Oleg and Ina

Here is my first blog entry for 2008. St Petersburg, after I wrote this on January 2, was mostly a bust...I got sick and the internet didn't work at the hostel, and the hostel was "chaotic" (more on that later). But here is what I wrote about the first day in the hostel.

January 2, 2008
I’m sitting at a kitchen table with Oleg and Ina after having made my way from the airport to the hostel for just 17 rubles, 68 cents Canadian, by taking a marshrutky (minibus). The ride in to the city was familiar, the closer to the centre I got, the more familiar the buildings seemed, the more familiar the rush of people. I got off at Sennaya Platz, following the instructions provided on the internet by the hostel, and realized that their next instruction, to take the #212 bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, would not be easy, as Sennaya Platz is an intersection of several roads on which the traffic, cars and people, rush wildly in every possible direction. Luckily, or perhaps deliberately, I had studied the Cyrillic alphabet this past fall, so was able to decode, if slowly, the street signs which sometimes appear on plaques on the sides of buildings at the corners of streets. I was looking for Sadovaya, but there were so many streets converging and taking off from this one intersection, that it was difficult to maneuver with even my one small bag on wheels and two small packs. People were rushing, and although there is apparently less traffic in early January than there was in June/July when I was last here, the cars and trucks are still in a frenzied hurry.

I could understand why people looked at me impatiently as I stood by the side of the street clutching my blurred MapQuest map of St Petersburg and trying to assess the faces of the passers-by to see which one of them might be inclined take the time to read the Russian instructions for getting to the hostel, but people hurried by with clenched faces reddened by the cold and framed in fur. I understood why they regarded me with suspicion, or just avoided eye contact completely, as I am different, a potential liability, extra work, extra time taken on the way home from work, or the way to an important engagement. When I could not identify anyone who I could read might open up their eyes to my mumbled questions, spoken in English monosyllables with a Russian accent, I just stood on the side of the street and watched. And thought. I thought that if I continued to look around me, examine the people, really look closely at the signs on the stores, watch which buses with which numbers turned in which dirction, I might figure out where I was to go. My instructions said to catch a 212 mini bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, get off at Lermontov, and then walk down Lermontov to Labotina and find #36. And so on. Or, the instructions told me, I could walk that distance in 20 minutes. The problem was that I didn’t know which direction to start walking, and so I stood for quite a while at this intersection and felt helpless. Because I have forgotten or lost my hat somewhere between the Vancouver Airport and here, my head got cold while I stood there, and because we are just past the shortest day of the year at the same latitude as Whitehorse, the dropping sun, even at 2 in the afternoon, was also leading to dropping temperatures. The pedestrian pace around me rose as the air got colder. And I just stood there and emptied my mind. Couldn’t plan. Couldn’t decide. I had too little data to work with.

So sitting across from Oleg and Ina in the hostel kitchen, I am grateful for both the warmth of the room and the hot tea that sits in a cup in front of me, despite the limp string of the tea bag that flopped over the side of the cup. They are young women, 23 and 24. Oleg is from Kaliningrad, a city on the coast of that tiny pocket of Russia squeezed in between Poland and Lithuania. “Russia is a crazy place”, she tells me in English, and then immediately translates for Ina what she has said. “It is unpredictable.” She has long blonde hair that reaches to below her armpits, and after she had met me outside the front door of the hostel on her way home from work and led me upstairs to the hostel, an old collective apartment that was bought by an Englishman two years ago and converted to this hostel, she had changed into a tight leopard skin shirt and pink tights, apparently her comfort clothes. She is sitting across from me at the kitchen table. There is too much stress here, she says. -- Too much stress for me, she continues. Tomorrow we are going to get our visas to go to Finland, and then to France. Ina’s boyfriend is in France. Putin is a monarch. He is crazy. It will not get better for us, for the poor. There is no middle class here, just the very rich and the very poor. We are the very poor, and it is not good for us. She almost spits as she talks, and delivers each of her statements one after the other as if she has rehearsed each one of them every day, every night as she walks to work, walks home, does her laundry. I can imagine her going through her list of complaints, remembering her fears, predicting a dour personal future for herself, and knowing with certainty that she must leave.

As I listen to Oleg talk, my body is vibrating the way that bodies do when they have been traveling on planes for almost 24 hours. My semi circular canals are still working to keep my perceptions stable, but the ground beneath me is no longer rocking, and I don’t have to be alert any more, don’t have to make any decisions, any plans, read any maps or instructions. I’m home free for the moment, and so my body is rocking. I want to ask Oleg some questions, and I try, but she says, no, listen to me, I have more. she has no time for my questions, And she continues to say how important it is that they leave Russia.

Ten days! She says, telling me how the country shuts down for ten days in early January. We have this ten day holiday right now, and it’s good for no one except the rich. They go to Japan, Thailand, Egypt where they lie in the sun for ten days while the rest of the country stays in the cold and waits for them to return. What good is this ten day holiday for us now? All we can do is eat and drink and have little sleeps. She laughs, and turns to Ina to translate again, and Ina laughs with her because we have been drinking wine and eating bread with cheese and caviar, a feast they prepared, in my honour, I think, upon my arrival.

I have to leave, Oleg says. This is too stress. Too stress. Every day I don’t know what I find when I leave my house. One day cheese is 27 rubles, the next day 37, the day after that 42, and I don’t know what to expect each day or know how can I pay for these things. It’s everything too, not just food. Clothes. Electricity. Everything goes up with no warning.

Ina speaks up. I want stabilize, she says. Stabilize. She tells me she is moving to France to get married to Stephan, who lives in Toulouse. She met him at the hostel when he stayed here last fall and quickly dumped her English boyfriend, the hostel owner. Ina works here, takes care of the place. I’m always here, she tells me, you can come and go as you please and I will always be here to let you in when you come back. The English owner is in Japan, and while Oleg and Ina wrestle with a broken window, I hear the word “mushina” repeated over and over again, interspersed with laughter. And so I ask, are you talking about men? They look at me and laugh, yes, they say. Men! They leave when it gets cold and now the window is broken and there is no one to fix it. They talk to one another in Russian and laugh. But I have read Duplessix Grey's book on Soviet women, and I have a pretty good idea what they are laughing about.

And so Ina, who is a younger version of the women who sit at the entrances of university residences and museums or any other place where people come and go, has been going to France once a month since meeting Stephan in September. It is difficult to get visas to go anywhere except Finland, so to go to France she must first go to Finland and then out. Tomorrow she and Oleg are going to get visas for Finland. When I ask if they are coming back this time, she laughs and tells me maybe. Maybe in a long time. Ina is going for love, Oleg is going for work. Ina wants to have two children and stability. Oleg wants a job.

As I stood at the Sennaya intersection and emptied my head, and then wondered what to do, I realized that the solution would not come by thinking. I could not think my way to the hostel, I would have to act. Get moving, I told myself. Just get moving. So I walked in any arbitrary direction, and then saw a group of young people standing around. The young and healthy are more likely to make eye contact, especially the young women, and sure enough one young girl was looking at me curiously. I smiled, but not too widely so as not to be thought a simpleton, and said the word “Sadovaya?” She responded in broken English, where you from? I told her Canada, a country that Oleg would later describe as very stable, and the young woman on the street told me that she was from some other part of Russia, a small town. So she does not know St Petersburg, but she will try to help. She is with a small group of other young women, and the six of them ask a young man for help.

Now I’m pretty sure that if I had asked that young man for help he would have sneered at me and walked away, not wanting to bother with a crazy old woman clutching a folded piece of paper, but when six young women with faces flushed with cold ask him a question, he stops to talk, lights a cigarette, and seems prepared to bathe in the attentions for as long as he can. He, of course, is a Petersburgian, and knows exactly where Sadovaya Prospekt is, and what direction down Sadovaya Prospekt one needs to walk to get to Lermontov, so he tells them, and they tell me, and with a “spasibo” I’m on my way to what I hope will be a hostel, the plastic wheels on my carryall clunking over the uneven concrete of the sidewalks.

I decide not to wait for the #212 minivan, and instead opt for the 20 minute walk down Sadovaya. I could use a walk after those hours cooped up in planes (although the flight from Frankfurt to St Petersburg, in a plane designed to hold 300, held only 20 of us. Customs was easy, and just to see how difficult things might get for me, I deliberately did not answer one of the questions on my immigration card. The customs agent did not notice. ). And so I boldly set out to find Lermontov Prospekt, rehearsing the Cyrillic alphabet in my head so that I would recognize the street name when I came to it. After about 10 minutes, and still not finding the street, I stopped two women who were walking towards me to ask for help. They both stopped, they both made eye contact, and both listened attentively as I monosyllabled my way through Lermontovskaya Prospekt, and they both nodded and pointed in the direction I was going. Spasibo, spasibo, I say, and my temporary insanity at the Sennaya Platz is at least momentarily relieved as I head towards what I hope will be the hostel.

Are you going to Belarus? Oleg asks me. It’s worse in Belarus. It’s worse. I was there visiting my aunt and they have a new policy, a new law just decreed by their president, and everyone must buy a “flicker”, that is a reflective strip that they must wear on their bodies, they buy it for $2 and if the police find you without your flicker, they will fine you $20, and all this it is on a $300 a month salary. I don’t know how they do it, and that president, Lukashenka, he’s crazy. He has turned off all the street lights in the country, and everyone must wear these flickers, it’s a tax, and he calls it for safety, everyone must wear these flickers so that the car lights will reflect off them, men, women, children, they are all wearing flickers on their clothes, on their purses. My aunt, she told me to get one, to wear one, and I refused, I am not citizen of Belarus and they cannot fine me and I will not wear such a thing on my body.

And there is talk there of more, talk of every citizen having to wear a badge with their identification number on it for the police to see, so that if you do something, you can be fined by the badge number. Belarus is terrible. I must leave Russia. It will only get worse. Oleg is quiet, and helps herself to another piece of bread with caviar, spreading it the way one might spread peanut butter. She is 24. Ina is 25. Oleg, I remind myself, wants to leave to get work, and Ina is leaving for love. They are both angry, frustrated, confused, stressed.

By the time I got to the hostel, it had only been two hours since my plane had landed, and the further away from Sennaya Platz I walked, the quieter the streets got, the shabbier the buildings. I wondered, of course, if there really would be a hostel at #36 Labutina. But I found a number 36, and a small plaque over the security key pad indicating that this was a hostel, and so I entered the security code that I had been given, and of course it did not work; rather, the pad emitted a long shrill sound and flashed a red light each time I entered the code. I stopped and went into planning mode. But I was soon saved from this by Oleg, who came down the street towards the door of the hostel.

Are you coming for the hostel, she asked me. Yes, I said, and she says, you follow me to the second floor. And I follow her to the second floor, and a bit later, while Ina and Oleg and I are sitting around the kitchen table, she asks me what I am doing, a woman alone, traveling in Russia, in January. No one comes here in January, she says.

Exactly, I think. That’s it exactly.