Getting Over It

For the last few weeks I’d been extremely annoyed by my host family, angry with them to the point of distraction. There I was learning a new language, reading new texts, writing new stories, while the three of them––each in their own way––was gliding through life incuriously, greeting day after day with the same mindless routine. They don’t read books or try new things or develop talents. What was wrong with these people?

My mother cooks, cleans, visits grandma, collects her pension, and does little Sergei’s homework while he talks to friends online. She watches the news uncritically; thinking and feeling exactly how she’s told to feel. (Why is it so hard for a woman who spent her first forty years receiving Soviet lies and distortions, to recognize the ones on television?)

My father has been driving a marshrutka taxi in circles thirty years, which I took as the ultimate symbol of his life––an interminable series of left turns, cigarettes, and bad TV shows. I can always hear him approaching by the sound of his wheezing, difficult breaths; the result of years of chain-smoking. Even though he gets up at six in the morning to go to work, he’ll stay up past midnight watching a Steven Siegal movie, or the its intellectual equivalent. Verdict: he must be brain-dead. (On a side note, Steven Siegal was just in eastern Russia meeting local Buddhist leaders. Saw it on the news).

My host brother is almost fifteen, but looks and behaves like an American twelve-year-old. He likes cars and hip hop––could you be more unoriginal––and talks on the phone more than a Fortune 500 CEO or a mafia boss. Why!? Couldn’t he do something for somebody besides himself? Couldn’t he be productive, or at the very least do his own homework?

I’ve been waiting two weeks to get over my anger. I hated feeling this way. Why couldn’t I just let them be who they are. I realized I was being a snob, but I still felt angry. I realized my host brother was behaving just like I used to, but that didn’t matter either. Finally, on Friday, the feeling broke. I was sitting in the kitchen at 2am, talking with my host mom (not unusual weekend hours). She’d found out earlier that day that I wasn’t going to be living with them next semester––I hadn’t gotten around to telling her myself. She’d been surprisingly understanding, and now as I listened to her talk about all the students who’d come and gone I realized how evolved her outlook was. She allowed her students to be themselves; she saw the good in them––even the ones who never learned much Russian, or the ones I would call difficult. Now, my host mother has probably never been to a therapist; she’s probably never practiced meditation or any of the stress-reducing-zen-oneness methods or programs that are so popular in the US. She didn’t go to the type of school that hung up ‘tolerance matters’ banners, or had diversity days. And here she was being the mature one, and I was acting like a schmuck.

Rah Rah Rasputin

We all passed out early on the night train back to Petersburg. Three days of nonstop in the most muscular city in Europe takes it right out of you.

Tolstoy associated St. Petersburg with femininity and Moscow with masculinity and Christ was he right on the second. Walking through Red Square is like being in the triangle formed by a muscular, flexing arm. On one side you have the Kremlin walls––huge and formidable, red with blood like a biceps under strain, both threatening and ostentatious. To the East is St. Basil’s Cathedral, the ornate hand and wrist of the arm, its onion domes twisting to the sky like fingers and a facade carved up by the lines of a wrist or the palm. It’s smaller than you think, and so well manicured it looks downright Disney. The long northern forearm of the square, opposite the Kremlin, is occupied by GUM (pron. GOOm), once the largest department store in Europe, now the continent’s largest irony. GUM has every top brand––Gucci, Prada, Versace you name it; it’s a palace of upscale, nouveau riche capitalism right on Red Square, where soldiers and the tanks and missile launchers would rumble through, singing Lenin’s praises, and pledging their balls and bolts to the eternal Soviet Union.

Not that the irony all that meaningful it just tickles me––the hubris. New Russia mocks Soviet Russia so endlessly there’s no sense in tallying up the examples; it’s condescending and obvious. As a matter of fact, I’d say there are four stages in Russian history––pre-imperial, imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet––and they coexist so uneasily its like being at the world’s most awkward family reunion, or an interminable divorce hearing between four spouses. Imperial Russia mocks pre-imperial Russia; the Soviets mock the czars; and post-Soviet Russia mocks everything that came before it, but loves and needs them too as history. Listen as you walk down the street, and you’ll hear the four eras stating their cases, pulling and tugging in different directions. That moulding on the building there is so elegant––I miss the czars. But thank God for the buses and the trains and the power––only Soviets could do that. And now look at that––a real Russian church, if only Peter hadn’t confused this whole country. Now I’m hungry, and if it weren’t for this Russia I’m actually living in, I couldn’t just pop into a coffee shop.

As Willard says in Apocalypse now––‘Kurtz broke from them (the military) then broke from himself. I’d never seen a man so broken up.’ Or a country.

PS: The title of the post is the chorus to the song that woke us up at 6:45 on the train back to St. Petersburg: an electronic, Russo/Euro-trash tune, in English, celebrating the mystic Rasputin. This is where I live.