In Which If Anyone Paid Her She Would Be Like Him

One Russian Man

by EMILY ROSENBERG

I went to Russia this summer because I thought it would teach me something about diplomacy. Unfortunately, my trip to Russia turned out to have no official trips inside government buildings, embassies, or foreign consulates, unless I count driving by them in our program’s shuttle. On paper, my goal for this trip was to become at least proficient in Russian, and therefore increase my chances for studying at an impressive law school, while demonstrating to everyone that I have an impressive pathway of diplomatic travel ahead of me to follow.

I even had a Skype interview for a collegiate forum on Russian politics before a round of shots and a night on the Dumskaia Ulitza bar district. The internship did not turn out, unfortunately, but thankfully that night I was able to have a very international experience. That night would also be the height of my experience with a Russian diplomat… actually the Russian Diplomat, one of the cheapest but not the most painful friends I made in Russia.

Diplomat, in shots and followed by orange Fanta chasers, became my closest ally and worst enemy for a night out with the eight other people my age I’d never have gone out to party with back at college. However, they being the only people I knew in the city who spoke English, everyone decided to put preferences aside and coalesce ourselves into a fragile yet functional group of friends.

Had it not been for the Diplomat, I would have felt alone that night on Dumskaia. Not only did he take my attention completely away from answering complaints of only slightly sensible college students, he made me feel warm on a cold summer night. He let me know it’s not the worst thing in the world to have an English name in a Russian city, and that it wasn’t too bad to be an American in an expatriate bar even if you could only speak broken Russian with a noticeable American accent.

The Diplomat made this night no different than the next occasional nights I’d have with him. We were alone with a bunch of Russians and a few Americans who I would thank later for refusing to leave me, even though it should have been clear to everyone that the Diplomat was already my escort.

That night, the Diplomat led me to Bar Fidel on Dumskaia, a closet space more or less reeking with very unfamiliar Soviet nostalgia. One of the girls in our group, Camille, told me that we were there to meet three British students in our class – who turned out to be two gay men, two very sweet girls who were already muffled by their own favorite name for vodka, and Rachel, the one Brit we already knew from class. Of course, three members of our group had already wandered off to another bar, taking on the role of each other’s inebriated escorts. I figured everyone’s sense of direction were equally mediocre by that time - a later start than usual at half past midnight – but still I didn’t worry about having them go. I didn’t mind being alone with the Diplomat anyway.

By the time the Brits made it to Bar Fidel, there were only two other girls out of our original American group of eight still with us… one had taken a break on one of the tables after dancing on and around the bar for the past hour, and Camille, whose sober smile left me no clue that she was going to forget her real leather jacket in the bar after we’d leave. The Diplomat and I were busy talking to a Russian man named Nicko for as long as we could before he’d find another girl awaken from her rest and declare herself ready for another round of dancing.

I was happy enough that I didn’t have to leave the Diplomat completely to talk to Nicko for a few minutes. There was no reason to think I’d leave everyone for the night, only that I’d leave them all for long enough to gain my sense of independence back. The strangest part of it all, though, was that I didn’t feel independent at all.

Nicko and I started dancing for less than a minute before he asked me to go home with him. I would have agreed in less than a minute to trade my crowded social life at the time with one Russian man if I were back home, but here I couldn’t imagine leaving with him. It wasn’t so much a fear of his other existence as bait for a St. Petersburg trafficking ring, but instead the dormant idea that I was moving too fast. Our friend resting before still sat at the table, black waves of rising hair sprawling over the wood, and Camille would have been too busy with the British people to notice that I had slipped off the bar scene for the night. But since the Diplomat was making me think way too much about such a pleasant offer to leave, I stayed with them both.

Nicko wasn’t the only man I left at Bar Fidel. The Diplomat lost his charm very quickly after following me home and insisting on staying in bed with me the entire night. It’s easy to admit that I forgot about him as soon as I could the next morning, but that would leave the truth behind. Unlike other possible liaisons, the Diplomat did not leave me entirely after the night at Bar Fidel ended.

Instead, he waited in my freezer for the rest of the trip, and his somehow tough glass skin never even cracked.

He came back to me in many guises, sometimes with a green mark on his bottleneck and once even with a stain of cranberry juice on his usually pale, emotionless complexion. It seemed for the rest of the trip, about four more weeks, that he was the one friend I’d make in St. Petersburg who I’d want to keep in touch with over the years.

We had memories good and bad. He helped me find out how I was when I was having fun, and how I was when I wanted to be alone for what might have been an entire day if a field trip to Catherine the Great’s palace wasn’t scheduled for that afternoon. He’d stay around me, sit on the side of my bed, or hover next to my head. I guess I was in luck every night afterwards, when he was only a throbbing memory to me.

The night before, when I decided to leave Nicko and return home with the Diplomat and the girls in my group, lasted longer than any other night in St. Petersburg. Even though I was surprised to find out the Diplomat left the next day earlier than he usually did - in the early afternoon - that one night in a way still hasn’t ended.

For the rest of the program and afterwards, the Russian men I was so excited to meet in St. Petersburg lost almost all of their importance, and my memories of one or two dates in Atlanta became stronger than they’d ever been to me before. These men who I thought I knew so well in Atlanta were so exciting to me, more than I could have convinced myself they were when I first met them.

I started to realize that after all this time with the Diplomat, who sometimes chose other names to call himself the next times we came across each other, I was just too American to always spend my time with him. It was no secret that he was a better match for the more European girls in our group, who knew more about traveling that I would for what could be more than ten years after the program. At the end of the trip, I spend my last night with the Diplomat, just to make the idea of putting on jeans in the fifty-five degree summer night a little less grueling and the air a little warmer to breathe.

The next morning he left early again. Instead of his throbbing gaze, I opened my window to see the grayish fog from last night’s boat ride hovering around me. It was a beautiful night. Again, there was no hint of political education in it, but neither was there art or history or literature. It was just fog, lights, boats, the Neva River water, and the Diplomat doing his job. If anyone paid me I’d be like him. Going out, staying out, letting people test out just how international they are before they carve a global life out for themselves.

It’s not to say that the way he does it – impairing senses and then surrounding one with people who speak no English except for “I don’t speak any English” – turned me away from international policy forever. It’s not to say that now I’ll never go back to Russia because some nights it was cold and confusing. Instead, I hope I can go back alone, and if I ever do, spend as much time with the Diplomat as I did that night. A shot glass or two of him, and the rest of the hours with one or two people who I do know very well, or at least like very much.

Emily Rosenberg is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Atlanta. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"These Streets Will Never Look The Same" - Chromatics (mp3)

"Lady" - Chromatics (mp3)

In Which We Are The Last Of Our Kind

Home From Home

by RACHEL SYKES

There is a small tavern in the city of Veliky Novgorod known as “Sinbad’s Cave.” The sign above the front door swings low from two brass hooks, spelling its name in faded, gold Cyrillic. Its doorway opens onto a pitch-black staircase, warm with the smell of cucumbers and damp - inside the walls are crowded with fishing nets, plastic crabs, murky portholes and an orange tree. Although the walls are unmistakably cave-like and drip in the manner of their namesake, they are made only of the dankest plastic.

Sinbad’s is neither a cave, nor even partially underground. It sells discount perogis and high percentage beer by ambiantly manufactured cave-light. Locally, it’s infamous for providing its clientele with lighting so low that you can’t tell the colour or form of the bar food. As a drinking experience, this means that it probably rates lower than consuming a can of gin and tonic in a snow drift. But for seven months, Sinbad’s was the high point of many of my days. From work, it was a last point of contact before I picked up a kilo of dates from the elderly woman on the corner of Main Street and returned to my tiny bed, two streets further, to listen to my host brother sing “Material Girl” through the walls.

Seven years after the fact, I get told off for talking about Russia. This must be to do with what I returned as. A mass of hair grown to two feet in length, wooden beads around my wrist and neck, a Discman full of ripped CDs of Russian ska, I had Novgorod written across my body and was not afraid to force it into the eye line of others. In the months after I left, all my thoughts turned towards it, my entire body feeling like its reboot might need several years to take hold. For my even more luckless friends, it was the break-up I never got over. I would lie on student futons and talk obliquely about my “soul” and the “Russian winter” spent in Sinbad’s Cave, until the memories of this place, which I had seized in a moment but crafted only in retrospect, were formed out of the desire to make myself an other.

I remained in daily contact with a friend I had met there. It became strange how, more often than not, we did not recall the excitement of our time together. We didn’t mention the adventures around a city where everyone noted our privilege, the drug dealers who wanted to date us, the strange trips to the middle of Russian nowhere. It was the mundanity that we wanted back. The elaborate and immensely boring routine which we had carved for ourselves in what had seemed like a parody of the western world. This, to us, was what became remarkable.

My friend was a seventeen year-old Australian girl, shipped with me to Novgorod by a ramshackle teaching organisation and instructed to teach the English we quite obviously misunderstood. We met on our first day as teachers and fell quickly into friendship, the two of us very much in love with our dissimilarities. As teenagers, we were still shaping ourselves out of the shadows of others. We loved each other, for the cold winter in which we both turned eighteen, because being so very different made us ambitious for ourselves. We were friends because we were obsessed with our hormones.

“It’s spring,” she would say, scanning the men as we crossed the melting snow towards Sinbad’s. “All the animals are mating.”

I looked at her and would often nod very sagely, pretending to be neither British nor sexually awkward. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was saying applied to me, but I did know that I wanted her to think it did.

The city wall in Veliky Novgorod

So for seven months we sat together in Sinbad’s, or in a better lit café called only “GRILL” that sold chicken covered in cat hair. On bad days, we ate the chicken. But on good days, we drank vodka with a glass of peach juice, listing one hundred Australian terms for vomit and conjugating Russian on the side. On one of these good days, whilst constructing a manifesto on oral sex, my friend began a list of what she was seeking in The One. Bullet by bullet, we wrote each point painstakingly in English then translated into Russian, in the back of my teaching book, a bright notepad whose cover dramatically recreated the bedtime routine of a family of Russian mice.

“A former drug addict,” she said with the pen poised at her mouth. “That’s obvious. Also, a drug dealer swagger, a B.O. problem, and a disgusting amount of back hair. And I mean, disgusting.”

The only thing I knew with that degree of certainty was that I wanted to go at least twenty-four hours without falling over on the ice. As it was, I couldn’t imagine myself an ideal. I could barely conceive of anything to settle for.

As a reality that I was more comfortable with, we described our friends at home in exquisite detail. Eventually, there were no parts of our lives that the other did not understand. We could give a full description of every best friend we’d claimed since kindergarten, every boy we’d brushed the hand of, every pop song that made us feel mind-numbingly understood, as only good pop songs could do. We might never have left home; we made sure every part of it followed us to that cat-lined café.

Slowly, together, we wrote intricate profiles of our fellow teaching assistants. Pages and pages in length, it seemed as though missing any detail of their fledgling personalities would mean that their memory escaped us forever. We denied them the privilege in which we luxuriated, defining their personalities with damning solidity. Tearing off every sticker from every bottle of beer we drank, making blood brother promises to spend our lives meeting in countries halfway between our antipodean homes until the ultimate goal might be achieved: a tour of the Eastern bloc in our twilight years.

There was no doubt that this was the point to which our future would always return. And we had to remember every part of it for when we eventually came back, together, fifty years in the future.

Church of the Saviour on Blood, St. Petersburg

One of our Russian friends, Yulia, wanted to follow us back home. Yulia was infamous amongst our friends for her love of aerobics. Her infamy spread for one simple reason; when she introduced herself to strangers she began by saying: “I love to shape my body.” Repeated explanations of her body’s morphic qualities meant that we referred to her only as “Shaping” for six months. She claimed not to care. When we suggested she should visit us in either Anglo pole of the world, she would respond with a sigh: “Quite frankly, girls, this is the only reason I am being friends with you.”

Shaping had a game she liked to play. In the middle of crowded bars, she would tear us each a square of her plain white notepad and distribute pieces between us. “Close your eyes,” she would say, “close them tightly.” Then, placing a pen in our hands, she would ask us to draw a room with no windows or doors, the colour of a brilliant white. “This,” she would whisper in our ears, “this is what heaven will be like.”

As a party trick, it wasn’t a lot of fun. But if we didn’t play along, she would go off to her shaping class in a puff of anger, upsetting chairs and beer cans as she left. The game would last for about fifteen minutes and by the time we surfaced out of our trance, all we could see were white lights and phobias of death. Shaping told us that the aim was to find the most important thing in our lives, to focus our energies on what we cared for the most. She claimed her white room had to be some form of gymnasium.

In the back of one of our notebooks, my Australian friend wrote to me: “Here’s to a lifetime of meeting half-way between us, until the time we enter a white room with no windows and no doors.”

Months after we left Russia for the final time, we struggled to see ourselves in our notebooks. By the end of our short time there, I had fallen in and out of love enough times to feel, firstly, less British, and secondly, changed in a deeply fundamental but ultimately inexplicable sense that no-one at home would ever be able to understand. Outwardly I might look the same: same skirts, same woolly hats, same discount t-shirts with “MAKE TEA. NOT WAR” written across them in inoffensive pastels. But still, my world had expanded, unfathomably. If I was sure of anything, I was 99% sure of this.

The full terror of that remaining 1% was enough to ensure that my friend and I wrote to each other every day. Back in Australia, she felt like she was waking up from a seven-month hangover. I had half-heartedly started at university. Bulbous packages, some actually shaped like kangaroos, turned up at my halls of residence, spilling coasters of every Australian city over my textbooks. I sent back ill-formed letters, attempting to delicately balance first-year philosophy with explicit sexual content. I interpreted, revisited, cut and paste sacred parts of my diaries and scrap books, adding photos, CDs, and, unbeatably, excerpts from the five tapes of the dictaphone I had religiously carried. I had recorded impulsively and without discrimination, leaving me with tape upon tape of appalling in-jokes, accordion music, and depressing speeches from our superiors, whose job of teaching English expanded far beyond our seven month holiday in Veliky Novgorod.

In October, the month I started university, I got an email with the following writ large in the subject box. “ELENA SERGEIVNA,” it read, “IS NOT HAVING AN ASSISTANT THIS YEAR.”

St. Sofia's cathedral, Novgorod

Starting universities on opposite ends of the planet, we were running at everyday life with all the gravitas of an astronaut returning from space. About my year abroad I was casual and always cool in conversation. We had lived through a Russian winter, I would say, what can the north of England do to me? I was in danger of becoming one of the people that university guides warn you about. Empty bottles of vodka lined my tiny room, Soviet matchbooks lit the cigarettes of strangers, and a miniature accordion sat on my kitchen table. Sometimes, as if struggling for affectation, I still carried the Dictaphone.

In October, two months out of our English teacher guise, my friend told me that our role as teaching assistant no longer existed.

Elena Sergeivna was an English teacher who had married young to a man in the Russian militia. She taught the humanities pathway in our school in Novgorod, where the high achievers of the top year, we were told, would develop a fine grasp of English in order to become an economist in either New York, or Leicester.

“We expected poets,” we complained, “We get economists.”

As Elena Sergeivna repeatedly told us, teachers in Russia earnt as much as doctors. But doctors earned the least in the country. The teachers who did the most work still needed second jobs and would frequently ask us if we knew of anyone who needed a cleaner. Elena had finally decided to get pregnant. Now in her early thirties she would loop the following phrase: “I am only here until pregnancy.” We mourned the fact that a woman both so young and so unmotherly could soon be with child. She had assumed that two fully grown women would not need looking after; we, in turn, gave her no pity.

After we left Novgorod, we never heard from Elena again. But three months later, word somehow reached Australia that our former jobs had been done away with.

“We’re obviously not good enough,” my friend suggested, before rattling off an anecdote about the time we ate two litres of soup, ordered in a Chinese restaurant because we knew neither the relevant Chinese, nor the relevant Russian.

In England, I continued to tease and provoke relationships with my ex-teachers in ways that extended their every relevance to my world. I made sure if I had to leave Russia that most of the Russia I knew would come with me. It was inconceivable that I could be anything but the weirdest personality that my closest Australian friend had helped to cultivate through seven months in Sinbad’s Cave.

When I went on dates, I would say I was passionate about dried fruit and pickled cabbage. “As long as the dried fruit has been stored in two metres of snow,” I would add glibly. “I like ska-punk. And I like to pluck my eyebrows.”

I was nineteen years old. And Elena Sergeivna never had an assistant again.

Rachel Sykes is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Too Tough (Saint Etienne remix)" - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (mp3)

"Strange (Totally Sincere remix)" - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (mp3)