Igor bangs on my apartment door at nine in the morning with three bottles of Baltika Light. “I only wanted to buy one, but they didn’t have change,” he says.
Last night, he tells me, he got together with some old friends from school. They drank a lot of beer. He is surly and gloomy.
We have returned to his reality, and his reality is crisis. He’s put out some feelers, but he knows the prospect of finding a job is slim right now. At the end of April 2009, the Russian Statistics Service reported that 7.7 million people (10.2 percent of the workforce) were unemployed. Since April 2008, there’d been a 71 percent growth in unemployment.
Igor’s mother has asked him to renovate the apartment while he is out of work and she’s on vacation in Abkhazia. He asks if I might be interested in helping, and I agree. We take the number 284 marshrutka to his place, through the industrial parts of town, where prostitutes stand in dirt driveways off the main road, leaning on dump trucks.
I’ve only been over to his apartment a few times before. Normally we meet somewhere in the centre. His building is across from the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery on the Avenue of the Unvanquished in the area of St. Petersburg known as Piskaryovka, which is lush and green. Development is restricted near the national cemetery.
The siege is the defining historic event of St. Petersburg. There is a museum dedicated to the siege that is one of the most horrifying museums I’ve ever seen. With food supply lines cut off for nearly three years, the city starved. They ate belt and shoe leather soup, their pets, each other. The stories of those who survived are some of the most harrowing survival stories ever told. One photo sequence at the siege museum shows a young girl’s photo taken just before the siege and then at roughly one-year intervals during. The effect of seeing someone age thirty years in two years is stunning. Living in Piskaryovka, lush and beautiful as it is, Igor is confronted with that history every day, and while he’s not likely to admit it, it must make him think about death and the past a lot. How could it not?
It certainly stayed on the minds of other denizens of St. Petersburg. Over the years, I’d been invited to a number of apartments for dinner—that famous Russian hospitality—and one question kept popping up, especially among those whose parents’ generation fought in World War II, in which Russia and St. Petersburg sacrificed so much and which is referred to as the Great Patriotic War. After a little food and a little drink, someone would invariably ask, not accusingly but with inquisitive, disbelieving eyes, eyes that really wanted to know: Is it true that Americans think they won World War II?
In the elevator of his building, Igor’s neighbour has installed a mirror so that when he comes home drunk, he can check himself out before seeing his wife.
Igor’s apartment is a stuffy two-bedroom flat he shares with his mother and his two cats, Russian blues. The apartment breathes about as well as a banya, and I imagine that I can still smell the ancient grease from the days of the potato chip makers. The small kitchen has a balcony looking out on a cheap hotel frequented by tourists from the Stans.
The apartment has been under renovation ever since I’ve known him. There are always wires poking out or half-constructed shelves. Now he has scraped the old wallpaper off the walls to replace it. We will also replace the old wardrobe and install decorative Styrofoam tiles on the ceiling. It’s a job that should, given a generous ratio of slacking off to work, take us about one week.
The cockpit of Igor’s room is his cluttered computer desk. The old PC there is constantly downloading movies, games, and TV shows, and it is perpetually logged into V Kontakte. Scattered among the ashes and beer spills on his desk, there’s a DVD for quitting smoking, two Arabic language learning discs, video poker, Professional Coffee: The Barista’s Bible, and the musty hardcover English-to-Russian and Russian-to-English dictionaries whose pages have separated from the glue in the spine. There is also a model ship that I suspect, at one time or another, was encased in a bottle.
There’s a hookah in the corner of the room. A painting with tribal text reading LIFE, his own artwork, hangs on the wall suspended from two chains, and amulets dangle from the corners of it. Above his bed are framed collections of beer coasters from his old job at the restaurant Chaika. A few photos of Anya are propped here and there, their edges curling. Several No smoking signs are taped to the walls.
In his mother’s room, he proudly shows me the photo taken the time Putin and Gerhard Schröder came to Chaika. The photo shows Putin in close-up with the smiling face of Igor at the bar in the background. There’s another photo of him striking a Schwarzenegger pose during his weightlifting days.
He smokes and plays me some of his favourite YouTube clips. One shows two teams of Japanese guys playing soccer with binoculars taped to their eyes. Another one shows Medvedev and Putin with several former prime ministers of Ukraine standing stoically at some formal event. Yanukovych (who, at the time of writing, has just been deposed as leader of Ukraine), offers a sunflower seed to Medvedev, who accepts. Then he offers one to Putin, who shakes his head politely but firmly.
Igor smokes seven cigarettes. We drink a couple of cans of Nevskoye. Then we take a walk to Sberbank to pay his bills.
“Anya is calling to me,” Igor says, “saying, ‘I am missing you. Can we meet?’ ‘What for?’ I say.”
He tells me that if he doesn’t find a job soon, he will follow through with his earlier plan to join his friends Katya and Big Al, who are working as cooks at a resort near Sochi. They had already gotten him one gig, which he turned down because of Anya’s duality. Her duality is not his problem anymore.
“If you go there, how long will you stay?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” he says. Thanks to the 2014 Olympics, it’s the only place in the country where jobs are actively being created. The pay is very good, an apartment is generally included, and he can easily visit his uncle and family in the winter.
“Won’t you miss St. Petersburg?” I ask him.
He looks out the window. “Man, now I have hangover. I am getting it only in St. Petersburg. Not in the sea air. It’s always too hot or too cold here. Today too hot.”
His normally spry demeanour is tempered. He loves his city and here he is demeaning it. The crisis, the unemployment—it is all starting to get to him.