Igor’s mood registers a slight uptick after the decision is made to go to Siberia and Lake Baikal. It’s July 1, and a new gambling ban has gone into effect. We walk around downtown and watch men loading all the city’s slot machines into big blue trucks. Then we shoot back up to Akademicheskaya, a stop away from Igor’s place.
There are wide asphalt sidewalks, parks, and student cafés for the foreign students of St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University nearby.
We pass a middle-aged couple on the street. The woman is drinking a can of beer while the man eats an ice cream.
We stop by Igor’s favourite café and grab a seat across from an aquarium where catfish mate. The aquarium needs better filtration. The glass is clear, but the water is heavy with sediment. “Hotel California” plays over the restaurant sound system.
“This is my place,” Igor says. He comes here sometimes by himself, usually for breakfast. He always sits at this one table in the back facing the aquarium.
We watch the catfish do it. Igor orders some Caucasian dish made from eggs, chicken, and potatoes fried together with spicy tomato sauce and fifty grams of vodka.
“In Irkutsk, I will see my sister and brother,” he says. “I decided I will not see Father. He is not like Uncle. I will just get the information what he is doing from sister and brother, to tell to Uncle. It’s not right that twins should be so far apart, not even knowing where the other one is for two years.” He orders another fifty grams and drinks a dark Kozel beer. It is clear that things are weighing on him, this business about his father. He’s negotiated with the workers doing the renovations on his neighbour’s apartment to bring down the old wardrobe we disassembled.
I stumble across an article on alcohol in the newspaper. A study suggests that there is more alcohol purchased in Russia today than in the chaotic and stressful nineties. And this statistic doesn’t even cover illegal sales. Some grandma cooks up some hooch (which is called samagon) to supplement her meagre pension, selling it to neighbours, and it kills every old alcoholic in the neighbourhood.
Igor is discerning in his vodka choices. Some small bottles can be had for as little as seventy rubles. It is not as bad as the turpentine the samizdat-era writers used to drink, but close. He sticks with the moderately priced Green Mark and its Fresh Vodka slogan.
I tell him that Fresh Vodka is a very funny slogan for me.
He says, “And for me it’s very funny to see the expiration date on my vodka.”
“You think you’re an alcoholic?” I ask.
“Probably I am drinking too much,” he says. “Beer mostly. Vodka rarely. In the winter, as you saw, I am not even drinking beer.”
There is a slight awkwardness in the air after I ask this question. Then it passes.
We decide to walk back to his apartment, along the Avenue of the Unvanquished. This area along the avenue, bordering the siege cemetery, accounts for some of the greenest parts of the city. It’s wooded, and we walk down trails far away from the actual street. The trees—pine, blue spruce, birch—are lush and dark.
We pass flocks of massive grey and black crows, which, I tell Igor, are the most terrifying crows I’ve ever seen.
Igor says, “I will tell you the story with crows. You know they like shiny things. In Abkhazia, tourists are losing these shiny things. When I was a boy, I would go hunting in crows’ nests, and sometimes was successful.”
I tell him about a documentary I saw in which crows drop nuts from traffic signals for cars to break open.
“Actually, crows very smart beings,” he says.
We are not far from the centre of St. Petersburg, yet we wander through a horse farm and a thicket of woods before emerging into a big wholesale market. We’re across the Avenue of the Unvanquished from the cemetery.
“Bodies are not only there,” Igor says, pointing to the cemetery. “They are here.” Now he points to the ground we’re walking on. “Besides the law, it’s another reason no one will ever build here. Dig and you will find bones.
“Kostya’s grandma lived here during the siege. She said they would bring bodies from all over the city. They were everywhere. We are again walking on them now.”
I look down at the sandy path.
“Imagine,” he says, “starving people were bringing the dead here in winter, with no strength to dig, especially in frozen ground. They were lying everywhere here.”
We cross the street and enter the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. There’s a dried-up lake to the left of the cemetery. A mother and two children walk in their bare feet in the mud. A sign instructs the public not to fish.
“It’s bullshit,” Igor says. “I was fishing all the time here.”
The monument in the cemetery is called Motherland. There are vast stretches of communal graves, elevated platforms with date markers designated by year only. The eternal fire is surrounded by wilted bright red plants. The fountains are dry like the lake.
“It used to be beautiful here in the nineties,” Igor says, suddenly and unexpectedly angry, “especially during every May 9 artillery show. Now, no one is caring. Veterans are dying more year by year. I think in thirty years no one will remember.”
Back at Igor’s place, there’s a toupée-sized jellyfish fermenting in a three-litre jar of brownish water on the counter with cheesecloth over the top.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Chainiy grib,” he says. “Bacteria and yeast.”
Literally, this means “tea mushroom.” I know of only one type of mushroom associated with tea, and this is not that.
He tries to explain: “It is not a real mushroom, it is bacteria, man.”
I ask where he got it.
“I asked my friend,” he says. “It’s Japanese stuff. I can get it easily, maybe from someone’s grandmother. Just asking. He gets it from somebody and somebody is giving to someone else.”
He begins enumerating all the diseases it cures. He says it’s especially helpful for the liver. We look it up online and find out it’s a kombucha colony.
Igor will leave it there for nine days.
“It’s a little bit alcoholic.”
“You believe in it?”
“I think so. People aren’t drinking shit, man.”
“But do you feel something when you drink it?”
“No,” he says, “just tastes a little bit bitter.”
We leave the chainiy grib to buy some beer at the store downstairs.
On the way, we run into a group of Igor’s friends going to play PlayStation and smoke weed. We greet them and exchange a few jokes and then carry on our separate ways.
“Do you ever join them?” I ask.
“Rarely.”
“Why not?”
“Because they will be smoking ganja and dancing like morons and smiling.”
I have long known that Igor doesn’t like weed, but the downer on dancing and smiling is something new.
We bump into those same friends again the next night. They are running across the parking lot to the car driven by a Hello Pizza! delivery guy. They buy the pizza off the delivery man by offering to outbid the person who ordered it. They bring it to Igor’s apartment.
These are real Russian stoners.
They smoke from a one-hitter and smile and dance like morons, just like Igor said, in the kitchen. They drink cheap Chilean white wine and speak with long strings of mat such that it’s difficult for me to get what they’re talking about.
Ilya works at the Grand Hotel Europa. Anton is a carpenter. Alex works in merchandising. They laugh and trade quotes from The Simpsons. Ilya mimics a conversation between Hugo Chávez and Obama. The joke is that Chávez exposes Obama as a transparent smooth talker with no substance. But the three of them don’t even know that Obama was recently in Moscow. It hasn’t been a high priority on Russian news.
They ask me the requisite questions, such as how much does a house cost in the West? And when they leave, they suggest that we join them later in the courtyard.
Igor has a special connection with these friends from the neighbourhood, most of whom he grew up with, went to school with, has known forever. With these kinds of friends, life is like an American sitcom—to the degree that life in Russia can be like an American sitcom. They pop by anytime, and Igor can just pop by their places anytime. They congregate daily in the courtyard. It’s extended family.
“This is my place, man. I can go to anyone’s apartment around here anytime and sit and drink or just have tea and talk,” he says.
We inspect the wallpaper again. Dorofay has continued to shred it, burying her claws deep in the soft, thick material. Not an inch of wallpaper below four feet has been spared.
He goes to the closet and digs out Dorofay’s pedigree. He showed her a few times while he was at the shipbuilding university and won a few ribbons. Igor is full of surprises. I wouldn’t assume that the young hooligan who posed for photos like Schwarzenegger and skipped all his classes (except badminton) would have been into cat shows.
He logs onto V Kontakte. Anya is posting love poems on his wall.
“I don’t love her anymore,” he says. “For girls, love is eternal. For men, it’s not.”
Right now, he’s particularly into the V Kontakte game City Bandits, a role-playing game in which one slowly builds a crew of mafiosi in competition with other players. He mindlessly taps at the keyboard, robs a few banks. He’s made something like seventy thousand euros today.
We head down to the courtyard, but none of his friends are there. So we sit in the sun on a bench.
“I think it’s time I learned some Russian mat,” I say.
“You think you are ready?”
“I am ready,” I say.
“What was your last grade on veniki beating?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You failed. It means you are not ready for Russian mat.”
Which is likely true, but he explains anyway. There are two main words, he says: hui and pizda.
“I can easily make twenty swear words from hui with different prefixes and suffixes,” he says.
It is difficult enough for me to pick up the sense of Russian spoken in the monotone in which Russian men speak it. What I hear when Igor talks to his friends in real mat, especially when drunk, generally goes something like this: “Motherfucker, to the dick [something, something] fucking shit, pussy [something] dick this, fuck that [something something something] whore cunt …”
He takes my notepad and makes two columns. One column is a positive variant and the other is a negative variant. For example, very bad adverbs: huyovo (I feel like fucking shit), pizdets (I’m totally fucked). Good adverbs: ohuyenno or pizdato (I’m fucking awesome or I feel fucking good).
“Then, you can use them together for more emotional thing. Can use good with good and bad with bad, but can’t use bad with good. And if you’re changing the endings, you can play with it.”
The true inferiority of the English language with regard to swearing becomes clear in any discussion of Russian swearing. The sheer number of possibilities and the sophistication—the only word that covers it—make Russian swearing vastly superior. I can say, in English, “Motherfucker, shit cocksucker damn,” and it’s expressive but sounds absurd. Russia’s great mat speakers are street poets, but to be a poet you can’t simply have an intellectual understanding of the language; you have to feel it. And I can’t feel it.
This doesn’t stop me from trying. He teaches me to say Ya segodnya ni huya ne sdelal (Today I didn’t do a motherfucking thing). And my attempts leave Igor in hysterical tears.
“Goodie one,” he says. “Excellent.”