Igor, Anya, and I watched the 2008 Eurocup semifinals, Russia against Spain, at the Office Bar in St. Petersburg. The Office is a faux British pub, and we had a table reserved in the sunken basement right in front of the big screens.
The Russian national team’s improbable showing in the Eurocup, matching up against one of the best teams in the world, with the chance to play in the Eurocup finals, had the unlikely alliance of skinhead hooligans and businessmen in the Office Bar losing their collective shit.
Everyone sang along with the new-old national anthem. But from the start, the team looked unsteady, playing under a downpour. Igor predicted, confidently, “It’s going to be draw—0–0, 1–1, or 2–2.” The crowd chanted, “Rossiya! Rossiya! Champ-ee-on! Champ-ee-on!”
A few years before this, at a party I threw in an apartment I rented in the centre of St. Petersburg, Igor got down on his knees in the hallway outside the apartment door and repeatedly bashed an empty bottle of Baltika into his forehead. The occasion at the time was the ousting of the Russian team from an early World Cup qualifying round. Back then, they hadn’t stood a chance. Igor was practically crying that night, wailing, “Rossiya proigrala! Rossiya proigrala!” (“Russia lost, Russia lost”) and hitting himself with the bottle. Neither his head nor the bottle broke, but the scene made a memorable entrance to the party for other guests.
By 2008, Igor’s soccer enthusiasm was less fanatical. He was older and more low-key in general. Gone were the days of swimming the Griboyedov canal and smashing bottles on his head. After Russia went down 1–0, Igor altered his earlier prediction: “Will be draw at half. Then Russia will lose.”
With their current star player Andrey Arshavin—the local hero from the Zenit team—playing an awful game, Pavlyuchenko picked up the slack. But when Spain took the lead and Pavlyuchenko missed a goal, the crowd—everyone—quickly turned on him.
The game is supposed to be a war and the Russian players formidable soldiers. The announcer called Pavlyuchenko a pederas, which means exactly what it sounds like it means.
A few plays later, Igor altered his prediction again: “I wasn’t thinking that our defence was going to be so weak. Our defence is shit, man. Draw at half will be bliss.”
The announcer derided the team more aggressively as Spain went up 2–0. Igor used the translator on his cellphone to explain to me the proper translation of the slang phrase the announcer was now using to describe the Russian squad, and it returned mob of bendy-legged cripples.
Anya sat quietly smoking Vogue Lilas the whole time, occasionally texting.
Seventeen minutes left. The crowd chanted, “Davai, davai!” (“Let’s go, let’s go!”). Then, from the middle of the field, a pass to no one and the ball went out of bounds. The crowd clapped sarcastically.
“Man,” Igor said. “They are running in circles.” On the ensuing play, Spain scored and went up 3–0. “The seven-year-old boys playing near my flat—they are better!”
“You think it’s the rain?” I asked.
“No, in another case I will say yes. This, no.”
Suddenly Pavlyuchenko headed one in. Everyone screamed. A meaningless consolation prize, but they were on the board.
“He was pederas earlier,” Igor said, “but not anymore.”
Any hope was short-lived. The temporary exhilaration of one spectacular goal faded. The outcome was clear. One very skinny girl periodically shrieked hysterically.
When it ended, the businessmen and hooligans collectively mumbled about the suki (bitches).
“Where was our defence?” Igor said, dropping his head in his hands. “I didn’t see it.”
We sat at the bar and listened to the news reports and postgame coverage. The announcer said that a St. Petersburg man threw a TV out of a fifth-storey window during the match, killing another man walking by down below.
“Bendy-legged cripples,” Igor said.
He and Anya left because she had to prepare for her exams. I sat and drank and commiserated with the barman. He cried over Russia’s loss. The front of his T-shirt read Happiness is a mushroom cloud; the back, War is the answer.
I had assumed I’d never hear from Igor again after our early morning billiards session at Panda in 1999, but he called me after a few days and invited me to the Russian banya, which he said was even more Russian than Russian billiards, and if I hoped ever to understand the simplest thing about Russia, then I needed to experience it. I didn’t know if this was a good idea. After all, he was a dude whom I’d met in the middle of the night on the street who’d taken me to some criminal pool hall after exhibiting highly suspect judgment in swimming the Griboyedov.
But I decided to check it out. We met at the St. Petersburg landmark known as Five Corners, where five different streets converge, for the first of what would turn out to be countless trips to the banya. We walked to Dostoevsky street. He stopped under a black awning in front of a steel door that looked more like the door to a bank vault than a public sauna, and he said, “Citizen of the USA, prepare to suffer!”
We entered a cement and cinder-block foyer that smelled of chlorine. An old woman sat at a schoolchild’s desk. The desk was covered with bunches of veniki, branches held together with twine, some oak and some birch. Igor picked up a couple of birch, shook them, smelled them, decided, based on some mysterious criteria, which two he wanted, and gave her a handful of rubles. I followed him up the stairs into a smaller hall with wooden dividers separating booths.
Igor ordered two hours of banya time from a shirtless guy in sweatpants. The guy was covered in faded prison tattoos (banya attendant seems to be one of the most popular jobs for ex-cons). Igor rented sheets and slippers for each of us and we paid what amounted to about twenty dollars.
We went to our stall and sat on leather-upholstered benches. Between the benches was a small table, about knee height, with an ashtray on it. I waited for Igor to undress first so as to understand the protocol. I went to one of those middle schools where you didn’t dress or undress in front of anyone—ever. So going to the banya with Igor was my initiation into the getting-naked-in-a-manly-way-with-other-men thing. We hung our clothes on small metal hooks in the walls. Once we were swaddled into our sheets, Igor emptied the contents of his backpack: a bar of pine-scented soap, deodorant, mittens, a felt hat with earflaps and a Red Army star on the front, four bottles of Baltika beer, a vial of eucalyptus oil, three packages of squid jerky, and a whole dried fish wrapped in plastic. Then he snatched the branches and went to soak them in a bucket of hot water and eucalyptus oil.
At the time, it was all deeply confusing. I really had no idea what was meant by banya beyond the fact that it involved some kind of steam room.
Igor returned and ordered me to follow him. We left the booth and walked past a couple of guys kicked back on an orange couch. They were soaking wet with sheets tied around their waists like us. The TV was tuned to a soccer match. Two cigarettes smouldered in ashtrays in front of them, but they seemed to be asleep or passed out. We walked down a hall and into the tiled shower area. There were buckets sitting on concrete platforms and four shower stalls. An impossibly skinny dude with long hair lathered an old man’s whole body with an oak venik. The look on the old man’s face as the skinny dude washed him was piercing and severe. In the very back was a ladder leading to a small rectangular pool, about ten feet by six feet. The water had a green tint. Igor opened a wooden door to the parilka—the steam room.
“Ah!” he said. “It’s a good steam. Now we begin. Find a place and lay down right away. Soon, I will come.” He shut the door behind me.
There were three other guys in the steam room. I walked up the wooden steps and sat on the bench across from them. One of them had a huge ladle called a kovshik. He used the handle to open the black iron doors of a brick oven, then he dipped water from a bucket and splashed it on the rocks. One of the other guys shouted, “Dobavim,” meaning to throw more water on the rocks.
The water sizzled and a wall of two-hundred-degree wet steam pushed across the small room. It melted through my sinuses, and I ducked to get under it. The guys across from me squinted. The other guy shouted, “Dobavim, dobavim!”
I spread my sheet across the bench and lay down supine. The sheet was scalding. Hovering my arms and feet slightly, I tried to minimize the parts of my body that burnt when they touched the bench.
Igor reappeared armed with the two birch branches, one in each hand, both of them dripping water and sweet-smelling eucalyptus oil. His sheet was bunched around his waist, and he wore the mittens and the felt Red Army star hat with flaps over his ears.
He ascended the steps.
“Cover your dick,” he said.
I covered my dick.
Igor whipped the branches in the air so the heat collected in the leaves. Then he lightly—surprisingly gently—smacked every inch of me, stopping only to push the leaves into my face and to poke my heels with the stick end of the branches. This was the second time I had met him in my life. It took about ten minutes, until the leaves—by then dry and crisp—singed the skin and Igor declared enough.
We hurried out of the parilka red and puffy. I gasped for breath. Sweat stuck leaves and twigs to me. We hung our sheets on metal coat racks and jumped into the freezing cold pool. After about five minutes, we climbed out and returned to our booth.
“You feel the rebirth?” he asked.
“I feel it,” I said. And I did.
I sipped from a bottle of beer. Every American sweatbox cautions against drinking and sauna, but you’re unlikely to find a bathhouse anywhere in Russia in which sweaty, naked men (and for all I know, women too) are not consuming some alcohol or other. I got immediately buzzed and light-headed. I chewed a few strings of the squid jerky, which is like salted rubber bands.
Igor tore the dried fish (vobla) in half and plucked out a shrivelled thing the size and colour of a golden raisin that he insisted was its pancreas. “Eat,” he said, holding it out to me in his palm. I shook my head.
He popped it into his mouth and then broke off pieces of the vobla and munched happily.
Then we did what you do in the chill-out hall of the banya: we talked. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about billiards: “Practise, practise, practise,” Igor said. We talked about women: “The girls here don’t understand that I am alive. I am not a slot machine. They only understand how to take.”
We repeated the process—parilka–pool–booth–squid jerky–beer—three times, until we had the desired effect: skin spider-webbed with red blotches and mental relaxation to a degree requiring total concentration just to maintain consciousness.
“Do you understand why people are coming in banya now?” Igor asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Probably they even doesn’t think about it. But somebody, for entertainment like with their friends, to drink some beer, to talk and stuff without the girls … They still didn’t realize that their lives are beginning again. Probably it’s true.”
Nine years later, on the day after the Spain–Russia World Cup debacle, Igor had one of his “day offs,” as he calls them. We headed to the famous Bateninskaya banya on Karbysheva street, also known as the Round Banya, also known as Shaiba, “hockey puck.” A white building with a hollowed-out space in the middle for an outdoor pool.
In those nine years, we had banya-ed countless times. We had hit most of the banyas in the city. And Bateninskaya was our favourite. It’s unique, with its circular structure and outdoor pool, and the steam is often perfect. The possibility of running into naked girls at the shared outdoor pool was also an advantage.
As we entered Shaiba, we were surprised to see the same group of cops who had caused a ruckus here once before. That day, we were sitting in the chill-out room. We had soggy, cold sheets wrapped around our waists. We sipped beer, and I struggled not to pass out from too-frequent intervals in the steam room. A group of drunken cops settled up their bills and retrieved their valuables from the safe. As the banya attendant, a kindly middle-aged woman whose unfortunate job it is to sit in a room of naked, drunk, and sweating men, handed a service revolver back to one of the policemen, he fumbled and it discharged right over her head. Everyone in the chill-out room, including Igor and me, hit the deck.
Now the drunk cops were drunk again and leaving the banya. “S lyogkim parom!” the one who nearly shot the cashier in the head said to Igor. I’ve never heard a great translation of this phrase. Literally, it’s “With a light steam.” You say it to people as post-banya congratulations. It takes the same grammatical form as “Happy Birthday” or “Happy New Year,” neither of which include the word happy in Russian. Instead, it’s “With birthday” or “With the New Year.”
The phrase is the alternate title of the most popular Russian holiday film, the Russian Miracle on 34th Street: The Irony of Fate or With a Light Steam. The plot is simple. A group of four friends go to the banya on New Year’s Eve as per their long-standing holiday tradition. They get totally plastered there and two of them pass out. One of the men passed out is supposed to go to the airport for a trip to Leningrad, but the two plastered friends can’t remember which one. They make their best guess and send the wrong friend to Leningrad. When he arrives, not realizing he is in Leningrad, he takes a cab to his address, 3rd Builders Street, Building 25, Apartment 12. The street exists and the building is the same as his, his key works in the lock, and even the decor is similar. A beautiful woman lives there, and romantic comedy ensues …
The drunken cop slurred and swayed as the banya attendant returned the officers’ things from the so-called safe, a drawer behind the counter. They were trying to pay but seemed unable to find their money.
She produced a handgun snapped into a leather holster. With her free hand, she pointed to a hole, about the diameter of a number two pencil, in the wall behind her. “Last time you came in here and got as stupid drunk as you are now, I handed you back your gun and it went off. You gave me your gun with the safety off. You could have killed me, and you probably don’t even remember.”
“The safety is on, grandma,” one of them said. “We’re not going to kill you.”
“You told me the safety was on last time, bitch. And now you come in here again, and give me your gun, and again you leave completely shit-faced.”
She took their money and handed the man his gun. He laughed and dropped it into his sports bag and they left.
Then she turned to us. “See that hole? Do you see that hole?” She put her finger again to the bullet hole in the wallpaper. She shook her head and cleared her throat. “Now you,” she said to us. “Who are you? What do you want? I will never take these assholes’ gun again. Never.”
Igor ordered two hours of banya time, two sheets, and two birch veniki. She assigned us to the booth the drunken cops had just left, number three. Each stall has small swinging doors, like in a western saloon, a picnic table, and two benches. The police had left a cheap Casio watch and rubles all over the floor in stall number three.
We sat down and changed into our sheets.
Igor and I ordered two mugs of kvass, a malted black bread beverage that comes in tall frothy mugs. A waitress, also middle-aged, busted through the doors of our stall and placed the heady mugs of kvass on our table.
“She doesn’t seem at all bothered by us naked men, does she?” I said.
“She’s seen so many dicks,” Igor said, “she doesn’t fucking caring.”
The loud, jolly voices of thirty or so Russian men in the midst of their weekend steam competed with the famous voice of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko coming from the TVs mounted on the walls. Lots of bodies make for the best banya conditions.
One older guy sitting next to us asked if we were from Israel. Igor laughed and told him I was a foreigner and he was Russian.
A cricket chirped somewhere under the benches below us. Igor and the man didn’t seem to notice it. Igor tried to explain the quality of a proper steam like this one: “You feel it with the lungs. It’s what it means to sweat and not feel heat.” And I got it. It’s hot. Scalding hot, but not cutting. A light steam.
A little boy shielded his face with his hand and sat next to his father on the bench.
“Papa, it’s too hot,” the boy said.
“Okay,” the father said, “we’ll leave in thirty seconds.”
The boy counted out loud—”Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven …”—and crept toward the exit.
I listened for the cricket. If it were a machine, some kind of recording, it’d have a rhythm. But this seemed a random, occasional chirp.
“I think it’s a real cricket,” I said.
“Man,” Igor said, “no being could live in banya. Even cricket. It’s bullshit.”
We were on our warm-up steam. During your first go, you’re absolutely dry, and the way you want to play it on your first go, according to Igor Rules, is to sit there only until you hit the sweat point, the moment your dry skin bursts into tears.
I told Igor to take his place on the bench so that I could beat him.
“You are not ready,” he told me.
“I’ve studied long enough,” I said. “I can’t just be your birch branch bitch.”
This was persuasive logic for him. He handed over the Red Army star hat, the gloves, and the venik.
The Russian banya habit is documented as far back as 1113 in the Primary Chronicle of Kievan Rus’, a loose coalition of Slavic tribes:
They warm [the banya] to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day and actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.
There were Russian jokes during World War II suggesting that if they could only get Hitler into a banya, they could end the war.
But the ceremony of the banya is not wholly a torment. Only to the casual observer or the unstudied amateur is the lashing violent. There are massage schools in Russia that teach venik massage, but it’s also a kind of folk knowledge, like reducing high blood pressure with leeches or curing a cold with onion tea. Igor learned from his uncle, his mother’s brother, with whom they lived for a while after she and his stepdad split.
You start by shaking the branches lightly over the whole body. With one venik you hit the person, while you stir the air with the other. The leaves immediately dry out, so you have to periodically stop and rub them across the body to collect sweat. It may look as if the beater is wailing on the beatee, but the truth of the banya is that the beater is the one who really suffers.
After a minute or so, I was done; my hands burned, my heart pounded, and I felt as though I might pass out.
“You get B-minus,” Igor said, and this was surely grade inflation.
The thing that makes Shaiba special is the outdoor pool, shared by men and women, that constitutes the centre of the puck. We swam a few laps then returned to our booth for beer and squid jerky. Igor peeled apart vobla. He opened them up lengthwise with his thumbnail and rolled out the pancreas. He offered it to me. As usual, I declined and he ate it.
“You know why you got B-minus?” he said. “You were too much collecting sweat. The next step after getting A in beating me, to fulfill the spirit of banya, is to eat this fucking fish with beer. The more stinky, the more tasty.”
In this case, I am afraid that I may never fulfill the spirit of the banya.