by Alexia Brue
'Are you next?' Marina whispered to me.
'No, I think I'd rather give the treatment. Why don't I learn on you? C'mon, it's not as if I'm practicing a medical procedure. Natasha looks like a good teacher.'
Gallia had told us earlier that when Natasha performs the veynik treatments, it looks more like a shamanistic ritual or a Martha Graham dance than a mere beating with twigs. I glanced over at Natasha again. She was young, maybe thirty or so, and had a natural, earthy look compared with the other silicone women. Her breasts sagged slightly, and her hips were wide and sturdy. In short, she was normal looking, whereas the young Russian patrons had the svelte, statuesque Slavic build. I noticed another, more subtle difference. All of the women under fifty had shaved or waxed off all of their pubic hair save for a narrow Mohawk. Natasha hadn't. Even Gallia, who was unequivocal on her position that Russian men were swine, had a tidy Mohawk. Later I asked Marina why Russian women groomed themselves so specifically. 'It's pretty standard for young urban women. They don't do it for men, they prefer the hairless feeling themselves. We can have it done tomorrow if you're curious. I think Simone knows a good place. I used to get it done when I lived here, and, trust me, Russians are gifted waxers.'
After Gallia and Natasha had finished catching up, Gallia rejoined us on the benches. 'Gallia, has Natasha always been a banshitsa? I mean, is it a profession that you are born into?' I asked, remembering that half the hamam ladies came from the village of Tokat.
'No, no, no.' Responses are always emphatic in Russia, as if you've asked a stupid question. 'She used to be a Russian-to German translator, but when she lost that j ob she started working here.'
'What kind of wage do you think she makes?'
'Well, her actual wage is probably very low, like fifty dollars a month, but because there are so many hard-currency clients she probably does really well with tips.'
'Do you think she'd give me a lesson on how to use the veynik?'
'Yah, I'm sure she would be flattered that you are so interested in what she does.'
But I would have to wait a while before my lesson. Natasha puts on her robe and mittens to perform her veynik dance only once an hour. 'I have to pace myself, otherwise I'll get too dehydrated and maybe pass out,' she explained.
It was time to get the parilka ready for a new session. Banyas, unlike saunas, are not left continuously at the same heat. The biggest banya surprise was how much structure and discipline was applied to the sweating ritual. You don't simply shower, sweat, shower, and leave. Having a real banya involves partaking in several rounds of carefully moderated heat - ideally 140 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit with a 20 to 40 percent humidity range - and submitting to the will of the poddavshitsa.
At the Sandunovskye, along with the other Moscovian banyas of the highest echelon, heating the parilka is a formal affair compared to the haphazard heating up that takes place in St Petersburg. At the 3-ruble Tchaykovsky, there is certainly no paid poddavshitsa, so the queen bee of the moment heats the parilka to the loudly voiced specifications of the other bathers. If she does a bad job, if the steam doesn't disperse evenly, or if she pours too much water on the rocks, thereby smoking out the room and sending the women running from the parilka, they will yell, 'Khvatit! khvatit!' or 'Enough!' and it will be a long time before this banya amateur is allowed to pick up the ladle again.
Natasha, a self-described lyubitel (die-hard fan) turned professional, has a more formal and exacting approach to heating up the parilka. To label Natasha a mere poddavshitsa would be ridiculously unfair. Rightfully she is a banshitsa, part herbalist, part homeopath, part performance artist, and part witch, in the words of one Sandunovskye regular. The women rush up to her. 'Natasha, Natasha, is the parilka ready? What herb is stewing in the red bucket over there?' Banya devotees schedule their sweats around her working hours.
First she cleared the parilka of bathers, telling them it was time to start a new session and she needed it empty to do her work. When Gallia explained to her that I too was a lyubitel, Natasha let me accompany her into the banya to observe the heating process. So I stood next to her, both of us naked, holding ladles and wearing pointy felt hats. I thought of the priest's holding icons for the faithful down the street.
Once the room was empty, she unhooked the furnace's metal doors using the butt end of the ladle. Inside the massive furnace was a platform holding a pyramid of round metal balls that looked like miniature cannonballs. She began to scoop warm water from the bucket into the furnace. She counted forty ladlefuls of water in Russian. 'Why warm water?' I asked, the dutiful pupil.
'Because cold water makes a weak steam. The steam from cold water falls directly to the floor. The steam from warm water is spread throughout the room evenly.'
Then she shut the oven door and replaced the latch. Next she grabbed the black garden hose from outside the parilka door and dragged it in. She sprayed the ceiling and the walls of the parilka generously but without getting water on the floor. The temperature of the room was rising by the second. The walls and ceiling exhaled steam, and, as if I were captive in a stormcloud, beads of precipitation began forming on my body.
'Natasha, I think I'm getting dizzy,' I admitted.
'This is nothing yet.'
She led me out of the parilka and shut the door firmly behind her. We waited for exactly two minutes outside while the steam dispersed evenly throughout the room. The forty ladles of water sizzled on the cannonballs and fired rays of heat and steam through every square inch of the parilka's treehouse structure. As I peered through the window, I felt that I was witnessing the process of some profound chemical decomposition process, even though it was just water molecules bursting from liquid to vapor. After a few minutes, Natasha walked out to the reception area, where many of the bathers were drinking tea or eating salted sardines called volba to replenish all the salt lost through sweating. From the other room, I could hear her calling out the now familiar, 'Ladies, it's time to steam.'
Devushki and babushki alike rushed to make a line outside the parilka. Gallia, Marina, and I were first in line, and about ten penitents were behind us. Everyone adjusted their hats to make sure no stray hairs would get fried by the heat. Each of us wore flip-flops to protect our toes from the hot cement floor.
Natasha opened the door, and in total silence, with all the seriousness and sense of purpose of facing a firing squad, we entered. The heat above three feet was so unbearable that the women walked in doubled over. Everyone immediately carved a niche for herself. Some spread their towels on the floor, prostrating themselves on this lower level of heat as quickly as possible. The alpha women who assumed positions sitting or lying on the benches brought their hands to their faces in order to filter and soften the steam before it hit their nostrils. In America the heat would have required a billboard-size notice reading 'Please consult your doctor before entering.' This truly was nostril-singeing steam.
I crouched low and spread my towel next to Marina, who had her knees pulled in tight to her chest in a banya fetal position. The less skin you expose, the less painful it is. I tried this, too, and it helped a bit. My toenails hurt from the heat. Growls and groans rose up, a chorus of approval from the other women.
'This is too hot, isn't it? Everyone is suffering. My toenails are going to fall off,' I whispered. At serious banyas like Sandunovskye, there is a prohibition against talking midsession. If you speak above a whisper, some bossy Russian woman will invariably hush you with a 'Be quiet. We are trying to relax here.'
'I know, but for Russian women the more excruciating the better. Look at Gallia,' said Marina.
I looked at Gallia, lying two feet higher on a bench. Her eyes were closed, and she wore an intent look of concentration. 'She looks miserable,' I said.
'No, that's her Buddha look. She's in heaven.'
'Well, I have to get out of here. I can't take it.' I crawled down the stairs as if escaping from a burning house. Just as I was about to stand up and bolt through the door, three women
shouted, 'Nyet,' in unison. Natasha, who was sitting on a bench by the door and rocking back and forth with her eyes closed, explained in a whisper, 'You can't leave this early in a session. You'll ruin their steam. Just sit it out for another two minutes.' My skin felt as though it would begin melting any moment, but it was slightly cooler out of the treehouse. I sat next to Natasha, closed my eyes, and thought about Seneca, who died in a Roman steam room. I could imagine worse ways to go. Then, to my utter amazement, I heard the cracking sound of leaves hitting skin. Just when I thought this woman was the lone masochist, four others joined in. These women were out of their minds, or else they redefined warm-blooded. I asked Natasha a question that occurred to me after watching so many Russian women revel in what were brutally painful circumstances: 'Why are the Russians so fond of the banya?' I asked.
'Well. . .' She paused. 'I think it's because Russians like extreme situations.'
Finally Natasha nodded at me, essentially dismissing me from class. I slinked out of the parilka in shame. Now the heat-immune Russian women would all have a story for dinner about the weak American girl who couldn't stand the heat.
Water. Water. Where was the cold water? I grabbed hold of the side of the Japanese soaking tub and splashed water onto my face and into my mouth (bad form, but I didn't care at this point; I had already humiliated myself as a banya zero). I took a few deep breaths and tried to steady my heat-addled brain. Then I climbed the stepladder into a soaking tub that looked like an enormous wooden wine barrel. I bobbed up and down like a cork in the fifty-degree water for a couple of minutes before the other women started to stream out of the parilka. They were smiling radiantly, as though they had just suffered through a terrible ordeal but had escaped alive.
To make room for others more worthy than myself, I got out of the tub and caught a glimpse of my body in a mirror on the opposite wall. My skin was gone. I was red and blue and purple, I was a medical experiment gone terribly wrong. I could see the veins in my breasts. I had X-ray vision.
Natasha came out with Gallia and Marina and said, 'In a few minutes I'll show you how to use the veynik,' and then she went out to the reception area to smoke a cigarette. Ten minutes later she returned, carrying her pink bathrobe and white felt gloves.
'Marina, you hot-blooded Kazakh, are you ready?' I asked. Marina stood up, stretched like a cat, and doused herself with cold water. There was the undeniable sense that we were about to embark on something difficult and painful, but a necessary and worthy endeavor. The banya, especially when you add a veynik treatment, is a three-day juice fast crammed into three minutes. The sweat, while 99 percent water, also contains about 1 percent hard metal, and the heat speeds up your kidneys so that waste and toxins are processed and released more quickly.
Natasha put on her uniform: pink bathrobe, woolen mittens, and pointy white hat, and she scooped up the silver basin with two birch veyniks soaking in warm water. She looked like a baker, a housewife, and an elf. I, her apprentice, wore just a felt hat. The parilka had cooled since the height of the last session's heat. Marina, our sacrificial lamb, lay on a bench with a cold wet towel wrapped around her hair.
Natasha took a veynik in each hand. She raised the bouquets of birch to the ceiling as if lifting two huge torches to the sky and shook both hands gently so the leaves trembled and shed drops of water. Then she dropped her arms to her sides and began moving them in wider and wider circles on top of Marina's body. I crouched next to Marina. I could smell the fresh, tannic aroma of a damp October morning in Vermont. With each circle, Natasha circulated the parilka's hot air and coaxed the steam onto Marina's body. All this before any skin-to-leaf contact.
And then - thwack. The first blow was to Marina's feet. The feet contain nerve connections to every organ in the body, so it's a good place to lay that first blow of heat. It sends waves of heat throughout the trunk of the body and allows the body to prepare for the onslaught to come.
After her feet had absorbed the initial shock, Natasha began beating the branches in quick, rhythmic movements up Marina's calves and thighs and across her back. She played her shoulders as if they were snare drums. Cha, cha, cha-cha, Cha, cha, cha-cha. The sweat streamed down Natasha's face, but she showed no signs of heat fatigue. She tapped Marina twice on the hip, and Marina turned over. Before repeating the same series of lashes on her front side, Natasha dunked the branches in a bucket of cold water and gently brought the branches to Marina's face so that the cold water streamed down her neck. Marina sighed with gratitude. Those small injections of cold water are the only thing that makes it possible to endure lying there passively while heat and steam are heaped onto your body and birch leaves slap your skin, removing the toxins. Or so the folk wisdom goes.
It felt as if the veynik treatment lasted an hour, though it was probably more like four minutes. It seemed I was going to learn by watching. For her final coup de grace, Natasha shook the branches, a shamanistic call to the spirits, and then shimmied the two bouquets down Marina's body to lock in all the purifying steam of the parilka and all the organic goodness of the birch leaves. Finally, she poured a little more cold water on Marina's face and then helped her to sit up. Marina opened her eyes; the whites of her eyes were completely clear, and she gave us a weak smile. We helped her down the stairs and revived her with buckets of cold water before depositing her in the marble tub like a small child.
'I feel at peace,' Marina managed to get out.
'You do this once a week and you never get sick. Really, it burns all the germs right off your body,' offered Gallia.
'Gallia, what time is it?' Marina asked.
'About seven-thirty.'
'We've been here two hours, unbelievable. Alexia, we need to hurry. Simone is expecting us any minute.' Marina then pulled herself out of the cold pool and proclaimed triumphantly, 'Well, I can end my search for the perfect bath. How about you, Brue?'
'My perfect bath won't possess the Nietzschean "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" guiding principle,' I said.
We dressed in less than five minutes, which was in great contrast all the young women around us, who were spending five minutes just coloring one eyelid. We rushed toward Simone's loft apartment. The rain had stopped, and we walked by the small Russian Orthodox church. The courtyard was empty, and I pondered how different the rituals were - the pomp and regalia of the liturgy versus the peasant and the profane at the banya. Inside the Russian Orthodox church, the women piled on the scarves to cover their shoulders and their hair. The faithful require so many accoutrements — icons, robes, vessels for drinking water and wine. Inside the banya, all that is stripped away and the soul is truly bared.
Simone threw a dinner party to welcome Marina back from her exile. She and Andrew, her dashing English war photographer boyfriend, had just flown in from Rome with pasta, fresh pesto, and raspberries. Andrew was such the perfect Central Casting version of a globe-trotting, passport-as-thick-as-a-novel war correspondent that I wondered if Simone hadn't ordered him from a top-secret Magnum personals catalog. But they had met, I was told, at a banya birthday party that a mutual friend had thrown at the Sandunovskye. Andrew was instantly smitten and called Simone a few days later. After they'd arranged to meet for a drink, Simone, ever the ingenue, said, 'Will you recognize me with my clothes on?' Andrew, though he photographs fighting in Chechnya and Iraq, was
An eclectic assortment of friends showed up. First was Sasha, a tall and gangly Russian who told me almost immediately, 'I don't work, I travel, and I'm not interested in guidebooks that tell me how to live on fifty dollars a day.' Sasha's girlfriend, Svetlana, cat-walked in five minutes later wearing something gold, shimmery, and strapless. Svetlana was a certain kind of Russian woman — that perfect cocktail of DNA: the tall, trim, leggy figure of a uniquely well-endowed ballerina and the softly chiseled face, wide-set eyes, and painted, pouty lips of the typical Slavic stunner. She was gorgeous, and in her mysteriously quiet way, she spent dinner politicking and power brokering at her end of the
table. Then there was Nigel, a dipsomaniac Englishman who gulped wine, chain-lit cigarettes - his own and Svetlana's - and smiled and purred involuntarily. mysteriously based a block from the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, but he spent as much time as possible with Simone in Moscow.
As Marina had explained to me earlier, Svetlana was Sasha's devushka.
'So devushki are prostitutes?' I had asked.
'No, I mean, well, not really. They aren't paid to perform sexual acts, but it is understood that in exchange for being supported in high style, they'll perform, service, satisfy, you get the idea . . .'
'So the devushka is like a kept woman or a mistress?'
'Yes, precisely, but with a little geisha thrown in.'
'And is this relationship between devushka and patron exclusive?'
'Well, from the woman's end it is. Like last year, Sasha supposedly spent fifty grand on Svetlana's needs, and this buys him exclusive rights to her affections.'
'How do you know all this?'
'Sasha tells Simone everything, especially since Svetlana's gotten rather more demanding lately. Last year Sasha bought her a Range Rover. Now she wants to be sent to an art and auctioneering school in London for a year, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose of a devushka relationship. At least from Sasha's end.'
'Yes, a long-distance mistress is hardly a desirable situation. And do they act like boyfriend and girlfriend?'
'Well, you'll see for yourself tonight. Sasha is "physically obsessed" with her, but in public they seem rather indifferent to each other.'
And throughout the dinner party Svetlana seemed to pay more attention to Nigel, while Sasha regaled me with a delightful body of banya jokes and stories: 'A cell phone is ringing in the banya. Boris picks it up and says, "Yes, of course, dear, buy yourself the mink coat." The phone rings again, and Boris answers it and says, "You want a diamond ring? Anything you want, dear." For a third time the phone interrupts them, and Boris answers, "A Mercedes SUV, of course, buy it." Then he holds up the cell phone and addresses his banya buddies: "Whose cell phone is this, anyway?"'