Fast train to Moscow's soul

The old woman's back was so hunched she couldn't get her chin off her chest.

Wrapped in layers of ratty sweaters, she stood against a tile wall, one hand extended.

Elderly Russians are everywhere in the subway tunnels beneath Moscow, begging for pocket change.

Still, looking at her, I felt a stab of melancholy.

Then four mean-looking teenagers in scarred leather jackets rushed past her. They muttered to one another, turned back and surrounded her.

My stomach clenched in panic. But then I realised what I was seeing.

These boys were digging through their pockets, handing the old woman every coin they could scrape together.

Since moving to Moscow last year, I have been schooled in the stark realities of Russian society by daily rides to language classes and the office on the Metro.

The sprawl of tracks and tunnels seems to offer a direct line into Moscow's soul — a place of faded elegance and hopeless cynicism, debauchery and destitution, barely contained brutality and touches of kindness.

Up above, wild Moscow rages along, lawless and mad, cold and rich. Down below, the trains are roaring through the dark.

The Metro is where you will find the people who are just scraping by in the shadow of oil wealth and the ones who already have fallen through the cracks.

It is the haunt of stray dogs and lovesick teenagers, homeless alcoholics and wounded veterans, tourists and bone-weary commuters.

Always rush hour

The sight of a stray dog startled me early one morning. He was limping on three legs in the tangle of the turnstiles.

His front paw dangled. It appeared to be split in two, dripping blood, as if somebody had stomped on it. He was glancing around desperately, as though looking for help.

Hundreds of commuters clogged the station but nobody stopped for the dog. An old man bent down over him for a moment, then hurried along.

I was on the other side of the turnstile, fumbling for my card. When I looked up again the dog had melted into the forest of legs.

I peered around but I couldn't see him anywhere. I stared at the rows of students, workers, pensioners — an anonymous mob, stolid and stone-faced.

Somewhere in this Soviet building, a creature was suffering, but I would never find him. And if I did, then what?

I didn't know how to find a vet. I had been in Moscow just a few months and could barely speak Russian.

I had to take my place in the line, and the line moves only one way. If you don't move fast enough, you get shoved in the back.

I thought about the dog all day. I told my Russian teacher about him and she gave me an incredulous look.

“But the people you see on the Metro have horrible problems,'' she reproached me.

“I know,'' I said. She was right, but I couldn't help it. I was embarrassed.

Still, I looked for the dog on the way home. I didn't see him.

I walked back to my apartment, trying to get the memory of his crushed paw out of my mind, the wounded way he had looked up at the passengers.

When I got home, I cried.

Icy faces, warm souls

When I first got to Moscow, it was the heat of summer and the press of bodies on the Metro almost turned me into a teetotaler.

I couldn't bear the stink of the drunks on the trains, sweating, their clammy skin clinging to mine. Empty bottles rolled and clattered underfoot.

Then I would see young men spring gallantly to their feet to offer their seats to old women, or the way Russians buried their noses in books as the trains screamed through the tunnels and decide it wasn't such a bad place after all.

But I couldn't get over the cold faces of all those strangers, sketches of anxiety and woe lit in the greenish glow of the massive fluorescent lights, so gothic they are almost beautiful.

“When you take that escalator down and look at those faces, get hit with all of that anxiety, all of the worry, it is incredible,'' one of my colleagues said.

One day I was riding out for a Russian class. It was around noon on a Saturday and the city was shaking itself out of sleep as a few early snowflakes skittered down. The Metro car was almost empty.

I sat staring at a young woman across the way. She must have been up all night.

She looked delicate and well dressed. Her head sagged on her neck. Her eyes, heavy with last night's make-up, drooped shut.

She crashed onto the floor and the jolt woke her long enough for her to haul herself back onto the bench, where she promptly fell back into her dreams.

By now everybody in the carriage was staring at the girl, but impassively. A pair of tough-looking men were watching her like wolves.

Anybody could have scooped her off the subway car, taken her away, done anything. Who had abandoned her here?

How long had she been rattling through the tunnels, waiting to sober up? I glanced at the men again.

They were whispering to one another, laughing a little, running their eyes over her slumped body.

Then my stop came up, so I stood and got off. In the end, I was just another face in the crowd, watching, and then moving along.