During the 1990s and the early 2000s, love was the ticket out of Russia for many Russian women. But Russian men didn’t have the currency on the foreign spouse market that their female counterparts had.
The only escape route Igor ever flirted with involved cereal production.
This was in 2002. Igor and his friend Rafik were tapped to be managers at a new British muesli plant set to open in St. Petersburg. The owner of the British plant was a regular at the restaurant, Chaika, where Igor and Rafik were both barmen. The St. Petersburg muesli plant promised to be a good job, but the big perk was the practicum: a month in the UK studying the muesli production facilities there. A practicum meant standing around taking notes, essentially doing nothing—a month’s free vacation abroad. The question of whether to return once he was out of the country was one to be answered later.
The word lovely was the first thing Igor came to hate about the UK. It sounded so beautiful. It had the word love in it. But really, it just meant okay, at best. It meant, in Russian, normalno. And he felt, by the end of the trip, that its overuse in Peterborough said everything that needed saying about the place.
The Sleep Inn sat on the highway next to a gas station with a convenience store. It had a small restaurant serving a daily buffet, but it did not have a bar. From the Sleep Inn, their handler drove them ten minutes along a highway with no shoulder, a route Igor and Rafik understood they’d have to walk from now on, past wide open fields, to the muesli plant.
The director shook their hands, welcomed them, and said, “Okay, who will take the first shift?”
He handed them white coats and white shower caps. “I asked, ‘What for? I don’t have hair,’ “ Igor recalls. He wears a perpetual crewcut. “They said, ‘Anyway, put it on.’“ The director asked their shoe sizes and brought a pair of special white boots, steel-toed with non-slip tread, for Rafik.
“We don’t have your size,” the director said to Igor. “I’ll see what I can come up with tomorrow.”
He walked them around the plant. Introduced them to the guys, Abdul, Jammy, and John, who in turn introduced them to the system. They spent about fifteen minutes studying each position.
Their idea about what they’d come here for and the director’s idea, they quickly realized, were vastly different. Igor and Rafik had imagined strolling around in street clothes, looking over the shoulders of the men working. They imagined studying the construction and schematics of the factory and discussing, over cups of tea, possibilities for the factory they were subsequently to manage in St. Petersburg. They imagined a free trip to the UK and fifteen pounds each per day for meals.
Instead, they found themselves scheduled for twelve-hour consecutive shifts (when Igor clocked out, Rafik would clock in, and vice versa), Igor’s starting early the next morning. They’d work six days on the line for that fifteen pounds per day, alongside other guys making more than eighty per day. “The first shift, they were showing me how. The next shift, I was working,” Igor says. Every three hours they got a twenty-minute break. Then, so they wouldn’t get bored, they’d shift stations, from the mixer man to working the line to filling in the batches of individual fruit and flakes to moisture testing … They would hardly see each other except during the shift change. Every week, they had one free day: Sunday. For the whole month, then, the entirety of their free vacation to the UK, they’d have four days off.
They left the plant, carrying their shower caps and white coats and Rafik’s matching white boots.
They walked back along the highway to the Sleep Inn as the sun was setting on their first full day in the UK. Igor was transfixed by the cars’ headlights. “I think we’ve been trafficked,” Igor said.
Rafik left the road and hopped a small fence. “Are those cherry trees?” he said.
Igor hopped the fence after him. A whole field of cherry trees. They picked and ate them and dropped some into a plastic bag for later.
As they ate, they heard a strange shuffling sound. Rafik’s arm pointed at something in the grass, and it took Igor a moment to make out that it was a rabbit. A small grey rabbit with its back to them, its nose in the air, sniffing, and alert ears. All around them, small spots of fur darted in the same erratic flurry. The field was infested with rabbits.
At the Sleep Inn, they walked through the restaurant and inspected the buffet. “There was a very, very pretty waitress there. But it cost seven pounds per person,” Igor says. They went upstairs to their rooms. Rafik packed two of the four Sleep Inn towels into his suitcase and zipped it up.
“Fuck,” he said.
“What?” Igor asked.
“The maid’s going to come in here tomorrow and see the towels are missing.”
“So take them when we leave.”
“I don’t want to miss my chance.”
Igor thought for a moment. He went to the door and snatched the Do Not Disturb sign. He held it up for Rafik to see, then opened the door, hung it on the knob, and lay on the bed. They both laughed. In the standard Russian hotel, such a simple thing as a plastic sign hung on a door could not possibly keep the cleaning ladies out. “It’s worth a shot,” Rafik said.
When Igor clocked in at nine a.m., there was a pair of cheap black workboots waiting for him. The plastic soles were more slippery on the floor than his sneakers.
Jammy helped him acclimatize to the mixer. “First of all,” he said, “when you on mixer, you the Mixer Man. That’s usually my spot, but you cool. When you on mixer, you take it.”
Mixer Man handled ten-kilo pallets of pure cashews, fifty-kilo bags of coconut, and other obscene volumes of every nut Igor had ever seen (and some he hadn’t), raisins, flakes, and so on. The machine did most of the mixing, but Mixer Man oversaw the quantities and made sure the mixture soaked long enough in the bath before sending it down the line.
“You the man, Igor,” Jammy said to him. “You keep at it like this, I’m gonna convert you to my religion.”
“I am atheist,” Igor said.
“Smoke a ganja, shake a woman. That’s my religion,” he said. “And one other thing: call me Pomi.”
He didn’t quite know what to make of Jammy, but he liked him. And after being told to call him Pomi, Igor and Rafik from then on referred to him as Pomidor, which means “tomato” in Russian. The director they anointed Greedy Bastard.
One of the other guys on the shift was Dirty Johnny. “He was a strange dude,” Igor says. He had thick glasses and hardly spoke, but when he did, Igor couldn’t understand him. He sounded like the Russian voice that dubbed Beavis on Beavis and Butt-Head.
“Don’t mind him,” Pomidor said to Igor. “He eat them rabbits from the field. Done fucked him up.”
“We saw the rabbits.”
“No, man,” he said. He explained that the government had employed some chemical pest control that hadn’t killed the rabbits off but made them all go blind. The field was infested with blind rabbits. “That lad right there”—he pointed to Dirty Johnny—”he hunt them and eat them.”
Rafik showed up about thirty minutes before the shift change and told Igor he needed to consult with him about something. They stepped outside.
“It worked,” Rafik said.
“What worked?”
“The cleaning lady didn’t come in because of the sign. But—I can’t believe it—she left two more towels, and two more rolls of toilet paper.”
“You mean to say she left two more rolls of toilet paper today?”
“Yes.”
Igor digested it for a moment. “It is strange,” he said.
Pomidor suggested that he and Igor get some booze. Igor walked and Pomidor rode his bike alongside him. The Victoria Wine Shop was one of the few places in the city open when Igor’s shift broke.
After they bought some Guinness, they sat for a little while drinking in the courtyard by the liquor store. Igor asked him about UK cops. He had yet to see a police officer since he’d arrived.
“This is our cops,” Pomidor said. He pointed across the courtyard to an object that Igor thought at first was a light post. It had a conical base covered in anti-climbing paint and rings of barbed wire. It curved at the top and ended in a dark tinted-glass sphere.
“What the fuck?” Igor said.
“They are watching, and when seeing something, they are coming.”
Igor smashed his empty Guiness can, dropped it under the bench, and opened another.
“You moving here, then, bro, or what?” Jammy asked.
“I only have four weeks visa,” Igor said.
“Only four weeks visa? Shit, for five hundred pounds I can get you a UK passport. The real deal. Welcome home.”
Igor looked at him. He seemed to be serious. They were silent. He thought about St. Petersburg and the white nights. He thought about difficult times in Russia. He thought about the hours he was working with only one day off on what was supposed to be a practicum in a country that respected its workforce.
Every morning, Igor trudged up the highway. He stopped in the field and picked cherries to supplement his muesli diet. For a moment, when he startled the rabbits, their clouded eyes would meet his before they began darting erratically around, sometimes running into the cherry tree trunks.
And every evening that week, when he returned home after drinking Guinness with Pomidor in the Victoria Wine Shop courtyard, he discovered two more rolls of toilet paper added to the little two-by-two tower Rafik was erecting in the motel room. Rafik’s suitcase had become pregnant with the Sleep Inn towels.
At first, they had assumed that the delivery of two towels and two rolls of toilet paper must be for the whole week, or that someone had made a mistake. After all, they already had two towels—not to mention hand towels and floor mats—and two rolls of toilet paper in the room. But when they switched shifts the next day, Rafik reported that it had happened again: two more towels and two more rolls of toilet paper. They were shocked, and a bit disconcerted. Did the cleaning lady imagine Russian men like them went through two rolls of toilet paper per day? Was it some kind of insult? “Every day, we were sitting and wondering why she is giving us every day two rolls,” Igor says. “Like we are shitting all day.”
By the morning of their first day off, they ran out of soap. Soap didn’t come in near as plentiful a quantity as the towels and toilet paper. They discussed the situation.
“Should we let her in today?” Rafik asked.
“We need the soap,” Igor said.
“We could buy soap. The soap is quite cheap. It is cheaper than the towels.”
“If we can get it for free and get the towels, that is cheaper, though.”
There were other compelling reasons to let her in. The room by now was a real mess.
“It is true. But maybe she is not so generous?”
They thought it over and decided. They had no idea what the woman would do when she discovered two towels where fourteen should be. They removed the Do Not Disturb sign from the door and quickly left.
They walked an hour along the highway into town. They passed by a junkyard and stopped. A friend of Rafik’s in Petersburg who drove a Rover had had the emblem stolen, and he’d asked Rafik to pick him up a new one. The junkyard had one, but they wanted seventy pounds.
The junkyard guy directed them to a bus that would take them around the city. They saw factories and houses. The bus driver told them about a public swimming pool. Two huge pools—one indoor and one outdoor. He told them which stop it was at. When they arrived, they were the only ones there. Just them and lifeguards sitting in the corners. They didn’t have suits, so they went in their underwear.
The lifeguards suggested a cinema nearby. They carried plastic bags with their wet underwear. They had some trouble finding the cinema. Each person they met told them to go in a different direction. One guy said for certain it was just right down there. They went and found nothing. They asked another person who told them absolutely, one hundred percent, it was right back where they’d just come from.
When they finally stumbled across it, they were amazed. Twenty-five screens. The kind of thing that is absolutely typical in and around both Petersburg and Moscow nowadays was to them, at the time, an enormous and exotic technological entertainment marvel. They watched Tom Cruise in Minority Report. They had already seen it dubbed in Russian before they left, but both of them agreed it was cooler in English. In Russian it had been impossible to understand what it was about.
They tried to make the most of their day off, to forget about muesli for a little while. To forget about the fact that they still hadn’t been given their proper food money. To forget about what had become of their great UK vacation. Russians expect to be taken advantage of in their own country, and while it wasn’t necessarily a shock that the British were taking advantage of them, it wasn’t the promise of freedom and fairness and honesty that Igor had imagined.
They’d hoped to take a bus home, but they found that there was no bus going anywhere near the Sleep Inn. Everyone came to the cinema by car.
When they entered their room, they smelled disinfectant and cleaner. The stack of toilet paper stood by the door, still seven storeys tall. Rafik walked into the bathroom. The tile and mirror had been wiped. And new towels hung from the rack. This was what it meant to be in Europe. It meant that even though she now had confirmation they were stealing towels, even though she now understood that the volume of toilet paper she left daily was too much even for such Russian guys as them, she would continue to bring it.
“Pomidor told me he can make UK passport for five hundred pounds,” Igor said.
“You think it’s bullshit?”
“Probably it’s bullshit. But maybe not.”
“Did you get the money for food from the Greedy Bastard?”
“He gave a little.”
“Greedy Bastard. We should be taking notes and we are working like this.”
They lay in their beds. They thought about how, after only one week, they hated the taste of both muesli and cherries. They thought about the possibility of UK passports. And they started to think about how to get their revenge on the Greedy Bastard.
The next morning, they went to the smorgasbord in the Sleep Inn and the pretty waitress took their order. She had an accent, Igor thought, and he asked if she spoke Russian. She was Lithuanian and spoke Russian pretty well. She was there, she told them, with her husband, who was the dishwasher. A scruffy-looking dude with a dark moustache came out of the kitchen carrying a bus tub. “That is my husband,” she said.
Igor drank coffee while Rafik went back to the room for a plastic bag. When he returned, Igor distracted her while Rafik, watching out for her husband, filled the plastic bag with sausages, boiled fish, eggs, and buns. They didn’t have a refrigerator in their room, but they could eat off of it at least for the day.
Then Igor went to the muesli factory for his shift. When he arrived, he asked the Greedy Bastard for their food money again.
“Oh, shoot, Igor, I only have credit cards on me right now. Here’s enough for a couple days. I’ll give you the rest later, okay,” he said.
He gives us our due like giving scraps to stray dogs, Igor thought. A few days would pass and Igor would come to him again and the process would be repeated. Igor was certain that if he didn’t ask, he wouldn’t get anything. He grew more and more pissed off.
He did like the guys he was working with, though. Even Dirty Johnny was okay.
Abdul was very respectable. He had a family, a wife and five kids. He was the shift manager. He drove a Rover. One day during the break, right before shift change, Igor and Rafik were wondering about the price of such a car in the UK. Dirty Johnny, they knew, drove a Ford Fiesta, which he’d bought used for two hundred pounds. Igor rode in Dirty Johnny’s Fiesta once. He’d offered him a ride back to the Sleep Inn after a shift, and Igor accepted. He noticed the back seat was filled with trash up to the windows. He opened the passenger door and Johnny swiped soda bottles and cans and chip bags onto the floor so that Igor could sit. The crevices of the seat were thick with muesli crumbs. Igor remembered the ubiquitous potato chip crumbs around his apartment.
Abdul told them how much he’d paid for the Rover. Igor doesn’t remember now how much it was, but it was a lot, and he and Rafik agreed that it was a reasonable price for such a car. On their next day off, Igor and Rafik invited Pomidor to the Sleep Inn to drink real Russian vodka and hang out. Since they didn’t have a fridge, they filled the tub with cold water and soaked the bottles for a little while.
Pomidor slammed the door and the tower of toilet paper—two by two and nearly as high as the top of the door jamb—collapsed.
As they drank, they talked about how much they hated the Greedy Bastard. Pomidor also didn’t like him. Pomidor told them that they were not the first foreign guys to come in for a “practicum.”
They had worked through the Russkiy Standart and most of the Flagman when Jammy noticed the manual on Sleep Inn hotel services. He found out you could order pornos and you wouldn’t be billed for them until you checked out. The room was billed to Greedy Bastard.
They ordered up a couple and turned the volume on the TV all the way down. The three of them sprawled across the beds, drinking bathtub-cooled vodka.
Then Rafik said, “I want to call home.”
Igor said, “I also want to call home.”
And the lightbulbs went on simultaneously for all three of them.
“Yes, my friends,” Igor said. “That’s it. Call all your friends, call all your enemies, and say to them, ‘Fuck off!’“
First Rafik called a couple of girlfriends back home. Igor called a girl in Moscow, then another girl in Germany. He urged her to spend her euros on any breakfast cereal except muesli. He proceeded to call girls he knew in three different regions of St. Petersburg. He said, “Hello, we are in UK. We are conducting an analysis of the regions of St. Petersburg. What’s going on with the weather there, baby?” In one part of the city it was seven; in another part, five. He was surprised, and asked the girl in the Leningrad region to double-check when she said it was five. Other than that, neither he nor Rafik had much to say. The story of their UK adventure had been a disappointment. They drank shots, toasting the receiver so the person on the other end could join them. Pomidor rubbed his hands together like a cartoon villain the whole time, repeating, “Greedy Bastard, Greedy Bastard,” and drinking vodka from the Flagman bottle. They kept the porno running without paying much attention to it.
At some point, perhaps with one person or another on the line, they passed out.
Igor had to be there in the morning for his shift. Igor was Mixer Man. He stared into the swirling basin and felt his head spin. His stomach turned with each revolution of the mixer. It was as if he himself, his whole body, were a gigantic mechanical mixing machine. And the sensation wasn’t at all pleasant. He was staring into the trough when he heard the Greedy Bastard’s office door slam shut. He looked up and saw the director storming toward him. His eyes were the size of golf balls and his face was bright red.
“Igor, what the hell? I just got a call from the hotel. Did you call Russia last night? Did you make many calls to Russia last night?” His ears and neck were redder than his face. He was an even-tempered man, and though inside he might have been in a rage, he managed to contain it. “Do you know how expensive it is?” His clenched hands pulsed in front of him.
“Oh, really?” Igor said. His spinning head and woozy stomach facilitated this charade of guilt. “We didn’t know. Only, we were missing our families very much.” When he said this, he realized that the only person he’d somehow neglected to call was his mother.
“If you want to make calls, and I’ll tell Rafik this later too, you can make them from my office. Whatever you do, don’t call from the hotel ever again.”
“I’m very sorry,” Igor said, doing a contrite good boy routine. “We won’t do it again.”
By their last week, Igor had lost two kilos and Rafik six.
As they stumbled home one day that week, Igor shouted, in Russian: “Fuck the UK! Fuck the Greedy Bastard! Fuck the muesli!”
They decided to inflict damage. They came across a construction pylon in the street, and Igor pounced on it. He rocked. He planted his feet and strained to pull it out of the ground, but bolts fastened it to the asphalt. “Fuck the lovely UK!” he shouted. “Fuck the bloody UK!” There was another one further down the street. He ran to it and kicked it, but it too was bolted down. Then Rafik tried, with the same result.
When they arrived at the bridge that took them to the highway, where one of the police sentinels stood guard, they followed the cable for the camera down the other side. Rafik took his Swiss Army knife and prepared to cut it. Igor swayed back and forth. He was somewhat nervous, but his anger outweighed his nervousness. Then something occurred to him. He said, “Stop, Rafik, stop.”
“Don’t do it. You will get electric shock.”
Rafik looked at the cable and at his knife blade. “Probably you’re right,” he said.
“Fuck the UK,” Igor said. “Let’s go home.”
The prospect of taking Pomidor up on his UK passport idea was no longer conceivable. For that moment, after the aborted UK vandalism, “home” meant the Sleep Inn, but after three weeks there in that life, Igor wanted only to return home to Russia.
During one of their final shift changes, Igor sat drinking tea with Abdul, Pomidor, and Rafik. Abdul seemed upset about something.
“Some asshole took the emblem from my Rover,” he said.
“Yes,” Rafik said. “We have this problem in Russia also.”
Igor asked Rafik later if he had taken Abdul’s Rover emblem. He said that he had. He didn’t feel good about it, but he planned on selling it back to his friend in Russia for five hundred rubles. Rafik packed his bag full of Sleep Inn towels. He stole the common-use iron from the hall, and he kept the white workboots from the muesli factory.
Because the Russian airline Aeroflot had very strict weight requirements on baggage and Rafik didn’t want to pay the fee, he wore most of his clothes in layers, so that, even though he’d lost weight, he looked puffed up and doughy.
Igor purchased one final souvenir at the airport. The Sleep Inn towels wouldn’t do for him; he wanted one with the Union Jack on it. “To dry my ass back home,” he says.
When they boarded the plane, Rafik took off his extra layers of clothing and piled them with his hand baggage. Then they sat in silence, thinking how much the Greedy Bastard had made on them: eighty pounds a day times six days per week times four weeks times two Russian suckers.
As the plane touched down, Igor remembered a few lines from The Igor Tales, a twelfth-century poem chronicling the battle of Prince Igor against the Polovtsians, the basis for the classic Russian opera Prince Igor. Igor and his men are defeated and taken prisoner. He escapes several months later and returns home, and the poem goes:
It is difficult for a head to be without shoulders.
It is equally difficult for a body to be without a head.
It is difficult for the Russian land to be without Igor.
The sun shines in the sky.
Prince Igor has returned to the Russian land.