One Moscow Night(mare) | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: One Moscow Night(mare) | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jeanette Morris
11/11/14
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The rumbling transport bus turned off the main highway leading out of Moscow and into the drizzling midnight blackness. A second turn onto a dirt side road marked with the international “no admittance” sign confirmed my suspicion. Regardless of what the Aeroflot Russian Airlines clerk in the airport terminal had promised, I would not be their guest at a “hotel” that night.

A wooden gate brought the bus to a stop. High and made of solid wood, it hid whatever lurked behind it. The weary driver tapped his horn and waited. Another tap. No response. Definitely not a hotel.

Finally, a spot light pierced the darkness and the gate creaked open. A bleary-eyed guard waved the bus through. It crept along a drive lined by a dark forest of dripping trees. Ahead, dim orbs hung atop invisible posts pointing the way. The way to what? Seconds later, the bus stopped again at a barrier.

I looked around inside the bus to see the reactions of the other passengers, who also had missed their connecting flights out of Moscow. Snickers, grins, and a few under-their-breath exchanges in Russian, which I couldn’t understand. A shiver crawled up my spine. Where were we?

At that moment, I recalled Rod Serlings “The Twilight Zone,” a favorite when I was a teenager. Ahead, the Soviet-era, multi-story building looming large and sterile in the misty night conjured up one of those weird sci-fi journeys into the paranormal.
No one moved. Now what?

Fatigue finally overcame apprehension; one by one, the other passengers disembarked and pulled their luggage from the compartment under the bus. My luggage was on its way to Samara, so I made my way through the gloom to the entrance. A plaque on the outside wall read, “Institute of…something.” More Russian lessons might have helped. I tried the door, but it didn’t budge.

By then another passenger, a pregnant girl, arrived and tried another door. It opened and I followed her into a corridor devoid of furniture, wall decorations, or signs of life. Several yards to the left sat a female guard at a small metal desk. As the rest of the group, eleven in all, entered, the guard’s eyes opened wide in unmasked surprise.

Wasn’t she expecting us?

I flashed back to the English-speaking Aeroflot clerk with the box-red hair, so adamant about the arrangements to put me up overnight, so vague about the specifics. I had asked several times which hotel, what address, but she had refused to answer. Only lowered hooded eyes back to her papers. Now everything was clear. Sort of.

At the guard’s desk, after some unintelligible discussion about who would share rooms, keys were distributed in exchange for our room vouchers. A matronly woman escorted me to the seventh floor and opened the door to room 5-22, smiling as if she were giving me the penthouse instead of what it actually was—a student dorm room in an empty hostel. At least I didn’t have a roommate.

Two unmade cots, a single desk and chair, and a small TV. The room had its own full bath, far from sterile, but the rusty water flowed warm. I had a place to lie down for a few hours behind a locked door. At least I had my makeup. The grungy clothes I’d been wearing for the past thirty hours would have to last yet another day.
Is there such a thing as a zero-star hotel? How did that Aeroflot clerk sleep at night? No doubt better than I did amidst the chattering behind razor-thin walls, heavy rain drops plunking on the metal roof over my head, and the 3:00 a.m. rising of the coo-coo birds in the forest surrounding the facility.

I gave up on sleeping, got up, opened the unscreened window, and hung my head into the freshly washed breeze. The pungent scent of the pine forest cleared my jet-lagged head. I actually hummed along with the choir concert of hundreds of birds, invisible but present.

But, how did a smart, middle-aged grandma end up in an abandoned student dorm, alone, somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia? What had happened to my carefully devised plans, my surety that I had plenty of time to make my connection, where my friends would be waiting, and all would be well?

As dawn broke, the reality of my situation hit me. Only God knew where I was—God, and the clerk with the box-red hair.

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