We arrived at Manzhoulli late in the day. We had travelled the last miles of China through the night. The train crossed the border to the Russian side and was pulled into a large shed where I recall it took almost eight hours to lift each car off of the wheels that had carried us from China and place the cars on bogies that would fit the width of the rails in Russia.
The place had the feel of a frontier town… aside from the endless grasslands that spanned from horizon to horizon on the way in to the town itself…it had that gritty, dusty, shitty feel of someplace that existed only because of some circumstance that mandated its existence. I got the feeling that Manzhoulli was the place that they threatened to send misbehaving Siberians to. You’d know you pissed someone off bigtime if you got stationed here.
Tumbleweeds wouldn’t have been out of place in Manzhoulli.
Inside the station was a restaraunt where the ‘smugglers’ who I shared a cabin with treated me to the first real western meal I had eaten in so many months.
Beef Stroganoff… sweet delight… the creamy stroganoff and the wide noodles were like a beautiful angel dancing a dance of joy on my vagabond tongue… a culinary massage to my homesick taste buds…except for the fact that the heavy metal silverware… something I had not used in many months… it really imparted a sharp metallic taste in my mouth.
I finished off the extraordinary meal with chopsticks I had retrieved from my bag… the ones Masami gave to me in Osaka Japan.
That I missed Masami I already knew… but eating the stroganoff there in Manzhoulli with the chopsticks she had given me… I felt guilty that I had not been able to give her a proper goodbye. She really deserved it. She was never anything but good to me. She always gave more than she took and it always made me want to give her back. I had planned to travel with her during my last week in Japan and talk about the future.
When I left the university and had my student visa pulled I wasn’t given very much time to get my affairs in order… I wasn’t even given twenty four hours to leave… the officials pretty much wanted me at the airport immediately.
I had different plans.
I slipped away quietly and told no one.
There was no way I was going to tell my parents I had left school and that I needed money for a plane ticket right away. I spent most of the next day coming up with a plan to have my roommate forward mail to me and from me while I hung out in Australia for the rest of the semester that I was supposed to be a student in Japan. And I didn’t feel like seeing the officials change their mind about letting me go… that’s why I slept under the bridge in Kyoto that last night and hightailed it out of the port at Osaka.
That was all behind me now… the heartbreak, everything really. I had made it this far… why look back? The only regrets I had were that a wonderful woman and I parted ways with a phone call.
Now I stood at the doorstep of the hyphenated land of Eur-Asia… and if it didn’t have a hyphen it was at least a hybrid. It was a middle ground between two worlds. I felt so ready to make passage there.
I had to laugh when I recalled running into his accomplice in Beijing. Actually I didn’t run into him at all. I was riding the bus when I saw that mother fucker standing on the sidewalk looking like a lost dog. I jumped off the bus at the next stop and followed him. It was Elan. I was sure of it.He never saw me and I followed him for awhile. Only an idiot couldn’t tell he was being tailed by a westerner in China. For one… I didn’t have black hair and secondly… I was about a foot taller than everyone else. Elan was an idiot.
I found out where he was staying. There was a tiny cafe right there… I think it was called ‘The Pink House.’ I sat there and drank a beer or two and tried to figure out the best way to nail him. That prick was gonna get a smackdown.
In a lot of ways it wasn’t even my battle or my anger that made me want to do it. It was what he and his buddy did to my friend Joel… who was there for me at the Pig & The Whistle when I was in a backroom with the sharp edge of a Yakuza’s knife pushing into my throat… we took turns saving each others asses it seemed. Not only did Joel extricate me from a situation where a very sharp knife was pressed into my jugular… he had the steadiness and presence of mind to grab my passport off of the table after he pushed those guys off of me.
I didn’t know a lot of Japanese at the time… certainly not enough to beg for my life… but that shit was serious… when the guy with a blade pressed in your throat tells his buddy to find a mop… well… that shit’s serious. I felt bad that my mom would be getting a call from some low level State Department official asking where she wanted my body shipped to. I couldn’t move the way that guy had that knife on me.
That I got out of that one with my life was a blessing. That Joel grabbed my passport was a pleasant bonus. We ran from there out a fire exit… down the fire escape… laughing so hard we could barely keep running. I always got on Joel’s case about not grabbing my thirty thousand yen off that table too. At which point Joel would doublethink clinking my glass in the toast we would inevitably be about to make and then give me a dumb look. He hated when I bugged him about not picking up that thirty thoudsand yen. I saved his ass a time or two.
What those guys did to Joel was something so cruel and inhuman that I suppose it would be traumatic for us both if I accurately painted that moment in words. Suffice it to say that my plan to smackdown Elan was not hatched so much in anger or revenge… it was just that I supposed… no I knew… that the world and all of humanity would be a better place without scum like him intertwining paths with us.
It was only weeks ago that I fought with his buddy in that hallway… slipping in his blood in my bare feet.
I wanted to be sure that as he started his walk on his path to hell that he knew… that he was absolutely certain that it was me that helped him take the first step. I wanted to remind him to ‘say hello to Satan for me.’
I know that the university officials and even the police quietly agreed with my position. That’s why I wasn’t sitting in jail right now in Osaka. They saw honor in what I did.
When the police arrived there was so much blood on the floor that someone said that their first question was ‘where is the body.’ Man it was a bloody scene.
Unfortunately at the moment, and fortunately as the wisdom of time has crept by, that asshole never showed up.
I remember almost laughing as we fought there in that darkened hallway… slipping in the blood on the ceramic tile in our bare feet… slicker than oil on polished marble I’ll tell you… it was almost funny… like jello wrestling or something… one guy trying to kill… one guy really trying to avoid being killed… and both of them slipping and sliding in all of that blood… it’s probably what saved us both… that neither could throw or land a good punch or jab on the slickend slip and slide of warm blood on ceramic tile there.
Now I had my eyes on Elan. The score had to be settled… the karmic books balanced.
Each evening Elan would ride his rented bicycle past the cafe just after seven. On the night my train was to leave for Russia at a little after eight in the evening, Elan was going to be riding straight into the biggest smackdown of his life. I had a feeling that destiny, after all, was on my side. The guy really deserved what was coming.
I had never planned such a thing before. The fight in Osaka was a moment of passion… there was no planning that kind of thing. I think everyone should plan at least one really good smackdown in their lives. You learn a lot about yourself… it’s really a giant excercise in looking within the human being that you are. You get to see a part of yourself you pretty much never knew existed… a part of you that under normal circumstances you would never be acquainted with…and although it’s frightening it’s amazingly self intimate. You’ll walk away knowing a lot more about yourself that’s for sure.
That was the plan… get Elan at the Pink House… finish the last sips of my beer… leave a really nice tip… I think it would be important to leave a really nice tip if you leave a bad scene for someone to cleanup… and then walk to the trainstation where I would in minutes be on my way to the Russian border. No one would have even stopped me. I imagined they’d just stare at him while I walked away.
That night I sat at the table… I was remarkably calm for what I was about to do… I remember that most of all. My senses were all heightened no doubt. There was no nervousness though… not even jitters which suprised me… maybe because I had gone over it again and again in my head. I enjoyed the sounds of the capitol city and the Tsing Tao beer I was drinking… the sun was about to set… lighting up the polluted Beijing sky in that thick orange way…and I watched for the first sign of Elan riding his bicycle towards me.
This time I wouldn’t fail. Elan was about to go down… the hard way. "Meetchermakermotherfucker!"
With the benefit of eighteen years having passed by I can honestly say that it is a blessing and a miracle that on that night, Elan never rode his bicycle by the Pink House Cafe. Whichever way he turned in life that day… it was definitely the right way. I know that if he did ride by that cafe, two lives at least would have turned out differently. Forever and permanently altered.
We both lucked out it seemed… it was just another thing to put behind me. That and a lot of miles.
After that meal at the Manzhoulli station… which seemed to have been offered to me only so that the smugglers could keep their eyes on me and protect their mysterious ‘stash’… I sat out in front of the station with Sergei and he and I shot the shit… Sergei the ‘just bribed border official’… he took long draws on his harsh smelling Russian cigarette and shot meaningful questions at me about life in America and the nature of the relationship between our countries in between hits. I couldn’t tell if he was sizing me up for something… paying a little extra special attention. ‘Givin’ me a little scrutin’" as we say in the Windy City.
Sergei and I both agreed that it was all bullshit the way our nations behaved towards each others and we concluded that he and I were just like each other… that we really just wanted to live our lives and dream our dreams and not worry about one nation or the other nuking us and our families out of existence. It’s funny how two regular joes can come together and solve the world’s problems.
Sergei never mentioned at all the bribe or inquired about what it was paid to protect. It seemed to me after a while to be ‘the Russian Way.’ Almost like it really would have been rude of him to actually ask what it was he just took a bribe to allow into his country.
This building in the frontier town of Manzhoulli at the Chinese border just miles east of Mongolia was the place that welcomed me to what was then the Soviet Union… supposedly as Ronald Reagan termed it… the ‘Evil Empire.’
I don’t know much about the empire… but the people I met there were some of the kindest most wonderful and warm people on the planet. No wrong or harm was ever done to me in my travels there. The service sucked… but that my friend is what the Russia of 1990 was all about. A crumbling empire and a people who smelled opportunity and change on the wind. You could see it. You could feel it. You could smell it.
And the stroganoff… that stroganoff was my culinary welcome back into the western world. It was the first taste of home in so long. That stroganoff… it was the strong and hearty embrace of a wonderful friend I had not seen in the longest time. That stroganoff was a milestone… the stroganoff was a sign that I had made it… halfway. Halfway around the world. It seemed like Manzhouli was that place… the place where I went from each step taking me a step further away from home to each step taking me a step closer to home. That stroganoff was indeed the epicurean point where from there, each footstep was one footstep closer to my home. The place youth made me run from, a newly earned maturity made me miss… the place my stomach missed the most. Manzhoulli’s stroganoff… that was the most memorable meal I have ever had the pleasure to eat.
Sweet cream settled into my stomach like a warm velveteen ball of lead. My digestive system was no longer used to its dreamy lactose heaviness. How many months had it been since I had even had a glass of milk? Asians didn’t seem to have much love for the bovine delicacies… I had missed the milk… the cream in dishes like the stroganoff… and especially cheese. I don’t think I ever saw cheese in China… I bought some once in Japan to make a cheeseburger with. I think I dreamed of cheese once.
The Japanese told me that they had a nickname for people like me… they called us the ‘"butter people" or often "the big nosed butter people." They say that to them… westerners smell like butter. It is because of the amount of dairy that we east supposedly. It oozes from all of our pore and is carried on our breath. I know ot to be true because after some months of living among "the fish people" as I thought of them… for the same reasons they called me one of the "butter people" I noticed that If there was a fresh westerner on a subway car… I got all hungry and reminiscent of the delicacies of dairy that were celebrated daily in my homeland.
