BY ARLINE KLATTE | if you dare utter an English word outside Genine's apartment, she will harshly shush you and usher you inside. She doesn't want her neighbors to know she is an American because, she reasons, if they did, they might assume she's affluent, hold her at gunpoint and rob her of all her Western goods. Frankly, I think she's a little paranoid. But for foreigners living in Moscow, this is a normal state.

Consider this story that recently made the rounds in expatriate circles: A Brit answers his doorbell at midnight. He sees a feeble babushka (the Russian word for grandmother) through his peephole. He unbolts his four locks, opens the steel door and is ambushed by two Mafiosi. Depending on the storyteller, varying degrees of torture and robbery ensue.

When our doorbell rang at 3 a.m. the other morning, my incoherent, groggy-yet-urgent words to Jon as he leapt out of bed were: "Don't let any old ladies in."

He ignored me. At the door stood a babushka who was screaming something about her new kitchen and water. As my overwhelmed spouse opened the door, she bustled past him, looking in our closets and peering behind doors. She soon found what she was after: water gushing through the roof into our living room and, subsequently, down into her newly remodeled kitchen.

Typical. It was already spring and the ice guys hadn't come. The ice guys are government employees whose full-time job is to visit all the apartments in Moscow with sledgehammers and destroy the massive icicles that have formed during the winter. We had a frozen lake on our roof and, on this particular spring-like night, it had begun to thaw.

In Moscow, people thrive on hassles, drink entirely too much vodka, smoke a lot of Camel cigarettes, shun exercise and rarely eat lettuce, opting instead for the cheaper alternative: massive Chernobyl-fertilized cabbage. The food is really bad here and the people are surly until you get to know them. But for people who like 3 a.m. surprises, Kafka and the absurd, Moscow rules.

My morning ritual consists of trying to get a ride to work. Moscow has no private cab companies. But capitalism has created a cottage industry for regular folks with cars looking to make an extra ruble. They pull over, and if they happen to like your proposed destination, they'll pick you up and rant about that devil Gorbachev all the way. If they don't feel like going where you're heading, they'll grunt a loud "NYET" and drive off.

The other morning was a minus 20 degrees Celsius morning full of NYETS. (That's about 4 below zero Fahrenheit.) I stood on Moscow's main boulevard, Tverskaya Yamskaya, surrounded by the low-slung gray buildings that create the bleak yet awe-inspiring atmosphere of this place. Faded stencils of comrades Lenin and Stalin still proudly grace the walls of decrepit dwellings. But most have been covered by scaffolding. And that rugged Marlboro cowboy, with his tanned face and deep dimples, has more sex appeal than those old guys. He hovers like a new god, highlighted by those blinding Coca-Cola logos that explode in red and white, the only color on the slate-colored skyline.

Car after car whizzed past, trailed by brown puffs of noxious gas as I feebly stuck out my gloved yet still frozen hand. But then, as happens often in this strange city, my luck quickly and inexplicably changed. I heard the telltale bass-heavy strains of Bachman Turner Overdrive and then saw the lemon yellow 1979 Ford LTD stuttering up Tverskaya like a glorious warm mirage. Usually, I am not this excited to see Boris. That day he was my guru.

While most Muscovites complain about the flight of their brightest compatriots, lured by the promise of the West with its tenure-track positions, paychecks that don't bounce and fabulous sushi restaurants, Boris did it backward. A Russian by birth, Boris survived a harrowing émigré experience at the gawky age of 11 and then something even more treacherous: high school in Ontario. But, he said, there were few prospects for him in Canada.

So at the age of 27 he shipped his prized Ford LTD, complete with its eight-track tape system, and various BTO, Deep Purple and Steely Dan tapes, back to Russia. He proudly calls himself a Canadian and makes jokes about Russians constantly. He spends his weekends working on his car while dressed in his Western uniform: Airmax Nikes, 501 Levi's and a Reebok T-shirt. He has created a fantasy suburban life for himself in the heart of post-communist Russia.

Moscow is full of misfits like Boris -- locals who complain about it constantly but would never think of leaving, and the restless expatriates who want to make an easy buck or, simply, to have an experience. Besides the "new Russians" who strut down Moscow's streets in Hugo Boss suits with a cell phone glued to their ear, there are the foreign new rich here -- Brits, Americans, French, Italians, Irish and loads of Canadians making more money, drinking more alcohol and sleeping with larger quantities of decidedly more attractive women than they could ever hope to bag at home.

Most of these newfound Moscow residents see themselves as teachers. They are the sages coming to convey that urgent and difficult lesson: buy low, sell high. Twenty-three-year-old bankers dine out every night at one of Moscow's ridiculously overpriced restaurants, such as the Gastronome -- an old apparatchick hangout located in the basement of one of Moscow's seven looming, wedding cake-style Stalin structures. Once a month, when the American Chamber of Commerce holds a meeting at the Gastronome's bar, the room is loud with gesticulating Americans, talking excitedly about Coke's amazing presence and McDonald's forays into the bribe-filled world of Russian real estate development. After several men's drinks (whiskey is the liquor of choice) they stumble into the marble-ensconced dining room and feast on $60 portions of bad confit canard and $100 bottles of Gallo burgundy.

They are quite pleased with the way things have turned out. They are generally short, balding, not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-shed types who have escaped their lives as invisible schmucks in Detroit to become respected businessmen in Moscow. They date 7-foot-tall Slavic beauties half their age. They smoke cigars and drink too much. And after 70-hour work weeks, they flock to Moscow's dens of debauchery like the Hungry Duck, a Canadian owned bar. They hurl coasters at each other. They take off their clothes, flaunting shockingly pale torsos, and boogie on the horseshoe-shaped bar as only dull white men can. The room is aflutter with air-guitar-playing CEOs with constipated expressions on their faces. Sundays are spent recuperating. Monday, deal-making starts afresh.

Expats run amok can be spied at various venues. The Starlite Diner is a real old American trailer restaurant and the only eatery in town that stays open 24 hours. It is constantly crowded with foreigners who stop off after work -- around 10 p.m. -- to grab $9 burgers. Starting at 4 a.m. on weekends, the booths are filled with rowdy partiers eating Jalapeño poppers -- lovely concoctions of peppers stuffed with deep-fried cheese -- while the Beach Boys croon over a vintage jukebox. The drunken expats flirt with the waitresses, 16-year-old Russian beauties from the countryside who wear heartbreaking uniforms of barely crotch-covering miniskirts, saddle shoes and tight white cardigans. It's supposed to look like America's heartland in the 1950s. It depresses the hell out of me.

Then, there are those places that male expats interested in exploring their inner old man frequent. These places, such as the famous Metropol Hotel bar, Uncle Guilly's restaurant and the recently renovated Writer's Union, are smoky, woody dens with implied "No Girls Allowed" signs tacked to their doors. At the Metropol, fresh-faced recent college grads recline in the same overstuffed worn leather chairs in which nearly every Soviet leader has also rested and pondered important thoughts. The young expats smoke their Cuban cigars, discussing their merits over those inferior Hondurans, sip $12 mini-shots of Glenfiddich and compare notes on which Moscow video bootleggers can access a month-old episode of "Seinfeld."

In my capacity as a writer for the English-language daily, the Moscow Times, I received a press release for one of the expat circuit's many cigar dinners. It waxed poetic about cigars and czars and returning to a time of civility. Half the country was starving then, and still is, by the way. Of course, I went.

The main promoter of the cigar extravaganza was a dude in his 20s from Arkansas with a Germanic accent -- sort of a German royalty schtick. He spoke at length about the subtleties of smoking a cigar -- how lighting one properly is like getting a woman ready for love. You hold the match under it, let it expand, let the juices start flowing. I quoted this comparison in my article. He called the next day, a wounded publicist. "I thought I was among friends." Think again, and stop talking with that accent.

Western women living in Moscow are also highly successful in the world of business, but less so in the arena of love. Many complain that Western men become obsessed with Russian women, who are very strong and incredibly feminine at the same time. They have not been touched by Western feminism. My friend Olga thinks American women are insane.

"I would love not to work -- to visit museums all day and read my books," she says, her eyes going slightly misty. And if she didn't work, she would spend her time in the high-minded pursuit of culture. I, on the other hand, spend most of my idle time feeling guilty for not working, and then even guiltier for watching reruns of "Flipper" dubbed poorly in Russian as a distraction.

Olga thinks it is the American woman's need to prove herself in the workplace that has led to the downfall of Western womanhood. And she doesn't need some high-falutin' rhetoric to prove her point. "You've emasculated your men," she says. "Why do you think so many American men wear these ponytails and earrings?" Umm, fashion?

As a Western woman living in Moscow, you endure certain inevitabilities. If you sit on some outside stairs or on the sidewalk in front of your apartment, just chatting with friends, smoking a cigarette and minding your own business, you will be accosted by a fierce babushka waggling a finger and admonishing you to stand up, lest your uterus catch a cold. Chairs are OK, but a cold cement seat is akin to asking the universe for quick sterilization.

Of course, the challenges of being an expatriate anywhere are these daily culture clashes. When Boris picked me up on the boulevard, I had just mastered a new Russian phrase: Kak vash lubimi sveert? It translates to that first-grade question: What is your favorite color? I tried it out on Boris. He pondered, scratched his chin, and then let loose an oration about the implications of the color gray.

Where I come from, we ask each other questions all the time, but most of the time, we don't really want to hear the answer. If you ask a Muscovite a question, he or she will take you seriously. "Excuse me," I always want to interrupt, "it's just a question -- it doesn't really mean anything." But this is the greatest lesson about the elusive Russian soul -- everything means something.

For Boris, the return to Moscow is a return to the land of opportunity. That morning, Boris was in a lather about his latest project. He has some friends in Siberia -- a place where the ice guys never come to hack away rooftop icicles because the snow never melts. Boris' friends have found a perfectly preserved frozen mastodon. He is in negotiations to sell it to some obscure university in Idaho. "It's got the meat on it still," Boris said. "You could cut a piece off and barbecue it right there in the snow."

A tiny plastic Canadian flag dangling from Boris' rearview mirror whipped in the wind. The song "Takin' Care of Business," blasted over the eight-track, and I had one of those little moments of enlightenment that keep me here. In a city full of craziness, I feel strangely sane.
May 6, 1997

Arline Klatte was Lifestyles editor of the Moscow Times from October 1995 to February 1997.