At the van I met the other five travelers; I was the only foreigner. We just nodded to each other; somehow asking questions seemed intrusive, too personal. The van had three rows of seats. One person sat up front with the driver, a mother and daughter had the first row; a woman with her five-year-old granddaughter and two French bulldogs had the second row, and my dog and I got the last seat. It was, I realized, the bad row: narrow seat, no leg room, no heat. All of our luggage was piled up around and under the seats. One of the bulldogs — Frosya — lunged at my dog, who lay next to me, shaking. When we set off, Frosya began to moan and whine, while the little girl turned around and kept up a non-stop monologue: “Can I pet your dog? What’s her name? Frosya is not very nice, but our other dog is sweet. You can pet her if you want. Is your coat warm? Do you know how to make smiley faces on the window? I can show you!” After a while, as Frosya continued to moan and tug at her leash to get at my dog, I pretended to fall asleep. The little girl poked me to get my attention.
I burst out laughing. It was going to be one hell of a long trip.
But after an hour or two, Frosya stopped whining and the little girl fell asleep. No one spoke, not even among themselves — out of fatigue or tension, I don’t know. We bounced along the pot-holed, uneven roads of Russia’s provinces, passing long-haul trucks and rickety local cars, as signs for villages and little towns appeared and disappeared in flashes of headlights. I fretted about what I had packed and what I’d left behind, and worried about the border crossing.
I must have dozed off. I woke up about seven hours after we’d left Moscow when the van stopped and the door was opened by a border guard, who shone a flashlight at us. “Show your passports!” We all held up our passports. “Give me yours!” he said to me. I passed it up, he glanced at it and passed it back, apparently unfazed by an American presenting a U.S. passport in a vanful of Russians and dogs.
We drove into what I now think of as The Zone — the border zone with Russian facilities on one side and the Estonian buildings on the other. It was a vast fenced-off area with roads for trucks and cars, booths for guards and several outbuildings. Several long commercial trucks parked off to the side, as if left there while the drivers redid their documents. Everything was lit by tall streetlights.
We piled out of the van. It was about 3 a.m. and bitterly cold — my phone showed 0 degrees Fahrenheit — and the asphalt was covered with thick, uneven layers of dirty ice. In my suitcase-hauling practice, I had failed to take that into consideration. First, we hauled our bags and dogs to one booth. The window opened and I handed over my passport and entry card; the guard handed it back and told me to go to customs. I dragged everything over another expanse of ice to a small building, hauled it inside, piled it all on the x-ray conveyer belt, and answered questions. No, I didn’t have anything forbidden. Yes, I had two computers. No, I had no plants or drugs. The Russian guards were polite. I took my passport and hauled everything outside again, on to the next booth.
This booth, I realized only afterward, was the Important Booth. Here you handed your documents through a window to the guards and waited. I stood outside with one of my van-mates, a middle-aged woman in a thin wool coat. The French bulldog family was delayed behind us. “The other two were taken inside,” my van-mate told me. We stood there for about an hour in the frigid cold. Every once in a while the booth window would open and they’d call one of us over. “What is your work?” “Did you leave the country in the last two years?” And then the window would close and they’d go back to their computers. Later the woman told me they’d asked her, “We see you were in Kyiv in 2013. What did you do there? Who did you see?”
I walked back and forth with my dog, jumped up and down to keep warm, and waited. Finally, the window opened, my van-mate got her passport and started walking toward Estonia. After another 10 minutes, I was called up and handed mine. Relief; I could go. I put the computer bag on top of the wheeled suitcase, draped the two bags with clothes and dog food over my shoulders and hung my purse around my neck. I dragged the suitcase with one hand and held my dog’s leash with the other. Estonia was at the end of a long, ice-covered road — about 800 meters, a half-mile, the guards said. “See those lights way off there? That’s Estonia.”
It is very hard to drag 150 lbs. of luggage across a half-mile of ice in the middle of the night in below 0 temperatures with a dog on a leash.
By stopping every 100 meters and switching hands, I finally made it to the Estonia side. The border guards were very kind. I said I was a journalist and they asked why I was leaving. Had I been threatened? Did something happen? I told them about the new law and said almost all the foreign journalists were getting out. They shook their heads sympathetically, stamped my passport and said, “Welcome to Estonia.” No one looked at any of my carefully prepared documents proving my dog was healthy and vaccinated, that I didn’t have Covid but did have health insurance.
My fellow traveler and I climbed in the new van to warm up while the driver contemplated how he’d fit in all the luggage, four more people and two more dogs. Finally, the mother and daughter arrived. Because they’d been pulled aside by the guards, I assumed they were fleeing the country and wondered if they had been politically active. They had been interrogated for more than an hour, the mother told us. They had close relatives in Kyiv, and the guards had questioned them about their family, what they did, what their plans were, where they were going. It seemed that anyone with Ukrainian connections was suspicious. The guards had asked to see their cell phones — a new trick used by the police to find compromising materials and sites, as well as phone numbers and addresses. “But I told them ‘no’,” the woman said. “I told them that if they had an order from the prosecutor’s office, I’d hand it over. But otherwise, no, it was my private property.” For some reason, the guards decided to release them.
At long last, the French bulldog family made it to the van. My dog and I sat in front this time, out of Frosya’s reach. We had spent more than two hours in The Zone, and the entire trip would take about 14 hours.
As we drove off, the first sign we saw in Estonia was a bright blue and yellow billboard reading, “Glory to Ukraine!”
We were not in Russia anymore.
When I arrived in Riga, my friends met me at the van and whisked me into an apartment in a sprawling late-Soviet housing complex of bulky long blocks surrounded by lawns, trees and children’s playgrounds. In Moscow, my large apartment was on the top floor of a 90-year-old building and filled with antiques and art. My small Riga apartment is on the first floor of a 40-year-old building with décor by IKEA. That contrast, it turns out, is perfect.
Latvia has the largest Russian population in the Baltic states, and my neighborhood seems to be home to most of them in the capital. Older Latvians also speak Russian, and young Latvians often speak English, so communication isn’t a problem.
Work is not a problem either. As soon as the staff of The Moscow Times landed — in cities including Amsterdam, Istanbul, Riga, London — we all got back to work. Some Russian correspondents have remained behind, quietly helping with reporting. New people are joining us; there are a lot of good journalists looking for jobs. We feel like it’s important to keep operating, to make sure that those who rely on us can still find us.
And we’re making the transition, although many hours are taken up solving the technological problems of the modern home office: too many devices, new cell phone numbers and WiFi routers, with everything stopping when automatic payments from my Moscow bank are no longer accepted or confirmation text messages are sent to a Russian telephone number no longer in use.
In the two weeks between the start of the war and my departure from Russia, I had wept constantly. I cried when I walked my dog in the park across the street, where I knew every bush and tree and patch of grass; when I sat at my desk looking out at my beloved Moscow courtyard; when I bought bread at my local bakery; when I drove a familiar route along the Moscow River, past the Kremlin, and then homeward along one of Moscow’s central avenues. I couldn’t imagine that it might be the last time I’d see places that had been the backdrop of absolutely everything important that had happened to me in my adult life, where there were so many people and so much that I loved.
But now work, the novelty of a new city, the daily battle with iPhones and computers, keep me in a continuous present tense. I don’t think about the future beyond next week; I don’t think about the past. Except to realize that even if I can go back to Russia, it won’t be the Russia I loved.
Maybe that superstition is right: Once you shut the door, walk away and don’t look back.
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