Igor and I went to the banya again, and he violated his cardinal rule. We had been talking, as we sometimes talked in the banya, about women. One thing he had said about Anya stuck in my head: “I am trying to figure out whether she is the shadow or I am.”
Then, while we sat in the chill-out area in between steams, he ordered fifty grams of vodka.
I called him out. He had once commanded me that, whatever I did, I must never drink vodka in the banya. A good friend of his died after drinking vodka and passing out inside the parilka.
“This is not alcohol,” he said. “This is medicine. This is cure.”
I refrained from accusing him of the Duality.
He shot the vodka and clanked the glass on the table. “We are now entering Heathrow Airport by Jeep!” he said.
Later that night, I invited Igor and Anya on the traditional closing boat ride for the writers’ festival. Every year we rented a big boat stocked with alcohol and, around midnight, cruised the canals for an hour. Then the captain steered the ship out onto the Neva for the raising of the bridges. The river was mobbed with boats small and large.
The first time I’d heard of this spectacle, I didn’t quite understand it. “We are going to look at drawbridges go up?” I asked. But it’s difficult to describe the collective feeling of joy that the sight inspires.
And in the summer, city life in St. Petersburg revolves, to some degree, around the bridges. Each bridge goes up on schedule, and if you don’t leave the centre by the scheduled time, you have to wait until the morning when they come down again. Every night, cars scream toward the bridges in hopes of making it just in the nick of time. Some of them invariably don’t. Long lines of traffic are always blocked in for the night. Taxis hurrying to get their final fares across the bridge are stuck. They turn off their engines in the middle of the road and sleep for a couple of hours until the bridges go down again.
The bridges are brightly lit on the sides, and they rise slowly. From the water, the view is stunning—the Winter Palace on one side and the Peter and Paul Fortress on the other. Thousands of people line the banks. The boats sputter and bob in the choppy water, dangerously close to one another. They jockey for position under this bridge or that one as it rises. On one boat they’re having a dance party, on another a wedding celebration, everyone shouting and partying. Sometimes there’s fireworks over the Hermitage. And after the bridges are up, the massive barges and cruise ships wind their way up the river.
Our boat that night carried a group of about a hundred North American and Russian writers, and Igor and Anya. It was the closing night of the final year of the festival. And I was thinking about those nine years roaming the nooks and crannies of that ethereal city, drunkenly chaperoning drunken writers—some of my heroes—home from those nooks and crannies, wandering fictional paths taken by great fictional characters—Dostoevsky’s murderer Raskolnikov and, of course, Gogol’s person-sized nose. All that time, I hadn’t only been drinking and sweating at the banya with Igor. I’d sat in on seminars on Russian punk rock and Russian translation. I’d heard Mikhail Iossel’s stories about being a part of the artistic underground there in the eighties, with the KGB constantly hassling writers. I’d met an entire new generation of young Russian poets, one of whom had told me the first time we met that he was trying to write works that actively resisted commodification, which blew my mind because back then I’d just come out of a writing program in which lots of people were actively trying to write whatever Random House could sell. That last boat ride was a big night.
Igor sat at a table with Anya for as long as he could stand the boredom and lack of social engagement. Then he started walking around the boat talking to everyone.
I sat with Anya for a little while. Once Igor was gone, she grew even more quiet and a little sulky. Meanwhile, Igor was on the outside deck, infiltrating group after group, sharing shots of vodka. At one point he threatened to throw a Russian poet whom he disliked overboard. There was uncomfortable laughter. Everyone, especially the Russian poet, hoped that this was a joke.
When the ride was over, we docked on the Fontanka canal and no one wanted the night to end. We careened down the street toward Dumskaya street and its legions of sleazy bars. Igor wanted to join us, but Anya took him by the arm and led him away.
Around eleven the next morning, on the Day of the Family, Igor called. “Wazzup muzzafugga!” he said. He sounded wasted. Sober, he typically didn’t use this particular refrain, very popular on one of the local radio stations. “I will be in Suliko in five to ten minutes,” he said.
“I thought you were working,” I said.
“I don’t feel like working today. So you’ll meet me there in five to ten minutes?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay, see you, man.”
I’d slept for only a few hours. It took me a little while to get myself together and head down to Suliko, the cheap but tasty Georgian restaurant behind the Kazansky Cathedral. When I walked in, he was slumped in a booth in the corner. There was an almost empty carafe of vodka in front of him, and he had finished a business lunch, the typical midday restaurant deal including, at Suliko, fish soup, beet salad, meat and rice, and a cup of mors (boiled fruit soaked in water). He seemed practically asleep, wearing his work uniform. The black apron was tied around his waist.
“Wazzup muzzafugga?” I said.
“Hey man,” he said. “I am not spry. Nothing is interesting. It’s autumn depression. I need to see the first snow.”
“It’s summer,” I said.
“In Russia, summer is autumn depression.”
He forced me to drink vodka with him. I noticed that his right knuckles were like hamburger. He told me that, on the way home from the boat ride, he had made Anya stop the car. He got out and started a fight with a brick wall. Surprisingly, the brick wall won.
“I told you, man,” he said. “Never drink vodka in banya.”
He fumbled his cigarette, mumbling and slurring. I ordered more bread to keep him eating.
“How did you get out of work?” I asked.
“Just left. Said I wanted to leave. Director said no. I drank some whiskey. Then director said, ‘You are drunk, get the fuck out of here.’“
“Are you going to be fired?”
“No, just day off. That’s all.”
The real deal started to come out. He and Anya had reached an impasse. She refused to move in with him without being married; at the suggestion of marriage, Igor’s refrain kicked in. “Why do I need another stamp in my passport? Why do I need more ink on my hands? A ring on the finger? I hate rings.”
Marriage in Russia is a rite of passage that sees the permanent modification of the passport with a marriage stamp, to go along with the other stamps designating your city registration and place of work. To Igor, it was just more bureaucratic officialese, just like any other engagement with the system in Russia: meaningless. He’d rather they just got a place together.
He said she’d stopped by work that morning, and they had a fight.
“It is like how I already told you. How House MD says, ‘Everyone lies.’“
“Well, happy Day of the Family, man,” I said.
It was unclear how many people noticed the new holiday. There was a municipal banner hung downtown that read Day of the Family. Love, Dedication, Trust.
Igor’s friend Big Al suddenly arrived, and he immediately understood the situation.
“We need to get your drunk ass home, Igor,” he said. Big Al pulled him into a standing position and Igor slung his arm over his neck.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow never dies,” Igor said. He smiled and his eyes closed. Big Al walked him out of Suliko.
After they left, some guy tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “I can’t help hear you talk English. May I ask you please, do you happen to have the email address of Al Gore?”