The Halfway Point
Last week the city of Irkutsk announced they were shutting down schools due to a SARS epidemic. The streets empty, like something out of I Am Legend. The schools were being “quarantined,” the City of Irkutsk said on their website.
This, coupled with a week of weather around minus 40, compelled us to take the direct flight from Irkutsk to Thailand. Five and half hours to smoggy Bangkok, another hour and a half to the island of Phuket. The Ruble-Baht exchange is a good one, and the white sand beaches, young coconuts, and so forth. Plus, it’s what the Russians do, fire off to Thailand, so we chalked it up to a continuation of our cultural experience.
And so here I am, seven in the morning, birds tweeting away, by a pool trying to pick out words from Russian families as they pass by on the way to the papaya and pineapple breakfast buffet. This place solidly middle class German and Sweden and Russian. I don’t get the sense they care much for Americans, or maybe they just don’t care for us, how we put our kids on our shoulders. No other nationality seems to do this! I never knew it was such an American thing. Anyways we seem to break a plate each breakfast, so our presence is known. I kind of feel like this is supposed to be European place, Americans should stick to their Disney World. Though maybe that’s in my head. Either way the men around the pool drinking tall boys in straw hats, tattoos of crows on their chests seem out-of-place and content. And the children thrilled, except when getting sun-screen smothered over their ghostly faces. (This includes our own children.)
It’s a bit vertiginous, the decision a sudden one. I had been expecting another week of frigid mornings on ice cube of the Tramvai with Haley, watching sparks off the wires light up the dark shop windows. Then SARS. And now we learn how to say “Kite-surfing and “riding on mopeds” and “OMG fish are eating dead skin off my feet” in Russian. Last night, in Bangtao Town, we stopped and lowered our feet into tanks. Every cell in my brain that had watched those old James Bond movies said don’t do this. It’s a really bad idea. It was all I could do, dear reader, to keep my dogs in there. Haley asked if the fish would stop eating once they got the dead skin cells, or keep going and eat our feet. I honestly wasn’t sure of the answer.
Flesh-eating fish or not, it’s really nice to feel warm, and ride elephants, and drink from coconuts. Though the monkeys are positively vicious. They give ravens a run for their money.
Colorado died. My co-pilot of fifteen years, the first creature I was charged with taking care of. We came home one evening to find a lump on his nose, which went from the size of a walnut to a plum over the next few days. We called a vet, a young balding man in a hoodie who came to our apartment to tell us, in Russian we could understand, that our dog had rak. I know that word! – coupled with the shot of horror that your dog is going to die.
How often had I imagined the moment. Except it had always been in Sitka. Hiking with Colorado out to the rainforest with a cocktail Burgess Bauder would have blended up. Finding a spot and holding him. And now here we were in Siberia, the ground all around us frozen, my dog looking up at me with his brown eyes as if to reassure me. Asking, who can ever plan such things?
The following day we loaded Colorado into a cab and visited the vet clinic, where a pretty young woman, the head vet, held his head and whispered in his white floppy ear could he please lift his lip. He bled on the floor. She stroked his head. He bled on her latex gloves. She told us about how it used to be animals needed to be X-rayed at the hospital in the early hours of the morning when the machines weren’t being used by people, but now they had a special pet X-ray in town. We took him in another cab to this new pet X-ray where he bled on the glass and shook his head and clots of blood caught on the vet tech’s hoodie.
The next day the vet came to our apartment, and, holding his paws, we gave him three successive injections, the last of which stopped his heart.
Haley believes Colorado’s soul-body is somewhere on an island near the North Pole, and he’s watching us, and she’s particularly concerned about his head and his eyes, whether these still exist so Colorado can see us. Her language is so advanced, but her emotional development is not, and so it’s a fascinating study to hear her talk so cleanly about subjects like death and love and how we humans are, and – lately – should be on this earth. I have the distinct sense that children are much closer to such knowledge than we adults, some cord rubbing over their brain that makes them sing of knowledge lost to us. Like some frequency they can hear, albeit faintly, that we cannot.
Speaking of frequencies, I have been assured the Federal Safety Bureau here in Russia has eyes on us. At night Rachel and I play the game of which one of our friends is it? As Rachel says, anyone listening in at the apartment will become very good at English pronunciation, considering how much time she spends with Kiera-Lee on the English alphabet.
I don’t know if it’s the natural rhythm of our lives, my grandmother’s Russian blood, or the fact that the exchange rate largely favors the dollar, and we can get a half-gallon of milk (though it comes in four small packages you need to bite to open) for about a dollar and a half, instead of almost 8 dollars in Sitka. But this country feels like a fit. (And I’m not just writing that because we’re possibly under surveillance.) Kiera-Lee is understanding pretty much everything in Russian, Haley has started yelling at her teachers in Russian when they don’t perform correctly, and Rachel and I both can answer the phone now without feeling like we are digging our own language grave. All is, well, better in our snowy Russian world. Stepping into a restaurant without the clammy hands, and a mind compulsively conjugating the verb “To run away.”
Though I will say we’ve passed out of our first flush of love, our “crush,” on Irkutsk and its winter. We are now seeing things with a cold eye, as it were, the реальная жизнь. So it goes with healthy relationships, right? Easing into routine, and acceptance. I can feel the pollution from the coal factory in my eyes, in my lungs. The walk with Haley each morning, her eyelashes freezing as she eats warm Tajiki flatbread on my shoulders, seems to have gotten longer, especially the section through the leechfields of apartment buildings, steam coming up from the sewer covers, the smell of sulfur and sweet sewage swirling with the teeth-hurt smell of old, compacted snow.
Research on the Neva has continued, I’ve been visiting the archives here in town, as well as the extensive library on the other side of the river. I presented in Moscow last month to Fulbright with Sergey Pashkevich, as well as to the alumni, and it went over well. Alexander Petrov was in attendance, a professor at Moscow University, and he was appreciative. I hope to come back for another conference in Moscow in March, the flight from Irkutsk sucks, with the 5-hour time. But it’s worth it.
In town we continue to get chastised by the babushkas, this roaming band of enforcers always ready to ding us for not having hoods on the kids or letting Kiera-Lee fall asleep on her sled. Get your kid dressed in her kombinezon or snowsuit (we refer to it as a zimoy because it is one of the first Russian words we learned though no one else calls it that). It’s basically a lobster suit, under which go wool tights and a layer or two of shirts. Good thing being if your kid falls from any substantial height as Kiera-Lee did in Listvianka from a bench by the lake five feet down to the frozen lake itself it doesn’t matter because she basically bounces. The cushion is preposterous. It’s like walking around in a pillow.
But the babushki, it really is freaky, like watching a band of birds swoop with no apparent leader. One yells at you for your child having mittens instead of gloves then rest assured every subsequent babushka you encounter will do the same. Get chastised by one grandma, then another, then one more, until you’re corralled into buying a yack fur blanket. Then you get downgraded to shakes of the head and tsks. Rachel full-on got chased out of the market. They’re no jokes, the babuskhi here.
Though we’ve since learned the trick. Two head coverings. Some combination of hood – balaclava – hat. Pick two. Do this and the babushki become dangerous in a different way, they’ll kiss your kid to death, nuzzling the nose and forehead and cooing.
My mom visited, and witnessed one of our dressing-downs by a babushka with a peeling and bloody nose. Not someone you’d necessarily take advice on staying warm from. Mom also experienced Russian banya and the rest of it with great aplomb. Made French toast and definitely earned grandma of the year.
A couple more notes on Russian life, in no particular order:
Go out in the street here when it’s anywhere below minus thirty Celsius and you will see most women over the age of 35 covering their noses. Why? Who knows. Frostbite? They have their beaded mittens over their them like they all have nosebleeds their trying to stop.
The big shopping complexes here are called торговый центр, and they have everything from the winter sleds to cream cheese sushi to goldfish. To go in an out they open just one door on one side of the Arctic entry, and one door on the other side, leading to a line to exit the place, everyone with bags of stuff, that is absurd. Here is a photo of Haley negotiating one of the remarkable knit spider webs that keep kids, well, in a spider web for hours. It’s brilliant, another example of Russians being very good at the chess of life.
The hallway of the building where we live is painted mint-green. I have heard about an essay by Joseph Brodsky that references a mint green line extending through all the buildings of Russia, and even through the minds of the Russian people. What does this line mean? I don’t know. But it makes me think of Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I find myself missing it very much, especially those dark chocolate chips inside.
It’s warmer here at night than during the day. As in, usually there’s some comfort in the States when you see the low temperature, because you know it will occur at like, two in the morning. Not so here. The low occurs right in the middle of the afternoon, whereas nights are relatively balmy. Weird.
I participated in the Russian Orthodox tradition of dunking three times in a frozen river on January 19th. It was effing cold. Apparently my soul is now owned by the Russian Church. Sorry Jewish side of my family.
Before they leave a restaurant or the clinic or wherever women stand in front of a full-length mirrors to fix their scarves and set of their coat. It makes me think of my grandmother and her mirror in the hallway and how she looked into it before she went out. There is no self-consciousness in this act. It doesn’t matter who watches. I love this.
Which leads to the larger point that, it was really only after Christmas that we began feeling like we weren’t always doing something wrong. It’s nice not to feel like you’re messing up. Or at least to begin to feel that way. Like not getting the rhythm for the longest time and then suddenly hearing it. Boom.
When it’s below 30 the moisture in the exhaust from cars appears like breath, and both vehicles and people emit white clouds of breath that the sun shoots through. It sometimes feels like walking through fog.
When my mom visited my friend’s mother regaled her with stories about how the anti-communists killed 6,000 people in 1993, when the U.S.S.R. fell. Then told the story of how her father looked Jewish and always had to apologize to people for appearing so. Awkward.
On all cars the windshield wash nozzles freeze so you regularly see people pulling over to use know to wash their windshields with these rags that come in plastic yellow cylinders and absorb dirt in magical ways. If they don’t have rags they use snow which actually works very well rubbed over the glass for cleaning.
In the States, especially in New England, there’s this unspoken competition to wear shorts as far into fall as you can. I was never very good at it. Here in Russia if you try and go out in shorts or even with no hat the guys are all over you. What are you thinking? And they’ll recite some line their mother told them about never going out without a head covering. Nothing manly about braving cold weather.
In each restaurant or café there’s a strange and wondrous decorum when it comes to hanging up your coat. Here’s what we’ve been able to glean: start with the lowest hook first. Don’t hang your hat. Never use your hood to hang your coat, just the loop made for hanging it.
If you need to conduct any serious business call someone. Don’t use text. Russians won’t respond. That said, Russians love emoticons. I mean LOVE them.
Women don’t drink vodka. Or rather, only bad women drink vodka.
When it comes to phone conversation Russians are just so cool. They speak in low voices, almost mumbling, exchanging davais and ladnas like having a baseball catch. It makes me envious. I wish I was that cool.
On the flip side of this coolness, Russian driving is like nothing I’ve experienced. You’d think they’d be very good at driving in the snow. And they are, except they do stuff like lock their wheels to stop on the ice, meaning the vehicle careens out of control at a red light for a good ten feet before sliding to a stop. That’s right, they jam the breaks to stop instead of pumping them. They do seem to have a preternatural sense for where black ice is. But each day on the trolley to school I see an accident, a police man out there with his flashlight. I have heard the police man dispenses judgment then and there, though I’m not sure this is true.
Russians smoke in winter like no one’s business. Probably just to keep their chests warm.
You’d think people would eat large fatty meals here in the winter but they don’t. Rachel and I think it’s because folks in Irkutsk are descended from the gulags. I made this joke once with Olga and it didn’t go over well. But the truth remains. Russians are not overweight, and they use small plates not out of decorum but just because they don’t eat much. It’s like every Russian meal is an American snack. We have overeaten a couple times, and kind of miss that bloated, American sensation of pain. Is that strange?
Shoe horns are everywhere. And people actually use them. I have yet to find one to buy.
You’ll be walking down the street here in Irkutsk and suddenly what seems like a mob hit on a man in white splats onto the sidewalk in front of you. Actually it’s just men on the roof shoveling snow, creating mini-avalanches. As far as I can see they shovel without regard for people below. Miraculously I haven’t seen a direct hit. Just another example of how some strange magic is enacted over here.
All sushi here has cream cheese inside it. That’s all there is to say about that. You can’t get sushi without cream cheese.
Each morning as we take the 1 Tramvai to school we will see two cars in the half light in the middle of the street, drivers standing outside, smoking, a police man checking the damage, trying to determine who was at fault. Every dang morning. Makes me glad I’m on the Tramvai, which wins every time.
Russian adhesive tape is just awful. So frustrating. Most things you use in everyday life here are better, but tape is not one of them. Rachel had a full-out Italian-style tantrum over Christmas when her presents kept coming open.
You get like, three seconds of a green light to cross a street. Which makes for everyone bursting out of the blocks when that little green man appears on the post and the beeping starts. And if you’re still in the crosswalk when it turns red again the vehicles won’t see you. Just the green ahead of them.
In the morning on the way to school there are dogs waiting for us when we step off the Tramvai. A black one and a white one and a brown one. Haley doesn’t like them, who knows where they sleep at night. But there they are, at attention, sitting in the snow.
There’s one particular restaurant in town and always outside there are men smoking with tattoos on their necks and gunstraps standing beside idling Land Cruisers. Very strange. It’s an American restaurant with a Lincoln Continental in the middle of the floor. It all feels very Quentin Tarantino.
Russians are very concerned about space but not time. How you move, whether it’s by vehicle or foot, the direction you move in. They have like 25 verbs for “Go.” But time, not important. I wonder if it has something to do with the cold. There’s the sound of a steel door swinging in -40 degrees and it sounds like a saxophone. The air brakes on the 480 bus outside our window sound exactly like Haley waking up at night and crying. Everything has to do with orientation, where you are when you hear something, taste something. Pigeons huddle by steam vents against the cold. All that matters is staying warm and the temperature at night is warmer during the day, as I said. In the morning Rachel drinks a bowl of coffee. It could happen at any time, this drinking of coffee. When you travel on a bus the windows are iced and people pull up their phones to see when their stop might be because they cannot see where they are in space, and no one likes that. Seen from our window it appears like a shadow play, or a play of lightning bugs on the bus, these people finding themselves on their phones. They do it not to see the time but to see what direction they travel, where they are, on GPS.
On that same note don’t say great or wonderful to Russians. Just ok or I understand. They really think Americans are weird like that, always smiling, saying everything is so wonderful. It’s not. Really, it’s not.
Men in the sauna never say no to more steam. Once I was in there and a diminutive woman in a bikini and British flag flip-flops ordered more steam. One by one the men left. She was voracious. “More,” she kept saying. Until she was the last one left. It was awesome.
Our girls use the bidet in our apartment as their “Little Girl” sink. It makes them very happy, this little girl sink. We do not use it as a bidet.
No one uses a stroller here for any kid under two. Either walk or don’t, the avian approach to survival. You learn to walk because you have to. If you don’t fly when you get kicked out of the nest, too bad.
Never have I seen such beautiful braids. Like parking garage ramps around the side of the head. Rachel watches YouTube videos to practice. She’s gotten good.
Instead of learning to change the oil on an outboard in Alaska Haley learns to run a Russian Pechta stove. We all miss fires. Wood here hard to come by, they often use coal.
To get to jiu-jitsu in the evenings I take the 12 marshutka south of town to a spot by the river. After dropping Haley off at school in the morning it’s the 15K back home – – the K stands for commercial, and commercial might stand for the marshutka itself, a strange beast of a vehicle that came into its own following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Recently I was in Moscow and one of the Fulbrights did a presentation on these eponymous white vans that fill the gaps in a city’s transportation system. Zipping about the city along so-called “fixed” routes, though as far as I can tell it the drivers take whatever route they feel like, depending on traffic, depending on mood, depending on whether they’re low on gas, etc. These white vans with their lucky thirteen seats a result of deregulation, of freedom I guess. Plunk down $8,000 for the GAZelle, the first Russian-built minivan, stick a number in the windshield (some are contoured with LED lights in winter so you can see the glow of “16” from far down Karl Marx Street) and you’re in business. The vans seem to fit right into the outpost quality of Irkutsk, a wildness that reminds me of Alaska. Sometimes in marshutkas you’re so squished in you can hardly get your cell phone out. And if you do then people will read your messages, and I read the messages of others. “Do you go to the club tonight? No, Igor will be there. Did you put on the borscht for tonight?” Everyone piled up in these goose down coats, in a great cloud of cushion, breath fogging the windows, and the windows freezing, so once more it feels like traveling along in some ice cube. I get a little seasick in marshutkas, probably because I can’t see outside through the windows. It feels like a movie set on some film in the 1950s, the bouncing real and you can feel the movement but there are no visual references.
Workers use drywall knives to break up snow that has been tamped down by thousands of Unty heels to a snow-concrete. The clack-clack is a sound I will always associate with Russia.
The Montessori school continues to be great for Haley. She evolves into a promising candidate for a Federal Supermax Corrections Officer, we can’t get away with anything. We have been let in to see the school itself just a couple times, they don’t usually let parents in. I managed to get a photo of Key messing around.
Go to a restaurant here and often you will see photos of the meals on the menu. You know how in Chinese restaurants the picture is basically what you get? Not so here. The picture is nothing like what you end up getting. Be forewarned.
It’s a Russian tradition that men do the BBQ, called here the shashlik. It’s taken pretty seriously, just men around the BBQ. Haley didn’t like that very much, so out she came with us. I was proud.
Each Wednesday Haley slips on her Russia swim cap and gets thrown in the pool by a swim instructor right out of central casting. “Hell – ee!” she’s always yelling. She’s the one at the bottom of the ladder.
History presents itself in strange ways – my Russian tutor had a German boyfriend that her father hated because of Leningrad. A van belonging to a German cleaning service had an emblem that resembled, at first glance, a four-leaf clover, and, at second, the Nazi iron cross. They were passing it off as a snowflake, but I wasn’t fooled. I was sitting with my mother when she visited, and she recited, in a low voice, how our family was lost to the Germans in a cabbage field somewhere in the Ukraine. Meanwhile two German men next to us reprimanded the waiter over his English. Somehow it all feels so much more … present.
What are the ethics of wearing boots made of reindeer depicting Santa and his reindeer on the rim? I still haven’t settled on an answer, but it makes me uncomfortable, like how happy would Santa’s reindeer be if they knew their skin was being used?
We miss our dog.
