Anatomy of a Lie

Last year, I started taking part in a stage show called Tell Me A Story. Six people each get five to seven minutes to tell their story to the audience, where five stories are true and one is a lie. Then all six storytellers come on stage and the audience is invited to ask questions of them, looking for weak points or tricking the liar into giving themselves away. This is a live event so the only way to watch is to come to Heldeke or watch the live stream on the day.

However, I thought it might be fun to look at two of the shows I did, once as a liar and once as a truther, and break down the stories that I chose to tell. In December, I told a true story and not a single person thought I was lying. I was highly disappointed in myself. For January’s show, I was asked to lie and I told the following story. My words on stage, as best as I can recall from my notes, are in bold, with my commentary in not-bold.

I told Cliff, my boyfriend, that I wanted to go to Russia without a visa. “That’s nice,” he said. “Are you coming back?” So I had to explain to him that he had to go with me because someone had to do the driving, which turned out to be the only sensible bit of the whole plan.

I feel like this kind of lie, or rather embellishment, is actually perfectly acceptable for any story. But the truth is that we planned a 10 day trip around Estonia based on a list of places that I wanted to see and that I thought he’d find interesting, including Saatse Boot.

See, Setomaa, the land of the Setos, was torn apart by the Estonian-Russian border in 1920. And there is this small cluster of villages that until recently had only one road leading to them and there’s this one part of Russian territory, known as Saatse Boot, which juts out into Estonia claiming some farmland and a big chunk of this road.

To be fair, I know this was what I meant to say but on stage in the heat of the moment, I’m not sure how well I managed it.

There’s no road access from Russia, so there’s no official border control there. If you follow this road into Russia, the only thing you can do is stay on it until you are out again. And this is totally legal.

One person asked me afterwards whether everything was a lie and I said, well, no, of course not, else I’d have to set the story on Mars. All of this is true.

There’s three very strict rules:

1) You can’t cross the border on foot.

2) You may not stop your vehicle for any reason.

And finally, rule number three, a rule that would only ever need stating in Estonia: you may not enter the territory in search of mushrooms.

Still all true! But now as I’m writing this, that question about whether everything is a lie has me wondering if I could get away with actually making up something up on this kind of scale, talking about a place that doesn’t even exist. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me before.

So we drive down this road and sure enough, there’s a huge yellow and black sign warning us in three languages that we are entering the territory of the Russian Federation. Up ahead were more warning signs: no stopping, no pedestrians. Technically, though, we hadn’t yet entered Russia, so I asked Cliff to pull over so I could take a photograph from the Estonian side.

Now the truth is we stopped well before the border and were extremely aware of our position on the Estonian side of the border. But later, I read an article about this border crossing and, apparently, there are a lot of incidents where people get out of the car to take photographs of the sign without realising that they are already in breach of the rules. Then the Visit Estonia website updated their article on the subject to say that it is prohibited to get closer than 15 metres to the border post. And that got me thinking about the fact that I’d probably broken the law with the photographs that I took.

I stayed away from the grass so no one could accuse me of mushrooming. I took a photo of the signs and then a photo of our car. It was sunny with blue skies and birdsong. I took a photo of the forest. Then I stepped forward for another picture.

This was the most scripted part of the entire story, because I literally turned around on stage, with my back to the audience as I took a photo of the car. When I told Cliff what I intended, he thought it was hard to believe that someone could accidentally cross a border, so I wanted the audience to be disoriented as I did that last step towards them.

There were three wooden shelters hidden in the trees which I had not photographed because I didn’t even know they were there until two Russian border guards came running at me. I held up my hands to show that I wasn’t holding any mushrooms and the faster one, a grey-faced man with dead eyes and a rifle, said some sort of Russian version of “Go ahead, make my day.”

I messaged a friend of mine to ask if Russian border guards carried gunss and she said yes, of course! But, she said, not on hips, but rather on the chest. She explained that it is much easier to carry around a 3-point belt attached to a rifle which allows a hands-free option and yet still very easy to use the rifle if needed. This didn’t make it into the script but I was happy that I was ready for any questions.

I said “I don’t speak Russian” in Estonian, which was not very helpful but he barked for the other guy, who looked about 12 but did, in fact, speak English.

We are now deep in fantasy land here. All I actually knew was that there were people who had been arrested here, both tourists and locals, and that they were fined and taken to a border station called Krupa.

He said I needed to show my ID, which was in my pocket, and then he asked to see my passport, which was not. Why not? Well, I wasn’t planning to travel across countries, I told him, and dead eyes just looked at me and I said “I mean, I didn’t plan on passing a border control” which wasn’t actually helping y case.

Just for the record, for the actual trip where we drove down to Setomaa, my passport was in my handbag.

The 12-year-old with a gun said “You like crossing borders!” and I just said “Um?” Because, ok, yes, it’s true. The guy shook his head and said “You! Come with us!”

I called out to Cliff and say “Don’t get out of the car,” and he says “I’m not coming out of the car, Sylvia.” Like, he’s already reversing to get the hell out of there.

This is a classic Cliff move, even if it didn’t happen. For the previous shows, I didn’t tell him what story I was going to tell, so that he could be surprised and enjoy watching. But this time, I did tell him, to make sure he was happy with his portrayal. (He was)

One thing to notice here is the change in tense; I shift mid-sentence from past tense to present tense. I wanted to add a stronger sense that I was telling it exactly as I remembered it and so as we shifted into pure fiction, I used present tense to keep it from sounding too much like a story.

So we walk through the woods — still beautiful by the way — to this old jeep where dead eyes signals me to get in and they take me deeper into Russia.

I’m not going to get into any detail because actually, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

It’s the first time that it occurred to me that I should have the embassy number saved on my phone. “Hi, this is Sylvia. I’m in a Russian prison but I swear to god I wasn’t mushrooming.”

I was super proud of myself for that callback to the mushrooming.

I have no idea where we are going and what is going to happen. I’m not understanding anything they say anyway and it doesn’t seem like we’re headed for Siberia, so I stare out the window thinking “Wow, this is Russia.”

Truth: It is very unlikely that I would be this calm.

We pull into this village that looks like something out of Fallout, all cracked roads and peeling paint on the houses, and to some police station where a woman behind a desk shouts at me in Russian until I fall apart and start crying. And she says something else and someone shouts “English!”

And she says to me, “Your man is coming to pick you up” and then, with a scathing look up and down, “I hope he has a credit card.” And there’s a cell there but she just points me at a wooden chair pushed up against the wall and goes back to her paperwork.

I couldn’t find out anything about Krupa and it isn’t marked on Google maps, even though I found two mentions of people being taken to Krupa after being arrested for border violations. It is probably one of the abandoned Seto villages so I just made up a description. The woman is mainly there to keep me from being the only female but she’s also one of my favourite characters in the story.

So meanwhile, Cliff drove straight to the closest Estonian police station to say “Some Russians appear to have abducted my girlfriend but I think she probably deserved it.”

I think this was the biggest laugh of the whole story. Certainly, I remember feeling confident that the audience was completely with me by now.

And they were not surprised. They were like “Taking photos at the border?” and he said, “Yep,” and they said, “Yeah, that’s the ninth one this year.” All tourists. This is the migrant crisis of Setomaa.

There’s a great newspaper story about an Estonian woman who insists on crossing into the forest for — yes — mushrooming but I had to choose between her and the migrant crisis of Setomaa and I decided I liked the idea of it being all tourists. The ninth one this year, however, truthfully reflects the number of border transgressions at Saatse Boot in 2019.

So they tell him he needs to go to the border station at Krupa to pick me up and that there will be a fine. And Cliff says, they said it like, “Well, you know, if you actually want her back,” like he might be able to just leave me in Russia.

Note that I’ve now clarified that the police station is a border station. I couldn’t have known when I got dropped off there but it’s reasonable that Cliff would know and later tell me. Really, I’m hoping not to get caught out by anyone who knows the place.

And he did, he drove to the border station, which is where I am, sitting in front of an angry Russian woman who occasionally looked up and glared at me as if daring me to cry again.

Did you notice that I am quietly shifting back into past tense while telling Cliff’s story? I was relaying what he told me so it’s less immediate and I wanted to end up back where I started.

**And he paid 600 euros to spring me free and said “So, you’ve had your trip to Russia and your birthday present, all in one.” **

I couldn’t actually find much information on what the fine might be so I chose a number that was high enough to cause a fight but not so high that people would be shocked. One person said that my naming the actual amount of the fine is what convinced her that it was a true story.

I wanted another line there, maybe a second callback to the mushrooms, but I was worried about going over time and also, I didn’t want it to sound too pat. So I just ended it there.

When we all returned to the stage for the questions and answers, I was ready to offer details about the Russian police and at the same time mindful that for a true story, I needed to be ready to say “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.” But then, not a single person asked me a question. The audience asked a few questions and then dragged one poor young woman over the coals whose story, I thought, was most obviously true.

When it came to the vote as to who was lying, friends of mine, a Russian couple, raised their hands. Technically they didn’t have any inside information; however I have decided that they don’t count, because no one else voted me a liar that night. At the end of the show, when I stepped forward to admit that my story was a lie, one voice actually cried out “What? No!” It made me so happy, because I think that with a good story, people want to believe it, so it was actually a disappointment to discover it wasn’t true.

I had already agreed to do the next show and this time I was going to tell the truth. My goal was clear: I needed to get as many people as possible to accuse me of lying. By now, I knew that a truth disguised as a lie was an entirely different type of story.