Ilona
12-10-2010, 07:52 PM
When the steward kicked the door in place, there was no way back.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the Moscow metro earlier this year, one of the newspapers I write for sent me to the hills of Dagestan to report from the hostile and hospitable republic.
Most of my colleagues had booked the Aeroflot flight, so I was left flying Dagestan Airlines, a tiny operator running a couple of Tupolevs out of Vnukovo.
In Russia, airplanes are kept together with rusting bolts and duct tape. And in order not to lose my nerves when the engines hit a glitch or when it seems that turbulence is taking over, I usually drink away the entire supply of on-board cognac.
As an added bonus, if I drink it, the pilots can’t – and I usually wake up only when the beast hits the runaway.
But on this Dagestan Airlines flight, in the same bloody plane that crash-landed at Domodedovo last week, there was no cognac. They only served tea, and the wallpaper aboard the plane was hallucinatory enough to send me to asleep.
Luckily, the airline had seated me next to Elmira, a very pretty girl from Makhachkala. With long dark hair, mysterious eyes and a little line of mascara, she’s the type of Dagestani girl everybody warned me about. Look into her eyes for too long and the next thing you know – you’re either married or beaten up.
“I miss Moscow already,” she whispered. “It’s just that once in a while you really need to go back to visit relatives. If it was up to me, I’d cut all the connections with Dagestan.”
So she clearly wasn’t the person to ask what to do when I got there, and before I could even ask she had fallen asleep on my shoulder.
During the flight, she woke up a couple of times when the engines would roar, or when the air-conditioning broke down and started dripping water over her. At one point during a dream, Elmira dug her nails into my arm, whispered something in one of the 40 local languages in Dagestan and fell asleep again with a smile on her lips.
When we zipped over the mountains and descended toward the Caspian, she was rudely awakened by an array of text messages. “If only…,” she said – and deleted everything she’d received.
She looked at me for a long time. “Give me your number,” she said. “Don’t worry – I’ll call you. Don’t ask why, I’ll let you know.”
She left me guessing why.
After disembarking from the plane and suffering a wild taxi ride, I slept through most of the morning. When I woke up, I had a text from Elmira promising to call me later that day. But she didn’t.
And when I tried the next morning, her phone didn’t answer.
“The number you are trying to reach is unavailable,” it kept telling me in the horrible accent we all know. “Please try again later.”
Olaf Koens is a freelance journalist based in Moscow.
The Moscow News :rtfm:
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the Moscow metro earlier this year, one of the newspapers I write for sent me to the hills of Dagestan to report from the hostile and hospitable republic.
Most of my colleagues had booked the Aeroflot flight, so I was left flying Dagestan Airlines, a tiny operator running a couple of Tupolevs out of Vnukovo.
In Russia, airplanes are kept together with rusting bolts and duct tape. And in order not to lose my nerves when the engines hit a glitch or when it seems that turbulence is taking over, I usually drink away the entire supply of on-board cognac.
As an added bonus, if I drink it, the pilots can’t – and I usually wake up only when the beast hits the runaway.
But on this Dagestan Airlines flight, in the same bloody plane that crash-landed at Domodedovo last week, there was no cognac. They only served tea, and the wallpaper aboard the plane was hallucinatory enough to send me to asleep.
Luckily, the airline had seated me next to Elmira, a very pretty girl from Makhachkala. With long dark hair, mysterious eyes and a little line of mascara, she’s the type of Dagestani girl everybody warned me about. Look into her eyes for too long and the next thing you know – you’re either married or beaten up.
“I miss Moscow already,” she whispered. “It’s just that once in a while you really need to go back to visit relatives. If it was up to me, I’d cut all the connections with Dagestan.”
So she clearly wasn’t the person to ask what to do when I got there, and before I could even ask she had fallen asleep on my shoulder.
During the flight, she woke up a couple of times when the engines would roar, or when the air-conditioning broke down and started dripping water over her. At one point during a dream, Elmira dug her nails into my arm, whispered something in one of the 40 local languages in Dagestan and fell asleep again with a smile on her lips.
When we zipped over the mountains and descended toward the Caspian, she was rudely awakened by an array of text messages. “If only…,” she said – and deleted everything she’d received.
She looked at me for a long time. “Give me your number,” she said. “Don’t worry – I’ll call you. Don’t ask why, I’ll let you know.”
She left me guessing why.
After disembarking from the plane and suffering a wild taxi ride, I slept through most of the morning. When I woke up, I had a text from Elmira promising to call me later that day. But she didn’t.
And when I tried the next morning, her phone didn’t answer.
“The number you are trying to reach is unavailable,” it kept telling me in the horrible accent we all know. “Please try again later.”
Olaf Koens is a freelance journalist based in Moscow.
The Moscow News :rtfm: