Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  A few days later, I was back at Irina's door. Irina was ecstatic to see me. We hugged. 'Irina,' I said, 'what are you doing for the next three days?'

  'A couple of tours, not too much.'

  'Let's go to some banyas.'

  'You invite me? Does that mean you pay?'

  'Yes, Irina. You are my guest.'

  'Oh, it is so wonderful.'

  Irina found her long-ignored banya hat, and we made the rounds of St Petersburg's more offbeat banyas. We hit Smolni, the favorite banya haunt of the KGB, in a four-story concrete block decorated in vinyl and dim lights. To Irina's glee, we rented a private banya suite, where we bobbed up and down in the cold pool together and Irina told me about weeping caryatids in her short story that was anthologized with Pushkin.

  Our most memorable outing was to a village-style banya in the ugly outskirts of St Petersburg. Locating this place was difficult, though Irina had heard about it and wanted to visit for years. A taxi driver with a mouthful of gold teeth found it for us, while regaling us with better banyas we should try in the meantime. This was typically Russian, the desire to point out that you're not going to the best place, that the best banya, cheese, church, can be found at X inconvenient location. Finally we came upon three women walking along a dusty road in beach towels asking one another out loud, 'Have you ever seen anywhere so beautiful?' I remembered Irina's first greeting: 'Welcome to my beautiful apartment.'

  After getting settled and undressing, we ventured into the parilka and Irina complained, 'Oh, it is too cold in here.' She grabbed the hose and started 'giving water to the walls.' I realized that I had been spoiled by the protocol and propriety of the watering process in Moscow. In St Petersburg it's often pandemonium. Irina sprayed everything, everywhere, and everyone. I felt the room getting hotter around me. The other women started to moan - at first, I guessed in approval of Irina's aggressive watering tactics. All of a sudden the air in the room disappeared, my shins and toenails became painfully hot, the walls seemed to be coughing scalding steam. Afraid to face the fate of a steamed wonton, I jerked upright, covered my face with a damp towel, and crawled out of the room on my hands and knees. The other women were right behind me this time and spoke quickly to Irina, who still held the garden hose and looked very guilty. 'Too much water,' she admitted.

  Only temporarily humbled, we headed out to the lake for a swim. It had been a cold summer in St Petersburg, and the lake wasn't more than fifty-five degrees. Irina was red-faced and happy.

  'Oh, I like this banya very much. I'm getting clean inside out. For two days I haven't smoked, and now I never smoke again. Yes, I become pure again.'

  'Were Soviet times very hard?' I asked.

  'Oh no, very nice times, Black Sea vacations twice a year, always enough money. I was a journalist, and I make as much as a doctor.' I wondered if the banya had produced such a state of euphoria that Irina thought only of the good. Perhaps she was so high that she couldn't remember the lines for food, the repression of the free press.

  After the banya, we walked through a mangy park where afternoon strollers examined curious mushrooms and the houses of New Russians were loudly being constructed along the shores of another small lake. Irina told me the cost in dollars of each upcoming monstrosity. Finally we reached the subway station; a huge platform outside had at least twenty stalls selling food and drink.

  'I want to buy you a snack to thank you for the wonderful banya,' said Irina.

  'No, it was my pleasure, really.'

  'You try this special doughnut and coffee,' commanded Irina, and we entered a prefabricated silver edifice on wheels. Irina ordered, and we were handed two cups of instant cappuccino and a plate of fried dough. Irina told me how clean she felt after the banya, how she would never smoke again, and how she would start work on a novel. As I wiped the grease off my lips with a coarse napkin, I noticed that I was starting to love all the contradictions of this country.

  The next morning, I left at dawn for Helsinki. Irina came down to the street with me and hailed a cab. She surprised me by getting into the car and riding to the train station. 'I want to make sure nothing happens to you on your last morning.'

  She walked me onto the Repin's platform. As I hugged Irina good-bye, I realized that I didn't know her last name.

  finland:

  saunatopia

  There is nothing that Finns have been so unanimous about as their sauna. This unanimity has remained unbroken for centuries and is sure to continue as long as there are children born in their native land, as long as the invitation still comes from the porch threshold in the evening twilight: 'The sauna is ready.'

  - Maila Talvio, 1871-1951

  [V]oluntarily they torment themselves, acquiring pain instead of cleanliness.

  — Nestor of Kiev, writing about Finnish saunas in 1113

  I boarded the Russian Repin, an old Soviet train, for the six-hour ride from St Petersburg to Helsinki. The crisp, sunny early August weather seemed to mirror my destination: Lutheran sauna country. 'How was Petersburg?' asked an English family on the train. They had ridden overnight from Helsinki but had been denied access into Russia because of incomplete visa paperwork.

  'Even better than Anna Karenina' I said, already missing the tarnished sparkle and mysterious happenings of St Petersburg. 'How was Helsinki?' I asked in return.

  'Rather too perfect, really,' the mother replied in clipped Oxford English. A prophetic comment, as it turned out.

  I had my own compartment for most of the ride. Watching the forests roll by, I calculated how many veynik could be made from each swath of forest. This grove of birch would yield at least three hundred veynik, five from that one tree alone. Responsible deforestation — veyniks require only a few leafy outer branches —all in the name of a good banya. I'd heard the Finns used veynik, too, but they called them vastas or vihtas, depending on whether you're in the east or west. I thought about Irina, en route to a writers retreat in Optima, no doubt soon to be terrorizing the nuns in the abbey. In the end, she had shown herself to be a true mensch.

  I tried to picture my boyfriend, Charles, whom I hadn't seen since a week-long stopover in Budapest two months earlier. As the Repin chugged west through the seemingly pristine Russian countryside, on the other side of the world Charles was probably snapping pictures of shy starlets. That was his job, and being a celebrity photographer required a rare blend of social and technical skills. His effortless stream of provocation and self-effacing humor produced marvelous responses and spontaneous pictures.

  Charles loved the baths of Budapest and had wanted us to visit them together. He is at his happiest soaking up to his chin in water, and we passed many languid summer days sampling the ubiquitous hot spring baths on the Buda side and looking at Roman and Ottoman ruins (my obsession). But Budapest scored low on bathing culture because the atmosphere in the baths was more German Kur than New Rome. The German, Czech, and Hungarian brand of rejuvenation involves enemas, medical massages, and carbon dioxide treatments in which a rubber bag is cinched tight around your waist and filled with C02 . Talk about the placebo effect. While some of the Buda baths were tucked away in architecturally interesting places and had a romantic old world grittiness, these are not joyful places to be.

  Next week, Charles would arrive in Helsinki to enjoy the waning days of summer with me in a country he wasn't particularly curious to see. Work and visa restrictions had made it impossible to visit Russia, a place that held more fascination for him. I felt a definite pressure to make Finland come alive.

  I heard a sudden knock on my cabin door, and a stone pillar of a man, a statuesque, uniformed blond who looked like Dolph Lundgren on high-dose steroids, entered the compartment. Thirty minutes earlier, two dark Russian men had come through, grabbed my passport, and stamped it. Now, at the Finnish border, Dolph, in heavy boots and with perfect English, asked, 'And how was your stay in Russia?' as he looked under the seats for stowaways. This question, when asked by someone in uniform, can never sound c
asual. 'How was your stay in Canada?' sounds nonchalant, but a deliberately slow articulation of 'And how was your stay in Russia?' can make even an Omaha dentist feel as though he's jumped onto the thrilling pages of a John le Carre novel.

  I was grateful that Dolph didn't have a German shepherd like the guards at the Slovakian border, but he didn't need a salivating dog to be intimidating. Concentrating on looking blase, I said, 'It was very pleasant.' He stared at me like a pit bull sizing up the fight of its prey before attacking. 'Are you carrying anything valuable? Jewelry? Works of art? Icons, perhaps?'

  The last question rattled me. I was prepared to say no to 'Do you have anything to declare?' but when Dolph asked so pointedly about icons, religious paintings that adorn churches and homes across Russia, I struggled to maintain my composure. Two exquisite renderings of St George slaying the dragon were buried in my suitcase. Should I lie outright, or should I massage the truth and say, 'I picked up some little paintings at a junk store, but I don't think they're valuable'? He would then ask to see them, inform me that they were icons, and I would act shocked and say, 'What? You call these little dragon pictures icons?'

  I went for the big lie. In my mind's eye, these icons were already hanging on the wall next to the fire escape in our apartment. Besides, what were the chances that Dolph would dig to the bottom of my suitcase? And even if he did unearth the icons, the outcome would be the same as if I confessed right now. The icons would be sent to the Russian authorities, who would either seize them or charge me an enormous 'tax.'

  'No? You have nothing?' he asked skeptically. 'Well, let's have a look.'

  A crimson wave washed over my face; I felt seasick. At that moment, I knew I'd make a terrible spy. I'd sing at the mere mention of Siberia. What would Marina do? She and Colin had smuggled two icons back to London without incident. I opened the huge suitcase that I'd spent two hours packing late last night. Dolph and I both stared down at the neatly packed contents.

  He took pity on me. 'It would be a shame to ruin your perfect packing job. What's in the yellow bag?' I unzipped the bag. 'A computer. What do you need with a computer?' he asked, as if carrying a computer qualified me as an intelligence agent. 'Is it an iBook?'

  'No, it's a ThinkPad,' I said. He seemed disappointed. The interrogation was over. Dolph welcomed me to Finland, and a moment later I heard a muffled, 'And how was your stay in Russia?' from the next cabin. I was officially an art smuggler.

  Arriving in Helsinki with ten hours of daylight still stretched before me smoothed over any anxiety about my usual predicament of not having a place to stay. My icons were intact; the weather promised to be perfect for the next month; I was in a foreign country of fluent English speakers, where public bathrooms were clean, sanitation was an obsession, and taking a sauna was the state religion. What wasn't there to smile about?

  My only Finnish acquaintance, Reeta (pronounced with a trilled R and transformed into a five-syllable word), was at a wedding in Turku, Finland's original capital on the west coast. But at this point I didn't want help. I preferred to put myself at the mercy of a city, to see what unfolded. Entering a city for the first time is like meeting a person - you form a first impression that is generally correct. And my first impression of Finland was of a Utopian fantasy land where quotidian business happens with unprecedented ease and no one gets too excited about anything.

  The train station, conspicuously missing the general splattering of bird droppings and broken bottles so common in Russia, had a lodging office catering to poor planners like myself, where I picked up a list of Helsinki brokers with short-term rentals. I knew better than to hope for a four-story town house (I would never equal my Istanbul digs in this lifetime), but a small studio with a kitchen and, who knows, maybe a sauna would be an ideal home base. Helsinki, with its stunning esplanades and cobblestone streets and the sleek, frosted-glass modernity of its countless bars and restaurants - each, it seemed, stolen from the pages of a Wallpaper design fantasy — was the obvious place to unpack my bags.

  Not only was Helsinki absurdly picturesque, it was also easy to navigate and decidedly provincial, especially considering that it is a European capital. The Gulf of Finland, the same gulf that St Petersburg perches on, acted as a guiding North Star, and nothing was farther than a fifteen-minute walk. Helsinki occupies a small peninsula with two different centers of gravity, depending on your personal tastes. Some might call the harbor area of Eteläsatama Helsinki's hub, with its thriving market square, the kauppahalli, and the nearby fish market where you can buy gravlax soaked in everything from cognac to vodka to honey. Others stake the center of Helsinki at Stockmann's doorstep. The Finns are fond of saying, 'If you can't find it at Stockmann, it doesn't exist.' And that's not hyperbole - the ten-story Stockmann sells everything from truffle oil to sauna rocks to Aalto-inspired furniture to Tom of Finland books. The center of my Helsinki universe, I hoped, would be the Finnish Sauna Society headquarters, a sauna sanctuary on the island of Lauttasaari, just west of central Helsinki.

  Twenty-five minutes after arriving in Helsinki, I was at Maarta's real estate office in Kaivopuisto, a chic neighborhood crammed with boutiques and chocolatiers. Four-dollar cappuccinos, $40 pedicures — gone were the $2 champagne-and-caviar snacks in St Petersburg. Gone also were the flies on the food, the swirl of garbage on the street, and the charming Russian surliness.

  I did my New York best to negotiate Maarta's only available apartment down from $80 per night. Since the owner in question, already at her country house, was trying to rent it at the last minute, I figured she might be willing to negotiate, and she was. I rented the apartment for $50 a night, sight unseen. Checking the apartment seemed unnecessary in a country where, I was quickly learning, cleanliness bordered on sterility and functionality bordered on obsessive. I hoped I hadn't just rented the one exception.

  An hour later, Maarta, a relentlessly chipper fifty-year-old woman, helped me collect my bags at the train station and gave me a car tour of Helsinki: the sloping parks and gardens of the embassy area, different views of the Gulf of Finland, and the massive island military fortress of Suomenlinna, forbidding even from three kilometers away. Finland, I soon learned, is a one-metropolis country. The Helsinki metropolitan area — if you include Espoo and Vantaa — is home to nearly 1 million of Finland's 5.2 million people; the next largest city, Tampere, lags at 195,000. The city's prosperous, meticulously manicured atmosphere was worlds away from St Petersburg's grime-encrusted facades and chaos. The layout, the perfect vistas, the seamless transportation systems (a web of trams, buses, subways, and free bikes), the garbage-free shaded streets, all seemed to suggest a metropolis designed in one all-encompassing scheme of Utopia. The people also seemed like refugees from Stepford. They walked purposefully, looking contented and sane, smiling into their shiny Nokias.

  'You've picked the nicest month of the year to visit Helsinki. Perfect weather and long days,' Maarta congratulated me. 'What will you be doing in Helsinki for the next month? Are you here to enjoy the festival?' she asked.

  'What festival?' I asked, my interest piqued. My arrival seemed so auspicious that perhaps I'd been lucky enough to arrive on the eve of a bacchanalian sauna festival. Maybe the Helsinki equivalent of the running of the bulls involved Finns running naked by moonlight through the streets to the nearest sauna.

  'Every year Helsinki hosts a summer festival, but this year it is a little more special because we have been selected as a European City of Culture.'

  'What does that mean, European City of Culture? It sounds like a great honor.'

  'Well, really, it means nothing. It's just a marketing ploy.' I wrote this comment off as Finnish self-effacement. 'Are there other cities of culture?'

  'Yes, though I'm not sure what they are.' Then, remembering something important, she added, 'But I do know that no city in Sweden was selected.' Her glee in conveying Sweden's failure was thick with schadenfreude and was my first taste of the rivalry between the Nokias and Ericssons, the inv
entors of sauna and the usurpers of sauna.

  We pulled up to my new home just off of Korkeavuorenkatu, a street name I wouldn't, even after a month, be able to pronounce. Next door to my new home was an Alko, a state-run liquor shop, the only blight in the area. The tastefully furnished two-bedroom apartment, stuffed with books and classical music recordings, was a gem by Manhattan standards. Maarta took me to the basement to show me the laundry facilities and the common apartment sauna.

  'Here is the sauna sign-up book. You can reserve a sauna time for yourself. Most evenings are filled in, but there are some free slots during the day.' I examined the sauna appointment book, the same narrow-lined schedule used in American offices, filled in with names like Tikkanen and Ruusuvuori. I peered inside the sauna, windowless and drab like a prison cell in light wood. It smelled like the inside of a tree.

  'My friend lives next door, and maybe you can take a sauna with her. Lenin hid in that building before sneaking back into Russia. So you can use the same sauna as Lenin.'

  I appreciated Maarta trying to provide a cultural experience for me, but I had made it a point not to visit Lenin's tomb in Moscow, and I had no desire to walk in Lenin's Helsinki footsteps. No, I had shifted gears. I wanted to see Sibelius's and Alvar Aalto's saunas. The renowned composer and designer had both taken great care with their saunas, and Aalto had designed some curious, curved sauna benches.

  There were only six days until Charles's arrival. Six days to complete the bulk of my research. Six days to declare a winner in the unspoken banya-sauna rivalry. Six days to uncover enough offbeat Finnish delights to keep Charles entertained. Of course, Charles's entertainment was not my responsibility, and we could discover things together; but in a way, he was a guest on my fantasy trip. This wasn't a vacation we were taking together. Rather, he was visiting me on an odyssey that had spiraled out of a vacation to Istanbul. That made me the de facto host and tour guide. I looked forward to getting caught up in the swirl of wonder and curiosity that characterizes Charles's approach to life. Yet I loved the greater spontaneity and serendipity of traveling alone. Was this an approach to travel or an approach to life? I wasn't sure.