2000 Charles River Review: The Paper It Was Written On

For nearly four months I spent at least two evenings a week at Alexi's apartment drinking vodka, smoking, and eating whatever food we collectively gathered. This night in particular we shared a rare feast, our last together, although none of us knew it when we entered together.

The dirty fourth-floor apartment always seemed warm and inviting after I trudged 11 blocks from the Metro station in the snow. The temperature dipped as low as 20 below in the winter in St. Petersburg, and windblown snow clung to my wool ski mask, forming an icy crust where my breath collected between my nose and mouth. Through my jeans and long underwear, my thighs went numb. Moisture froze like pointy icicles on the hairs inside my nose, and tears brought on by the wind crystallized on my eyelashes. Our destination, Alexi's 80-year-old low rise building carved from giant blocks of granite, looked impermeable to the cold. My toes came back to life as the five of us instinctively jogged the last few yards and threw open the heavy oak door.

Ah, warmth. I always ran the four flights of steps to get my blood circulating again. The heat felt so good. For a while, at least. Like when I was little and I came in soaking and cold from playing in the snow. My fingers were red and icy, so Mom told me to run them under cold water in the sink to warm them up. I thought it made more sense to put them in warm water, but even lukewarm water burnt my frozen fingers like fire. The cold water, however, felt warm and soothing--until my fingers thawed, and all of a sudden the water felt cold. That was like Alexi's apartment. It thawed us as we stamped the snow off and peeled our coats, boots, hats, scarves, and gloves off. But within 20 minutes my body always realized the trick, and I found myself swimming in cold water.

The food lines were at a peak, and no one had much to spare. But Misha, whom I had been dating for four months, always managed to pull together extra loaves of bread, jars of pickled garlic cloves, and on rare occasions, fresh pomegranates and lemons. This night, he pulled from his coat half a fish wrapped in paper, sliced lengthwise down the middle, gutted and smoked with the head and scales still on. From tip to tail it was about 18 inches long. Alexi and Pavil cheered. Lisa, my roommate, and I winced.

"You don't like, Nadia?" Misha teased me, bringing the fish closer to my face. The cloudy bulging eye stared at me, but the lure of protein tempered my disgust. "I think you like. I get it just for you." He nuzzled his stubbly face into my neck and kissed me. Misha smelled of wet wool and the vodka we drank earlier at the cafe. The silk of his long black bangs brushed my lips. A lingering blur of vodka almost made me forget we weren't alone. We were never alone in this city. Although I longed for more than just the bristle of his four-day-old beard, I gently pushed him and his fish away.

It was a good looking fish. My standards had changed over the last few months, since the run on currency. Students in my dorm were sharing boiled potatoes for dinner, then drinking the water to capture any remaining nutrients. This fish was a miracle. I'd waited in line two hours at a bakery the day before to use my ration tickets for two loaves of heavy bread. I paid in rubles, nearly 20 rubles a loaf, a painful amount to the Russians in line around me. To me, 20 rubles equaled about 20 cents. I would have bought ten more and shared them, but I would have used up my rations. A ruble was nothing to me anymore, barely worth the paper it was written on. When I first moved to St. Petersburg the exchange rate was about ten rubles to the dollar, now it was close to 100, and inching higher every day.

I gave the woman behind the counter an American dollar bill and asked for six sweet rolls. She handed them to me with bare fingers, no bag or paper because of the shortage of paper in St. Petersburg. She didn't bother asking for ration coupons and slid the dollar into her apron pocket. She knew she could cash it on the street for much more than the value of six rolls. I tried to conserve my American money for emergencies. It could buy almost anything from almost anyone, even though it was illegal tender. I only had 14 one-dollar bills left after the transaction, but I hadn't had anything sweet in so long I couldn't resist. Lisa and I inhaled two rolls outside and ate two more later that night. The other two remained wrapped in used notebook paper in my coat pocket.

We were lucky to have that fish. We were lucky to be eating it in that repulsive room. Years of coagulated dust had accumulated in the corners, accompanied by dozens of cigarette butts. It was a solidly built building with impressive architectural detail, but despite its formidable outer appearance, it was falling in around itself, and no one, not even Alexi, seemed to notice or care.

I walked over to the carved wooden mantle, chipped and stained with age and neglect, and swirled my finger in a glass bowl of colorful condoms. I noticed them as soon as we walked in because the bright red, green, and purple were the only colors in the room.

"This is new, Alexi. Who'd you get these for?" I turned to our host, who was several years younger than the rest of us, 16 or 17, I assumed, but never asked. Alexi blushed. He didn't know much English, but he knew what I was asking him. About five foot nine with a broad boyish face and course brown hair that wouldn't lie flat, Alexi didn't seem to fit the underworld role he played. He blushed often, spoke seldom, and averted his eyes. But he could afford his own place, something most young married couples couldn't do. And those who could afford them usually stayed on waiting lists for years. Alexi had come to St. Petersburg as a runaway three years ago. Misha found him on the street and put him to work for his father's black market organization. He peddled art, watches, flags, and things I preferred not to know about. I knew Misha must have gotten the apartment for Alexi. I didn't really care how. I knew they all were black market criminals, but the line in Russia was so gray. If you wanted to eat, you did what you had to do.

"SPED. Take," Alexi finally answered me about the condoms, gesturing for me to take a handful.

"Kak? Ya ne ponimayu," I switched to Russian for clarification.

"You say AIDS, we say SPED. Same," Pavil answered for Alexi. "Alexi doesn't want to get AIDS. He doesn't want you to either."

"Oh," I answered, wishing I had never brought up the condoms. Lately, conversations among the five of us tended to turn dark quickly.

"I'm hungry," Lisa said, flopping down on the mattress on the floor. Other than one folding wooden chair, the worn mattress was the only place to sit in the two rooms Alexi rented. He didn't have a fitted sheet. Instead a gray flat sheet spread across the mattress, never quite covering it. The mattress underneath was yellowed and stained. I tried not to look at it. Alexi wasn't the only tenant in the small apartment. Two elderly couples occupied one room each, and they all shared the kitchen and the bathroom. Alexi's larger room must have been a grand family room once. It had high ceilings with ornate molding, built-in book shelves, and hardwood floors. The shelves, like the rest of the room, stood empty, except for an old out-of-tune baby grand piano, abandoned by a previous resident. Dust covered the instrument's dull finish. A few of the yellowed keys were broken. We had to walk through the piano room to get to the room with the mattress, a smaller room with a stone fireplace across one corner. The whole place smelled of cigarettes, cabbage, and oniony body odor.

Misha and Pavil pulled bottles of vodka out of their coats, and we settled on the floor, staring at the fish. I wasn't sure how we were supposed to eat it. Alexi contributed half a jar of pickled garlic cloves and I put a round loaf of coarse bread and the two sweet rolls on the paper next to the fish. My Let's Go St. Petersburg travel book never described eating half a fish with garlic for dinner.

"Sok," said Misha, flicking his neck with his middle finger, producing a hollow thud against his throat, Russian sign language for drink, particularly as it pertained to vodka. He raised his bottle high to launch the meal. I wished we had coffee instead. We passed the bottles a few times and tore up the bread.

Finally Misha lifted his fish off the paper and thrust his face right into the yellow-white flesh, tearing a bite off with his teeth. He laughed with caveman-like satisfaction and handed it to Alexi, who bit into it with equal vigor. Then Pavil.

"It's good," Pavil said with his mouth full. He chased the fish with a soft juicy garlic clove.

"Are you going to eat that?" Lisa leaned over and whispered in my ear. She was usually the daring one, talking me into doing things. This time my hunger made me bold, and I grabbed the rubbery body from Pavil and bit into it. It tasted like salty, fishy leather, a little dry, but definitely not terrible. I'd eaten much worse in the past few weeks.

"It's OK," I admitted and passed it to her. She followed. We passed that fish around the room for an hour, smoking and finishing off the vodka, garlic, and bread.

"I still don't know why you came here," Pavil said, challenging Lisa and me with the same question he asked every time he got drunk. He always became argumentative. "Why study in Russia when you have best universities in the world. You stay here, and I go back to America."

We ignored him, again. He scooted over on the mattress near Lisa and snuggled his head into her lap. "You and Nadia will leave Misha and me here so you can go home and eat hamburgers and pizza every day instead of dry fish," he whined in his oh-pity-me voice.

Rolling her eyes, Lisa jumped up, letting his head flop onto the mattress. She stood up on the chair and put her hands on her hips. "Yes. Behold the ugly American. So kill me for wanting to go home. Wouldn't you? You take it so personally. Of course I want to go home. Geez, I've been here six months. I love you guys, but I'm not staying here. You wouldn't even want me to, anyway. You'd get bored with us. The novelty of having American girlfriends would wear off, and then what would I be left with? A fish?" She was trying to sound angry, but we all knew she wasn't. Pavil and Lisa argued about Americanness all the time.

"You think this is vacation. You think condoms are funny. We are dying here," Pavil answered, pushing up his sleeve to expose track marks on his arms. "This is my vacation," he said slapping the purple scars on his forearm.

"Go to Hell!" Misha erupted, jumping to his knees and locking Pavil in a choke hold. "We don't need your shit." He threw an unresisting Pavil, who was taller and heavier than Misha, to the floor and stared him down with unnerving authority. Pavil shriveled under Misha's glare. Misha returned to his lounge on the mattress, expecting us to ignore the outburst.

Only hours earlier the five of us, along with a group of Misha's friends, had been dancing happily to folk music in a Russian-style pizza cafe. Misha held me close, kissed my neck, and promised we'd be alone later. I didn't believe him, but the promise felt good. The acoustic music, drunken chanting, and clinking glasses lifted us high as if we already were by ourselves.

"To America. Nastroovya," Gregori, the sloppy red-bearded singer shouted, tilting his glass to Lisa and me. The band knew us because we came to the cafe regularly with Misha and Pavil, who seemed to know everyone in St. Petersburg.

"Nastroovya," we shouted back. I leaned into Misha and danced with my eyes closed, absorbing the moment, which I knew would melt when the music stopped. I used to listen to cassettes of Russian folk music on my Walkman while I wrote in my journal, trying to recapture the feeling of Misha holding me as we danced. But my last batteries died two weeks earlier. The live music felt even better anyway, the bass twanging of the balalaika pulsing in my chest, pressed against Misha's.

That was only a few hours ago. Now, in Alexi's cold room, only Pavil's words reverberated in my chest.

Pavil wanted sympathy when he tore into us. He wanted Lisa to pet him and kiss him and tell him everything was going to be all right. But everything he said was true. Lisa and I would go home, and we would never stand in food lines again. That was just life. Sometimes I wanted to yell at Pavil too. I imagined myself beating my fists on his chest and screaming. Why did he have to ruin everything with reality? That was the last thing any of us needed.

I wanted to love St. Petersburg, to stand in awe, the way I did the first few months. The ornate wrought iron railings on each of the hundred or so bridges, the Venice-like canals that bound the city together. It all seemed like living art. I loved taking my gloves off and fingering the chinked sculptures on buildings we passed. History oozed out of the architecture. It all made home, suburbia, seem so dull, lifeless, empty. St. Petersburg, only four months earlier called Leningrad, overflowed with revolution. I don't know when the beauty began to fade. But I could hardly see the city around me anymore. I could only see Pavil's scars.

I looked over at Misha, lying on his side on the mattress, with his legs curled up in a fetal position and his chin resting on his hand, propped up by his elbow. An open bottle leaned up against his stomach. He was looking at me, watching my reaction to Pavil and to his own outburst. When he caught my eye he furrowed his brow, mocking the seriousness on my face, then winked and beckoned for me to come sit with him. But seeing Pavil's arm--that, Misha's temper, and maybe eating the fish--had made me nauseated all of a sudden, and I wanted to get out of the room.

"I have to pee," I announced and left the room. I hated the bathroom at Alexi's apartment, but I needed out. It was a small putrid-smelling closet with a toilet that had no seat. It probably hadn't been cleaned in ten years. An unidentifiable film covered the grimy tiles. My goal was to get in and out without letting any body part touch anything in that room. There was never any toilet paper. Not that there was ever any toilet paper anywhere else either. At the classiest places, like the Kirov, they sometimes had small scraps of a paper. And I don't mean tissue paper, I mean regular paper, like newsprint or writing paper, that we were supposed to use for toilet tissue. I knew about this before I decided to go to Russia for a semester and gave up about a quarter of my backpack space to bring six rolls of 1,000-sheet Scott toilet paper. The first few weeks I used it as I would at home, but when I saw it dwindling, I panicked and began rationing it. I always carried a neat fold of toilet paper tucked between my passport and my plane ticket in the money belt I wore strapped to my stomach under my long underwear.

Straddling the disgusting toilet, I noticed a small pile of ripped up paper in the shelf where a roll of toilet paper should have sat. Alexi always surprised me. Great, I thought. I can conserve my stash, which I only expected to last me another two weeks. I cringed at the thought of two more months without toilet paper.

When I came out, an old man and his wife stood in the hall, apparently waiting for me to finish. All the times I'd been to that apartment, I'd never seen any of the other tenants come out of their rooms. The man looked sick and frail. Long wisps of thin white hair framed his gaunt face. Never lifting his feet from the floor, he shuffled slowly toward the bathroom. He wore an ankle-length nightshirt that looked thin and drafty. His wife, who supported him with her elbow, looked much stronger and more robust. She scowled at me and said something in Russian that I couldn't understand. She had hardly any teeth.

I looked down as I passed them, trying to spare the man the indignity of having me staring at him in his nightgown. Were we being loud? Did we wake them? The hall felt cold, and I wrapped my arms around my waist to conserve heat.

Back in Alexi's room Pavil had emerged from his gloom and was filling a pipe with hash. He focused so intensely on whatever he was doing, whether it was filling a pipe, tying his shoes, or counting money at the end of the day. His small blue eyes grew sharp, and he twisted his tongue sideways between his teeth. Not a flake of hash fell to the floor.

I stepped over Lisa and sat in front of Misha, who still lay on the bed. I leaned back against his chest, and he slipped his arm around my waist, warming me up a little. Misha always made things seem better than they were. He talked about the future, as if we'd see each other again, although we both knew it was unlikely. He exalted bland mundane food like the fish and made me feel as lucky as a princess to have it--instead of revolted as I ordinarily would have been. I nestled into the curve of his body and laced my fingers into his, closing my eyes and imagining us alone.

"I know good underground club on Friday night," Misha said between long drags on a dwindling cigarette.

"Yes?" Pavil asked without looking up.

"One hour north, in factory near Osograd. My uncle knows owner and fixed things with police. It will be good, like last time. We get you ladies out of St. Petersburg for a night. I take you dancing and buy you too many drinks."

He pulled me in tight and swayed back and forth to imaginary music. Misha had natural charm, a wide, enthusiastic smile that made me feel special, that almost made me forget the things I wished I didn't know. His lips were always deep red, and his chiseled cheekbones were still dusted pink from the cold. "You come?"

"We can't. Our art class is going to a museum on Saturday. We have to go." Truthfully, I wasn't all that disappointed. I loved the risk of going to these clubs with Misha, but each time I felt lucky to have survived, not to have lost him or been stuck by a needle or attacked.

"You come all the way here to see museums?" Pavil rolled his eyes. "We can show you real Russia, real life."

That was true. We'd seen a hell of a lot more of Russia than any of our American classmates.

"Yeah, but we've already blown off so many classes for you guys. We have to go," I said.

"Besides, I could use a few good nights' sleep."

"Sleep, ha. Go back to America." Pavil added.

"You will come," Misha said squeezing me.

This time Lisa got up and went to the bathroom. I followed her.

"You okay?" she asked me. "You seem kind of quiet tonight. Don't let Pavil get you down. You sure you don't want to go to the club? I couldn't care less about that museum. But I'm not going if you don't."

"I know, it'd be fun. But, I don't know, I think I'd rather stay home." I couldn't tell her the truth, that whole scene was starting to scare me. I tucked behind my ear a few stray strands of long greasy hair that had escaped my two-day old braid. Standing there looking at Lisa's equally greasy hair, I became aware that it didn't even bother me anymore not to bathe regularly.

"See you back inside," she called as she walked down the hall toward Alexi's room, leaving me alone in the hall.

Again when I came out of the bathroom, the old couple waited in the hall. I awkwardly walked past them, trying not to raise my eyes from the floor.

She hissed at me as I passed, and I couldn't help looking up.

She rattled something off in mumbly Russian, but I couldn't make out a word. It sounded like a wicked curse. As she began to yell louder, her voice filled me with icy fear. Misha and Pavil came running out, with Alexi and Lisa a few steps behind. The old lady kept going, pointing at me and Lisa.

"I didn't do anything," I said to Misha. "Why is she yelling at me?"

"She says you used up her toilet paper and her husband is sick."

Misha stepped forward to talk to the woman and she began screaming at him and flailing her arms. Her husband, who looked so ill I wasn't sure he knew what was going on, grabbed her arm and tried to calm her but he lost his balance and fell on the floor. He landed on his back with his feet on the floor and his knees up so that everyone could see up his night gown, which was the only thing he wore. I imagined my grandfather lying there, sick, naked, and hungry and some oblivious girl having taken his toilet paper. I wanted to turn away, but I couldn't.

Misha leapt forward to help him up, calling him grandfather in a gentle voice. Once on his feet, the man brushed Misha's hand away. The woman continued yelling.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I tried to tell her in Russian, but I doubt she heard me over her own shrieks. Tears welled in my eyes, but I swallowed them away. Pavil put his hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me back into the bedroom. I shrugged him off.

Misha dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of rubles, which he pressed into the palm of the old man.

"We don't need your money," she screamed back in Russian that even I could understand.

"It's not money," he told her and paused, looking slightly embarrassed. "It's paper."

I'd seen Misha pull out thick rolls of cash to pay off police officers when we got pulled over one night. I'd seen him bribe my way into exclusive underground clubs and orchestra seats at the ballet. But his money never seemed so powerful or pathetic as it did in the trembling yellow hand of that old man.

The woman spat at Misha, but kept the bills and helped her husband to the toilet. We went back into Alexi's room.

"Stupid babushka," Pavil spewed. But I knew she was right.

"Let's go home," I said to Lisa, who nodded.

"But the party's not over," Pavil teased.

"We've got class in the morning."

"Always class, always class."

It was nearly midnight. Lisa, Misha, Pavil, and I layered up for the trek back to the dorm. Halfway down the stairs, I realized I'd left my backpack at Alexi's.

"Wait here, I'll be right back," I hollered over my shoulder as I sprinted back up the stairs.

Alexi was still at the door, wrestling the warped deadbolt in place.

"I forgot my bag. And I have to pee."

He nodded.

I grabbed my bag and took it into the bathroom. I pulled out my journal and tore out all the remaining pages. I ripped them into squares, filled the shelf and made a large pile on the floor. I added my small wad of real toilet tissue, most of my rubles and seven American dollar bills. Then I pulled out my collection of Gogol short stories and furiously began tearing out page after page out until I realized it would take all night. I left the whole book and ran back down the stairs.