We wrestle the Red Dog into a cab at the Novorossiysk train station and drift in and out of sleep as the cab careens along the twisty mountain roads, passing in the oncoming-traffic lane around hairpin turns. Barges on the Black Sea dot the horizon under fluffy cotton-ball clouds, the kind that don’t look real.
At last, we approach a set of massive cement-block letters reading Welcome to the City of Your Dreams. Gelendzhik is a rather small resort town that reminds me of beach towns in Florida, with houses painted in pastel colours and palm trees in the yards. It isn’t long before the cab stops in front of a steel fence with Igor’s uncle’s address. Right across the street is a beer bar, which Igor calls Borya’s Place. “We will spend a lot of time at Borya’s Place,” Igor says, paying the cabbie and fumbling the Red Dog out of the trunk.
Igor visited his uncle for the first time a few years ago. Like him, I’d grown up not knowing my biological father. I eventually met him in my late twenties. It wasn’t exactly a Hollywoodstyle feel-good reunion where we instantly became best buds, but it wasn’t awkward either. Somehow, it seems infinitely more strange to meet the identical twin of the biological father you’ve never known, as Igor did when he met Uncle Vova, than to meet the man himself. But Igor and his uncle had hit it off, and Vova took him in as family.
Behind the metal gate, in the driveway of Igor’s uncle’s three-storey house, is a light blue Zhiguli parked underneath a trellis of rusty metal fence. Grapes and flowers and the family’s laundry hang from the metal rebar criss-crossing over the driveway. The driveway is lined with a flower garden of rubber trees, roses, elephant ears, and lilies.
Their house is about five minutes from the beach and you can smell the sea in the air. The view is spectacular. The mountain range to the north is covered in lush green trees. At the top of the nearest mountain is a sign, in the tradition of the famous Hollywood sign, that reads GELENDZHIK in big white letters. On the next mountain summit over is a neon advertisement, dwarfing and outshining the GELENDZHIK sign, for the Russian cellphone company Megafon. Because of this advertisement, we’ll learn, the mountain has now been rechristened Megafon Mountain.
Uncle Vova sits at the outdoor kitchen table with no shirt or shoes, just a pair of shorts and a knee-high plaster cast on one leg. He has long hair and a wide, gold-toothy smile. He looks like Animal from the Muppets. A decrepit French bulldog woofs beside him.
Uncle Vova stands and limps forward, opens his arms to Igor, calls him muzhik. They embrace. Aunt Irina rushes out, shouting at her husband to sit down. Then she joins in the embrace, hugs Igor and hugs me.
We put our stuff away. Uncle’s place is three storeys, most of which he rents out. He built it himself, and you feel the craftsmanship in the placement of every floor or ceiling tile and in the sturdy steps leading to the second-floor guest rooms and the third-floor guest apartment, all empty except for us. Then we return to the outdoor kitchen.
There’s a thermometer mounted on the wall. Igor looks at it and then looks at me. “Like I promise you,” he says. “Thirty degrees in the shade.” It’s nine a.m.
Immediately, Uncle Vova starts in on the crisis in Gelendzhik. It’s still early in the season, but he has zero tenants lined up. He’s unsure how it will develop as the season goes on. People may decide to save money on vacations to Tunisia and Egypt and instead come here. Or people may decide not to vacation at all.
We tell him about the empty train from St. Petersburg to Novorossiysk. Uncle seems despondent. He smokes. He ridicules me when I stir a half teaspoon of sugar into my tea. “Watch how I do it,” he says. He dumps four heaping teaspoons of sugar into a small cup of coffee. “This is not sugar,” he says. “This is vitamins.” He slurps loudly and pounds the cup onto the table. I can’t tell how old Uncle Vova is. Could be an excellent, spry sixty-five or a worn fifty. The resemblance between Igor and Uncle Vova is elusive, but I see it in the eyes and the nose and the exuberance.
Aunt Irina cooks a massive breakfast for us: bread caked with butter and layers of fresh salted red fish, sausages, scrambled eggs, and coffee.
Uncle Vova tells us that if his leg wasn’t broken, he’d be out on the highway with a sign recruiting tenants. The competition is fierce. Almost every house in this area, within five to ten minutes of the beach, has a Room for rent sign in front of it. If he doesn’t get tenants this year, he tells us, he may have to sell the house. His younger son Sergey should be hustling up tenants on the boardwalk, but instead he doesn’t know what the fuck his younger son Sergey is doing. Certainly, it seems, not trying to help the family save the house.
“House,” he says. “Reminds me of a little joke. Man catches a golden fish and the fish offers him three wishes. The man says, ‘Okay, I’ll have a new house, three million dollars, and that was just one wish.’“ He and Igor laugh, and I laugh because their laughing individually is infectious but their laughing together is epidemic.
Igor’s uncle hunches over the table and tells another joke. Igor fires back with one of his own. His uncle takes this as a challenge, spins out several stories and anecdotes, pounding the table with his fist, his long, thin hair flying around his head. Much of this performance is either beyond my Russian or untranslatable.
The joke/anecdote call and response between Igor and his uncle gets me thinking about Russian humour in general. For instance, here is a Russian joke:
A guy comes to a brothel and he picks out a girl. They go into a room and close the door. Five minutes later, she rushes out and screams, “Uzhas-uzhas!” The word uzhas, often whispered under one’s breath, literally means “horror.” So she rushes out screaming, “The horrors, the horrors!”
The madam sends in another girl. The door closes, and five minutes later she rushes out, screaming, “Uzhas-uzhas!”
So the madam says, “Okay, looks like I have to take matters into my own hands.” She goes in herself. The door closes behind her. She’s there for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Then she returns, visibly ruffled but composed. She says, “Well, yes, it was uzhas. But not uzhas-uzhas.”
Another joke: A guy walking down the street sees a man fishing in a city park. The first guy thinks, Okay, I’ll come up to him and I’ll ask him, “Anything biting today?” The fisherman will either say, “Yep, they’re biting,” to which I’ll respond, “They’re always biting for assholes like you,” or he will say, “Nothing today,” to which I’ll respond, “They’re never biting for assholes like you.”
So the guy asks his question. The fisherman turns around and says, “Fuck off.” The first guy, with surprise and admiration, thinks to himself, Eto tozhe variant (“That’s another possibility”).
Igor and I walk to the beach with the good-for-nothing Sergey, Igor’s cousin. The Russian word for cousin translates as “brother or sister once removed.” (There is no word for siblings in Russian, or grandparents for that matter.) Igor, who is technically an only child, refers to Sergey as his brother. They’ve only seen each other once before in their lives.
“It’s cool to have brothers here,” he tells me as the three of us walk along the embankment, a perfect eight-kilometre semicircle.
Looking around, I realize that it’s the only place I’ve been in Russia that reminds me of somewhere in the West. It really is like a Russian version of Florida. There are water parks and human slingshots, long-leaf pines and sunshine. The water is aqua and the sand white before turning to grey pebbles at the shoreline.
The beach is packed—thick as the Moscow metro at rush hour. Blankets and sheets overlap. Feet rest millimetres from heads and heads millimetres from asses. “Usually it’s twice as crowded as this,” Sergey says, and twice as crowded as this is difficult to envision.
Sergey is spindly and boyish, but there’s something kind of Frankenstein’s monster–like about him—the square head, deep-set eyes, slow and deliberate movements.
Sergey strips down to his tighty whities. We swim into the bay. I ask him if there are sharks and he says there aren’t. I find this news—that there are no sharks in the Black Sea—incredibly liberating. I splash and swim with abandon, unafraid. In Florida, it’s always either alligators or sharks or snakes. Here: a whole ocean and nothing capable of eating me!
Why, I wonder, are there no sharks? He doesn’t have the answer.
He asks me whether there are sharks in Florida, and I tell him there are. He asks how many, and I tell him I don’t know.
“A lot, I think,” I say.
He seems concerned. He asks if there are shark watchers on duty. I tell him sometimes there are shark watchers on duty.
We swim back to shore.
“Stones here are perfect for skitting,” Igor says.
“Skipping,” I correct him.
“Yes, skitting stones perfect here.”
He is right. The stones are perfect. And actually, skitting sounds like the better verb. So we skit stones for a while across the surface of the Black Sea.
“Once,” Igor says, “in the sea, two sharks meet. The younger shark looks up and sees a swimmer. ‘Oh, let’s go eat it,’ he says. And the old one says, ‘Oh no no no stop stop stop. You know what you need to do. You need to go underneath while he’s swimming and touch his ankle with your fin. Then go down again and wait.’ The young one says, ‘What the fuck? Let’s just go eat him.’ Old one says, ‘No no no. Without shit it’s going to be much more tasty.’ “
Uncle smirks and shakes his head. He signals his turn by knocking on his cast. “Jeff, I have a political anecdote for you,” he says. “Medvedev goes to visit Obama in New York City. They meet and have a very cordial meeting. They discuss and sit down to a grand meal. Obama’s team serves him a first course, a second course, a third course, a fourth … and finally Obama asks, ‘What else would you want?’ Medvedev says, ‘I’d like to eat the brain of a young negro child.’ Obama doesn’t flinch. He sends his people away immediately, and shortly they bring it, and Medvedev eats. A few months later, Obama comes to Moscow, and the same meeting of heads of state takes place. After the final course, Medvedev asks, ‘What else might you want?’ Obama says, ‘I’d like to eat the brain of the deputy of your Duma.’ Medvedev says, ‘Okay,’ and sends his assistants away. But one hour passes. They wait. Another hour passes, then three. Finally, Medvedev’s assistants return, and he asks them what’s going on. ‘Where are the brains?’ ‘Well,’ his assistant says, ‘we’ve shot half the Duma already and we haven’t found any brains, but if you like tongue, they have tongues like this.’ “ Uncle sticks out his tongue and holds his hand way out in front of his mouth and looks at me wild-eyed.
I ask where he heard this anecdote.
He says that it’s an old one from the Brezhnev era. “I just updated it,” he says.
I’d anticipated another racist Russian joke. There are many racist Russian jokes. But instead, it did something interesting. In this one, the joke turns on the Russian racist, ostensibly, in this case, Medvedev, and it becomes, from the Russian point of view, self-deprecating: no brains in the Duma.
Igor tries to tell another joke, but his uncle interrupts halfway through with the punchline. Igor looks slightly defeated. He is still an amateur in the presence of a pro.
After dinner—a huge pot of Uzbek pilaf charred in a cast iron dish—Igor asks where Uncle’s other son, Dima, is, and an uncomfortable silence settles around the table. It seems like a good cue for me to give them some alone time, and I go to the bedroom for a while to catch up on some sleep. But soon Igor appears in our room with the news about Dima.
Turns out Dima left his wife and son, who moved in with Igor’s uncle and aunt. Then he had an argument with Uncle that ended with a drunken Dima attacking his own father with a kitchen knife. He was subsequently banished from the family.
“It was a shock to me,” Igor says. “Dima tried to stab Uncle. He has serious drinking and drugs problem. We won’t be seeing him.”
When we head out that night, Dima’s wife, home from work in a trinket shop, is sitting on Aunt Irina’s lap. She works several jobs every day of the week while Aunt Irina takes care of their son, Artyom. She gets home every day around nine and spends a couple of hours with Artyom before doing it all over again. She wears a silken Japanese-style blouse. Her mother–in-law fawns over her, petting her bright red dyed hair.
Sergey joins us as we walk down to the embankment and find an outdoor beer garden. Waitresses in Uzbek-style clothes bring us vodka and a beer for Sergey.
Sergey doesn’t drink, he tells us, because of what happened to his brother. I guess he’s afraid that he too might try to stab their father. After telling us this, he proceeds to consume a beer faster than I’ve ever seen anyone not in a drinking contest consume a beer.
Of course, like Igor, he doesn’t consider beer alcohol. And so, by the end of that night, around four in the morning, the non-drinker Sergey is passed out face down on the table at the outdoor beer garden near the sea.
The mornings start with us walking downstairs to the outdoor kitchen, where Uncle Vova is waiting in ambush with jokes and anecdotes. Most of his teeth are gold and he has an aged dancing flamingo tattooed on his forearm. He is clearly going out of his mind with this broken leg. The guy is bursting with energy, which he directs toward entertaining Igor and me and berating Sergey for being a lazy piece of shit.
We head across the street to Borya’s Place, where Igor orders a litre of beer. “Why I’m ordering a beer? I don’t want beer,” Igor says.
“I also don’t want beer,” I say, “but I’m the only one here not drinking it.”
“Da,” Igor says, “some sort of it.”
We order borscht, but they bring us cabbage soup. “What the fuck the cabbage soup is doing here?” Igor says. But there is no arguing with the wait staff at Borya’s Place. They are all Borya’s relatives. You eat what they serve you. Your order is at best a rough outline of your general preference. And borscht is essentially cabbage soup with beets, so in effect we have a kind of borscht minus the beets.
I finish the cabbage soup and order another. This time they bring cabbage soup with beets.
Igor gives me a look suggesting my Western weakness, needing so much food. “Look at me,” he says. “I am not eating. I am not sleeping. I am spry.”
At night, we return to Borya’s Place for another litre of beer and then cross the street to Uncle’s place to boil pelmeni, meat-filled dumplings, in the outdoor kitchen. There is a full-size fridge in the outdoor kitchen that doesn’t stay shut. We have to tie orange twine around the door. The cupboards are plastered with eighties gumball stickers: Van Damme, Bryan Adams, Terminator, RoboCop, Transformers, Chuck Norris … Irina cooks dinner for Vova and her daughter-in-law and grandson in the indoor kitchen. We boil our pelmeni on the outdoor stove. And we all eat together outside.
Marusya, the thirteen-year-old French bulldog, begs by hacking at me while I eat and staring with bulging, sad eyes. The left side of her body is swollen from a tumour and her tale is mangy. If you pet her, she rolls onto her side to present her dirty belly to you. She spends the day coughing and skulking around the driveway in search of shade. They feed her once a day by throwing a raw chicken head—beak, comb, eyes and all—into the flower bed. She sleeps at night on the shoes piled outside the door, snoring loud enough to compete with Igor. She seems particularly fond of sleeping on my shoes.
She’s out of breath summoning the energy just to beg for pelmeni at my feet. Igor looks at her with pity. He says, “Last time I saw her, she was spry.”
Anya calls Igor every couple of hours. When he hangs up, he says, “She is worrying that I will have affair. She is saying, ‘Tell me how you miss me. Tell me you love me.’ Everyone is coming to Gelendzhik to have affair.”
But we have come to Gelendzhik to get our positive on, and in so doing we will ride four-wheelers. We walk to the embankment to browse the wares of the multitude of four-wheeler rental operations there, and at the very first four-wheeler rental operation we find ourselves face to face with Dima. He is sitting on a blue four-wheeler in a Gelendzhik hat and faux Oakley sunglasses. Dima’s whole vibe is very different from Sergey’s. Sergey looks innocent and wide-eyed. Dima is lizardy. Sharp lines radiate from the sides of his mouth.
He recognizes Igor, and they shake hands. Igor introduces me. Igor tells him that we’d like to go four-wheeling. Russians call four-wheelers quadrocycles. Dima arranges for us to be picked up by one of the guides at Uncle’s house in a couple of hours.
“Let me ask you something,” Dima says. “Father is pissed off?”
“Yes, he told me about it,” Igor says.
Dima looks at the ground. Then he looks at Igor again. “C’est la vie,” Dima says.
They chat awkwardly. It’s heavy material, and this is only the second time they’ve seen each other in their lives.
Igor asks him what happened. “How could you try and stab your father?” he asks. “How could you leave your kid?”
“He said something wrong. I said something wrong,” Dima says. “The wife was fucking my brain. So I left. That’s it. The only thing I miss is the kid.”
While they talk, Irina appears with Artyom. Dima picks him up and hoists him onto the smallest four-wheeler. Artyom pretends to drive. Dima gives him an eight-by-ten photograph of a sailboat on the water. Artyom takes it, still astride the four-wheeler, not quite sure what to do.
Irina, normally overflowing with warmth, chats with Dima through clenched lips. Then she picks up Artyom and he waves goodbye to his father and his father waves back.
We ride the quadrocycles for two hours up Megafon Mountain. We have three guides, eighteen-year-old kids. In a normal season, they do multiple trips per day with fleets of tourists. The two of us constitute their first trip of the week. One guide drives in front of us, the other two in back. They make us wear what amounts to full suits of hockey gear. They make us sign insurance waivers. (“Ten people flipped last year,” one of the guides tells us.) They ride sidesaddle in bare feet and smoke as we navigate a technical course between trees, up the mountain. Igor keeps getting stuck between trees and pissed off. We stop on a ridge and the guide points out strange streaks in the rock that he says were made by a meteor.
I ask for one of our bottles of water out of his backpack. I drink it and take in the view. But for the four-wheeler trails and meteor tracks, it seems untouched. When I finish my water, I hand the empty bottle back to the guide to put in his backpack.
“Just throw it,” he says.
I look around. It shouldn’t surprise. In Russia, some products, such as Lambi toilet paper, are marketed specifically as having been produced with absolutely no recycled paper whatsoever. The Sierra Club in St. Petersburg has packed its offices with spent batteries in hopes that one day the city will introduce a program for safely disposing of them. These are the moments when I discover how deeply childhood recycling propaganda has affected me. “I’d prefer to take it down. I’ll carry it,” I say.
“Fuck it,” he says. He snatches it from my hand and pitches it into a thick, bright bush.
We ride to the top of the summit, where we can see both the GELENDZHIK and MEGAFON signs. A perfect view of the circular bay. The bay too, says the guide, was made by a meteor, a different meteor than the one that striated the rock. We hang out for a while, gazing at the bay and, on the other side, the village of Divnomorskoye. The only sounds are the squeals of the grasshoppers. The dandelions up here are the size of softballs. On the way back down the mountain, the whine of the four-wheeler brakes is the exact same pitch as the grasshoppers at the top.