In our efforts to complete the renovation before Igor’s mother’s return, we spend an entire day, until well into the evening, wallpapering the apartment. The next morning we wake up late to find the wallpaper, our single accomplishment so far, shredded by Dorofay the cat. There is a brief moment of defeat.
But we do not lose hope. We push on. We pull the old wardrobe away from the wall and find years’ worth of trash back there.
There are ancient copies of the St. Petersburg Times, an old telegram from his grandmother in Abkhazia congratulating him on his birthday, and an actual chicken foot. Igor holds up the latter and laughs. “Cat was playing with it,” he says. Dorofay again. He tosses it into one of the green garbage bags stuffed with old wallpaper.
I glance at the old newspapers. They’re from 1999, the year we first met, from the era when Igor used to read this very paper from cover to cover to learn English.
The big news was coverage of the fighting in Chechnya. There’s a surprising photo of a very young and trim Putin shaking hands with Bill Clinton. Another photo is of a dust-up between Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley during an NBA game. There are mentions of some local bars and clubs we used to go to in the events section, and five different classified ads for foreign marriage agencies.
We disassemble the wardrobe, but it is slow work. We stack the heavy wood of the wardrobe in the hallway. We try to measure and apply some of the ceiling tiles, which are about two feet square and made of Styrofoam. The tiles don’t quite fit in the spots we allot for them, and they are not flush. The seams are just untrue enough to be noticeable. It’s a mess.
We begin to realize that we will never make the deadline of his mom’s return.
We’re discouraged by our own slacking and ineptitude, and so we slack some more, taking a break in the courtyard.
I hang out for a little while, but I get the sense that maybe it’s been my influence that has kept us from getting the work done. Every day Igor emails applications for jobs, but he doesn’t even get called in for interviews. I suspect that he is falling into a depression over his inability to find a job in a country in which there are no jobs. So I return to my apartment at metro Bolshevikov.
As I’m waiting for the marshrutka to take me to the subway, a guy in a pink snow-bunny coat stumbles out of the woods carrying a five-litre water bottle filled with beer. He staggers across the street, staring with fear at the traffic because, it seems, he has not the mental processes to get out of the way of anything, only some primordial directive to move forward.
After a few days, I take the marshrutka back to Piskaryovka to meet Igor and go to the banya. I step off the bus and he is standing at the stop dressed in grey from head to toe. The sky also is grey, from horizon to horizon. His clothes and mood match the sky perfectly. Even his eyes, I notice, are the exact same shade of grey, the colour of his cats. He syncs somehow with Petersburg, like a chameleon.
We wait a long time for another marshrutka, going in the direction of the banya. We don’t talk much.
I ask him if everything’s okay.
“I’m still have no job, man,” he says.
He tells me about “the talks” with Anya. This is how he refers to them. “We have had many ‘the talks’ with her.” He sums up their whole relationship: “We are going round and round. This is her character.” He doesn’t want to discuss it any further.
It’s a weekday. Others are at work or at home saving their money. We are the only ones at Shaiba, which means it will be a crap steam. We walk in and I note once again the pencil-width bullet hole behind the check-in woman’s desk.
“You’re getting fat, man,” I say to Igor.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m drinking beer every day with you. I’m not supposed to do it.”
I tell him what I had for breakfast: ramen noodles, two fried eggs, yogurt, bread, sliced tomato.
“I ate today one pickle, two sandwiches, and an apple. That’s all.”
I call the number for the café on the in-house phone and tell her that I want a mug of kvass. She tells me the price. Then, after I put the phone down, the door behind me opens and the woman I spoke to appears. “You just ordered?” she asks. I nod, and she goes to get our kvass.
“Chill,” Igor says. “I am going to smoke.”
In the parilka, Igor lets me have another go at the venik massage. This time there is no B-minus, or even a C-minus. I have no strength at all in my arms. The greyness and depression of St. Petersburg have depleted me. I too have absorbed the great weight that is a gloomy summer in a world in crisis.
“More amplitude!” Igor shouts. But I’ve got nothing.
He sits up and snatches the veniki from me. He beats himself, standing in the middle of the parilka. Flakes of his skin, the remains of the Gelendzhik sunburn, and leaves fly around him.
Back in the chill-out room, I announce that I can feel my heart beating in my legs.
“It means the arteries are like this,” he says, making a huge circle with both arms. “You need fifty grams of cognac … or vodka. Wait. Which increases arteries and which decreases? I don’t know. You need it. One hundred grams and you will be the happiest man in the world.”
We leave the banya and stop by the Ryumochnaya. Igor asks the bartender whether cognac or vodka narrows arteries and she says, “How the fuck should I know?”
We have plastic cups of vodka with tomato juice and minipickles.
“I’m exhausted,” Igor says, “but coming back to life a little bit.”
I hadn’t known what to anticipate this summer. It is the first summer in ten years that I’m not working for the literary festival. I had planned to hang out, write. I’d intended to travel, but I didn’t know to where. Eventually, I planned to land in Krasnoyarsk, where Yulia is visiting her family, and see what is left of my marriage. Since Igor isn’t finding work anyway, and since we can’t manage a single, simple, productive thing such as finishing the renovations on his apartment, I wonder whether we might downshift—whether we might get our positive on—a little more.
“I know what you need,” I say.
“What I need?” Igor asks.
“Another trip.”
“Trip to where?”
“Come to Baikal with me. We’ve been south, let’s go east. You can swim in the Russian soul.”
Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in the world, a legend of mythic proportions in Russian culture, a spiritual place, one of the crown jewels of the Motherland. We have both talked often about wanting to see it.
“All right,” he says. “Better do that than sit here boring. I think people are just bored. This is the answer for everything. They are bored from life, bored from everything. Sometimes the boredom is pissing people off. It’s the usual thing.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right. I can’t imagine we’ll be bored at the biggest lake in the world.”
“I have a sister and brother near Irkutsk, and my real father lives there.”
This is news to me. I’ve never heard about them, and I had no idea that he knew where his father was, much less that he was still alive. I haven’t even seriously given any thought to the idea of Igor coming with me, or what we might do. And now we are suddenly en route to seeing the family he never knew.
“Have you been in touch with them any?” I ask.
“A couple times, but we never met. I will see them and then I can tell Uncle how they are.”
I had visited my biological father for the first time in California a decade earlier. I was glad I had done it. I tell Igor how strange it was to see an expression that you had always only seen in the mirror on the face of someone you’d never met.
“I don’t need to see him for this. I already saw my face on Uncle’s. Now, about this trip, just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Fuck the fucking train. We will fly.”
The train is slow, so I figure we might as well fly. And like the Russian Federation’s, Igor’s currency reserves, his savings from the oil-rich Putin years, are still strong. We have a great feeling as we finish the meal. So what if the world is still in crisis? We are invested with purpose. We are men going on a trip. A couple of strangers on the road again.