“Under the Lens”
Gretchen Fernholz

It’s a picture-perfect day in small-town Russia, and we’re going to spend it inside a stuffy museum.

Ahead of me, my friends Almeda and Taya walk single-file alongside a crumbling highway. I jog to catch up with Almeda, my fellow American, and hiss at her in English.

“I thought we already went to the Lipetsk Museum?”

The shoulder isn’t wide enough for both of us, and I step carefully to avoid tumbling down the ditch. Almeda turns to me, her translucent skin shining in the sun. With every stride, her blonde curls bob up and down.

“No. Well—yes?”  The din of oncoming traffic crescendos as several boxy Soviet cars races past us. Almeda waits for the noise to die down and continues. “We went to the local history museum. This is the local art museum.”

Taya, a petite brunette and Lipetsk native, marches ahead of us, her slender limbs swinging with conviction. I sigh and fall in line behind Almeda.

I’ve enjoyed our time in Lipetsk, but truthfully, there’s not much to see. Once a popular spa getaway, these days Lipetsk is a humble industrial city that seems to be perpetually looking backwards. The streets are still named for famous communists, monuments stand in every park, and the town apparently contains enough interesting artifacts to fill two museums. I don’t have very high expectations for the afternoon but enjoy our walk over.

***

The Lipetsk Museum of Local Art is a white Le-Corbusier-style edifice with two adjacent doors, both labeled as main entrances. Taya must not come here often, because she doesn’t know where to go. Confused, we head for the left door. An older woman with a dyed chestnut bob and sepia-tinted glasses sits behind a counter. As we crowd into the narrow entrance hall, she looks up and cocks an eyebrow. Taya, our native Russian speaker, takes the lead.

“Dobryi den’ (Good day). We’d like to buy tickets to the museum, please.”

The woman purses her lips, coated in a metallic pink shimmer.

“To enter the museum,” she rattles off in bureaucratic Russian, “you’ll first need to go to the front desk to provide documentation. Then you can proceed to the main ticket counter. Both are located out this door and around the corner.” Having conveyed the necessary information, she falls silent and stares at us with catlike green eyes. We all murmur thank yous and stumble back out the door.

In Russia, college students get free entrance to museums, and yet I feel guilty depriving this modest local establishment of an already-paltry entrance fee. Nevertheless, we stack our student IDs in a metal drawer and slide them to the lady behind the window. She rips three FREE ENTRANCE tickets off a roll, slides them back with our IDs, and explains where the various art collections are located. Before we can begin our visit, another museum worker in the back pops her head out and quips, “Be sure to check out the communal apartment!”

As the ladies clarify for us, the communal apartment is located in the wing we just came from. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it’s also the Museum of Local Art’s claim to fame. Perpetual housing shortages plagued the Soviet Union, so multiple families were often crammed into small suite-style flats with shared kitchens and bathrooms and never enough bedrooms to house all their occupants. These communal apartments were neither luxurious nor comfortable, but there seems to be a sense of nostalgia about them nonetheless. I don’t understand why anyone would want to preserve or relive such a housing situation, but I’m awfully curious to see it. We race through the art gallery and back to the Soviet wing.

The same bespectacled, chestnut-haired woman we first met awaits us. We flash our tickets, and she bustles out from behind her counter wearing a leopard-print jacket, black pants, and a chunky beaded necklace. She does all the talking, fussily explaining the proper order for visiting this half of the museum, and sweeps us down the hallway into a replica Soviet schoolroom.

Tiny children’s desks sit under Young Pioneer banners. My fingers itch towards my camera, and I sidle up to Taya, who’s poring over a collection of Soviet-era stamps.

“Taya, can we photograph here?” I ask quietly in Russian.

“I don’t know,” she says thoughtfully. “We could ask her.”

“Can you?” I plead. “I’m too scared.”

Like a fox anticipating rabbits from a burrow, the woman has her eyes trained on the doorway as we come through it—probably because we’re the only visitors in the entire museum. Before we can pose our question, she directs our attention to the dozens of old clocks adorning the walls and pelts us with rapid-fire descriptions—“elegant brass, timeless wood, manufactured plastic”—and then waits expectantly for our reaction. We cast hurried glances over everything, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the appropriate volume, until she ushers us into the next room, and the next. This woman seems determined to chart our course through her wing of the museum down to every last artifact. Finally, we’re able to break away.

“If you proceed upstairs,” our self-appointed tour guide says, indicating the steep, narrow staircase behind us, “you’ll see our projection room. We have a special film that we show schoolchildren.”

“Projection room” was a little too generous – it’s actually about a five-square-foot landing. Almeda, Taya, and I plop down on the stairs, and I whip out my camera now that the coast is clear.

“God, I thought she’d never leave!” I exclaim in English, training my camera on Taya and Almeda.

“Yeah, for real though,” Almeda says, baring her teeth for the picture.

Laughing, Taya takes the camera and photographs Almeda and me on the staircase. We keep shooting, waiting for our tour guide to start the “special film.”

Taya calls down to her in Russian. “Nothing is projecting on the screen!”

In a flash, our guide scoots up the lower flight of stairs and her head appears through the rails.

“Oh, the film is only for visiting schoolchildren. It isn’t set up at the moment.”

So why did she send us up to the film loft?

As I ponder this, the guide spies the camera I’m still clutching. I follow her gaze, and my stomach drops in horror, anticipating the scolding about to come. My fingers clench protectively around the camera.

“Would you girls like me to take your picture?” she asks.

I heave a sigh of relief.

“Yes, please!” I answer, glad that there will be documentation of the three of us in this bizarre little museum.

I hand over the camera, a “twisty-lens Canon” as I lovingly call it. I try to explain what button to push and where the viewfinder is, and Taya, bless her, backs me up with a more grammatical summary. Our tour guide doesn’t seem to notice my accent or the incompleteness of my explanation. Her catlike green eyes light up as she examines my camera—I wonder if she’s ever used a DSLR before.

She tells us to smile “beautifully” and takes our picture from the landing below. As the shutter clicks, she hums approvingly.

“Thank you, thank you,” we all murmur in a chorus.

She’s about to hand my camera back when an idea materializes. “Would you girls like your picture taken here on the landing too?”

Taya, Almeda, and I exchange glances. The landing, cluttered with boxes of old cameras and reels of film, is not particularly photogenic. “Umm… yes?” Almeda finally responds.

The tour guide eagerly shuffles up the stairs, and we trade places. “Ahh yes, that’s great, with the old broadcasting equipment behind you. Wonderful.” She takes our picture again, click. We return to the first floor, but the guide still has a firm grip on my camera. I can see the gears whizzing in her head as she scouts more shooting locations. She’s hooked.

Our guide-slash-photographer leads us to an antique phone sitting on a table and points. “One of you, go stand next to it.”

The three of us look at each other sheepishly.

“Well, come on, who’s first?” she demands impatiently.

Eager to please, I scamper over to the phone table. “Now pick it up,” she commands. I grab the sturdy receiver and make a silly, pseudo-consternated face. She doesn’t even raise the camera.

“No. No, no, no, no, no.”

“What?” I ask, startled by her strong response. Behind her, Almeda and Taya are doing a poor job of stifling their giggles.

“That’s not pretty. Don’t make stupid faces like that.”

“But it’s funny!” I protest. She narrows her eyes and snaps a picture just to placate me, then starts giving me directions.

“You need to smile. There. But don’t look away, where are you looking? Not that way! Look here, right at the camera – there we go, now that’s beautiful.”

Her artistic vision involves the mirror next to the telephone table, so she fine-tunes the angle of my face and torso and snaps a couple more. She dismisses me with a wave of her hand and turns around to face Almeda and Taya. “Who’s next?”

***

The rest of our visit proceeds in much the same way, and I realize what a strange role-reversal it is to become the object of interest in a museum. The entire space is curious and crowded, littered with old household things you might find at a flea market, and our tour guide photographs us with all of them. There’s a display featuring women’s fashion from the 80s, whose hats she commandeers and eagerly places on our heads; a sewing corner stacked with machines and fabric; and a vintage Vespa scooter that we all take turns perching on.

The famed communal apartment is a large, open area that flows from kitchen to living room, and every inch of it has been painstakingly decorated with authentic Soviet artifacts donated by community members. There’s a short, sturdy fridge, a tiny oven, and porcelain ware that we lift delicately for an imaginary tea party. The museum walls are covered with an assortment of hand-woven tapestries, old photographs of Lipetsk, and generic, mass-produced Communist banners commemorating Lenin and labor.

Though Almeda and I have been careful with our Russian use around the guide, opting for short responses and low volume, we’ve certainly outed ourselves as foreigners by now. Our slow response time to her directives during the photo shoot was especially damning, and as we stand in the communal kitchen, she finally asks the dreaded question:

“Where are you from?”

“Lipetsk,” Taya answers truthfully.

Almeda and I exchange a glance. Even during times of political turmoil, we’ve never received trouble for our Americanness, but small-town Russia operates under a different set of rules. I decide it’s easier to lie.

“We’re from Moscow!” I proclaim.

The tour guide calls my bluff—her frosty pink lips widen into a rare smile and she arches a penciled eyebrow. “Oh really? What part?”

We’re doomed!

“Well…” I begin, gathering my thoughts in Russian, “the thing is, we’re actually college students from America…but…we are living and studying in Moscow this summer.”

Without missing a beat, our guide asks with genuine interest what part of the United States we’re both from. I’m caught off-guard by how matter-of-fact she is about it—usually when we make the America confession, Russians gasp in surprise or crack a joke about “Mr. Obama.” Not this time. Almeda and I tell her about our home states, and our visit to Russia, and what we’ve done in Lipetsk so far. She soaks it up, nodding slightly and interjecting with clarifying questions (“Washington, like the city?”). Our nationalities melt away and suddenly we’re just four ladies having a chat.

The tour guide poses us for a few last photographs and then finally relinquishes my camera and us, her living mannequins. As we meander towards the exit, reliving our unexpected photo shoot in reverse, Taya asks our guide the question I found myself wondering: “So where are you from?”

She turns to Taya and smiles, fingering her necklace absently. In typical Russian grandmother fashion, her response is sprinkled with life advice.

“I was born and raised in Lipetsk, but I spent several years living in Azerbaijan when my husband was sent to work there. Actually, that’s where I learned how much fun it is to interact with foreigners!” She impishly inclines her head towards Almeda and me.

“I never intended to live in Azerbaijan, but it ended up being wonderful. Yes…those were happy times!” She smiles warmly, then addresses us seriously. “Girls, always follow love. The rest will work itself out later.” She gives us a knowing wink.

In the entrance hall, our guide stops us with one final imperative. “Make sure to sign our guest book! We love to look back and remember our visitors.”

Almeda and I both write little notes thanking the museum for its displays, and our tour guide for all the photos she took. Taya has the camera now, and she’s looking at our guide.

“May I take a picture of you and the girls together?” she asks politely.

Our guide is startled by the question. “Me?” she asks, nervously smoothing her leopard-print blouse. “Oh no, no, I couldn’t possibly. I don’t like photos.”