The initial thrill of bribing the police subsides and the cumulative effect of two weeks of hangovers sets in. We are both exhausted and sleep for almost twenty-four hours straight. I even sleep through Igor’s snoring.
We wake up simultaneously in the middle of the night somewhere in Russia. The train is stopped and silent. Outside, a shirtless man squats by a small campfire. We make tea and talk for a little bit.
“What will you do when we get back?” I ask Igor.
“Find a job,” he says. “Any job. I am pissed off to sit at home since January.” We have not checked, but we hope that the situation in the country is improving. (It’s not.)
“You’ll get one,” I say. Then I ask something else I’ve been wanting to ask: “Have you ever wondered why we became friends?”
“You can’t just say like this,” he says. “No answer question. Let it be. You can answer this question?”
I think for a minute. I recall an Aristotle quote: “A friend is another Himself,” which I’d always read as “A friend is a version of the self.” I wondered at the Igor part of me. And the me-part of him …
“I can’t explain to you,” Igor says. “Better you explain me why you are breathing. Why you’re not forgetting how to breathe?”
The train jerks, startling us, and moves again.
Our coupe reminds me of a coffin. A lot of human transport devices in Russia remind me of coffins. Or maybe not a lot, but at least two: this coupe and most elevators. I start down this line of thinking and out of nowhere remember a conversation with an old friend about his greatest fear.
“I have this friend from Ohio,” I say. “His greatest fear is that the car he’s driving will break down in the middle of an intersection.”
“It means to go straight to the psychologist,” Igor says.
“Probably. But I don’t think it’s uncommon for Americans. You know, in the US, if your car breaks down in the middle of the intersection, first of all, it means your car sucks. It means you’re poor. And probably that means you’re a loser. Also, you inconvenience people and they look at you and think that you’re poor and in their way. So there’s this shame that goes with it.”
“In Russia, if your car breaks down, it means your car is shit. Everyone’s car is shit. Someone will help you. Others will drive around.”
What he says is true. Russians, as far as I can tell, do not invest themselves in their cars the way it seems Americans do. And probably any given Russian does not necessarily regard his or her personal poverty as something to be ashamed of, like many Americans I’ve known.
“Just out of curiosity,” I say, “what’s your greatest fear?”
He thinks for a moment. “Loneliness,” he says.
As we travel north, the rain falls harder, the temperature drops, the blue sky rusts and then goes grey.
Igor grows flustered searching for a missing black sock.
“I have only one sock,” he says. He holds up the lone black sock. Printed on the toe in white lettering is No nonsense. “I’m thinking someone stole the other. It’s disturbing, man, if someone stole one sock.”
By the time we arrive in St. Petersburg, it’s like we never left, like the journey never happened. We got our positive on, but the positive is all gone. Back to overcast crisis. We’ve been through some kind of shared hallucination of a tropical place in Russia which could not, in the same nation that we’ve just arrived in, possibly exist.
Igor fumbles the Red Dog out from under the train seat. Surely it’s seen its last journey.
On the way out of the station, he throws his stray sock into a garbage can.
Back in Gelendzhik, in the evening on Russia Day, the day I’d been convinced I had the swine flu and the day Igor got the news that his grandfather had died, Igor had decided to end it with Anya. While all the couples who had patriotically screwed on the previous Family Contact Day were giving birth to children, Igor ended it with his girlfriend of many years.
Not that this was a huge shock. Before we’d left for the south, he had put her on relationship probation. They’d been arguing non-stop. Every time they’d argue, she would change her status on V Kontakte from engaged to single. After a big spat, she posted the status update Men are like blenders, you think that you need one, but you’re not sure what for. He had been thinking about ending it for some time, and something about that day in Gelendzhik and the news of his grandfather’s passing made his decision.
We were at a café on the Gelendzhik bay. It’s hard to remember which one, all their names blend together—Mr. Pizza or Café Pizza or Pizzeria Fast Food or Santa Fe or Malibu or Dolce Vita or Tropikana or Chili Pepper or Tijuana. We were celebrating the Russian Constitution and drinking vodka, which Igor insisted would cure the swine flu, at one of the cafés—they were all pretty much the same. We were both walled inside our heads, me from sickness and Igor from grief.
“There is some psychological square,” he said.
He drew a strange equation with pluses and minuses and, if I’m not mistaken, the symbol for the chemical element neon on a napkin.
“This is psycholinguistic programming, just advice to make you think. Say I am trying to decide what I will do, if I will break up with Anya or not. In top left, I think, ‘What won’t happen if I break up with Anya?’ In top right, I think, ‘What will happen if I break up with Anya?’ Below left, negative negative, ‘What won’t happen if I don’t break up with Anya?’ Below right, ‘What will happen if I don’t break up with Anya?’ I am using this process a lot with all decisions.”
“What will happen?”
“Lots of things. What won’t happen if I break up with Anya? She won’t be fucking my brain. This is most important thing.”
“So you made your decision?”
“I told her today that we are splitting when I am home. You know what she replied? ‘So I can start a new relationship, then?’ This is not the thing to say. And she knows it.” He’d hung up and she called back to apologize. She said, “I was just angry. That’s why I said it.”
“I can’t tolerate this kind of character, man. This duality. Fucking duality,” he said to me. “I told her the terms of probation: if you are saying one thing, this is your position. I suggested going to Sochi like Al”—there was good employment in the service industry in the resort town of Sochi, which was then hot in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics—”and she told me, ‘Okay, you should go.’ I asked Al, and he found me some work. Then I told her Al found me some work in Sochi and she said, ‘No fucking way you are going.’
“She doesn’t want to live with me, doesn’t want a baby, doesn’t want to cook, doesn’t want to clean. The main thing she wants is to check how I am doing two times per day. I am fed up with it.” He threw back another fifty grams and refilled our shot glasses from the carafe. “Fuck Anya. Fuck everything. I am alone. It is easier alone.” He raised his glass.
There were a lot of things I could have said at that point—but I was too sick. Despite the fact that she was the most balanced girlfriend he’d been with since I’d known him, and despite the fact that she seemed to do him great good, his mind was made up. We clinked glasses and drank.
“I don’t think I should be drinking. What if I really have the swine flu?”
“This is not drinking. This is medicine. This is cure,” he said. He had told me this once before, and it hadn’t ended well.
I felt despondent. I didn’t open up about my relationship the way Igor did. That was one of the things I admired about him: he knew exactly what the problems were and put them all out there. I bottled mine up more. Maybe these characteristics were American of me and Russian of him. Or maybe it was just me and that was just him.
I tried to apply Igor’s psycholinguistic square to my own situation. What won’t happen if Yulia and I get divorced? What will happen if we do? What won’t happen if we don’t? What will happen if we don’t? I didn’t have any of the answers. What I knew was that Yulia and I had become siblings, roommates. There was no affection. We didn’t talk. But I felt the end of the marriage was like a death. And I didn’t know if I could bear it.
We had met in grad school in upstate New York in the late nineties. She was totally new to the United States and a lot of things were confusing to her. I consoled her after her landlord chastised her for hanging her laundry to dry on the front porch. We were different in pretty much every way—she liked to shop and I liked to skateboard; she liked pop music and I liked punk rock; she liked to stay home and I liked to go out—but somehow that didn’t matter.
If I tried to pinpoint one specific reason, if I tried to say in some definitive language what went wrong, I couldn’t. There were all kinds of reasons; all kinds of things went wrong. We had treated each other shabbily. She was stubborn. I was stubborn. We were too different. We had grown apart emotionally over years of living apart physically—she in Ohio and me in Arizona for a year, and then me in Michigan and she in Atlanta for two years and Toronto for a third. And then there were the summers—every summer I went to Russia to work for the writers’ festival and she taught Russian at a language school in Vermont. Ironically, she stayed in my country while I went to hers. If you added up all the time I’d spent in Russia since 1999—more than two and a half years in total—only about a month or two overlapped with her. In 2007, I’d gotten a job in Toronto as well and joined her there. Things had finally come together as they were supposed to, but instead of working out, it was all combusting.
Next thing I knew, Igor and I were completely sauced at a club called Cool, and Igor was dancing with two Moskvichkas to that godawful playlist that I knew by heart. He and I might as well have been on different planets. Between my frequent trips to the bathroom—toilets in the Black Sea resort area, porcelain holes in the floor costing ten rubles a go, were among the worst I’d ever encountered, the last place one wants to be sick—I sat at a table and hoped I didn’t have swine flu. All I wanted was to sleep, to recover. He was celebrating Russia Day, celebrating the demise of his relationship, and coping with the death of his beloved grandfather, which he’d taken pretty hard. I didn’t have the heart to caution him off his high. And even if I had, he wasn’t to be daunted.
I tried to hang with him, but it was obvious my presence there wasn’t doing him any good. I decided to go. I approached him on the dance floor, unsure what to make of this Igor I’d never seen before, Dancing Machine Igor, wearing a T-shirt that read Never dance alone. He introduced me to the Moskvichkas. One was tall and brunette, the other short and blond like Anya. He spun the short blonde around and then swung her back into his arms. She hit his body with a thud.
“You are so huge,” she said to him, “like a wall.” She batted her eyelashes.
I told him that I needed to nurse my swine flu, and I walked home.
In our dorm-style room back at his uncle’s place, we had single beds separated by a nightstand. I couldn’t sleep when Igor was awake because he always wanted to talk. I couldn’t sleep—even with headphones—when he was asleep because of his snoring. I passed out hoping he wouldn’t come home and force me to drink beer with him. I slept the best I’d slept since the journey began, and when I woke up, I felt better; the swine flu, or whatever it was, had ebbed.
At ten in the morning, Igor’s bed still empty, I sat in the outdoor kitchen with Sergey. Soon Igor slammed the steel fence gate and stumbled in. He looked surprisingly spry. I’d seen him in far worse condition. He told us that he and the girls had hung out on the beach all night, drinking a little champagne and swimming at sun-up. When I came to the room later to check on him, he was snoring like a herd of buffalo.
In St. Petersburg, each of us goes his own way for a while. We need it. He has to deal with Anya, and we both need some rest and sobriety. I retreat to my small rented apartment near the end of the metro line, at metro Prospekt Bolshevikov. I chose to stay out here to get a different take on the city. I’d always lived like a tourist somewhere in the centre. It’d be inconvenient as hell, but I wanted to distance myself from things and get a taste of real life in Russia.
I sleep soundly without Igor’s snoring, as soundly as I slept the one night I ditched him at the club. I do pretty much nothing but sleep and embrace sobriety for a few days. Then I explore the area around metro Bolshevikov.
It’s not the worst part of the city, but it’s not one of the best either. Solidarnosti street, the main street in front of my apartment, is always dotted with skanky prostitutes in short skirts and stockings. Dangerous-looking drunk men haggle with them on the sidewalks. Sometimes these drunk johns and the prostitutes sit drinking malt liquor on the bench outside my apartment building door.
But like Anya, the region around metro Bolshevikov has its own duality. There’s a moment, somewhere between five and seven every day, when families claim the streets. The skinheads, hookers, and drunks make themselves scarce for a little while, and the sidewalks fill with young couples walking dogs and kids.
Not far away from the apartment, there is a Papa John’s, which is an upscale sit-down place in Russia, and a Pizza Hut. Beds of red-hot salvias and marigolds decorate the courtyards.
A few steps away from the apartment is something called a Vertical Turbo Solarium in a bright orange building. English graffiti over the orange paint reads Go Vegan and Emo sux.
The most striking feature of the landscape is the monstrous hospital Alexandrovskaya Bolnitsa, with broken windows and crumbling exterior brickwork. When Igor first showed me the apartment, I asked how long the hospital across the street had been shut down. “Dude,” he said, “it’s working.”
Inside, my apartment building has the traditional pee-scented entryway. The dark stairwells seem specifically designed to produce as many shadowy corners as possible. The elevator, perfectly coffin-sized, also serves as a common urinal, and sometimes worse. The apartment is on the ninth floor and has an excellent balcony. At sunrise, crows dive-bomb the balcony’s tin roof. They land there and fight, making a sound like thunder. I bang on the balcony ceiling with a broom and they swoop away.
Alone in Russia, one easily gets into a Raskolnikov/Underground Man state of mind. Gunshots occasionally ring out. Or maybe they’re cars backfiring. Sometimes I hear a woman screaming in one of the apartments around me, but it’s impossible to tell if she’s having sex or being murdered.
The hot water is cut off with some regularity; centralized water heating systems are repaired in the summer months. To take a bath, I boil water in pots on the stove and in the electric kettle. It takes about two rounds of each plus some cold water from the tap to get the temperature right.
There are no proper chairs in the apartment, only a couple of paint-splattered footstools and an ottoman. I need a chair with a back to write, and so I marshrutka over to Igor’s and borrow a flimsy dining chair.
I take the chair home on the metro. In the subway car, I put it down next to the bench and sit in it. This act catches no one’s attention at all, a foreigner sitting in a wooden chair on the subway.