С легким дымом

In looking for a theme to unite the long, mute past two-and-a-half weeks, I have finally lighted upon a single word into which I can condense my experiences. That word is “shirtlessness.”

I will soon get to why this is so appropriate, but in the meantime, I have a pretty extensive backlog of jokes to share.

It is the 1980s, and the Soviet General Secretary has just died. The funeral is taking place at Red Square.
A man walks up and says, “I have a pass,” and he is admitted.
A second man walks up and says, “I have a pass,” and he is admitted.
A third man walks up. “I have a season pass.”

It is 1937, and Stalin’s repressions are in full swing. A husband and wife sleep guardedly in their apartment. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the patter of feet on the staircase. A sharp ringing of the doorbell, accompanied by a loud voice. Neither dead nor alive, the husband goes to open the door. Within a minute, he comes back:
“Don’t worry,” he says, “it’s just a fire.”

A group of Soviet tourists is visiting Italy, and they are asking their tour guide how to say various phrases.
“How do you say, ‘How do I get to the hotel?’”
“And what about, ‘How much does this gelato cost?’”
One intrepid tourist asks, “How would you say, ‘Please provide me with political asylum?’”
“What the hell would you need to say that for?!” asks another tourist viciously.
“Oh, nothing! I just wanted to know which one of us is from the KGB.”

What do you call a Soviet musical quintet returning from abroad?
A quartet.

“Good morning, Mr. Brezhnev!” said the sun to Brezhnev in the morning.
“Good morning!” replied Brezhnev.
“Good day, Mr. Brezhnev!” said the sun in the afternoon.
“Good day!” replied Brezhnev.
In the evening, the sun remained silent.
“Why don’t you say anything, Mr. Sun?” asked Brezhnev.
“Go fuck yourself!” said the sun. “I’m in the West now!”

One policeman asks the other:
“What do you think about our regime?”
“The same as you do.”
“Then it is my duty to arrest you!”

The latest brown count: 38

Now, back to the narrative of the times. As I was saying, I have lighted on the word “shirtlessness” not only because it describes the state that I have been in for about 60% of the last two weeks, but also because it illuminates so many of the cultural experiences one has when Moscow is roasting in the hottest weather in its history (it reached 100 for the first time ever this past Thursday). In short, the history of the past few weeks is, more or less, the history of dealing with the heat.

The Russian’s fashion sense, a strange animal even without the heat, has actually become less strange with it. Normally, if you are a Russian girl or young woman, you will dress more or less in the Western style up until age 30 or 35 or so, with the caveat that you will wear hooker-heels as often and as gaudily as possible. The heat’s effect on this phenomenon has been most salutary, making the frightening heals and slinky dresses impractical and bringing on skimpier summer attire. Past age 35, the irrevocable and fascinating progression to babushka-hood begins. You start wearing matching blouses and long skirts. You get fat. You wear your hair shorter, and when it starts to gray, you dye it in some unnatural color, especially ruby red. By 70 or 80, you revel in your stooped grayness, and eagerly await the moment that a young man will help you with your unnecessarily large bag.

If you’re a working man in the summer, you will wear a light-colored, short-sleeved button-down collared shirt, with our without tie. Your pants will by light, preferably imitation linen. Your belt and shoes may, but do not have to, match. Ideally, your belt is imitation crocodile, in white, cream, or tan; brown will do. Your shoes are ideally white or tan leather, pointy, with little holes in them “for ventilation”; leather sandals—with socks, of course—are also acceptable. There is a 40% chance you will have a mullet. The heat has caused your shirt to go unbuttoned, even on the metro and the street. If you are younger than 20 or still in school, you might wear very short swimming trunks with bath sandals, shirt optional (there’s your shirtlessness for you). If you fancy yourself really fashionable, you’ll have a white t-shirt, light shorts, white shoes, and very thin white socks, which will come up a third of the way to your knees. Your chance of having a mullet, if under 20, approaches 60%.

At home, in sweltering apartments, all bets are off. Men strip down to their boxers, and women, well, they suffer. When V. Sr. and Jr. and I all sat in the same room naked but for our undies, talking Soviet cinema, I knew I had successfully assimilated.

Anyway, enough of that descriptive detour. Where I last left you, I told of our trip to Sasha’s dacha, and all that that entailed. The following week was pretty ordinary, so I will fast-forward to the next weekend, during which I went to O. and V. Sr.’s dacha.

We traveled in O. and V. Sr.’s Lada Niva, which looks as if it was built circa 1980, but is in fact only 6 years old (unfortunately, it also smells as if it were built in 1980). The ride there was not eventful, except in that the air through the windows was fresh, the backseat cramped, and the tape of Ukrainian drinking songs jolly at first, but kind of annoying the third time around. We reached the dacha around 1 AM (driving in the daytime would have been far too hot, and would be asking for trouble with traffic jams), to be greeted by the sound of crickets and the aroma of forest.

Their dacha is a rather different, more serious, more chaotic affair than Sasha’s. Sasha’s was a little country cottage, made of quaint makeshift materials (recall the old train cars), with a tidy little yard on one side with flowers and whatnot. Not so the host family’s. The plot is at least twice as big, and so is the house on it—which they built with their own hands a few years ago to replace the ancient wooden structure that had stood there since the 1950s and had started to fall apart. There is a huge garden plot, where they grow flowers, yes, but all kinds of fruits and vegetables too. Black currant, red currant, gooseberry, blackberry, raspberry, cucumbers, potatoes, dill, horseradish, etc. etc. This is V. Sr.’s pride and joy, and he works on it whenever he possibly can.

The next morning (or rather early afternoon), I was woken by O., who announced that the neighbors were going for a swim, and that I should get in on the action. I did not refuse. The neighbors were a jolly bunch; the husband had some pretty kooky theories on the “inevitable” hyperinflation and eventual political collapse that America was in for, thanks to the current financial crisis. When I asked him why it was so inevitable, he treated me to a long response that I didn’t understand—perhaps because my Russian is inadequate, perhaps because he was crazy. His father-in-law seemed to be of the latter opinion, but then again he seemed to think that “no negro should ever be president of the US.”

After this delightful excursion, I returned to the dacha to do some nice lying down, followed by some eating. This strenuous regimen, which was repeated a few times, was broken only at 10 PM, when the neighbor, Vladimir a.k.a. Vovan a.k.a. Vovets came over to play cards with us. We played a brilliant Russian card game called tysyacha or “thousand” for several hours. My amateurishness was apparent. The highlights of this little session were the part where a wasp stung me and V. Sr. used vodka to disinfect it/ kill the pain; the part where V. Sr. reverted to baby-talk to “stun” his opponents in the game; and most of all the part (actually the whole evening) where the men (including me) collectively decided to remove our shirts, due to the heat.

The next day was much of the same, minus the swimming. I got to see V. Sr. in his garden-tending element. He picked the vast majority of the cucumbers on the vine, and spent hours sorting his collection of berries (mainly black and red currants). The cucumbers are absolutely delicious, and I’m sure if I were more partial to the taste of black currants, I would have liked those too. But V. absolutely relishes the task—I think much more so than he relished the fruit of his labors.

Why, exactly, the obsession with gardening on the dacha? The answer is… a history lesson! In rough times (which were frequent during Soviet years), when produce was short, a dacha garden patch could supply almost half of a family’s annual consumption. Think about this for a second: the growing season around Moscow is 3.5 or 4 months—basically shit for agriculture. The soil is so-so, the sunlight is way subpar; the amount you can produce is rather limited. But what little a small plot produced could produce half of what you ate. In a whole year.

At first the Soviet government frowned upon this form of private production, but by the mid-1950s they had to acknowledge the reality that it was more efficient to let people feed themselves sometimes. In the early 1990s, which were particularly hard, people literally survived off of their dachas. My boss at work, who is from the rather chilly city of Perm, says that for two whole years (1990-1992), his family ate mainly the potatoes (nothing else would grow) that they produced on the dacha. He still managed to be like 6 foot 4, so no long-term harm done, but still.

Anyway: that Sunday night, O.’s mom, the babushka of drunken birthday party fame, arrived for a week of relaxation on the dacha. I talked with her about the Soviet times, and about her fondness for attending Youth Communist League rallies back in the 1940s. She seems not to think Stalin was a tyrant, although her reasoning was a tad strange. “Of course we were afraid. My father was in the army and all army officers were being rounded up. They would invent reasons to arrest you. But the country needed the slave labor of everyone who was arrested.” Ah, ok, I get—okay cool Stalin, you’re forgiven.

We left the dacha at midnight, hoping to escape both the heat and the traffic, but ended up getting caught in both and not returning home until 3 AM. But no matter.

The memory of the rest of the week is a bit hazy—I’m sure I did something interesting, but it escapes me presently—until Friday, on which day I threw a party: to be specific, it was an indiyskaya vecherinka, or Indian dinner party for my fellow ANE kids and teachers and all, for which I spent the whole day shopping and cooking in 99-degree heat (infuriatingly, the supermarket where I bought my produce, which is located in the largest mall in the Moscow city limits, does not accept credit cards). In the end, it was a wonderful, if rather cramped and sweaty, affair. I resisted every urge to go shirtless. O. enjoyed the sauce for my paneer dish (even though there was no paneer), but V. stayed away. Also, word to the wise: if you need to cook Indian in Moscow, avoid the shop “Индийские специи” (Indian Spices) in Moscow if you can. It’s really damn expensive.

The next day (Saturday), we all left for a weekend trip to the towns of Vladimir and Suzdal, which are located in the so-called “Golden Ring” of historical towns to the north and east of Moscow. The non-Georgia kids were actually not supposed to be on this trip, but thanks to me and Eric from Stanford, who went to the ANE International office and said “yo, why are we not on this trip,” we got on the trip.

After meeting at the ungodly hour of 8 AM at ANE, we hopped on a minibus, which took a good 5 hours to get to Vladimir, thanks to traffic (incidentally, its driver was also named Victor—see my third installment). This was frankly fine by me—I caught up on my sleep and then we played a game of Botticelli. Shirtless. It was fun, except for the part where Kostya (see previous posts) creepily put his camera on video mode and panned slowly back and forth across the bus several times.

By the time we got to Vladimir, it was early afternoon. The Georgia kids stayed in a hotel; we hangers-on (there were 7 of us at this point) found a “hotel” called the Gostinitsa Uyut, which I will translate loosely as “Comfort Inn.” Nothing particularly wrong with the place, except, shall we say, it was immediately apparent why you were paying only 400 rubles (about $13) per night.

We toured Vladimir in a grand total of 1.5 hours, which included the two absolutely gorgeous 12th-century cathedral churches there, made of limestone, an extremely costly material at the time. I suppose they paid for it in the end—while the Vladimirites were building really expensive churches, Ivan the Terrible in Moscow decided he wanted to spend his time taking over Vladimir.

Okay, well I’m bending the truth a little, but trust me, limestone + Italian architects = California-style budget problems.

After touring these churches and not much else, we suddenly found we had another 16 hours in Vladimir with nothing to do. This was frustrating, because:

1) There isn’t much else to do in Vladimir
2) It was hot
3) The hotel was nowhere close
4) There is nothing to do in Vladimir
5) Thunderstorms. No shelter. Wet. And then hot again.
6) We could have just moved on to Suzdal, which is a more interesting town, and maybe seen some of it before the even greater heat predicted for the next day
7) There just isn’t jack shit to do in Vladimir

We ended up going to the Georgia kids’ cheesy hotel, eating in the cheesy restaurant, and dancing in the INCREDIBLY cheesy “club” there. However, I am proud to say that we, good American students and citizens of the world, introduced the club-going population of Vladimir to the Macarena, which, when played, was greeted with incomprehension by the natives, who gladly received our new-fangled Western moves, against which the stolid Soviet moves just couldn’t compete on the open market.

While some stayed (and even swam afterward in the toxic-looking waters of the Klyazma River), I was one of those who elected to return to dear old Uyut and call it a night. The next morning, after a surprising excellent sleep, we made our way to Suzdal, where it was just really, really hot. But no matter. We visited the Museum of Wooden Architecture, where the highlight was actually an impromptu performance by a Russian folk duet. We then saw some old-ass and nice-ass churches, and heard some more awesome-ass liturgical music (I almost bought their expensive-ass CD).

Here’s a fun game: everywhere above where I’ve suffixed “ass” to an adjective, instead see what it sounds like when you put the hyphen after it, thus prefixing it to the following noun. It has a pretty amusing ass-effect.

After this, we tried Suzdal’s most famous product, namely medovukha—or mead. Yes, Virginia—they still make fermented honey in Suzdal, and it tastes really quite good. I bought a liter (for really too much money); around this time, many of us decided to go for a dip in the little stream running through town. Basically, this was an incredibly good decision. We went to a grocery store and bought some cheap food for lunch, made a picnic on the riverbank, and then went for a jolly dip in the gently flowing water, with our feet caressed by thick mud and our mouths treated to the taste of floating rivery plant matter. The water was warm, like a pool, and it was here that we Westerners made our second contribution to the socio-cultural life of the inhabitants of Vladimir Oblast: the game of Marco Polo.

After this, we got back on the minibus for the long and inevitably bare-chested ride home, punctuated only by a stop for water and ice-cream (and some pissing in the field).

I will now fast-forward to the next event of note, which took place on Tuesday.

Now, I have tried so far in this account to emphasize those experiences which best illuminate and reflect the culture of this large, strange country in which I find myself. Well, everything that has hitherto been written simply pales and shrivels in comparison to what comes next (critical note: this is foreshadowing).

You have heard my rants about Russian rudeness and dourness; you have heard of their strange fashion sense. All of these strange inhibitions disappear in exactly one place: the banya. This is also the place where the theme of shirtlessness becomes, to borrow some academic jargon, an inadequate descriptive tool.

To translate the word banya as “sauna” would not quite capture it. In a sauna, as I understand, you delicately get into some towel thing and sweat civilly with your fellow victims. In a banya, the experience hasn’t started until everyone strips down naked in front of each other. If some of you are clothed, it’s weird. If you know someone’s naked, but you can’t see them, it’s weird. If you can see them and everybody is in their birthday suits, it’s a banya.

My theory on the banya and why people there are so friendly simply has to do with awkwardness. You are all naked, and many of you are old and fat. It’s a bit awkward. If you don’t embrace it, it will be super awkward. The result is the dropping of one’s guard and the forming of manly ties between one and all. The banya has the feeling of a gentlemen’s club, with a mandatory dress code of very, very casual.

After stripping down into sweet, liberating nothingness (except sandals—this is important) and perhaps having some preliminary drinks (in our case, water to keep us hydrated; for most others, vodka or beer) and collecting your bunch of birch twigs, you go and do some bathing in a row of open shower stalls. Then, nice and wet, you go into the steam room, which is 90 degrees Celsius (194 Fahrenheit) at the entrance, i.e. the coolest point; the temperature next to the oven is 10-20 degrees Celsius hotter (i.e. above boiling point, or 212 degrees F). Oh yeah. It’s frigging hot.

As if this were not masochistic (and somewhat homoerotic) enough, you then proceed to engage in the activity that separates the banya from the mere sauna—the wheat from chaff, if you will: the old, sweaty Russian men from the wussy, ninny, not-as-sweaty Finnish boys. You whip yourself, and more importantly, one another, with birch twigs. And you know what? It feels great. The Russians swear it opens your pores and releases your toxins. I see no reason to doubt them. As you do this, some jolly naked dude throws scented water into the oven, which upon evaporation produces a lovely scented steam—in our cases, if I’m not mistaken, it was mint. After the steam room, you go out and promptly jump into a cold pool, which feels really, really good, and just lounge there for a bit. You then, quite literally, rinse and repeat for up to two hours.

All this time, you are surrounded by chatting fat men—in our case, curious as to where we were from and sharing their thoughts about America, the banya, etc. etc. You barely notice the distended stomachs and dangling whatsits. One old Russian fellow asked to know which of us was the strongest—this was of course Jace, whom he proceeded to lead off, whither we knew not. He emerged some minutes later with the news that the man had given him a thorough massage, and even walked on top of him, before announcing, “now—we are of the same blood.”

We left the banya feeling absolutely fantastic and very, very lazy, and walked a bit before going home. The rest of the week was not as eventful, except for seeing Inception (in Russian) with Eric on Wednesday and a wonderful picnic on Thursday on the occasion of our last day of classes (this was the hottest day in Moscow history, by the way, but with clouds and wind, it didn’t feel it). That night, Daniel, who was to leave Moscow the next day, and I went to Gorky Park and sat for a while at Chaikhona No. 1, a cool Uzbek-style café on the Moscow River, where between our sitting next to each other (to hear each other better, I swear), ordering identical strawberry milkshakes, splitting a tiny appetizer, and using the same napkin, we must have looked quite the cute homosexual couple.

Later we were joined by Sasha and Gelya, with whom we walked Moscow and talked for literally the whole night. When we dropped Dan off at his hostel, it was already 3:30 or 4; we then decided to take refuge at Arkady’s for a bit, since Arkady basically never sleeps. We sort of did nothing/ napped there for an hour in order to wait for the metro to reopen, which it did at 5:30 AM. I was in bed shortly before 7.

After this, there is not much to relate of the weekend. I shopped (twice) at Izmailovsky Market and visited Ostankino palace with Dima, one of Marino’s friends, as well as meeting up for dinner with Ian, also from Harvard. But in the last couple of days, my parents and grandparents have come to Moscow! And that, I will leave for my next post.

From smoky, crushingly hot, awfully India-like Moscow—до свидания!