by Alexia Brue
'In the 1950s more banyas open, only they not so nice. No more bathtubs, just parilkas and pools. Everything very common. Nothing beautiful. Stalin very bad man, so bad banyas. In the 1960s less turmoil. Khrushchev opens the borders and we meet the Finnish sauna and soon many banyas add Finnish sauna.'
'Why?' I ask. 'The banya is so lovely.'
'It's foreign. It's chic. Who knows. Maybe because sauna is dry heat and cleaner than the wet banya with leaves all over the floor. Alexia, rule one for journalist, Don't interrupt my story. I used to go to the Palace during Soviet times. It was a very beautiful banya, much marble and many statues, and it cost three rubles to get in. A lot of money! But I don't drink vodka, so I put money other people spend on drinking to the banya. But my favorite is the Sandunovskye Banii in Moscow. Have you been there?'
'No, not yet, but Marina and I will go next week.'
'Oh, you must go. This thing I really cannot describe, the statues, the carpets, the paintings, the luxurious waiting room. And then inside enormous plunge pool next to banya, just like prerevolutionary banya down on Nikravsava Street. And when I leave this place, I feel more beautiful.'
After all this outpouring of banya emotion, I asked, 'Irina, how come you don't go to the banya anymore?'
'It's bad for my hair,' she replied, and lit another Capri cigarette.
Marina's Version of Russia
I was so glad to have Marina, expert on all things Russian, to guide me through the slippery streets. It's one thing, when you lack language skills, to amble your way through a comparably sane city like Istanbul. Chaotic as Istanbul was, the people and their behavior made sense. But here in Russia, I couldn't find my center of gravity. The cabs were private cars with no meters, and on a particularly Twilight Zoneish ride, I almost got kidnapped by a scar-faced driver who kept asking me if I wanted to go out for shashlik (shish kebab). I watched a businessman in front of the covered market alternate bites of his ice-cream Popsicle with a bag lady. A band of teenagers rode through the streets on horseback at midnight. And I was tactlessly bounced at the ballet for impersonating a Russian and ordered to pay the $65 foreigners' surcharge.
Marina is not Russian, but after a childhood in Moscow and a two-year stint at a Russian investment bank, she both speaks the language perfectly and understands the peculiar post-Soviet style of getting things done. We had booked tickets to Moscow on a new private airline. Hours before the departure, my passport was still being registered by the authorities. When my entreaties were shrugged off, Marina knew exactly whom and how to bully to get my passport back. So we kissed Irina good-bye, thanked her for the tvorog breakfasts, and headed off for four nights in Moscow.
The first and last time I visited Moscow, in midwinter 1994, I came to see my then boyfriend, Josh, who was teaching English at a private school and living in a shabby satellite city. It was a dark, depressing, vodka-drenched visit. Josh had taken Pushkin's famous verse much too literally: 'We drink to escape our woes/Where is the cup? Our hearts will be more gay.' Beyond the drinking, there was a lot of Russian posturing. He and all his expat friends put a ridiculous amount of effort into pronouncing 'Pushkin' (Pwohush-kiin) and glorified their street barters for butter and eggs.
Anything would have improved on my last poisonous visit. The weather was the first surprise. I arrived in July, when Moscow was bursting with sunshine. The second great leap forward was in lodging. Staying at an airy, elegant loft five minutes by foot from the Kremlin obliterated all previous negative associations of the city. The gargantuan and sumptuous loft belonged to Marina's friend and former colleague, an aristocratic Frenchwoman named Simone, who was tall and elegant and spoke impeccable English with charming trilled Ls. I had no idea how splendid the life of an expatriate banker in Moscow could be.
From my vantage point in her blue, airy guest room, Simone had mastered the art of expatriate living. Her maid and chauffeur both adored her and said she was 'like a sister.' Pictures of her travels across Russia, looking ravishing in fur, dotted the apartment, as did little treasures from her excursions. Somehow, in a completely uncontrived manner she transported 16th Arrondisement opulence to the Volga. Aesthetic harmony reigned in the loft's luxurious, eclectic blend of bear and zebra skins, Russian folk art, black-and-white prints of pouting ballet dancers, and the odd piece of furniture upholstered in French fabric. Despite her tailored, perfectly accessorized appearance, Simone had no princessly airs. She was warm and engaging, yet just aloof enough to remind me that she floated in a different orbit. Irina in St Petersburg and Simone in Moscow were both perfect representatives of two very different stratospheres in contemporary Russia.
With just a small taste of its high life and with introductions to interesting people who didn't belabor the names of Russian authors, Moscow was proving a most enticing destination. Marina was happy because she could buy cheap fox furs and see old friends. I was happy because we were going to pay a visit to the Sandunovskye Banii, the most famous and stately of the Moscow banyas, where Pushkin went for inspiration until his untimely death at thirty-eight during a duel with his wife's lover. And there is no better tour guide than 'Pwohushkin.' Truth be told, though Pushkin is the Sandunovskye's most famous patron, he never actually visited it. He died fifty-nine years before Sila and Elizaveta Sandunov opened the Sandunovskye Banii in 1896.
The 104-year-old Sandunovskye Banii was right in the middle of Moscovian action near Teatralnaya Ploshchad. The banya was originally a country institution. Each village had at least one banya built on the banks of a lake, river, or pond. This ideal of a village banya endures today in a more personal form. Despite the fact that the majority of Russians live in cities and that the Communists tried to make everything communal, most Russians dream of having a country house, or dacha, with their own banya. This dacha-garden-banya scenario for them is the embodiment of an idyllic existence.
For centuries, effectively until Peter the Great took power, the cities in Russia were nasty, crime-ridden places. City dwellers preoccupied with trade didn't spend time or energy improving their quality of life with frills like banyas. The earl of Carlisle noted in his Relation of Three Embassies, written for Charles III in 1663, that banyas 'were as rare at Mosco as hunting.' Seventeenth-century Moscow must have smelled like a vodka-spiked sewer, and deliberate measures were taken: banya owners were exempted from taxes.
Our driver in an old smoky Lada took a 50-ruble note, about $2, and would take us only as far as the inner ring road. Marina knew the way and guided me through the steep, cluttered streets toward the Sandunovskye. Construction crews were everywhere, and scaffolding swayed in the breeze. Of course, one doesn't walk under scaffolding in Russia; it is like having unprotected sex - a big risk for a nominal inconvenience. So Marina and I were walking down the middle of the street, when suddenly we heard choral chanting emanating from a small onion-domed church.
The ethereal melody and vague scent of incense drew us into the tiny, crowded nave. Rows of bowed congregants stood in front of an altar with a diptych of Russian icons gleaming gold and magenta in the darkness. The women sang one verse and then alternated with the gathering of priests near the altar. After a few minutes, the congregants started to form a line near the altar. They approached the priest, received his blessing, and bent to kiss their favorite icon. One right after the other, the women pressed their lips to the painted wood blocks. All of the women, wrapped in shawls, heads covered in scarves, seemed possessed by a deep-felt fervor, whereas the men, shifting in their seats, seemed to tolerate the proceedings. A few women near the back turned to look at us. Their lack of a welcoming nod or a small movement to accommodate us in the pew was sufficient notice that we were not wholly welcome.
It was starting to rain, and we rushed down the small street to where a caravan of shiny black foreign cars, Mercedes and Lexus SUVs, was parked. As the hoity-toitiest banya in all of Russia, the Sandunovskye was a magnet for 'New Russians,' which is synonymous with an entire class of people who became rich
, generally through questionable or shady means, in the freewheeling wake of perestroika. The men's side of the Sandunovskye is known to cater to a devoted clientele of Russian Mafia; for this reason, some people avoid the place. For a vicarious experience of a banya filled with Russian mobsters, read the book or rent the video Gorky Park; the 1982 thriller depicts the protagonist visiting the Sandunovskye in order to eavesdrop on Mafia deals.
First, I must say another word about the nature of banyas. After many sessions with the St Petersburg witches, I had a banya epiphany. I realized how banyas are different from the Roman thermae and Turkish hamams. Banyas, unlike hamams, aren't paved with marble. Nor do banyas have the soaring, curvilinear architecture of hamam domes studded with skylights that glisten like diamonds. Hamams are gently heated with soft, vaporous steam that lulls the body like rich cello notes bowing across your body.
Banyas are pure village. The wooden-beam architecture is dark and coarse. The banya is a mad wizard's treehouse with a forest inside. Banya heat is infernal, the pure Stravinsky staccato notes of a violin piercing rays of heat through a prostrate body. Banya heat purges and punishes. Banyas are about suffering, the release from that suffering, and the j oy that comes from the resultant equilibrium. Inside the hamam, ladies in flower-patterned cotton dresses ply you with tea and oranges; they use soap and washcloths to clean and massage you on a warm marble slab. Hamam life is soft and sweet and altogether feminine. In the banya, the banshitsa whips you with branches and then leads you, dizzy, blood pressure dropped to 80/ 50, to the cold pool to shock your body back into consciousness.
Yet despite the externally more pleasurable, indulgent aspects of the hamam, hamam culture, at least in Turkey's largest city, was in a sad state of decline. Visiting local hamams in Istanbul was like walking through a cemetery, visiting a stone marker to a former epoch. A remembrance, a deserted monument to a previous age. Here in Moscow, the banyas were packed. Russians, like the Romans before them, believed in the simple recipe for political stability: bread and banyas will keep the people content. A well-fed, well-bathed citizen is a happy citizen. And I remembered Irina's banya treatise that, consciously or not, evaluated banya developments through the different Soviet leaders: 'Before the revolution, banyas very well built. Stalin's banyas not so good. Khrushchev build very nice banyas indeed. But Sandunovskye best of all.'
Once out of the church, we hurried past the fleet of expensive black cars. Most cars had drivers taking a nap or reading the paper and having their thirtieth cigarette of the day. My heart quickened as we searched for the entrance, weeks of anticipation coming to fruition. The women's entrance is hard to find, around the corner and up the hill from the more stately men's entrance. My suspicion is that the owners don't want the women to spend too long gazing jealously at the men's swimming pool encased in stained glass. Rule three of bath culture: Men always, always, always get the superior facilities.
Drenched in acid rain, Marina and I approached the cashier at the foot of a staircase that curved up for two stories.
'This isn't what I pictured,' I said to Marina as I noticed the prevailing design aesthetic of Versace meets Roman decadanza. In the lower atrium and in the recessed nooks leading up the staircase stood fake white statues from Roman mythology better left on a Miami lawn and beveled mirrors better left in Tony Soprano's house. This was a prime example of the prefabricated opulence so distinctive of Russians flaunting their money.
'Yes, I know, but this is what the New Russians consider classy.'
'What, it's five hundred rubles?' I said, looking at the sign.
The $20 fee was a near fortune in most pockets of Russian society. I had gotten used to living in the Russian ruble economy in St Petersburg with Irina. Ten cents for the banya, 50 cents for coffee and a pastry. The hard-currency economy for foreigners and New Russians runs about the same as New York City prices. The fee to get into the Sandunovskye was the same as my East Village shvitz back home in Manhattan. But in this context it seemed like a czar's ransom. Of course, for $6 we could have purchased tickets for the second class of service. But, paradoxically, here in Russia the highest class of service is the norm, and choosing the regular class is like choosing standing room only at the theater. Even parsimonious Irina in St Petersburg told me she chooses only the highest class of service.
We pulled ourselves up the balustrade and walked into the brightest, nicest banya changing room I'd ever seen, and my spirits lifted. In fact, it was more of a reception room with six banquette areas designed for sitting in small groups and sipping tea. Overhead there were hooks and shelves for storing clothes and bags. Several uniformed attendants buzzed around the wide rectangular room, delivering glasses of tea and water. Most of the guests were twenty to thirty years old, younger than the average St Petersburg banya-goer. Marina noticed this too and said, 'Oh, of course, it's devushki night. Simone said it might be.'
'Devushki night?' I asked.
'I'll explain inside. But be on the lookout for silicone.' Devushki, I later learned, means literally 'young women' in Russian, but among expats it's used to describe a particular genre of young woman — the attractive, hard-bodied chattel of the rich New Russians.
I did a cursory silicone scan, and everywhere I looked gravity-defying breasts reached skyward. Russian implants don't just enlarge breasts, they actually levitate the breast to within inches of the owner's chin.
'There's Gallia!' said Marina.
I looked toward the entrance and saw a thin, wiry woman with wide green eyes and an anxious face that melted into a smile when she saw us. Gallia raced over to Marina and kissed both her cheeks.
Gallia, I learned during the introductions, was a banya-phile and used to be the office manager at the bank where Marina sold Russian equities during the heady times before the crash in 1998. Until eight years ago, Gallia struggled with chronic bronchial problems and caught every virus being passed around the office. Finally a friend suggested that the banya would alleviate the pains in her chest. She tried it; it worked; and now she never missed her weekly session. Gallia undressed quickly and pulled a pink bowl out of her bag just like the hamam tasis. The wide shallow bowl contained a bar of soap, loofahs, washcloths, and a packet of herbs - she was a banya insider. All business, she said, 'Devushki, paritsa' (Girls, it's time to steam), and led the way hurriedly through a wooden door to the wet room. This wet room, with its white-tiled floor and enormous elevated plunge pool, was the largest, most modern banya prep room I had yet seen. The brightly lit, high-ceilinged room also had two soaking tubs overflowing with water near the door to the parilka, one made in wood in the Japanese soaking style, the other white marble with ornate rosettes on the side, no doubt a leftover from the original 1896 furnishings. The only other furnishings were the requisite rows of benches for resting in between sessions and for placing buckets stewing with herbs and other salubrious unguents.
I soon learned that Gallia was an old-school banya-goer, and like other Russian women, she did more than advocate for her method. When Marina and I headed over to the shower stalls along the wall to wash ourselves before going into the parilka, Gallia did not even try to hold back her sneer. She was crouching in front of a spigot that poked out from the wall, dumping small buckets of water over herself. 'This is the traditional way to clean yourself before banya,' she said meaningfully. I vacillated between wanting to wash myself in the 'correct,' old-fashioned manner and wanting to stand up to a bossy Russian woman. Soon I was crouching next to her, throwing steaming buckets of water over my back and listening to Gallia tell me, 'This country has no future.'
'Why do you say that, Gallia?'
'Don't listen to Gallia,' Marina yelled from the showers, 'she's in one of her moods.'
Gallia continued, 'As long as men prefer to drink vodka and make one hundred rubles a month selling potatoes instead of having good job and an occasional bottle of wine, this country has no future. Russian men, they don't care about job, about family, they just want to drink vodka.'<
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There was nothing to argue about. Russians, according to the World Health Organization, consume on average 15.5 liters of alcohol per year, beating out every other European nation. Getting drunk is perfectly acceptable social behavior; in fact, drunkenness is glorified among most Russian men, so temperance movements have difficulty finding a foothold. Gallia's life had clearly been affected by vodka. She spoke proudly of her nineteen-year-old daughter, whom she had raised alone. Gallia, I was shocked to learn, was forty-four. In general, Russian women don't age that well, or as Marina pointed out, they age overnight. Gallia, however, looked to be in her late twenties. Her daughter studied at an American college, and Gallia said, beaming, 'I'm so happy she has a future. In this country she would have no future.'
Gallia was well-known to the Sandunovskye's poddavshitsa, the 'mistress of steam.'
'Come meet Natasha,' said Gallia. Then she whispered, 'She's a witch.'
'Who is Natasha?'
'She heats the banya and announces new sessions. She also stews magic herbs, makes the best steam, and is an artist with the veynik. You'll see.'
Just then, a stout young woman with dirty blond hair wearing a thick pink cotton bathrobe and a pointy felt hat emerged from the parilka. Underneath her elfish hat was an elfin, small-featured face, pink and glistening with sweat. In her right hand she held two veyniks, one made of birch and the other of pine, and with the other hand she held up the limp, red body of a young woman who looked as though she needed to be revived with smelling salts. Everyone stood out of the way, as if gathered around a road accident, while Natasha brought the red woman to the marble tub and drenched her with water to remove all the leaves and pine needles from her body. Then she helped the woman step into the cold tub to cool off after the treatment. Only then did she remove her own hefty robe and revive herself with cold water. After she'd had a chance to resuscitate herself, Natasha noticed Gallia and gave her a kiss.