Even before the global economic crisis, Russia was embroiled in what some described as a crisis of the family. This crisis of the family enveloping the nation had many dimensions and direct connections to other social ills: alcoholism, domestic abuse, divorce, low birth rates, etc. The population of Russia had been in decline for more than a decade and was expected to drop by 667,000 in 2008. Add to that high divorce rates (65 percent of marriages end in divorce—the second-highest divorce rate in the world, after Belarus) and a lower life expectancy for men (a 2009 study would show that 50 percent of all deaths of men in Russia since perestroika were alcohol related) and the absence on the books of a single domestic violence law …
The Medvedev government addressed the problem head-on by instituting the president’s wife’s plan: the creation of a new holiday. July’s Day of Family, Love, and Faithfulness was conceived as something of a Valentine’s Day for the entire family unit. (Along the same lines, one region of Russia anointed September’s Family Contact Day, which urged married couples to stay home together and engage in contact so as to patriotically produce children nine months later—if perfectly timed, on June’s Russia Day.)
Further, the year 2008 had a theme. It had been christened by Putin himself as the Year of the Family.
Igor and Anya had been together for four years. They worked together at the Atrium café, and although she lived with her parents and he lived with his mom, they spent most of their time, physical and virtual, together. Last year, Igor had chipped in to help her buy a car, a maroon Honda Civic. When Anya didn’t sleep over at Igor’s place, they spent the night chatting through V Kontakte, the Russian Facebook, and playing electronic games against each other.
Of course, like all couples, they had their issues. It was no secret that Anya had long wanted to get married. When discussing it, Igor, skeptical about the meaning behind civil institutions, would say, “What for I need another stamp in my passport? What for I need a ring on my finger?”
One can hear in this, if one wishes, only assholitude. Or one could say that Anya’s desire for the trappings of family are in conflict with Igor’s disdain for the corrupt structures of power, the same corrupt structures of power that, in the form of the Putin–Medvedev administration, he sort of supported. Further, according to Igor, there were two finite difficulties in Anya’s character: (a) she was constantly “fucking his brain”; and (b) she exhibited a tendency toward what Igor had dubbed the Duality.
The Duality could be seen in several different phenomena: her doing something herself and becoming angry when he did the same thing (changing her V Kontakte status to single after an argument and becoming enraged when he reciprocated); her telling him one thing one day and the opposite another (acquiescing to his pursuit of a job in Sochi and expressing outrage when he got it); her telling him that she would do one thing and then doing another (declaring that she would not visit work during her day offs and showing up anyway).
In Bruce Hopper’s 1931 book Pan-Sovietism, he essentially (and without a tinge of political correctness) accused the Russian people in general of the Duality: “For all his capacity to suffer, the Russian is a contradictory animal.”
Like many Russians, Igor himself both loves and loathes the West. He loves and loathes Russia. Russians are known simultaneously for their great capacity for hospitality to strangers and for hard-core xenophobia. There is a set of rules governing just about everything, and then there is the way things actually work, a duality implicit in driving, the legal system, you name it. He is a contradictory beast in a contradictory habitat.
Igor’s uncle had lorded over me the extra head on the double-headed eagle from the coat of arms of the Russian Federation versus the single eagle from the Great Seal of the United States. He was joking, but come to think of it, symbol or not, when was it ever a good thing that a creature had two heads?
Decorum precludes me from interviewing my friend’s girlfriend about their relationship. But it is easy to sympathize with Anya. Igor is not undifficult. During many of their arguments, the main point in his defence is “Man is first!” Given all this, a little duality is certainly forgivable. Yet the 2008 Year of the Family version of Igor was the most domesticated I’d ever seen him.
My friend the samizdat writer and émigré from Leningrad, Mikhail Iossel, who founded the writers’ festival in St. Petersburg, describes his city as artifice incarnate. If not for the perverse imagination of Peter the Great, a seven-foot-tall madman, three hundred years ago, this unlikely city, built in a swamp on the bodies of more than a hundred thousand serfs, would not be. The architects of the city were steeped in the Italian Baroque style, so when you walk along the streets it looks European, but that visual aesthetic does not compute with the indescribable Russianness. This strangeness is compounded by the otherworldly summer light and the punishing winter dark. With the proper application of enough alcohol (and even sometimes without), walking in St. Petersburg is the equivalent of walking in a dream.
The inside of the Atrium café in downtown St. Petersburg, a spacious courtyard enclosure under skylights, was designed to be a sanitized inversion of the exterior. The pale and faded pastels of the outdoor facades were bright and vivid inside. An impossible indoor version of itself, a Bizarro St. Petersburg streetscape with an upscale Stokmann’s department store and a spitting lion’s head fountain.
You entered the Atrium through hallways converted into jewellery stores, the walls aglow with golden and silver necklaces and watches. Older Swedish and German and Finnish couples mobbed the place. It smelled of lavender soap from the L’Occitane kiosk.
This is where Igor and Anya spent most of their time before he quit and we went to Gelendzhik and he broke up with her, before it eventually closed down in the financial crisis. He doubled and tripled as the manager and barman and barista; she waitressed. There was a narrow bar about twenty feet across with coolers at both ends. On one end were the cakes (Marzipan, Royal Truffle, Mango Sour Cream Shake Cake, Boney M) and at the other end were the ice creams (coconut sorbet, grape, bilberry). Little coat hooks were attached to the brass bar railing with decorative leather ties. The food elevator had two compartments hidden behind polished steel sliding doors. Food came up the food elevator from the kitchen in the basement; dirty dishes went down. Igor’s domain included the espresso machine, the beer taps, and the full bar. One of his industrial juicers had a motorized knob into which he pressed halved oranges and grapefruits. The acid in the citrus had eaten away at the skin and the cuticles on both his hands. The other juicer was for carrots and apples and beets.
Two months before the conflict with Georgia in summer 2008, and before the economic crisis, I was in St. Petersburg working at the writers’ festival. The Year of the Family was to be the festival’s last year.
For ten years (I’d been involved for nine of those) the festival had been bringing the most interesting writers from around the world and inflicting powerful hangovers upon them. It had been feasible when the ruble was weaker, but every year the ruble crept up and up, costing the festival thousands of dollars that it didn’t have. On top of that, the bribes—after all, we were rich Americans, and what difference is there between Coca-Cola and a non-profit literary organization, anyway? How were they to know? But the combination of the strengthening ruble and the higher bribes made it untenable, and that last year was bittersweet.
I had chaperoned countless of the finest representatives of contemporary North American literature to Bar Dacha, one of the sleaziest, most glorious holes in the wall imaginable, while they danced till dawn. I had taken an Ivy League professor to a party hosted by Igor at a nearby restaurant, and the impression it made on him could in part be measured by the fact that he was forty minutes late for the workshop he taught the next morning. I had taken my friend Adam, one of my favourite young American novelists, out for a night on the town only to run us right into two drunk cops who took all our money. It was hard to believe it was all coming to an end.
I walked down Kazanskaya, past the crumbling, magisterial Kazansky Cathedral and Nevsky Prospekt, and sat at the bar of the Atrium with Igor. He was in the middle of a rush. He poured me a glass of carbonated water from the four-nozzle, German-manufactured fountain, which read, from the customer side Trink Coca-Cola. I drank it and read at the bar.
Anya took an order. She banged the keys on the computer. She propped one foot on the counter and fussed with a cigarette. “What do they need, baby?” Igor asked. She turned away from him. She threw aside one of the food elevator doors and ran a ten-dollar plate of three sunny-side-up eggs drowned in bacon grease to some Germans. The check, after a short delay, printed. Igor snatched it and whipped up a cappuccino. He set it on the counter for her.
“Everything okay?” I said.
“Like usual, she is fucking my brain,” he said.
When things slowed down, Anya greeted me and lamented her upcoming exams. She told me that when she wasn’t at work, she was spending all her free time studying, but that soon she’d graduate. Despite the fact that Anya majored in English, she only spoke to me in Russian. She was timid, the opposite of Igor.
The sun shone through the glass ceiling and Igor cranked out the yellow awning over the café. He wore a black apron, a black polo, thin black slacks, and a pair of plastic purple sports sandals. For some reason, Russians in service jobs often wear the cheapest possible purple sports sandals with socks.
He peeled a small onion and popped it whole into his mouth.
“For some reason,” he said, “every day I am wearing these nicotine patches, I am eating a raw onion.”
“But you’re not smoking?”
“I’m smoking and eating raw onions.”
Igor handed me the book he was reading, a thick hardcover. It was called The Ship of Sludge. I flipped open the first page, where there was an ornate signature. “He signed it for you?”
“No, it’s mine signature. I do this in all my books.”
“Why do you sign your own books?” I had other friends who did this but hadn’t expected it of Igor.
He thought for a moment. “I don’t know … It is about navy. It is funny as fuck what these naval officers are doing. It’s about life on the submarines. Lots about Kursk. Lots about Americans.”
“It’s fiction or non-fiction?”
“Well, basically, it’s non, but from the tenth teller it will be different.”
The accountant came in. She was a statuesque blonde with cat eyes. She appeared once per day, ostensibly to tally the books, but basically she flirted with Igor and smoked and drank coffee. She took a stool at the end of the counter near the juicers. Igor brought her an espresso and the daily receipts. Anya was also beautiful, but short and sometimes, it seemed, full of self-doubt. When the accountant came in, Anya softened toward Igor a little bit. She spoke the next order to him directly, but clipped: two mimosas with grapefruit juice, fresh squeezed, instead of orange. And a brandy.
He juiced two grapefruits on the juicer with the motorized knob. After he conferred with the accountant, he returned to the barstool across from me.
When Anya went by again, I asked about her sister, who was studying Chinese in Beijing right now, and she told me she was doing very well there, planning to attend the Olympics at the end of the summer and return to Petersburg afterward. It was an interesting choice. Her sister didn’t have any particular interest in China, and just a few years ago any upwardly mobile young girl would certainly have studied English.
“This reminds me of little joke,” Igor said. “Do you know the word optimist?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How about pessimist? Realist?”
I nod.
“Okay, so there’s three guys—one is optimist, one is pessimist, one is realist. Optimist chooses to study English. Pessimist studies Chinese. Realist studies AK-47.”