What you think about the week after a terorrist attack

Yesterday, my friend Lindsey asked me when I was going to blog again. February was a black hole. March has been a month of long, long days and a lot of mixed feelings--people are excited about moving (not us--we're in Moscow at least until August 2011), my twins--for graduating; Sara is making big life decisions. Parry is traveling, traveling, traveling. He weathered not one, but two airport/airline strikes in two countries. Now the sun is out, the snow is melting and my brain is starting to wake up again.

A dear friend of mine emailed me and asked me how I felt about what happened in Moscow on Monday when two female suicide bombers detonated explosives inside two very busy Moscow metro stations. Instead of writing a separate blog entry, I'm going to copy-paste the email I wrote her in reply. Let me be clear: I have no desire to be a dramatic diva about this. My family is fine. My friends are fine. I don't know of anyone in my acquaintances who was hurt. That being said, I'm a bit mentally shaken, especially as I read a report today that says there are as many as 21 "Black Widow" bombers out there lined up to take their turn attacking Russia. Here's the email:

Hi B:

I've been thinking about how to answer this email for the better part of my waking hours. I didn't want to be glib and say that of course it has rattled me, but the world is a tough place and I'll soldier on. I didn't want to say that I'm fine either because I'm not. I'm not at all but not in the ways I expected. Thank you for asking me not just if I was safe, but how I felt. Thank you for caring. Right now, that means more to me than just about anything that anyone has done for me in a long time.

Yesterday, Abby called me from school around 9:30AM. She never calls me from school. They had announced what happened during an assembly. She asked me, sounding terrified, if dad had taken the metro today. Without saying it, she was asking if her dad had been in the blast because she knows that Parry takes the metro quite regularly when he's going places during the work day. She knew he was leaving town and she was scared. Of course Parry was fine, but the fact that she, even for a moment, had to question what was going on, was unnerving. It made all of it seem more personal. She's 14. She shouldn't have to worry about her dad getting blown up on the metro.

Last night, I went to one of the expat forums to see what people were saying. The media here gives us nothing but sound bites and the government takes such fanatical control of the story that it is tough to know what really happened. Usually the expat forums have someone who knows something. As I was cruising through the posts, I found a youtube link to footage that someone took inside the Park Kultury metro station from the train opposite the train that was attacked. Apparently the person taking the footage was exiting the station and was filming what could be seen. I have replayed that footage five hundred times in my mind. I don't know why I watched except to see that it was real. It was horrifying. And really, only someone who has been in that metro station and ridden the metro as much as I have can appreciate what insanity it was.

There weren't any screams. The station was silent as a tomb except for the recorded announcement the metro train play at every stop before the doors close. There were bodies on the platform. Smoke. But what horrified me was the stairs.

Park Kultury is an older metro and the stairs are well-worn grey streaked marble instead of escalators. Yes, really marble. Stalin went through a phase where he blew up churches and other bourgeoisie buildings but sacked them of all their valuable building materials beforehand. The Moscow metro is filled with oppulent, slightly rickety fixures in the way that you would expect from Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Park Kultury reminds me of a shabby government building that has seen better days. It stands out in my metro travels, because you have to walk up the stairs to exit. The last time I was there, it was winter, my shoes were wet and I was worried I would slip and go tumbling down the stairs.

The stairs were covered with bloody footprints. People were trudging up the stairs in silence, tracking blood everywhere. Bright red blood, smudged, dripping--all over. As I watched them walk, I looked at those stairs imagining the times I have walked those exact stairs, bounding up, sometimes two at a time, in a hurry to meet someone. Sara went up and down those stairs three or four times a day for 4 months--her university was on that line. You don't expect someplace you know to look like that.

It occured to me that if I had been on that train, I wouldn't even be able to understand what was happening. I don't speak enough Russian to even know what to say. If I, or my husband, had been injured, how would we have explained who to call or what to do or what was going on? To be trapped in this nightmare and be completely helpless to understand it--to have to go to the hospitals and look at the white boards sitting out outside the entrances, trying to find the names of someone you knew that was missing--how would it be done? I'm in RUSSIA. I don't even know where the Emergency Services Hospital is! I use private medical facilities with European management and glibbly say, "If something bad happens, I'm going to be medivac'ed to Germany or Finland." If I was unconscious on a metro platform, what would happen to me? Would anyone who found my ID even be able to read the English name and information written there? What would happen to Parry? He speaks less Russian than I do. That scares me.

I've spent weeks in the Lubyanka neighborhood, prepping for my architecture presentation. The Lubyanka neighborhood, for the record, is predominantly owned/managed/houses former KGB and now FSB facilities. Walking up Bolyshaya Lubyanka street, beyond the obvious office buildings with the hammer and sickle on them, you wouldn't necessarily guess that some of these rather ordinary 18th century neo-classical apartment buildings are actually FSB owned and once were residences for people like Felix Dzherzhinsky, murderer and KGB founder. We would walk around, joking that we needed to be careful that the FSB/KGB would start to wonder what these foreign ladies were doing poking around all this highly sensitive areas for so many days. Now, as all the FSB drones are pouring through weeks of surveillance footage, trying to find evidence of these terrorists, part of me is wondering if we will show up on that footage, that somehow we are in the narrative--part of the story--and we didn't even know it.

One of my expat friends has lived here forever. Her husband is a the bureau chief of a very prestigious and important journalism outfit. She told me, while we were on our walk through the Lubyanka neighborhood, that if most expats knew half of what went on in this city, we would never leave our houses--and that she marvelled at how naive and innocent we were in assuming that everything as it appeared. The veneer of safety is just that--a venner, she insisted. After yesterday I am filtering what I'm seeing through that lens and I'm wondering if what I see is real--what of my reality is constructed from truth and what is fantasy. I have always prided myself on not being one of those expats who lives in a bubble. I don't romanticize Russia, but I don't villianize her either. I like to think of myself as a realist. I honestly don't know what is real.

This city always teeters on the edge of paranoia. This incident will make that worse--far worse--to the point of making the claustrophobia that I sometimes feel choked by as I'm making my way through the crowds, become smothering. My friend Becky told me once that you don't realize how exhausted Russia makes you until you leave and the weight of it is removed. That weight has grown over the last 24 hours. I worry that the already corrupt and dangerous police force will use the pretense of security to harrass innocent people and demand more bribes. I worry about more check points in the center and travel and fret about making sure every date, stamp and spelling on my official documents is in order 24 hours a day in case I am stopped. Today, I went to the mall because I had to look at something that wasn't my house. I am waaay behind on a lot of things, but being in my head was a bad space. The security guards stopped the car on the way in to search the trunk. That has never happened before. There are security and police everywhere.

I play the degrees of separation game. Parry has an employee who was on the Park Kultury platform. I know Parry. Parry knows him. Two of my church friends, Arteyom and Anastasia, transfer through Park Kultury on their way to home or school every day. Arteyom missed the blast by 10 minutes. Ten minutes is the difference between making or missing a light at a crosswalk or transfering from one metro station to another at a brisk walk or a stroll. You don't think that how fast you walk would make a difference, but in Arteyom's case, it may have made the difference between whether he walked into a death trap or missed it.

I will carry on and be a grown up about this. I'm not going to dramatize this because I wasn't there and I don't know anyone yet who was in the blast. That could change. The red line is one of the busiest in the city. Parry says that all their employees are not accounted for yet--at least as of last night--and they are going through the process. I'm sure it will be fine and that people who were on their way to work just freaked out and went home and couldn't be reached on their phone. The FSB jammed the mobile reception in and around the city in specific places because there was a theory--no idea if it is fact yet--that the bombs were detonated via cellphone. Calling people on mobiles was a disaster for most people in the center yesterday.

But I'm still processing, thinking, wondering. Will Putin decide to go to war with the Chechens again? Will there be another attack? Will it be soon? Will this incident totally freak out my relatives who are already nervous about visiting? I am grateful my family is safe. I am glad that Parry was flying yesterday instead of taking the train--he would have been on and off the metro if he were taking the train. I am grateful that my architecture group is on hiatus until after the easter holidays. I'm grateful my children attend an international diplomatic school that is as good as an embassy when it comes to protection. I wonder how I will feel when I get on the metro next time--Saturday in fact--and whether I will turn up my ipod and zone out to my happy music or whether I will be watchful, vigiliant and paranoid.

I'm watching a lot of cable television. The stupid Russian news keeps playing the same stupid footage over and over again. I'm sure the powers that be are trying to figure out what the narrative and spin is going to be. I'm sure they're trying to find answers. So I've stopped watching the news and I watch Discovery Travel and Living. I watch the trainwreck that is now Jon and Kate Plus Eight and more of Kat Von D than anyone should ever watch. I watch anything that reminds me that somewhere in the world are people who still care very passionately about ridiculous things like how much plastic surgery Heidi Montag has. That is where my head is.

Hopefully somewhere in this ramble you can find something that makes sense.

Miss you back,

H