Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  'Da, banya,' and they pointed to a door on my right and walked on.

  I had reached my destination. My first Russian banya. Fifteen women were staring at me. Fifteen people giving me the once-over, glancing at my purple shoes and khaki capri pants and registering my otherness. Having satisfied their curiosity, they went back to their preening.

  I disrobed quickly. Once naked, my otherness disappeared. I wanted to be one of them. I had read about the Russian ideal of sobornost, roughly translated as 'togetherness.' Travel writer Colin Thubron in Among the Russians explained how this concept of sobornost goes back to the obschina, the old Slavic village assembly, in which decisions had to be unanimous. To dissent was to proclaim yourself a heretic. Collective unanimity prevailed over the individual. I remembered one of the slogans of the Communist revolution: 'If you are not with us, you are against us.' Perhaps I was being too literal to view the banya through this lens, but there is something of the town assembly in the banya proceedings. And as I was about to learn, if you deviate from banya etiquette, the Russian women are not shy about correcting you.

  The whole washing room, the moechnaya, as it's called, was abuzz with incredible female energy. Mothers braided their daughters' hair. Women walked nude and purposeful about the room. They tended proprietarily to silver buckets, fed their bodies or large bowls with a hose, stood for long intervals under showers, or washed the soap from their bodies using bowl after bowl of water. Women shaved and masked and plucked and preened. Every woman demonstrated what seemed to be her own intricate and personal ablution. The comforting country smell of hay fields after a long rain pervaded the room. I traced the smells to herbs and branches stewing in plastic buckets all around the room.

  I showered (rule number one, 'Wash before bathing,' prevails everywhere) and watched people look at me. Mostly they were trying to figure out how to talk to me. One old babushka came up and started speaking a flurry of Russian. I gave the polite universal shrug for 'Forgive me, I do not speak your language,' and she started pointing to my watch and shaking her head no. I tried to mime, 'It's waterproof Still she would not let it rest. This was my first taste of the Russian fanaticism for rules and strict protocol. The watch came off.

  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 th
e 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.

  On top of all the food bounty, old maps of St Petersburg were dusted off. Irina then drew us little walking tour maps and made lists of places for us to visit — Anna Akhmatova's house, Dos-toyevsky's house, the Engineer's Palace at midnight. Irina was suddenly the full-service host mom, all because she thought my friend was an exiled Russian princess. 'Where did she learn such beautiful Russian?'

  The next morning at breakfast, Irina, who now understood my banya mission, decided that she must weigh in. As we drank our second cup of tea, Irina gave us an unsolicited list of inconvenient places we shouldn't miss.

  'And after all this activity, which banya should we visit, Irina?'

  She took a deep breath and looked dreamy. Marina and I glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. This would be our third dramatic monologue by Irina. L
ast night we'd sat through a forty-five-minute exegesis on the tempestuous relationship between Turgenev and Tolstoy, and yesterday afternoon it was twenty minutes on the noble life of long-suffering Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, whose Modigliani portrait hung in the kitchen.

  Ever the drama queen, Irina looked at us with the mysterious smile of a woman about to confide. 'I collect banyas in my heart.'

  I dared not look at Marina for fear that we would fall apart laughing. Get ready for Banya: The Miniseries, I thought. By injecting her favorite English word, turmoil, often enough, Irina could make any story sound like an epic melodrama.

  'Many, many banyas I visit, and I store in my heart. Beautiful memories. All my life I visit banyas. But then there was much turmoil.'

  She paused, as if to steady herself for an outpouring of emotion. 'The banya was my muse. Picture this, Alexia, I used to go skiing with my ex-husband outside of St Petersburg at our dacha. We skied very long and got very cold. After skiing we light banya fire and the hot banya on my cold skin felt very nice. There we would stay many hours, telling stories, eating, using the veynik, ex-husband and other men drinking, always drinking. Then I would come home. I would try to sleep but couldn't. I would get up and write all night until dawn, my head clear. All worries removed by the banya.'

  Before we could say anything, she continued, 'I remember well my first trip to the banya. The year was 1945 and I was living in Leningrad with my mother and her sister and her daughter during the war. Such turmoil. All the men away. Victory is announced and we go to the banya to celebrate. I remember this banya on Nikravsava Street. It was built before the revolution in the 1890s, so it was well built, with marble floors and a beautiful cast-iron staircase. I remember a huge line to get in. Finally we get tickets for the first class on the third floor. There's an enormous bathtub for children there. It's my first time to see a bathtub like this, and I cannot believe it. Our mothers leave us there for hours, and still my cousin and I do not want to leave.