Around dawn, the train car comes slowly to life. People wake up and start making tea from the big samovar at the end of the car. Igor appears beside my bunk and stands at the window, holding the two books I’ve given him for the trip, the second novel by Klyucharyova and the novel Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin.
“I finished them,” he says.
“What’d you think?” I ask.
The new Klyucharyova book doesn’t seem to have spoken to him the way Obshchy Vagon did. He summarizes it: “The main character, former revolutionary now in Moscow, early love has fallen hard. Now is searching for himself. He is considering getting baptized. Basically, this is the story of the man trying to find the reason for living … But he found it in this girl. He made a big mistake in cancelling the relationship with her. After cancelling, she was a junkie … then he realizes he loves only one woman and she is married to his best friend. And basically that’s all. But it’s very interesting.
“There is a part with the fucking good emotional transmission like in Obshchy Vagon. He is standing near the church, just scared to come in because he doesn’t know the rules of it. At end—he is artist—at end he is painting Madonna with his love’s face. The rest of it, not so good emotional transmission, but very realistic. Well, actually very interesting book … interesting storyline, man. But the first one was better.”
Prilepin was a soldier in Chechnya and subsequently an officer in OMON, Russian special forces, and after that a revolutionary with an extremist group called the National Bolsheviks. Sankya is about a young revolutionary modelled on the Nat-Bols, as they’re called. I didn’t know exactly how Igor would react to such an explicitly anti-Kremlin book.
“Prilepin beat Klyucharyova with this Sankya,” he says. “The story of him carrying the coffin of the father. It’s terrible, man. It was raining. He was wet. Out of power. There is still ten kilometres more and mother is crying and going after them.”
It dawns on me that the aspects of the books that he latches onto are those that have some immediate application to his life. Was Igor thinking that he had made a mistake in breaking it off with Anya? When he talked about the scene in Sankya where the main character carried the coffin of his father, the patriarch of his family, was he thinking of his grandfather’s recent death?
“Do you ever think about these kinds of things yourself?” I ask. “Like in the Klyucharyova book, about trying to find the meaning of life?” The woman below me stirs in her bed. Others still half asleep take note of the two guys speaking English.
“When I was young,” he says. “Now, just living. It’s too complicated. Sometimes I was thinking, we are not living. We are in hell. Because living here is like in hell. In the world. This is a hell. I was thinking that way.”
“Life is sometimes not so hot,” I say. “And for some people maybe it’s hell. But for me, for most of the people I know, if this is hell, it’s not living up to its reputation. Maybe there are moments of hell.”
“With a position like what you have,” he says, “I can say you don’t know what paradise is and what hell means. I think in Russia is hell because we are here just surviving.”
We arrive in Kras in a crushing heat wave. Thirty-five degrees Celsius.
Yulia and her father are there to pick us up. She’s been here all summer while we’ve been wandering the country like a couple of strays. And now here I have a kind of home. I’ll stay here for several weeks before returning to Toronto via St. Pete. Igor will roam farther—all the way back to the Black Sea for the job interview in Sochi—on his own. Igor and Yulia have met a couple of times before. They are not inclined to really hit it off. Yulia doesn’t drink and Igor doesn’t shop.
We are staying at Yulia’s grandmother’s place. Yulia, Igor, and I stroll around.
We sit in the square and watch some drunk auntie dancing there. Yulia says she dances there all night every night, by herself. Occasionally men get up and dance with her. Igor nicknames her: Kras Perpetual Mobile.
Igor and I have a feast with the whole family—Yulia, her mom, grandma, and sister, and her father. I meet Sasha’s son Ivan for the first time. He’s a huge smiling boy.
Sasha is plotting her return to Moscow now, where it’s more expensive but where there are prospects for an actual career. Grandma or mom or father or maybe all of them will go with her to help watch Ivan.
The first toast is to Sasha’s new driver’s licence. Her immediate plan, when she gets back to Moscow, is to buy that car.
Sasha is optimistic about finding a job in Moscow despite the crisis. Mom is eager to go. Grandma is not so. She is unhappy about going to Moscow, which she dislikes because of the people. By way of example she mentions that when she was there working for several months, during Soviet times, you would visit someone’s house and they wouldn’t put anything on the table, no tea or even chocolate. “Can you imagine?” she says.
The next morning, it’s thirty-two degrees when we wake up at eight. By nine-thirty, it’s thirty-five. By ten, thirty-seven.
We walk around the city. Igor asks me if I’ve noticed anything different about Kras compared with the other places we’ve travelled. He is shocked that I am so unperceptive. “I can’t believe you didn’t notice. There are no cats in the streets here,” he says. I hadn’t noticed, but this is because I hadn’t noticed that there were, according to Igor, cats everywhere in Gelendzhik and Listvyanka and St. Petersburg. Maybe I just don’t notice cats and therefore do not notice the absence of them. I think I tend to notice dogs more, especially strays. But then dogs, to me, are more noticeable.
The Lenin statue downtown has been turned into a playground for children driving miniature cars and trucks, and miniature ponies with pompoms and neon saddles. Skateboarders flip and spin their boards at Lenin’s feet. So much as touching the Lenin statue used to be prohibited. Now it is essentially a jungle gym.
Yulia, Igor, and I decide to visit the Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Chapel at the top of the hill for the daily cannon blast. We can’t find the bridge to the cannon, though, and so, with twenty minutes left, we flag a car. This is a fairly common practice in Russia. A lot of cars double as cabs for extra money. But one of the tried-and-true rules I’d always heard was that you never get into an unofficial cab with more than one person in it.
A white Japanese car with the wheel on the right stops. Two guys are in the front seats. They agree they’ll take us to the chapel quickly. And I figure Igor is as big as the two of them put together. But as soon as the car starts moving, the guy in the passenger seat flicks a razor-sharp diving knife open. He closes it and flicks it open again, looking at the driver out of the corner of his eye. The car comes to a stop at a light. If we go through the light, we’ll be leaving the main thoroughfare. I look at Yulia, who saw the knife as well, and nod to the door. I tap Igor, who is oblivious, but he follows us out in the middle of traffic.
We immediately find a stairway leading to the chapel and rush up it, looking back to see if the guys in the white car with the knife have decided to follow us. They haven’t. We make it to the top just as the cannon fires, setting off all the car alarms in the vicinity.
The chapel is built on a spot that used to be a temple for the Tatars and also a lookout point from which to notify the villagers of incoming hostile raiders. Krasnoyarsk and this chapel feature on the ten-ruble note of the Russian Federation.
We buy a small bottle of gorilka, small as an attempt at limitation, but after we finish it we decide to go to the store for another small bottle, second attempt at limitation.
Igor goes into the store. There’s a long line. When he gets to the front, he asks for a Nemiroff twenty-five-centilitre gorilka.
“Maybe you will take one point seventy-five litres?” she asks. “I think it’s the only size we have.”
“It’s too much,” Igor says. “I need only 250 millilitres.”
“Go over there and look for your Nemiroff while I serve other customers,” she says.
“Okay,” Igor says. He looks but sees only the 1.75-litre bottles and some gorilka infused with garlic that seems awful.
“Maybe you should take two bottles of one hundred millilitres each,” the shopkeep shouts.
“No,” Igor says. “This is masturbation.”
“Now I understand what it is I am doing, then,” the shopkeep says.
“But with me, I always close my eyes and think that I am in a dream. It helps me.”
Everyone in the line laughs.
She takes a three-hundred-millilitre bottle of Three Old Men and says, “I am always drinking this.”
“I am trusting you, then,” Igor says.
Igor is proud of his performance as we leave. “Do you know why I did it?”
“Illuminate me,” I say.
“After, she understood that if she will negotiate with me, I have a longer tongue than her.”
“Oh,” he says. “And this line about closing the eyes and dreaming, it is from movie Caribbean Pirates, right?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“No,” he says. “No, maybe not.”
Courtesy of Yulia’s grandma, Igor and I have the crowning breakfast of our journeys: a bottle of Bulgarian wine, a bottle of Bochkarev beer, chicken, potatoes, fried fish, smoked fish, two different mayonnaise-heavy salads, and bread, followed by a Tatar pie that is basically rice and apricots and raisins baked into a very tasty dough.
“Tanya is only texting me once per day,” he says. “It’s hard for you to understand I’m in love with her.”
“Is it possible you’re in love with her because she seems like the kind of girl who will take care of things?” I say.
“Maybe I’m wanting to care for her because she is caring about everything.”
He irons his shirts and pants before leaving. He’s got a kind of Miami Vice look going.
“You trying to impress someone?” I ask.
“I don’t want to look like shit on the plane, man,” he says.
After Igor leaves, things are a little weird. He is such a force that, once you’ve experienced his presence, his absence is a void. But also, Yulia and I have yet to discuss our separation. Did she get what she wanted out of it? Did I? Where will we go from here?
I had never known this stage in a marriage before, but looking back, I understand where we were. It was that stage when we both know that it was over but no one would admit anything. Instead, we were going with the flow, going through the motions, because after so many years, that was automatic.
I spend a lot of time by myself the next couple of weeks there. But there are a few times we go out and about, again not talking about the obvious, not trying to address the underlying problems or talk through them, not communicating, maybe just hoping, if we ignore them, they may go away or work themselves out …
One day, on the way back from the grocery store, she tells me about the jazz band she was in in middle school. I’d never heard anything about it.
“We used to practise in there,” she says. She points through a window of an apartment building not far from her mom’s apartment. It was still the Soviet Union, and a teacher at the music school selected her to sing because she had the lowest voice. He gave her the lyrics, and they practised a few times. She sings me a few bars and then translates the whole song. It is hilarious to picture her as a Young Pioneer in her red scarf singing a song that went like this:
I’m a little girl.
I party all day long.
Everybody hates me
who is not lazy to hate.
I like to pick up flowers
and I like to look into the river.
When I grow up,
I will leave for America.
In America, life is beautiful
I am penniless.
In America, the sun shines brightly
and I will not be physically abused.
I will have a lot of children
and I will love them.
But I am still here in Krasnoyarsk
without a penny.
When the music school director found out about the song, the teacher was fired and the band broke up.
Within a year from that summer, we will initiate the divorce. She will stay in Toronto and I will move, first to Moscow for a year and then back to Florida for a new job. In Russian, “to divorce” is razvestis. Both words have these unpleasant, sharp s sounds, the sound of something being scissored apart.
I meet my friend Fyodor for lunch. Fyodor is a 29-year-old marketing exec for the Krasnoyarsk professional basketball team Yenisei. I first met him in St. Petersburg while he was there for the writers’ festival, and we have stayed in touch. His wide-ranging interests extend from basketball to IT to poetry.
He picks me up in his beat-up Honda Civic on his break from work. He wears a suit. Skinny and pale, with red skin around his eyes, he looks like a well-dressed heroin addict. We decide to go to California Pizza for a slice.
We find a car pulling out of a spot. And by “spot,” I mean a thin sliver of sidewalk blocking the crosswalk. Fyodor obstructs traffic in both lanes for a few minutes while the other car backs out, then he manoeuvres onto the sliver of sidewalk. “It’s not exactly legal, but it seems fair,” he says. This might be the slogan for the Russian approach, I think. Not exactly legal, but fair.
We take a table at the California Pizza in Siberia. I order margherita, light sauce, light cheese, lots of oregano and tomato. And the pizza is surprisingly good. I ask him to catch me up on his life.
He’s broken things off with his old girlfriend, Lily, whom I’d met once. He met Katya, his new girlfriend, when he was driving around one day as a gypsy cab to make some extra money. He picked up Katya, and when they arrived at the destination, he told her to forget about money and pay him with her phone number. “Lily was a nice girl, but sometimes it is just the little things,” he says. “You dream of someone with dark eyes, and she had blue eyes. Her blue eyes were beautiful, incredibly beautiful, but you are dreaming of someone with dark eyes. So what do you do?”
Fyodor talks a lot about his career. He seems frustrated. He has a good job as far as jobs in Siberia go, but when he describes it, he uses English phrases such as “the HR model.” He tells me that the HR model in Russia is designed to use an employee up and spit him out.
He’s pursuing a certificate in marketing that can help him take the next step in his career. He had applied for numerous positions in marketing and management, but he couldn’t land one.
“I have tried, but I have failed every time.” He says this not with sadness or resignation or even real discouragement, merely as a statement of fact.
Opportunities are much more plentiful in Moscow and Petersburg. He has just returned from one of the Krasnoyarsk basketball team’s games in Petersburg. He has considered making the move to one of the two Russian metropolises. If he sold his car and apartment in Kras, he could probably afford another place and car in Petersburg. But it’d be a gamble. Further, often when he arrives home from work in Krasnoyarsk, his grandmother, who has a key to his apartment, has left a plate of varenyky ready and waiting for him on his kitchen table. There would be no plate of varenyky waiting for him in St. Petersburg.
It strikes me that Fyodor and Igor are the same age, and they approach their lives, their careers, totally differently. Fyodor has designed his background and education to fit perfectly that which theoretically is in high demand. He has excellent formal English skills and is proficient in IT. He is hoping that the certificate in management will propel him in some way that he has not yet propelled himself.
While we’re at California Pizza, a woman from his marketing certificate program stops by. She recently lost her job, which is a problem because she has to be employed in a marketing position as a condition of enrolment in the certificate program. So Fyodor offers to have his father, who owns a family company, draft some paperwork saying that she’s working for Fyodor in their company. Of course, Fyodor does not actually work for that company and neither will she, but the arrangement kills two birds with one stone: she gets a job to continue in the certificate program and Fyodor gets some management experience since he technically now supervises an employee. Not exactly legal, but fair.
Afterward, I walk around the city alone.
I watch Kras Perpetual Mobile dance in the square. Then I stop off at the Krasnoyarsk Festival to catch the high-heels race. A mob of gorgeous women in five-inch-plus stilettos. The winner, a beautiful girl in a red and white polka-dot dress, is out in front of the rest by at least six metres. Afterward, I ask her—being a foreigner in Siberia is kind of like being a celebrity, you can easily talk to anyone, even the winner of the illustrious high-heels race—how she managed to beat the others by so much, and she says, “I am a model, so I’m in high heels all day, and honestly, I didn’t see any competitors here.”
Igor calls after several days. “I got the job, man. Managing a combination restaurant, strip club, and bowling alley. Fifteen hundred dollars per month, apartment, food, everything.”
I’m happy for him. His voice sounds really light and sober. We make plans to rendezvous in St. Petersburg. I will be flying through on my way back to Toronto, and he will be returning briefly to gather his things and take the train, the exact same train that had taken us to Gelendzhik, back to the Black Sea to live.