Cathedrals of the Flesh (11 page)

After showering underneath a rusty spigot and washing St Petersburg off my sandaled feet, I followed the flow of women into
a room with a heavy planked wooden door such as one you might find at a remote log cabin in the Adirondacks.

'Banya?' I asked.

'Da, banya. Parilka,'
a young woman answered emphatically. More lessons from the Russians. So this was the parilka, the fabled interior
hot hot hot
room where all the banya action happens. It wasn't so much a room as a state of mind, a treehouse on stilts in a concrete
box. The treehouse was constructed with planks of dark, auburn wood the brownish red hue of cellos and violins. Strewn across
the floor, as if a hurricane had just blown through, were birch leaves and twigs. The slow wheeze of steam and the incessant
chatter of the women completed the illusion of a gathering of
Macbeth's
witches in this St Petersburg banya.

I stared at the disarray, clutching my water bottle. The only water bottle in the room. More otherness. Many of the women
stopped talking for a moment to look at me curiously. They were all wearing felt hats or kerchiefs in their hair, and almost
all of them were holding veyniks, bouquets of leafy twigs twined together. Trying to act nonchalant, I sat on the lowest bench
and breathed in deeply, pulling the heat close to my body. I imagined my body as a cappuccino machine, a vessel heated and
pressurized and bursting with steam. The first beads of sweat started to form on my forehead, hairline, and the small of my
back. I thought about Irina's spare room and decided that sleeping on the floor wouldn't be so bad. I even imagined that Irina
and I might visit a banya together. I glanced out the small window in the parilka. The evening sun at nine o'clock still glared
in. I noticed that my nose tingled and burned when I inhaled, a stiff shot of wasabi to the brain. Nowhere on my body was
as hot as my toenails. The heat was massaging my body everywhere and all at once. My brain was slowing down, no longer bothering
me with its constant critical interior monologue. At last, the inner voice was shutting up for a while.

The peace was short-lived. A woman with a gold-capped front tooth sitting next to me began to talk at hurricane speed and
gesticulated madly to my hair. In the international code of female vanity, I made out that she was concerned that my hair
would fry in the heat. She gathered a small fistful of my hair, took the ends in her hand, rubbed them together like sandpaper,
and somehow managed the English: 'Split ends.' Ahh, beauty magazine, spreading a veritable Esperanto. Words like
cellulite, split ends, exfoliate,
and
Wonderbra
are almost universally understood. Why she should have cared about my hair enough to spend three minutes lecturing me in the
heat, I didn't know. But Russians do have this fanaticism about their superstitious rules. I was the banya dissenter, the
banya heretic without a kerchief and veynik.

I bobbed my head and clicked my tongue,
'Da . . . da . . . da . . .
da
. . .
da,'
to her instructions at appropriate intervals. Then the
thwacking
began and spread like hiccups to all the other women. First the lady with the gold-capped front tooth, the queen bee of the
parilka, lifted her birch branch bouquet and began flagellating herself like a penitent Christian at Easter. She arched her
neck and beat her breast, décolletage, and back in quick, snapping wrist motions. A mottled red design slowly tattooed her
torso, and she moved her staccato brush strokes onto the legs. Meanwhile a chorus of other self-flagellators had begun. A
young woman next to me said,
'Paritsa
nye staritsa.'

'What's that?' I asked.

'Old Russian saying. If you
paritsa
like this,' she said, indicating the beating action, 'then you don't
staritsa
- get old.' Eternal youth through leaf-whipping welts.

'Veynik — for you,' she offered.

'Really, are you sure?'

'Yes, I am done. And you need veynik for your first Russian banya.' So I took the veynik from her and plunged it into a bucket
of warm water, and when the women started their next chorus of self-flagellation, I lifted my veynik with them. As the fresh
birch leaves danced through the hot air, they released the smell of forest walks after a rain. The leaves were warm and supple
from soaking, and the self-flagellation, while it sounded like punishment, delivered the same relief as a good back scratch.
Was I doing it wrong? Shouldn't it hurt? This was Russia after all. Suffering is the goal. But the nose-singeing heat was
punishing enough. My skin soon mottled into red Rorschach tests. The capillaries widen when exposed to the banya's heat. The
veynik
thwacking
had pulled all the blood to the surface and created blotchy tattoos, red badges of pride.

The other women smiled at me encouragingly, as though I were a young student who had surpassed their early low expectations.
I was one of them, one of the banya witches. Ask a Slavonic peasant where is the most dangerous place for magic and divination,
and she will reply, 'The bathhouse at midnight.' Village bathhouses were dangerous, dilapidated places and were superstitiously
avoided when not in use at the appointed bathing hours.

And here I was among the banya witches in their felt hats, stewing their mystery herbs and spitting three times to the left
(okay, not quite) as they passed the threshold of the parilka. This was the surest transport to the witches' refrain
'Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire
burn and cauldron bubble.'
Any one of these women around me could have been the dreaded
bannitsa,
the most hostile of the Russian goblins and a threat to newborn children.

The
bannitsa
was the reason that the midwife would walk naked three times around the bathhouse with the newborn child. Most women, including
the czarina, gave birth in the village bathhouse, but always in the company of at least two others to fight off the scourage
of the
bannitsa.
In Russia, 'The banya is your second mother' was a common saying, not only because the banya nourished people throughout their
lives, but because until the twentieth century most people entered the world on a banya bench. The banya was roomy and the
benches clean, and the hut itself was removed from the rabble and clutter of the family and house. (The logic there was that
if the banya burned down, as it frequently did, the house and hearth would not also catch fire.) If given a choice today between
having a baby in a banya or in one of the virulent Russian hospitals, the choice would be obvious, at least for me. From what
I had seen and read so far, this was one country not to have an appendicitis attack in.

I burst out on the street ecstatic from the sisterhood of my first banya visit. I'd been accepted into the sorority. I didn't
speak their language. I didn't have the right accessories. But I had enthusiasm. I understood banya ethos. I will admit that
there was part of me that thought upon entering the parilka, Is this all? After the grandiose marble halls of Istanbul and
the crumbling yet majestic baths of antiquity the rustic village aesthetic felt, well, too drab and coarse. But the banya
had one huge leg up on the hamam: it still pulsated with conversation and laughter. Inside Tchaykovsky I found a vibrant little
village. The voices - at turns secretive, authoritative, soft, and warm - the sloshing of water from a discarded bucket, the
sharing of branches, the not minding one's own business. A free-for-all parade of banya shoulder-rubbing
sobornost.

Reveling in this quintessentially Russian ritual connected me in a mysterious way to a place where I was the ultimate foreigner.
It was as if I'd come to Russia to partake in the ritual and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. I would be accepted.
I would find a community. Banya life is no different. I could walk the streets of St Petersburg with a stronger notion of
belonging, a greater sense of sympathy and understanding for the people around me, because I'd just bathed with them or their
mothers or sisters.

By the time I left the banya it was 10:30 P.M., but with white nights it looked and felt like 2:00 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon.
Throngs of people traversed Nevsky Prospekt, giddy with a night that refused to fall. At a bright corner along the Fontanka,
a large ensemble street band pounded out Louisiana blues, while nearby fashionable St Petersburgers chain-smoked at the cafés.
In front of a captivated audience, a lanky young man with pupils dilated so wide that they threatened to flood the whites
of his eyeballs held a microphone to his yellow teeth and sang a slow, sultry version of 'Light My Fire.' For him the night
was about to end unless it was chemically resurrected. I watched him, enchanted and vicariously drugged, through his three-song
set. Then I moved on, past vendors of A C / D C bootlegs, past the sherbet pink-and-purple buildings still shadowless in the
11:00 P.M. sun. Everybody was smiling, enjoying the freakish sun of the fifty-ninth parallel, the insomniac lunacy of another
sleepless night. No darkness to signal dinner, to signal sleep, to signal the end of the day.

In addition to the delirium of white nights, St Petersburg was preparing herself for the three hundredth anniversary of Peter's
founding of the city in 1703. It felt rather like walking in on an over-the-hill, half-naked woman of ill repute exchanging
her tattered, faded imperial clothes for something more practical. Construction crews gussied up all the main boulevards.
Sidewalks were torn up and expanded, roads repaved, grime-coated pink-and-purple buildings finally getting their faces washed.
The rivalry between the oft and loudly lauded mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and the underdog mayor of St Petersburg, Vladimir
Yakovlev, was waged in this rather overzealous, frantic fight to restore the Tolstoyan luster to St Peterburg in time for
the tercentenary galas in May 2003. St Petersburg has always been Russia's most liberal, urbane, and self-proclaimed 'European'
city. The Kirov Ballet at St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater is superior to Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, though the Bolshoi has
the better brand name in the West. And Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky were all St Petersburgers. N ow I was going to do
my own St Petersburg—versus-Moscow banya comparison.

Marina was to arrive tomorrow, and I couldn't wait. So far I'd been asking random people - the man who sold rabbitskin hats
at the market, the lady at the Georgian pastry shop, a Versaced-out girl who looked like a Memorex version of herself- 'Where
can I find a good banya?' I learned the Russian carefully:
'Kakaya vasha ljubimaya
banya?'
I received the oddest stares. This was the one sentence I could speak in perfect Russian, and the randomness of the request
struck many of my polling victims as funny. Yet every single person I asked had an opinion on the subject. The rabbit-hat
seller went every two weeks with friends. A rowdy group of his male friends would rent out the entire luxury section of the
banya for an evening of bachelor party antics. The lady who sold me my breakfast pastry every morning was a fan of Nevskie
Banii (just around the corner from Irina's), which had been closed for repairs for the last year; now she hiked out to a 'village
banya' in the St Petersburg suburbs, where there was a pond to swim in between parilka sessions. And the Memorex girl claimed
that Moscow banyas like the Sandunovskye were far superior. On the banya question, as on any subject, every Russian had an
opinion that was always expressed as fact.

Irina's English was pretty limited. After a dazzling display of sisterhood when I first arrived, we had settled into a state
of mutual toleration. My stock skyrocketed when Marina arrived five days into my stay. Just in time, too, because breakfast
had degenerated into hardened cream logs covered in chocolate. Not exactly how Lance Armstrong started his day. Also, Irina
had started smoking her Capri cigarettes after breakfast while bemoaning with every puff how 'unclean' it was to smoke. I
had given her a box of chocolates upon arriving, and she would dutifully eat one after her cigarette every morning. 'Not good
for your figure,' she decided for me.

'Irina, my friend arrives tomorrow. Stay for three nights. Then we go to Moscow together,' I told her in simplified English.
This is why foreigners speak fragmented English, I'm convinced, because we native speakers trim away all the grammatical subtleties
in speaking to them like deaf preschoolers.

Her face lit up and she kept repeating, 'Not a problem. Not a problem.' I soon realized that it was not a problem because
she was charging another $15 a night for Marina to sleep on the cracked leather couch. In Russia at this time, $15 went about
as far as $100 in the States — that's if you're buying from the Russian economy, and there are two distinct economies.

The next afternoon, I brought Marina back to our little Nevsky Prospekt pied-a-terre. Irina happened to be there, coloring
her hair. 'Irina, I thought you were giving tour of Peterhof?'

'No, group from Caucasus never came,' she said, somewhat annoyed and put out that we were seeing her in a plastic hairnet.

'This is my friend Marina from London.'

Then Marina greeted her in flowing Russian — as I listened to her, I imagined a Cyrillic thought bubble floating around the
room - and Irina's annoyance turned to shock, then enchantment, and immediately she started plying Marina with questions.
Marina tolerated the barrage of questions that ran the gamut from 'How did you learn such lovely Russian?' to 'What do you
like to eat for breakfast?' Then Irina turned to me and said, 'Oh, Alexia, you did not say friend speak Russian. And such
beautiful Russian. What can I fix you for breakfast? Anything you want.' In Irina's world, there was unmistakable causality
between personal approval and performance of household tasks. For the next three days, she served all of Marina's favorite
Russian delicacies, like tvorog, sweet milk curds. She even did our laundry for free, where previously she'd quoted me $5
a load.