hang up the phone. He calls me back later that evening.

“Never mind the television – I want to come to Moscow too. I heard it’s cheap to buy a car there, and you can make a lot of money as a taxi driver. When I come, can I stay at your place?”

Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev

Back when I was living in Ukraine, it took me around 10 days to master the exact pronunciation of the Russian “zdravstvuite”. So when I finally got the hang of it I said it to everybody I met: the neighbours, the concierge, the grumpy girl in the supermarket, bus drivers and especially the street cleaners. It got to the point where people became scared of me, and when I first moved to Moscow I started keeping my mouth shut. No hellos and no surprises.

And that’s just the thing that Yelena Rzhevskaya doesn’t like about Moscow any more. People stopped being polite, she says. For Yelena, even a casual “hello” on the stairway in the building would do. She remembers what Moscow was like before – a friendlier place. “Moscow in my early childhood was amazing,” she explains. “Tsvetnoi Boulvard was the most wonderful place in the world, especially in summer. There would be dancing bears, magicians popped up from behind trees and you could even see Chinese women who had the smallest feet in the world.”

The good memories ended abruptly in 1937. Her father, like so many others, was booted out of the Communist Party and lost his position in society before he even realised what happened. When he called his friends to see if anybody could help him find a job, he found out that the third friend on his list had been arrested and sent away.

“Fear was all around,” Yelena remembers. “When I once forgot my keys I had to ring the doorbell. Only after three or four rings did my mother open. Father in the meantime had packed his belongings, put on his best suit and kissed my mother goodbye, knowing he would never see her again.”

After she survived the 1930s, Yelena’s life became bizarrely intertwined with Hitler’s jaw. As a wartime translator she found herself in Berlin with a group of men who, rather by chance, found his buried remains. While Soviet soldiers were celebrating victory, Yelena crossed Berlin with a little red box that contained the Führer’s jaw and teeth. She was on a frantic search to locate a dentist who could identify the remains and confirm Hitler’s death. And when you look out of the window of Yelena’s apartment on Leningradsky Prospekt you can still see the red and orange flags that commemorate this very fact 65 years ago.

She’s tired of it all, though, she says. Every May come the dozens of journalists who are trying to get a hold of the translator who carried a jaw in a box, and later became a well-known writer.

“All those young people are still interested in that story about his jaw,” she sighs. “I’ve told it so many times, yet people still wonder about it.”

Veterans get flowers, compliments and handshakes on Victory Day, and the rest of the year many of them face being evicted from their apartments and have to stand in line at supermarkets where they can barely afford their purchases. This is not lost on Yelena.

“I don’t leave the house much more any longer,” she tells me. “But when I do, it would be nice if people said ‘hello’ once in a while.”

And not just in May.

This is my first in a series of weekly columns for The Moscow News. All illustrations (c) Evgeni Vasiliev