(2 of 3)
The assailants bolted, but not before slashing three of Artyom's tires, leaving him stranded at 2 in the morning. Six hours passed before he had the wound stitched up. "I had to fix the tires first," he explains. "I couldn't abandon my car. It's my livelihood."
Looking for customers, Artyom cruises the city's main streets: past the hard-currency shops with their shiny Western signs; past the gargantuan figure of Lenin still looming above October Square; past the posh, newly renovated hotels, where single rooms start at $300 a night; past the countless sidewalk kiosks that peddle everything from cherry brandy to bikini underwear; past a heap of rubble and a ghost of a building, where glimpses of sky peek through the windows of a grand old facade; past Pushkin Square, where the poet's statue is dwarfed by a flashing neon Coca-Cola sign. He slows down to observe the trendy youths outside McDonald's. Brash teenagers shout, "Order! Order!" seeking commissions to stand in line for someone else, while beggars with tin cups, squatting on pieces of muddy cardboard, display swaddled infants and severed limbs.
Old truths (egalitarianism, collectivism, the police state) collide with and give ground to new ones (inequality, individualism, relative lawlessness). The collisions reverberate in the psyche of a taxi driver. "This country reminds me of a huge market, where everyone sells and everyone is for sale," Artyom says. "I understand the reforms are for the better, and I understand that everyone has a right to buy and sell. But the sight itself is repulsive. I see babushkis ((old women)) lined up on the street, peddling jars of mayonnaise, and I feel pity and anger and shame all at once."
At the spot commemorating Russia's fight to save Moscow from Napoleon, a hand beckons. It belongs to a young woman, perhaps 22. She is going to the center, near Red Square. Artyom asks for 500 rubles; they settle quickly at 400. She sits quietly, her eyes wandering the street. But Artyom draws her in with a remark about inflation. As a topic of conversation, inflation, which hit 2,200% in 1992, is like the weather -- except that prices change more often.
Soon the young woman and Artyom are swapping memories about how life used to , be in Moscow: how pedestrians would point at foreign cars like they were flying saucers; how a piece of chewing gum for a child was a treasure; and how, as she says, "if you weren't a Komsomolyets ((a member of the communist youth organization)), you weren't a person, you didn't exist."
Despite everything, they both agree things are better now. "It's simple," she concludes. "If you're willing to work hard, you'll have money and you can buy what you want." A new Russian truth shared, passed along with 400 rubles from the backseat to the front.
Other encounters come to mind. There was the lonely woman who took Artyom home and fed him soup in return for conversation. And the man from Kazakhstan, a former party functionary, who boasted about his new BMW and waved a thick stack of 5,000-ruble notes, as if to prove that this communist had a knack for capitalist enterprise. And there was the prostitute who offered to pay Artyom with her body. "I thought about it," he confesses.