Some thoughts about the city
St. Petersburg in Fall of 2012
This is a piece I published in Reed College’s ROAM in 2014. It’s set during my first visit to Russia, when I was just a wee babe studying abroad in the big city.
So the thing is, people here remember living in the Soviet Union and are now living under some bullshit democratic regime and people are confused about paying for medical operations when they used to be free and now the city is full of traffic since Putin told everyone to buy cars. And the subways are clean and beautiful. They don’t smell. And women in stilettos and tight skirts kiss men in washed out jeans and tight shirts on the long escalator rides in and out of the metro; and they live at home with moms and grandmothers, so it’s understandable and there’s something pent up and frustrated about the sexuality in public, everywhere, trying to grab some ass before work and then dinner at home. I’m not sure what it’s like to bring a girl home, but probably there’s a lot of quiet sex.
My host parents are really great. Particularly my host mom. She and I drink tea together everyday and almost always she tells me stories. She loves talking and is good at storytelling and at speaking Russian so that I can understand everything she says. And so I listen a lot. She is one of those people who knows the history and particular details and anecdotes and personal lives of seemingly any topic or through the city she tells me about the buildings we pass, the architects, what famous people lived there; she knows the names of the noble families who owned the palaces that are everywhere in the city, wedged between townhouses now, with stores lining the street level. She has so many stories of her own too, about her and her family. I try to remember everything she tells me and so now I have some stories too:
There was a little girl singing a song about Stalin, about how he was bad and she was coming home from school and singing and not thinking and a cop swinging his fat baton stopped her and asked her name, her family, where she lived. She pleaded with him and promised not to sing the song again. He warned her about next time and watched silently as she nodded and turned for home.
She loves giving me things, mostly clothes, and she says she has all the cheap clothes I could ever want and to not try to buy cheap clothes here, because she has them already. Today she gave me a scarf because it’s getting cold outside. I’ve already received at least three sweaters too. Last Saturday morning she woke me up by walking into my room holding a black and white squiggly printed sweater stretched between her two hands in front of her, telling me I would need it, it’s cold outside today. I said thank you and continued sleeping.
Her sister’s dog is staying with us for a week. He is very small, with large pug-like eyes and snout, but more narrow, and a very pronounced undershot jaw, which makes him look generally ridiculous. Apparently he is a coveted breed here though because he has a dark blue tattoo on his inner thigh with his ID number in case he gets lost, and a chip in his ear in case he gets lost internationally. His mom has the same tattoo and chip — it’s a special breed. He is always cowering but doesn’t take too long to warm up to people. He eats shoes, or rather chews them, even if people are home but just not paying attention to him. My host mom said that her daughter read on the internet that you have to beat the dog with a newspaper every time it chews a shoe or does anything else bad. She says if you beat the dog at least once a month, after three months the dog will be good. I express doubt and tell her he will probably just become more scared of people. But it was on the internet. We agree that you can only punish a dog, in general, at the moment they do something wrong. If you wait, they will not know why they are being punished. I feel very bad and hold the dog whenever I’m around and I try to pay attention to him so he doesn’t become worried and start eating shoes.
The other day her husband, my host father, came home and saw that some folded clothes had been pulled off the bench in the kitchen and scattered on the floor. I wish I had seen them first. He saw the dog cowering under the table, grabbed a tiny creature several times, lunging at him as he scampered out of the kitchen. He clearly didn’t know about the in-the-moment rule of punishing dogs. I had never seen him be angry or aggressive in any way; he’s a calm and usually very kind and soft-spoken man, and it was unpleasant to see and there was nothing I could say. I let the dog sit on my bed with me and he was shaking and so I held him. I don’t think they hit him very often though or at least I’ve only seen it that once. I hope he learns for his own scrawny sake.
My host mom saves everything: bread crusts, cans, pieces of ribbon, so much clothing and cloth. She says she remembers how people would knock on their neighbors’ doors and ask for some bread, or a scrap of cloth, anything, to mend a hole. She remembers when there was absolutely nothing. That is the time we know from photographs and history books that a garden grew in the huge square by St. Isaacs cathedral. A vegetable garden planted and tilled by everyone, anyone, rows of cabbage and potato and whatever else could survive in hard cold earth, because the city was starving. And she remembers having nothing, so now she says she cannot throw away anything. And so there are piles of clothes, bits of cloth, lace, old shoes in corners of the apartment. She still mends the holes in her grandsons’ nylon pants and moves cloth from bedroom to kitchen to sew.
And food. The house is absolutely crammed. Every space is storage and so places where no one before imagined a cupboard are stuffed with cans and jars of preserves. Once she bent on all fours in the kitchen and nimbly pulled back the bottom edge of the counter, the strip of wood about three inches high that runs along the bottom between reached her hand under to pull out some old metal skillet that had been jammed in there. She was looking for the electric juicer, I think. And she tells me, almost everyday, to eat, to eat more, and if I politely refuse, she insists. And more than once she reminds me that she remembers having nothing, and so now I must eat. People must eat if they can.
But her daughters are upset with her current weight and they’ve told her to go on a diet. She laughs and shows me the tiny wedges of packaged diet food she’s been regimented to eat. The deprivation only makes her want to feed me more. Now is apple-harvesting season, and every trip back from the dacha is accompanied by a huge white plastic bucket or two of knobbly pale green apples. They bruise very quickly and become mealy, soft, spongy. She says Russians call it “cottony”.
Every time I leave the house it is necessary that I take at least three or four apples with me, which she carefully selects knife to peel off the particularly dark spotted areas. She tells me to give apples to my friends, and I try to but sometimes they’re just so pathetic and mealy that no one wants them and then I try to feed them to the stray dog who lives on the same street as my school. I call him Nasha, which means “ours”. It’s short for “nasha sobaka” which means “our dog”. From what I can tell, Nasha is not partial to apples and nudges them with his nose before stalking will eat them if he’s really hungry and they’re lying on the cement between him and the dumpster. She says I shouldn’t complain about eating so many apples and that I’ll be sorry soon when they’re done being harvested, the winter ones too, and we have no apples. But then she reminds me we’ll have apple jam, since she boils huge pots of apples and makes sweet, brown, syrupy jam that’s stored in the wall. I am happy now, I just wish I could catch the apples before they become cotton. The batch she brought home tonight are large and green and hard; they still have a chance.
