Igor and I trekked around the wintry city looking for currency exchanges with euros. Before the ruble sank further, he wanted to convert his pay. We didn’t discuss the fact that just six months earlier, in some nationalistic urge, he’d proposed converting his entire savings to rubles. All the exchanges we stopped at were out of foreign currency. We finally found one that could give him a maximum of one hundred euros, and he took it.
When we passed a Glinka statue, Igor asked, “You know Glinka?” We stopped and read the inscription, his dates of birth and death.
“Yeah,” I said. “The father of Russian classical music, but I didn’t know that he died at fifty-three.”
“Fifty-three is enough,” Igor said.
The traffic snarled around us, the historic streets feeling the crunch of millions of people opting to be warm in their cars.
We crossed over the frozen Fontanka via the Anichkov Bridge, with its four horseman statues. The scrotum of one of the horses, according to local legend, was etched with the likeness of the sculptor’s cuckold. Groups of tourists sometimes stood on the bridge peering intently at the horses’ genitals, trying to discern a face there. This was the same canal that Igor had his dock on the one summer he tried out free enterprise in Russia. It was the same canal where I once saw a boat cop chasing down three jet skiers.
As it neared four p.m., it was already almost dark.
At Shaiba, the round banya, a guy wrapped only in a sheet rolled around in the snow on the sidewalk out front. His bright red skin steamed. It was my first time at the banya in the winter.
“Listen, man,” Igor said, “if anyone asks, you’re Canadian, not American.”
I laughed. “You never asked me to do this before.”
“Before, there wasn’t elections,” he said. “If you say America, they will ask about Obama, about Bush. All this shit. No one knows who president of Canada is or when are elections.”
Every time I came to the banya, I understood it a little bit better. I watched Igor prepare the steam room, splashing the rocks with water then wetting the veniki and beating all the walls to moisten them. In order to prepare the banya for the proper humidity, to achieve the right character of steam, you must first massage the banya itself.
Then we sat in the chill-out area and perused the meat appetizers: beef, pig, chicken, turkey, horse, deer, moose.
“I would like some moose,” Igor said, “but it is crisis.”
We sat in the prepared parilka’s good light steam until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we rushed outside to the pool deck, where it was minus-seven degrees Celsius. I stood knee-deep in snow, my feet pulsing, staring up at the white sky.
We dove in. My banya-heated body didn’t register any temperature difference between the air and the water. The banya had cancelled out all feeling. There were only the textural sensations of air and water.
“Let’s go jump through the ice into the Neva,” I said.
“Fuck it,” Igor said. “My days of swimming in those waters are over.”
Steam rolled off the surface of the water. A group of naked girls clung to one side of the pool near the entrance to the women’s banya. Protocol with naked woman in the banya pool seemed to be: do not acknowledge. They clung to their side of the pool and we didn’t approach out of courtesy.
As we climbed out, my warm and wet hands stuck to the ice on the pool railings. The wind blew little bursts of snow off the roof.
I became cold once I was out of the pool. My sheet, which was hanging on a hat rack, was frozen like a massive strip of phyllo dough. My slippers had frozen also. I shuffled into the parilka again to defrost the sheet and slippers. It took all of maybe ten seconds before they were warm and pliable again.
In the chill-out area, we sat sweating, our heads spinning, our skin turning that blotchy leopard pattern.
“Man,” Igor said finally. “Earlier today it was hard talk with Anya. “It was so stupid. You see, the problem is, she is fond of Atrium. After the job she’s coming to the Atrium. She’s coming with her mom. And not so rare. Two or three times per week. It means she is working there one or two days per week, and she is coming there three days a week. She is coming and I am saying, ‘Go.’“
“Why does she go there?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She is fond of it. And she knows I’m pissed when anyone from staff is coming to say, ‘Hello! Hello! I’m not working not working! Hello!’ I’m not coming on Nevsky Prospekt except when you are in St. Petersburg. I am already ten years working there. I’ve seen these faces. I know a lot of taxis and they are already saying, ‘Hello, Igor. Hello.’
“For example, explain me one thing. She is coming with her mom. Today was this question: ‘You want to see me?’ I said, ‘No.’ The problem is, I know her character and before she asked me she had already decided to come to Atrium, and when I said no, she had already made up her mind. I knew it before, if she is asking this question, she already decided and she will be here without any doubts. Of course, she shows up.
“I say, ‘You are the master of the questions with no answer.’ She says, ‘You always have the choice to say yes or no.’ I said, ‘I already said no, and you are still here. It makes no sense answering your answerless question,’ and she was pissed off about it.
“Then she says, ‘Okay, I’ve got your position.’ And in the evening still it was two hours of talking. Why does the woman likes to talk about all this shit?”
I tried to offer some helpful advice. I suggested that it might all work out a bit better if he was nice to her and happy to see her and communicated this rather than asking her, upon her arrival, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Probably you are right,” he said. “I am just trying to break her character. There is a poem about it. How is it in English? Ukroshcheniye Stroptivoi? Tameness of Willful? Taming the Obstinate?”
“Taming of the Shrew?” I said.
“Yes, Shakespeare. So for me this is this story.”
His allusion to Shakespeare’s classic misogynist play made me realize that Igor’s interactions with everyone, including his romantic relationships, were all about breaking the other person and winning. He wasn’t working on his communication. He was adept and practised at conflict, whether it was an outright fight or some kind of power struggle or negotiation, and that was the mode he operated in.
Outside again on the pool deck, the slippers froze to my feet and the sheet to my waist.
“Anya is happy when I am hanging out with you,” he said. “I am not getting so drunk I am fighting.”
We shaved and dressed. I never cool down enough to stop sweating before we leave. We overstayed our two hours a little, but the woman who was almost shot in the head by the cop’s gun didn’t charge us any extra.
Igor walked toward his home and I toward my conductor’s palace.
As I crossed the bridge to the music school, I noticed that, even though the winter was now technically receding, the ice had spread further across the Moika canal. It was the winter solstice, when the days begin to count down, ever so slowly lengthening toward summer and white nights again.