We walk down the street, along the shore of Lake Baikal, toward the centre of town.
The Listvyanka specialty is hot smoked omul. Related to salmon, the omul is unique to Baikal. We pass the little post office and the Limnological Museum, an Uzbeki restaurant, the surprisingly upscale Hotel Mayak, and the newly opened Nerpinary, which advertises freshwater lake seals that sing, dance, and do math.
Tourists and villagers are easily distinguishable. A wedding party from Irkutsk vamps in a parking lot near the shore for their photographer. Tourists go by with expensive backpacks and travelling gear. Villagers carry coolers of omul or bushels of strawberries or shallow yellow plastic crates of raw shashlik, or they pull wagons full of beer.
As we enter the market, all the fishmongers shout at us: “Hot fish, hot fish. Hot omul!” Rendered in English, the call doesn’t sound particularly catchy. But in Russian, instead of saying literally, “Omul goryachy!” (“Hot omul”), they add diminutive endings to both words, as in “Omulyok goryachenky!” Diminutive forms are common in the market. They suggest closeness, friendship. I am your pal. Come, buy from me. Also: My fish are cuter.
Dozens of stalls, and stall after stall: omul. Omul after omul after omul, their body cavities held open with toothpicks to show the succulent smoked meat inside.
The fish is an endangered species, but one would not know that judging by the market stock.
Igor insists that we get some. I tell him it’s an endangered species and maybe we shouldn’t. He blows me off completely. The same reaction as the quadrocycle guide who pitched my plastic water bottle into the forest. Sometimes I wish I were the type who took a stand on principle, but I am weak and easily swayed. I was a vegetarian before I started coming to Russia. And now I will eat omul once Igor decides which monger we will buy from.
He considers for some time, strolls along, looking skeptically at one monger’s fish and then another. They all look exactly the same to me. They look good. Clean-eyed. They smell like fresh smoked fish should smell.
Finally, he addresses the fishmonger bearing the closest visible resemblance to Jabba the Hutt. She does not play the diminutive game. She is not your friend. She says firmly and convincingly: “My fish is the freshest here. Luzhkov, you know, the mayor of Moscow—when he is in Irkutsk, he buys omul only from me. I have an order tomorrow from him. I’ll smoke his fish tonight myself.”
This is all Igor needs to hear. He likes her style. He explains we’ll be here for a week. That he is a serious customer. She introduces herself as Yana the Fishmonger. Igor introduces himself as Igor Yurievitch. When she repeats his name and patronymic, she uses the same intonation as the cops on the train and in Novorossiysk.
She wants one hundred rubles per fish, but Igor proposes we pay eighty per and that, if these are good, we’ll buy omul only from her every day for the next ten days.
She looks us up and down. I imagine her doing complex math, judging our capacity for ingesting omul, predicting how many omul we’ll eat times the twenty rubles per fish the deal will cost her. Her face contorts into a snarl as she considers this. Then she smiles. “All right, boys,” she says. “Eighty it is.”
She opens an Igloo cooler in which the freshly smoked fish are kept warm. Each whole fish is wrapped in newspaper. Igor selects two. She approves of his choices. She puts them in a plastic bag for us.
As we walk away with our omul, I ask Igor, “How did you choose Yana?”
“I always go to the loud one,” he says. “She usually has the best, and if she is loudest, she is getting the most business. High turnover means fresh fish. It also means you can easily get discount from her.”
“What if she has crap fish but she’s just loud?” I say.
“Actually,” Igor says, “I think they all have exactly the same thing. But now, when we return and the others say, ‘Buy from me! Buy from me!’ I will say, ‘Yana has the best.’ Then they will try and sell me, saying, ‘I have the best.’ I will say, ‘Give it to me for free.’ And they will say, ‘No, with discount.’“
As we leave the market, two ladies are battling over placement for the fold-out tables on which they sell strawberries.
There is a small tourist market at the other end. It’s the same crap as at the tourist markets in Gelendzhik—Putin matryoshkas and wolf cub fur hats and T-shirts with McDonald’s insignias that say The party is over!, and folkloric wooden toys and seal figurines. There’s a small, locked workshop in the back of the market that has another Google translation on it: Danger. Homemade Production!
We sit on the beach at a little round glass table and eat our omul. It’s a compact fish; imagine an average-size river trout. The steaming white flesh slips off the bones.
“This would be a great place for a horror movie,” I say. “The sea monster that lives here has to be much bigger than the Loch Ness Monster if we imagine that a creature, like fish in an aquarium, grows to the size of its environment.”
“And the omul are his angels and the nerpi are his army.” “And everyone who eats omul before swimming in the lake will be punished.”
“If he’s getting revenge on every swimmer who ate omul, this is very busy sea monster,” Igor says.
We have been told that for every minute you spend in Baikal, you add a year to your life. I throw off my shirt and swim out, pushing through the shock of the cold until my limbs start to numb, and I swim back. The water is frigid, colder than the coldest cold springs in Florida, colder than ice baths my mom made me take when I had a fever.
“Congratulations,” Igor says. “One month added to life. No, let’s see. If one minute makes one year, you were there for, sorry, man, no—it’s one week maximum extra life! No more.”
Then he steps in. He walks in to his knees, holding up the wet ends of his shorts so that they don’t touch his legs.
“Take a photograph of me quickly so I can get out of here,” he says. I take his photo, documenting his having entered the limnological symbol of the Russian soul, and then we dry off.
Others, especially little children, swim far out into Baikal. “They must have insulated skin like seals,” I say to Igor. He agrees. We listen to the chaotic sounds of dozens of languages—Italian and German and Chinese and Japanese—and we wonder where the Russian tourists are.
A cruise ship goes by too close to the shore and sends a series of large waves across the beach. A family sitting near the waterline, their lunch spread across a blanket, is suddenly ankle-deep in water, and the retreating waves reclaim their omul along with their purses and a bottle of vodka. They scramble to retrieve their things in the cold water. No one offers to help. Another man splashes into the lake to catch his canoe that broke anchor.
I notice three armed guards leave an armoured car idling on the street as they get out to buy omul. People on the streets carry steaming omul wrapped in newspaper the way Parisians carry baguettes.
On the way home, we stop at a kiosk and buy a bottle of vodka and a few more Shore of Baikal beers. A babushka from the Republic of Buryatia is selling lavash that she bakes in a big stone oven. We buy two circular loaves for fourteen rubles total, and when we give her the money, she flashes a huge golden smile.
We return to the hotel and sit in the outdoor kitchen and drink vodka, which inspires me to offer a little thesis: “Gelendzhik is a soulless place, resorts, capitalism, consumption, et cetera,” I say. “Baikal is all soul, even in this, its most touristy zone.”
“Every Russian wants to see Baikal,” Igor says. “But the place is overrun with Western tourists. You Westerners think that bears are walking in the streets of Russia. But I didn’t see any bears. Only Swiss.”
I tell Igor about a Russian academic’s theory that all Western stories about Russians fall into two categories: Those Scary Russians or Those Crazy Russians. Partially this is a function of Cold War mentality and partially it’s the fact that the popular image of Russia is a fixed stereotype from somewhere around 1989. There are new nuances and frameworks, of course, but the typical male Russian character in the popular Western imagination used to be Sean Connery in Red October, diabolical yet sometimes contemplative and righteous with a thick accent and a powerful job as a submarine commander, and now he’s Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, diabolical yet sometimes contemplative and righteous with a thick accent and a powerful job in the mafia. The typical female Russian character has been downgraded from Brigitte Nielsen’s character as Ivan Drago’s wife in Rocky IV to the generic prostitute/mail-order bride.
How did the Russia we’d seen match up with that? Bears don’t roam the streets, but men evade army service en masse and far too many beat their wives and slaughter Chechens, who slaughter them back. Cops are easily bought off and they shoot holes in the walls of my favourite banya.
Beyond all that, there was the high-level crazy/scary stuff: the imprisoning of oligarchs who crossed the Kremlin; the bold-faced murder of crusading journalists and human rights activists; the fact that, in informal nationwide polls to determine the sexiest man in Russia, Putin often came out on top. These things were crazy and scary, but they also could happen anywhere. As I write this, a recurring feature has recently been born in the magazine New Republic called “Is Russia Weirder Than Florida?” in which the authors present news items that occurred either in Florida, my home state, or in Russia, and you have to guess which is which.
But no, no bears roam the streets (well, maybe if you go farther east), and Igor takes exception to the stereotype.
“You are the crazy-scary ones,” he says. “Always bombing somebody and eating McDonald’s and having Mickey Mouse. So it’s not soul or no soul. It’s not crazy or scary. It’s big question. Fuck it.”
It’s big question. Fuck it. I repeat these words in my head. There is some beautiful eloquence there. And of course, from the point of view of the Russian media, more bears roam the streets of Canada than the Motherland, and if the occasional cop fires off a round in the banya in St. Petersburg, that’s nothing compared with the constant coverage of ordinary citizens shooting up their schools or offices in the United States.
Galina, the owner of the hotel, comes out to sit with us. She asks how we’re finding the village. Igor tells her about his negotiation at the fish market. Galina tells us that she knows Yana the fishmonger. “Everyone knows Yana,” she says. “She has the best fish.”
Igor boasts that he got a discount.
Galina is impressed. “Yana is very strict with the prices,” she says.
“Probably she is boasting,” Igor whispers to me.
But she is, essentially, like the attendants on the train, Igor’s friend now. He has broken down the hardest fishmonger in the village. Victory.
Three Swiss guys arrive at our place and we invite them to join us for a banya run. They have heard about the banya, but they have never been. On the way, it begins to rain.
Robert, one of the Swiss guys, covers his head with his jacket.
“It’s ecologically pure rain,” Igor notes.
The Listvyanka banya is run by Yunez, a Lithuanian guy with a punched-in nose who owns the combo hostel/banya nearest to Baikal. Igor negotiates with Yunez to get us into the banya. Yunez begins explaining the mechanics of the banya to Igor, who takes offence. “I am Russian, you realize. I have been in banya since I was a little fucker.”
“Okay,” Yunez says, “you explain it to all these foreigners, then. If you need any help, there is a manual.”
In between steams, I read out loud from the manual, another product of Google Translate:
Treatment and prophylactic action of Russian bath on a human body … At first the person comes into a steam room and 10–15 minutes are soared, even before washing then cools down and has a shower bath cold water. And so 2–3 times …
It is impossible to reject aside and psychological effect from visiting of Russian bath—pleasure, pleasant sensations. The bath removes stress, creates effects of comfort of an organism and rest, that medical and preventive an effect also has. Not casually both Russian bath and a sauna is widely used by sportsmen. Regular [
] procedures weaken muscles, reduce weariness, train a hormonal exchange and vegetative nervous system, promote improvement of sports results and creates perfect conditions for working capacity restoration … Russian bath is counter-indicative: at oncological diseases; epilepsies; active inflammatory process of internal bodies; ischemic illness with a stenocardia of IV inactional class; insufficiency of blood circulation above a 2-stage; hypertensive illness of 3 stages; amypcardian heart attack if there have not passed 6 months; hypertensions to a bronchial asthea about frequent 3–4 once a day attacks; infectious diseases in the sharp period (at a heat); pulmonary heart …
“Somehow,” I say, “this explains it perfectly.”
“I told you before,” Igor says. “Banya is unexplainable.”
“We are glad you guys are here,” one of the Swiss guys says. “I think we would not have understood this manual on our own.”
“Let’s go counter-indicate our pulmonary hearts!” I cry.
My dream is to go direct from the banya into Baikal. After wading into the massive lake up to his knees, Igor does not share my dream. I try to persuade him.
“The water in those buckets is from Baikal. I am not going in this water again,” he says, indicating the buckets of water Yunez prepared for us in the shower area.
“Yunez probably took the water from the tap.”
“His tap is from Baikal. All water here from Baikal.”
“We are going, man.”
“I will sit here and smoke.”
I am much more taken with the idea of the soulfulness of this place than Igor is. Probably this is a good indication that I am much more of a sucker than he is.
The Swiss guys and I tug on our shorts, and I lead the charge out of the banya and across the street into Baikal, where we are quite a spectacle, three Swiss guys and an American, red, splotchy skin steaming as we splash into the lake. I stand it for as long as I can, but my legs start throbbing after thirty seconds and I have to get out.
When we return to the banya, Denis is a little wobbly. He sits down and his eyes roll back in his head.
“Don’t worry about it,” Igor says. He’s seen this many times before. “Give him a minute.”
His Swiss compatriots are silent. A few seconds later, Denis comes to. We force him to drink water and he steadies.
“Whoah!” he says. “Good rush.”
Sitting in the banya with the Swiss guys, we discuss how cheesy Europop sounds somehow much better in Russia. The country has a liberating effect on tackiness and cheesiness. The eighties lip-synchers Milli Vanilli even sound good to me here in Yunez’s banya on the banks of Baikal.
As we leave, Yunez pulls Igor aside. “Go on the website and leave something in the comments section that says you feel at home at my place, that you loved staying here, every day at Yunez’s place is like a holiday and comfortable for children. Something like this.”
“No problem,” Igor agrees.
The Swiss guys want to have a party at our outdoor kitchen. So we buy another bottle of vodka and when it runs out we buy another and when that runs out another, and so forth … Somewhere around the second bottle, we forget that we prepaid Andrey, the hotel owner Galina’s son, for an excursion to the island of Olkhon starting at six in the morning. Somewhere around the third bottle, I guess, I go to bed.