From Siberia, with love
Sitting at a cafe on Karl Marx Street, austere wooden benches and concrete walls giving off a self-conscious, post-Soviet feel. Lattes, muffins – hell, they have Americanos – along with a selection of loose teas you can smell from the jar before making your selection. Edison bulbs suspended by wires, cured brick walls.
About an hour ago I dropped Haley off at school. We woke early to catch the 1 trolley, which floats like a giant insect along the dark streets. Haley clapping her mittens when the number shows, instead of the Two or 4a, because it means our friend from Tajikistan who sells warm flat bread and gives Haley chocolate will be en route.
Twenty minutes later minutes we’re standing on the sidewalk in the half-light, a couple miles south of our apartment. It’s cold, just below zero. Haley with her bare hands shoved inside the plastic bag of the warm bread, palms thawing in the sesame-scented heat. Still holding the ticket from the trolley just in case the authorities come to check – which they do about every other trolley. Haley never loses a ticket.
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The school we originally put the kids in, Kroshkin Dom, School for Little Children, ended up a bust. Despite the reputation this country has for structure, the kids there shot about like loose electrons, napping, trilling bizarre nursery rhymes, hovering about the door and crying for mom. The smell of borscht each time you stepped into the place enchanting, and the girls emerged each time from the building with magnificent new braids – but still. Haley told stories about kids throwing down for scooters, and Kiera-Lee generally was shunted off to a corner, where she stacked plastic plates.
So we set out once more on a search for a school. And lo and behold Google.ru is different from Google.com. All of a sudden a world of schools in Irkutsk popped up — including a Montessori school that opened last year.
We sent an email, which was quickly answered. I visited with the headmaster and the three instructors. After some intense discussion, it was agreed that I could photograph the classroom, the child-sized sinks and stove, so I could show Rachel back home. Though, as per Montessori philosophy, that’s the last time I’ve been let inside to that dark box. Parents not allowed, I guess so the kids develop independence.
This the end of our third week there. Haley wakes in the dark, dresses in her overalls and sweater set out the night before. Eats a hard-boiled egg, kasha, Russian hot porridge for breakfast. I take the dog out while Rachel zips Haley into her “zimoy suit” – her winter suit with white fur lining. If we are outside, and her hood comes off, I swear the babushkas here threaten to call the Office of Children’s Services, and that’s after they’ve given you a thorough lashing with their index finger.
Down the four flights of stairs we go, Haley telling me her legs are tired, me telling her she’s taken three steps. As happens so often here in Russia there is a button you press to be released from your building. Haley frustrated because she’s already wearing her mittens and cannot press it.
On the trolley we play “I Spy With My Little Eye,” Haley always picking out the pink building near the public market. Also the statue of the bizarre beaver/tiger with a sable in its jaws, the symbol of Irkutsk. Interesting to me because I guess Isaak, my great-grandfather who I’m named after, used to ride on horseback to Siberia for sable furs. He must have come through Irkutsk. He left with my grandma for New York City in 1921, and – after a brief spate selling candy – became a furrier. In Brooklyn.
Across town, we go past shops selling Unti, reindeer boots which we hope to be able to afford come Christmas. Curving around the main shopping center where ballet dancers stretch on the bar behind broad, fogged up windows. So often the feeling of deja-vu, due to the number of hours Rachel and I stayed up in Alaska cruising the streets of Irkutsk thanks to Google street view. Or, as Rachel says, feeling dropped into a video game. I have gone up this hill before – Haley chanting “I think I can, I think I can” to the great pleasure of trolley-goers. (As you can see she breaks open even the most stolid Russian RBF.)
Once more the trolley curves, this time around an orange metal building, and we can relax because here the drivers switch and we have time to get off. Haley finds her twenty rubles and we stop at a kiosk aglow with the three coiled elements heating a stone stove. Michael in the back rolling dough. Haley knocks on the window and he smiles, and pulls a hot loaf from the wooden cooling rack. He speaks English to Haley as he hands the flat bread through the window, along with a shard of chocolate bar. She hands him back two bronzed coins, about 30 cents. The sun rises as she removes her gloves and I open the plastic bag and our little morning tradition plays itself out.
And so our life here evolves according to these small rituals. These two charges of ours, blink-blinking in this new universe, and one large furry beast. The lack of trees, of ocean, confusing surely. But they adapt. At the moment Haley counts higher in Russian than she does in English. Kiera-Lee runs around the apartment naked screaming Nieeeeett!!! We take Colorado out of the apartment four times a day, down the four flights of stairs then back up. His service dog collar allows us to catch him when he stumbles. His back hips work at, oh, 35 percent. When its cold he’s taken to peeing just before we take him outside, as if to say, c’mon, guys, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Just let me stay here by the radiator. We’ve developed a policy not to give in, tempting as it might be.
We keep ourselves fed with the help of our friend Sergei, who arrives with a turkey tomorrow for TGiving. A turkey that I should say walks this earth as we speak. Tonight he’ll meet his maker, and tomorrow into the oven. A few weeks ago we asked Sergei if he knew where we could get fresh beef. He shows up a day later, opens the hatchback, and there inside the car, a dead skinned cow. Hands me a knife. Ask, and you shall receive.
Both Rachel and I had been counting on absorbing this language, as the kids do. Wrong. Not so. As our Swiss friend Benoit, who runs a brasserie nearby the apartment, told us, you can’t mess around with Russian. For two main reasons: case endings, and verbs of motion. Whereas we use prepositions, Russians just change the ending of a noun – or adjective, or pronoun. And so you end up with words like Превысокомногорассмотрительствующий. Nothing is stable, words change, become unrecognizable. And that means you can learn the word for something, but no one will recognize that word unless you put on the correct ending. Accusative, Dative, Nominative, Instrumental, Prepositional, or Genitive. Good luck.
Haley has taken completely to Montessori probably because it’s how she grew up in Alaska – she insists on doing everything herself, forget your forty years of life on this earth, the idea you might know better. Most recently processing our fresh cow with the meat grinder purchased for twenty bucks at the local market. Because when I asked for burger at the butcher, she directly laughed in my face. “You do that at home,” she told me. And so it is. If you want burger here, you buy a meat grinder and do it yourself.
Or you have your three year-old do it.
All of it like some slow-moving dance, trying to hear the rhythm of life here, not miss a step. Always missing a step. But then every once in a while, buying some time with some mot juste, a brief exchange on the trolley where you hit the beat of a word right, tack on the right ending – and, for the briefest of moments, you feel folded in.
Perhaps because we’re in Irkutsk and not Moscow, perhaps because we have kids, we find ourselves at birthday parties using Google Translate to find a sentence that will be our point of entry. For example, “Wow! This disco paper the kids are throwing is really cool!” (It’s not. Disco paper the devil’s creation, I do believe. Why our entire family got sick, and Haley had to leave school for a week with conjunctivitis. Disco paper essentially thick tinsel a bunch of kids play with, over and over again. When one birthday is done it goes back into the bag for the next one. Disgusting. We were going to get antibiotics before our Russian friend told us black tea bags over the eyes works just as well. Anyways – if anyone ever invites you to a Russian kids’ birthday party and threatens disco paper, run the other way. Kiera-Lee hid in the trampoline. She knew what was going on.)
At times we almost feel forced into the Russian slipstream, which does not, despite what New Yorker writer Ian Frazier believes, always smell of cucumber peels and used tea bags and diesel. It’s something less fragrant, gentler. Newer. Not so depressing. As a cab driver told Rachel and I, people in this country are hyper-compensating after being a hundred years shut off from the world. No one wants to be a mystery anymore. Perhaps that accounts for this graciousness, this eagerness we encounter at every turn. I’ve been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu at a local gym, and folks there much more welcoming than any gym would be in America, though I had to get rid of the big American flag on my head. Our closest friend here Olga, who has a daughter Kiera-Lee’s age – she approached us on the playground and invited us over for dinner. Now she helps out with the kids, who adore her.
And of course, Lake Baikal. Largest freshwater lake in the world, holding twenty percent of the world’s, well, freshwater. I mean, they’ve got 80,000 seals there. We found a small gold-rush town called Bolshiye Kotye, and strolled the streets alongside cows and chickens. A picnic in the forest, the leaves changing. Baikal one of the most incredible biospheres I’ve encountered – it will freeze in January, and we look forward to more travels along its coasts.
A few scattered notes off the top of my head:
Before arriving we had been led to believe, by articles, friends, Hollywood, Russians were engaged in a larger life chess game underpinned by nothing – no moral gridwork, no concern for others. Just a drive to win. That the men were mercenary, standoffish, difficult. And you read the New Yorker article on Siberia, and see the photo of two intense-looking Russian men smoking at a train station, litter about, a cheaply made-up woman in the background. It’s a stereotype that has gotten way out of control, and is years old. As far as we have been able to tell, people here shy, not on time, generous to a fault. Mild-mannered, quick to give up a seat on the trolley, deeply concerned about children. The Russian women not dominant or crass, but loose-kneed and sly, humorous and flirty. Wanting nothing to do with the dog, while the men lean over to pet.
We’ve managed one date so far. Went to the Irkutsk drama theatre, which was spectacular. Got a box for a hundred rubles each – a total of three dollars. Saw a play that was a contemporary take on La Boheme, and about all we understood was that. Not entirely true. I noticed that the woman in front of me texted that she was in the theatre, and I was able to recognize and identify the case and ending. A thrill. Also, the theatre itself magnificent.
I spent a week in Moscow interviewing Fulbright candidates and had the pleasure of witnessing Audis and Mercedes parked at angles to the sidewalk because, well, they were Audis and Mercedes. Lanes in the road set aside for long black cars with blue lights hauling ass in the opposite direction of traffic. A diplomat or general or government official who knows. While I do believe in the above I will say that at times I feel I’m missing something large and uneasy in Russia culture – the oligarch culture? One time here in Irkutsk a Lexus and Mercedes pulled up, men with guns and earpieces stepped out, kept watch as a lanky dude with a man purse strung round his shoulder and shaved head, talking on the phone, slipped into a restaurant. What? Who knows.
Before her first day of school Haley’s teachers came to the apartment with pine nuts and honey. We served them tea. They sat down with Haley, and asked her if she’d like to join them at their school. She said yes. We had another cup of tea, and they left. The next day, Haley started school.
In the malls here they have kids centers. Kids climb huge webs and amuse themselves while parents get what they need. Amazing. Duh.
The other day I gave a talk in Listvyanka on life in Alaska, and how stories are built. I kept asking my friend what the purpose of the conference, filled with Mongolians and Chinese, might be. “Sometimes in Russia people just do things,” my host finally told me. I couldn’t tell if he was rebuking my question of why on earth were people at this conference, or criticizing his own country’s lack of sense. I still don’t know.
I went to the Sandunny baths in Moscow, ate herring and drank beer and wacked myself with leaves. (I was in the second class paths, or what they call Top First Class, as opposed to VIP, where you can buy women to beat you. I didn’t buy a man. It was fine.) I purchased a felt hat meant to be worn in the sauna with the purpose of stopping your hair from catching fire due to the extreme waves of heat coming off the stone oven. It seemed like a good investment. I’d post photos, but trust me, you dunna-wanna-see-ya.
The other day it was reported in the New York Times that an Air France flight between Paris and Shanghai got diverted to Irkutsk after smoked filled the cabin. It made great copy, these fancy-pants folks diverted to Siberia, made prisoner of the airport for three days. When a replacement plane showed up the hydraulics froze – they were in Siberia, after all – and so their trip was extended. Meanwhile the Russian authorities would not let them visit nearby Lake Baikal, or even go into town.
On a related note, it’s cold here. No doubt. But dry. You warm up quickly. I’d trade any of these -20 days for a 25 degree damp day on the Adak. That cold that just gets into your bones. Here you just need to cover your skin – if you don’t it burns. But it’s not a deep cold. That chill that just won’t leave you.
We feel like we’re riding the coattails of the Olympics and World Cup, everyone still so eager to show that Russia is pretty cool. However, we did come across this confusing effigy on Halloween. A figure stretched out on the hood of a car, with bloody prints all over, and an American kerchief. I don’t know. I really don’t. But had to get a photo. Might have been someone just had an American flag hanging around the closet, and, well, it went on the bloody corpse roped down to the car.
Magnificent and haunting these echoes of my grandmother I find – the dill and small pancakes (blinis) and the pink sauce from mayonnaise and mustard powder and capers I had thought was her own particular invention all over the market. Cow tongue. Even the meat grinder we bought because you cannot buy burgered meat – it’s all done at home. Just as my great-grandmother Bella, who only spoke Russian, once screwed her own meat grinder to the corner of her table in Brooklyn. Nice this feel of completing some circle started a century ago, when my great-grandparents first came to the States.
We got locked out one night, the woman who cleans closing the door behind her and flipping the latch. So we camped out for about 45 minutes, KL passed out, then went across the street for pizza and ice cream. Now Haley asks each time we come up the stairs when we can get locked out again.
Dog food comes in packages the size of cat food in the United States. Those envelope-sized hanging packages. It’s absurd. Cal will eat four of them in a sitting/standing. Probably the reason people don’t have big dogs here, too damn expensive.
Returning to our friend Olga. She introduced herself on the playground. She has a daughter named Vika, 2, same age as Kiera-Lee. She has been looking after the kids about three days a week, and, well, we took a leap coming here, and Olga caught us. A native of a small village in the area, she takes the kids to trampoline parks and petting zoos. We’re lucky to have found her.
When the kids miss home, especially Kiera-Lee, she asks for her “special blanket.” Given to us back in Sitka by Cheryl Vastola, who made it. On it eagles and bears and Russian dancers and a seiner gathering fish. It stops our kid from crying, and gets her to sleep. Who says art makes nothing happen? That blue blanket over her, and everything goes back to good again. Thank you, Cheryl.
Haley’s school stops kids from going outside when it reaches – 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Minnesota, in comparison, stops them from going out at 0. Though I have heard from Eric Jordan back home that Fairbanks cancelled recess at 50 below. Dang. Kids gritty back then.
Is it any wonder countries in the northern climes have good militaries? Here’s why: because preparing to go outside in the cold takes some serious planning, and mobilization of forces. The shapke, the gloves, the neck warmer, the socks, the snowsuit, the felt boots. And that’s not even getting into underlayers. (People don’t layer here by the way. Just a big fat coat for the outside, then something light beneath, because all the buildings are kept so dang warm here. Probably because energy is cheap, made by the coal plant on the other side of Angara. Incidentally probably why Bitcoin is “mined” here – energy so cheap, it’s affordable to do the work to come up with the code needed to develop the currency.)
No one has dryers here. Like, no one. Everyone hangs their laundry. The water here, pumped straight from the Angara River, is cut with chlorine to make it potable (most people don’t drink it) and often comes out brown in the evening. So if you want a bath, well, you’re bathing in river water, which is kinda cool. Though it is silty and brown, which makes you question whether you’re getting clean or not.
Same point as above – the laundry dries crunchy. I think this is because the water is hard? Rachel has taken to using white vinegar to soften the fabric, which works, but walk into our bathroom and your eyes sting with vinegar. Any open wounds, beware.
Haley got sick with conjunctivitis – disco paper … We had to go to the clinic. Like so many places in town you need to put on these plastic slip-ons before walking around the clinic. (They work remarkably well for dog poop bags.) Each time we had to go to the clinic they saw us immediately, and we paid the equivalent of $14. No wait. Everything clean and tidy. No attitude. It was like a dream.
As we are discovering Russians could care less about Christmas, December 25th, and are wholly invested in Novvye God, New Years. Whether this is a remnant of Communism or what I haven’t been able to figure. But everyone’s eyes fixed on Новый год, which apparently is an absurdly large party with vodka and champagne and fireworks and sauna and rolling in the snow and just about every Russian baby it would seem is born in September.
As I mentioned on social media I got in a yelling match with a guy who told me I shouldn’t walk Colorado in the playground in our courtyard. I smiled back at him, so happy to understand his yelling. Then let loose a barrage of all the Russian I know, which came out as your badger has diabetes, and please go in a carriage to the nearest pharmacy, I will see you there.
You can pay for things on your phone. It’s awesome. I just put in someone’s number, or Cberbank card into the app, put in how much you want to pay them, and boom. Babysitter, paid. Woman who sells us cucumbers, paid. Though the first time I used it in the market we ended up paying a woman’s phone bill while trying to buy honey. Suddenly she had a 2900 ruble credit on MTC. (A monthly phone bills is 315 rubles.)
Sorry but I can’t get over these braids. I mean, these things defy physics. Braids wrapped around their heads that look like ramps in a parking garage. Straight out of the future. Rachel has taken to watching YouTube videos to make all sorts of patterns, the FastBreak braid, and the Up braid, and the Croatian llama braid.
Colorado’s hind legs aren’t great. When we take him down for a walk he’s taken to super-dogging it down the last steps, launching himself onto the landing to skip the last few steps. Narrowly avoiding crashing into the radiator. Impressive, though sometimes he launches himself from too high up. This afternoon a woman is coming to the apartment to cut his nails.
And, in fact, I need to go back to meet her. The dog’s nails tap-tap over the floors waking all of us up with his pacing. Pick Haley up from school at 5 – she’s still in “adaptation,” normal school goes from 8am to 6 pm. Can you believe that? Longer than a normal working day. Then start thinking about how to deal with this turkey. I’m worried the oven will be too small … okay. Tea finished. Say “dost-ve-donya” to all involved in the making, and back home to the apartment to clip some dog nails and cook a turkey.
