I dug in my purse for a pen and discovered that the ink had frozen. It was six o’clock in the morning on my last day in Moscow and I stood at the door of the Bolshoi Theatre box office. The box office would open in ten hours and sell forty student tickets to the ballet that evening for less than the cost of a small plastic cup of instant coffee from the vending machine in my dormitory. To improve my chances of getting one of the tickets, I needed to sign The List.
I spent much of my childhood either in a ballet studio, or watching grainy youtube videos of the greatest ballet companies in the world. I had dreamed about seeing the Bolshoi live for years, but it was a dream that I never expected would actually come true, like seeing the inside of Willy Wonka’s mythical chocolate factory.
Regular tickets to the Bolshoi had sold out months before I knew I was coming to Moscow and I had been warned over and over again about the enormous demand for the inexpensive student tickets. A tour guide, several of my professors, and a fellow student who was a Moscow native had all attempted explain The List. Convinced I had misunderstood them, I Googled it and confirmed that there was indeed a formal system for getting these tickets that is enforced by the students themselves.
The List is set up to reward those who show a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of Russia’s artistic heritage. If workers at the Hermitage could protect priceless paintings during the siege of Leningrad and ballet students could perform on a diet of turnip soup after the revolution, the least I could do was stand in the cold for a few hours holding The List.
On the day of each performance, the first student who gets to the box office starts The List and guards it until someone else comes along to add a name and take a turn standing outside in the snowy January weather. You can sign The List until thirty minutes before the box office opens, when it is read out loud by the student who began it. Those who sign the list are given the first spots in the ticket line, in the order in which they signed.
At five o’clock in the morning I had hopped out of bed and ridden the still-quiet metro down to Theatre Square to put my name on The List. I waited for an hour but there was no sign of any list, nor anybody to guard a list that I began myself. But I had come this far. Giving up on my frozen pen, I dug deeper into my purse and found a stubby pencil. In large Cyrillic letters, I printed the transliterated version of my Dutch last name.
I stood for a few more minutes, scanning the shadowy predawn cityscape. The red walls of the Kremlin were barely visible across Tverskaya Street and behind an enormous Christmas tree covered in neon flashing lights. The theatre itself was quiet, but already the immense façade was lit expectantly, ready for the big evening ahead. It was snowing softly and although I was standing at one of the busiest crossings in Moscow, there was no sound and only my own footprints led from the metro station into the square itself. I pulled out my phone to check the time, realized that I was already late for my first class and that the temperature was up to a balmy -8C from yesterday’s -20C. I crumpled my list and shoved it into my pocket as I headed back to the metro station, deciding to let someone else begin it and come back later to sign.
I hurried back to Theater Square that afternoon as soon as my classes finished, with a sandwich in my pocket and wearing many layers of socks under my theatre-going boots. There was a crowd on the previously deserted steps, but I had no trouble finding the girl with The List. I wrote down Фликкэма again and then asked her, in halting Russian, when she had begun it. She told me that she had been there since noon. Then she climbed to the top of the steps and began calling names. All the students lined up in an orderly fashion.
At exactly four o’clock two guards came out of the box office. Instead of letting us in as I expected, they had a leisurely smoke and chatted for several minutes about the size of the crowd and the ballet being performed that night. My toes were numb. Eventually one of the guards motioned for the first five people to enter the citadel. A few minutes later, five more. Finally I was hurried through a metal detector and then I pushed my one hundred ruble note through the slot under a ticket window. The ticket was as large as my two hands, printed on cream colored paper with elaborate lettering. I felt as if I had received a golden ticket to my own dream world.
