Early, much too early the morning after my arrival in St. Petersburg, Igor bangs on the door of the apartment he had arranged for me near the metro stop Bolshevikov. I nearly sleep through the din, mistaking his knock for the sound of the crows landing on the tin roof over the apartment balcony.
“Don’t say any words,” Igor says when I open the door. “I am tired also. Just want to fall down.”
His T-shirt reads Soul Survivor. He looks about like I feel.
I have a dim recollection of the night before: arriving in Petersburg from Toronto, Igor greeting me with a bottle of vodka (brand: Green Mark; slogan: Fresh Vodka!), going to eat at the nearby restaurant Peking/Tokyo in a building called Jewelry Karat (where Igor ate spoonfuls of wasabi as chasers), stumbling back to the apartment, finishing the vodka, Igor leaving at some point in the night to retrieve his stuff for our trip to the Black Sea …
“Make way for the Red Dog,” he says. He leads in a rolling red suitcase that he bought for ten dollars in Egypt. It has a compass in the handle. The suitcase clunks onto the floor and he throws open the zipper. I pack my things on top of his things: diving fins, a volleyball signed by all the guys he played beach volleyball with in Egypt, two pairs of footwear, namely his white leather wingtips and flip-flops.
Another bag is stuffed with food that Igor’s mom cooked for us. I peel away the aluminum foil from a chicken breast and breakfast.
“I need to get sunscreen,” I say after adding my stuff to the Red Dog.
“Goddamn it,” he says. As we will see, Igor would prefer sunburn blistering his entire body, skin irradiated, to broadcasting the weakness that is the wearing of sunscreen.
In St. Petersburg, the weather is seven degrees Celsius and raining. The sky is white with low grey clouds. The Black Sea coast we’re heading to promises thirty degrees in the shade. This is the start of the busy Russian resort season, and the train should be packed. For now, we wear fall jackets and carry umbrellas. In terms of weather, there is very little differentiating this June morning in Russia from, say, a March one in Toronto.
The idea for the trip came together on the spur of the moment.
The world was in a global economic crisis. Igor and I were both in crisis too.
Six months ago, Igor had been the manager in an upscale downtown café called the Atrium, where he’d worked for several years and where he made a decent paycheque. But the economic crisis put the Atrium out of business. Unemployment in Russia was skyrocketing. No one was hiring in St. Petersburg at all, especially in the service sector. Restaurant after restaurant, café after café, bar after bar—empty and going out of business. His engagement to his fiancée was on again and off again, sometimes his call, sometimes hers.
While I had a job teaching creative writing at the University of Toronto, Yulia, who was then my wife, had asked for a separation. She was visiting her family in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk this summer. For the first time in ten years of travelling to Russia, I arrived there unmoored. The writing program I had worked with since 1999, the same one that led me to Igor, had ceased operation the summer before the crisis; the ever-increasing bribes and the strengthening ruble had finally made it unviable.
Igor’s uncle Vova lived in the resort town of Gelendzhik. Uncle Vova was the identical twin brother of the biological father that Igor had never met. Uncle Vova agreed that we could stay with him, so we decided to go there together for a week, relax, collect our wits. When we returned, so the plan went, I would sit in the apartment at metro Bolshevikov and write while Igor would restart his job search. Surely the unemployment situation, our relationships, the economy, Russia, the world, would get better again soon …
At the nearest grocery store, we pick up sunscreen and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, a gift for Igor’s aunt. (For Igor’s uncle, I have brought along a bottle of Canadian rye from Pearson dutyfree.) In North America, the sunscreen would price out around five bucks, the big, decorative box of Rocher, twenty. Here, the sunscreen is twenty and the Rocher dirt cheap. An inversion, I assume, of supply and demand.
We stop at Bar Bunker for hair of the dog. The bar is full by ten a.m. on this Saturday morning. Everyone seems pretty drunk already, but this is to be expected of the ten a.m. Bar Bunker set. We order two shots of vodka and two beers. An old man comes in, and since there are no spots on the benches, he wrestles with a folding chair, but he cannot seem to open it. Finally he gives up and leans against the wall, sipping from a glass of vodka in one hand, eating a piece of black bread with the other.
We take the metro to the Moskovsky train station.
At the station, we sit in the café. We order chicken kebabs with prunes and buckwheat. Then we stock up on the final necessities: ten beers, bread, bananas.
Igor briefs me on the most important aspect of Russian train travel. “On the train, everyone is turning on the imagination. A lot of shit, man. How cool they are. This is the train. Everyone is always lying in the train. It’s like, when you want to get away from yourself, try out a new reality.”
Trying out a new reality sounds pretty good to both of us right about now.
We board and squeeze down the tight corridor to our coupe. For a couple of middle-class dudes, we have middle-class seats. That is, we’re not in the platzkart, the communal, open sleeper car, and we’re not in the “lux” singles, but we have a coupe with four beds, two upper and two lower, that we’ll share with two other passengers. The coupe is essentially a walk-in closet with two sets of bunk-style, person-sized shelves, a window, and a small table in the middle.
Igor is hoping that our coupe-mates aren’t children or old ladies. “If it’s going to be old ladies, they are going to fuck our brains out,” he says. “They are going to look at us while we drink the beers. ‘Bad boys! Bad boys!’ If kids, the same shit.”
Igor intentionally bought lower-bunk tickets as a strategy to avoid children. Parents won’t buy the higher beds for kids, he says, in case they roll out. So you occupy the two lower bunks and it’s an automatic no-kid coupe. Once, riding the train to Abkhazia to spend the summer with his grandparents, a young Igor rolled out of a top bunk, smacking his head on the table.
“The only problem with the lower place is that people are sitting on our seats in the beginning,” he explains. “If you get lower seats, it means that it’s not your own. It means the guy from higher up has the right to sit on your place. It’s so funny to explain all this shit to you. And it’s funny for me too, because as I’m explaining, I am understanding, this is real bullshit.”
Each car has its own attendant. Our attendant brings linens, mattress pads, and pillows. The train has a built-in radio. Igor reaches for a white plastic knob above the window and turns up the volume. A crackling speaker plays, “I am leaving for the B-B-B-B-B-Black Sea …”
I lie across my person-sized shelf, thinking I might sleep. We have a 48-hour train ride there, a week in Gelendzhik, and a 48-hour train ride back.
“My yedem za positivom!” Igor cries. Creative translation: “We’re going to get our positive on!”
“My yedem za positivom!” I repeat.
Ten years earlier, Igor had taught me the first Russian phrase that I ever learned by heart. We were hanging out at an outdoor beer garden with his friend Big Al, a cook at the time in a fashionable downtown restaurant decorated like the inside of a submarine, complete with porthole windows looking out on fish-filled aquariums. The beer garden was in a little semicircular park on Kazanskaya across from the Kazansky Cathedral. By “beer garden,” I mean that there were a few plastic chairs, a rickety plywood kiosk around a keg of Baltika—the Russian Budweiser—and an unhappy-looking twenty-something girl serving plastic cups of beer and squid jerky.
We sat there for hours every night. The only problem was that there wasn’t a bathroom. Some Russian men had begun improvising, going in the space behind the plywood kiosk. For a day or two, I walked back to my dorm down the street when I had to go, but it took a long time, and eventually I figured, well, all the Russian men pee back there, so I will too. But—and this is an important lesson to learn about Russia—some things are okay for Russians and not so okay for foreigners.
One night, unhappy-looking twenty-something girl serving plastic cups of beer and squid jerky shouted at me when I returned from a pit stop behind the kiosk to our lawn furniture, where Igor and Big Al were cracking up.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said, ‘This fucking foreigner pees behind my kiosk every night, and he doesn’t understand a word of Russian,’“ Igor said.
“I can say some words,” I said. “Hello. Privet. Thank you. Spasibo. Goodbye. Poka. Excuse me. Izvinitye. Beer. Pivo. Potato with mushrooms. Kartoshka s gribami.”
“Next time you go, she will yell at you again. Don’t worry what it means—it’s not a compliment, for sure. Just tell her back,” Igor whispered, “‘Ty ochen krasivaya.’“
I repeated it. They corrected me. We spoke in low voices and drank more Baltika. “What does it mean?”
“Just say it,” Igor said.
“No way I’m saying it without knowing what it means.”
“It’s nothing bad, just, ‘You’re very beautiful.’“
“You’re very beautiful?”
As I refilled my bladder, I repeated the sounds of the phrase to myself, and I considered that I had no way of verifying if in fact Ty ochen krasivaya meant “You’re very beautiful.” It could mean something terrible, but the sound was crisp and clean. I watched several Russian men disappear behind the kiosk, and she didn’t say anything to them. And so I became slightly, drunkenly indignant.
I went behind the box, and as I returned, she shouted at me again. I turned and calmly delivered my line. She went silent. I could see her confusion as she wondered whether she’d heard me correctly. I repeated, “Ty ochen krasivaya.” She blushed and smiled. Igor and Big Al fell out of their plastic chairs. And from then on, I could pee behind the kiosk without getting yelled at.
When I returned to the United States after that summer, I immediately enrolled in Russian classes. And now, after many years, I read well enough but still speak poorly. Igor cringes. “Your Russian hurts my ears,” he cries. So we mostly speak Ruslish.
Blue, ruffled curtains shade the train window and a little net is attached to the wall over each bed for pocket stuff. Igor throws open the Red Dog. He strips down to his underwear and changes into a navy-striped wife-beater, shorts, and flip-flops. Then he pops out to smoke. I peer into the hallway and note that everyone on the train has, like Igor, instantly changed into house wear. People crowd the corridor in slippers and pyjamas or nightgowns, lining up for tea at the end of the car in front of a massive steel samovar built into the wall.
Igor returns and a waitress comes through selling hot dogs from a cart. Igor talks with her for a while. I don’t really catch it all. She smiles and flirts and he flirts back. She has long black hair and heavy blue eyeshadow.
I ask him, “Does it take so long to decline a hot dog?”
“The problem,” he says, “in Russian, if you are saying no, you need to say a lot of words.”
We wait for our coupe-mates to show up. But they never do, and suddenly the train is rolling, half empty.
Before we boarded, Igor kept saying, “I am waiting only to fall on the train and sleep.” But now he says, “We were drinking a lot and not sleeping, and still I have some spryness.” Spry is one of his favourite English words, picked up from one of his favourite English-language films, Bad Santa.
So instead of falling down, he invites his new friend, Sergey, whom he met just a few moments ago smoking between the train cars and whom he already calls by the diminutive Seryozha, to join us.
“This is the theme, as I told you,” Igor says. “In the train, you are becoming friends and all this shit.”
Before we are even out of the station, Seryozha and his wife, Masha, are drinking beer in our coupe. Seryozha brings a bottle of Golden Pheasant and Masha a plastic Baggie of smoked string cheese. We finish the first beers and pop open seconds and then thirds. I devour Masha’s string cheese, a fatty, processed Gouda-type product called chechil.
Seryozha and Masha are vague about what they do. They tell us they work in security and that they both served in the military. They do not look like security services types. Seryozha is missing his left front tooth and the right front tooth is mostly black. He is a tall, stocky dude, with one of those broad but firm beer bellies some Russian men cultivate. He wears a shirt that reads Don’t fuck my brain. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again. Both are probably in their early forties. Masha has thick curly hair. She is squat and doe-eyed with freckles. We ascertain that we are on the same train with Sergey and Masha coming back from Gelendzhik in nine days.
“Jeff is a famous Canadian actor,” Igor tells them. “And I am his translator. Maybe you’ve seen some of his movies.” He enumerates a list of made-up and real titles that I have supposedly appeared in, including Bad Santa. Seryozha and Masha are impressed, but they’re sorry, they have not seen any of my movies.
We are having a good little party when, at the first stop, a troika of policemen—the train police, a particularly menacing sort—appear in the doorway to our coupe.
“Aha! What kind of holiday are you celebrating here, people? Passports and tickets.”
Masha and Sergey scurry away. Igor and I hand over our passports. We are both already a little drunk. The cop reading my passport turns it upside down and then hands it to his partner, who looks at me. Clearly neither of them read English.
When they talk, they address only Igor. It is the first time in the ten years I have known him that I have heard him addressed in the formal manner, by his first name and patronymic: “Igor Yurievitch, you are of course aware that it is illegal in the Russian Federation to be drunk in a public place.” Igor blinks. He nods condescendingly. If we piss them off, they might fine us. “This one time we are willing to let you go, but if it happens again, we’ll haul you off the train.”
Igor hangs his head. “Thank you,” he says. He reaches over and slams shut the door of our coupe.
Igor says that beer is not alcohol under Russian law. He says that under Russian law, beer is a foodstuff, and he is right. (This designation has since changed; beer is considered alcohol since 2011.) And furthermore, they didn’t wear their hats, in correspondence with the strict uniform requirements, and they didn’t identify themselves by name as transport police, as they are supposed to, and they didn’t salute, which is also required of them. Lots of people are drunk in public places in Russia. “But you can’t say anything to cops,” Igor says. What we learned is that we need to keep the door to our coupe closed. “If they can’t see us drinking, we are not drinking,” he says.
Sergey and Masha do not return. Igor sulks while staring out the window as the train rolls toward the getting on of our positive.