MOSCOW, December 25, 2005 – Christmas day! Russians call it “Catholic Christmas” and don’t celebrate it; in fact, I usually have classes all day – and evening on Dec. 25. But this year it’s on Sunday and my School #69 is on vacation, and Sasha is coming back from NY today, so I was going to fix a big Christmas dinner and celebrate.
But on Thursday I got hit with an early Xmas present – the flu. And I don’t feel like doing or celebrating anything. Zhorik and I will probably go shopping at some point after he gets up. He didn’t come to bed till 7, so he probably won’t be up before 5!
Even for the Red Queen, this has been an usually zany week. Zhorik and Sergei got into a screaming match Sunday night and I had to stand between them to keep them from coming to blows. Zhorik had been shopping for his girlfriend’s bracelet and had used some of the $ 135 I had given him to get drunk, so he was less laid back than usual, and something Sergei did or said set him off.
As a consequence, he hates Sergei; he’s declared he’s going to go to the Army; and he blames me for letting Sergei back into the house and ruining our life together.
“Honey, you never told me that you hated Sergei and that you couldn’t live with him.”
“Yes, I did. Three times.”
That simply wasn’t true. If I’d have ever been faced with the choice between Sergei and Zhorik, it would have been made in a split second.
“Sergei,” I announced in the middle of it, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to find someplace else to live!”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied.
So much for control!
Zhorik announced he wouldn’t spend the night in the same apartment with Sergei and asked for 1000 rubles – about $ 35 – so he could spend the night somewhere near Petrovska-Razumovskaya metro station. I was to call and wake him at 10 so he could be at work at Kreutz’s at 10:30.
I called and woke him.
A few seconds later, he called back: “Kreutz fired me because I called and asked him if I could be a little late. He said if I couldn’t get there on time, I was fired.”
The irony is that it was entirely unnecessary. Sergei left with his friend Andrei Shkola, his childhood queer fantasy turned thief (Chapt. 110-111) shortly after Zhorik left, so Zhorik could have stayed here spent the night, awakened on time, and gotten to work on time. As it was, I was out 1000 rubles and Zhorik was out a job!
In the middle of all this, Tanya, Misha’s babushka buddy whom he
conned me into hiring as a cook and who I am sure connived with Misha to get as much money out of me as possible arrived bearing gifts: A jar of honey, a night lamp, a fuzzy key chain, and a half pint of “Balsam” booze.
I have never liked her or trusted her, and finally fired her because she just quit showing up for work. Besides being lazy and unreliable, the real problem was that, like most Russians, she’s a racist, and she despised Anton because he’s a “black” from the Caucuses. So her passive aggressive response was to just not show up and pretend she was ill.
But she was always toadying and bowing and scraping to me – and asking for or borrowing money. And now she needs – or is going to -- $ 1,000 to get the electricity to her dacha in the Russian boondocks about a million miles from Moscow. So she came to revive old ties and bow and scrape some more in hopes I’ll lend it to her when the time comes.
While I really didn’t care about the impression she siblings scene was creating for her, I was annoyed that she came in the middle of the only down-and-out battle I’ve ever witnessed between Zhorik and Sergei.
I asked Zhorik to meet her with me, because I wanted to be sure that Tanya didn’t get me to agree to something I didn’t want to. I had forgotten how charming and gracious he can be. He was the consummate host. I was very proud of him, and fell even deeper in love with him.
When I came home Monday evening, I found Sergei staggering drunk, disoriented, and bleeding from a broken nose.
I managed to piece together that he had been at a club where someone accused him of being “bi-,” so of course he had to do what any self-respecting “bi-” should: He got the shit beat out of him trying to defend his non-existent straightness.
In his defense, it was hardly a fair fight. Sergei is about 5 ft. 4 in. tall and weighs 135 lb. He said his accuser was over 6 ft. tall and had very long arms. I felt sorry for him, but it was a stupid thing to do.
Now that he’s out of a job, Zhorik has resorted to his old pattern of playing on the computer all night and not coming to bed until morning.
It’s worked out okay, because about the time my alarm goes off at 6:40, he’s into his first REM hard-on and ready to provide the inspiration for another prostate cancer prevention session.
Instead of coming to bed when he quit playing Thursday morning, he took a bath. When he came in and lay down beside me, I started massaging. “Want to?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Did you jerk off in the bathtub?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You didn’t want to wait and let me give you a blow job?”
“I didn’t think about it.
“Do you think our relationship is changing?” I asked.
“What do you mean, going to Svetlograd?”
“No, in general.”
“Why do you ask? Has Sergei been talking to you? He’s always telling me that it’s not going to last.”
“No, he hasn’t said a word to me about our relationship. Though I think he’s jealous because I’m giving you the attention I used to give him. Do you think so?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you still love me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“My relationship toward you will never change as long as you still love me.” I kissed him.
“You and Sergei have been spending a lot of time together this week. Do you still hate him?”
“No.”
“Do you still want me to throw him out?”
“No. But we’d be better off without him.”
No question about that.
“Honey,” I said, “if you can get a hard on, do you mind if I jerk off while I’m playing with your dick?”
“Huh-uh.”
So I unbuttoned his shorts and started playing. Semi. “Maybe this will help,” I said, as I slipped my lips and tongue over his cock.”
“It’s working,” he said.
I started playing with my own with my left hand while I massaged his with my right.
“I want to look at it with the flashlight,” I said, and reached for my mobile phone, which conveniently has one. It was beautiful. A little bigger than average; nice head, and swelling magnificently with each erection.
I handed him the flashlight. “Here, honey, you hold the flashlight and I’ll jerk off. I came rather quickly.
We kissed each other and slept soundly.
I thought maybe with the passage of time, Zhorik would change his mind about the army, but he hasn’t. “In March,” he had explained to me when he first broached the subject Sunday night, “I’ll go to the military office and tell them I want to join. I’ve already bribed them to stay out, so they’ll be happy to have me, and they’ll send me where I ask them to. They’ll send me to Moscow, and you and I continue seeing each other. I’ll only be in for a year and after that, you and I can get an apartment together and continue living together.”
But why does he have to join the army to accomplish that?
So Thursday night I asked him to list the advantages and disadvantages of joining the army.”
Advantages: First, he’ll be independent. Secondly, he and his buddy Igor will get to serve together. And finally, he’ll prove he’s tough.
And the disadvantages? “I’ll lose a year out of my life, and secondly, you and I won’t see each other as often. But I think it will only be a year. And you can come visit me in my barracks and I can come visit you on weekends.”
So he’s still programming me long-term into his life.
Russia’s inexorable March backward toward dictatorship continued unfalteringly this week with the final Duma passage of the regressive NGO bill bringing private and civic organizations under the scrutiny and control of the Kremlin (Chapt. 176).
With Putin about to take the helm of the G-8 and host its annual meeting in St. Peterburg next year, he could hardly ignore the protests coming from the U.S., the European Union, and the U.S. Congress, so with much ballyhoo, he proposed what he said were about 60 softening amendments.
But they did little to change the bill’s onerous destructiveness, except that foreign NGOs won’t have to re-register as a separate Russian entity. Virtually all the rest of the restrictive and regressive measures remained unchanged.
Allegedly passed to prevent money laundering and terrorism, it’s quite plain that the real rationale was to lessen the possibility of another “soft revolution” in Russia by giving the state more control over citizens acting independently.
What was merely paranoia has become an obsession that colors all Kremlin decisions.
The gulf between the view from the outside and the view from the inside is almost embarrassingly revealed by a World Economic Forum survey of 20 major countries that shows that Russia is the only one of the 20 countries in which trust in the state is increasing!
Does this reflect a disconnect between the citizens and their government? An effective PR smokescreen that so obfuscates what’s really going on that most don’t even know; or was trust in the Soviet government so abysmally low that there was nowhere to go but up?
The Russian people have already made it clear that they are more concerned with stability than democracy, so does this continuing trend simply mean that the average Russian views the post-Yeltsin government as increasingly stable and therefore increasingly trustworthy?
It certainly doesn’t reflect any reality.
The relentless and unwavering growth of corruption in Russia – along with a lack of political will to fight it – will present major obstacles as Russia assumes the G8 chair next year, Transparency International warned earlier this month.
Russia’s ranking with Zimbabwe on the international corruption scale already has already made it a laughingstock, but the “Forum for the Future” agenda adopted by the G8 at the Gleneagles Conference in July “has a huge anti-corruption component” that under these circumstances Russia will find it very difficult to comply with, noted TI head Yelena Panfilova at a Moscow press conference.
“It’s curious how Putin will handle himself when he heads the G8,” observed liberal politician Vladimir Vysenko. “Thre're going to be quite a few questions put to him, in part about this.”
Corruption pervades every aspect of Russian life. My student Olga’s Mitsubishi was struck and slightly damaged in a fender bender last week. She would have to spend a day waiting in line at the traffic police HQ unless she could persuade them to simply accept her traffic report at the site.
“Maybe you could give us a little something?” brazenly suggested the uniformed bandit.
“I only have 500 rubles (about $ 17.50). This accident was not my fault. I’m a victim. Perhaps you could take the 500 rubles?”
“You’ll spend more than that on dinner while you’re waiting at the headquarters,” and turned his back on her.
My Institute of Diplomacy student Stass, who works for Transparency International, told me yesterday that someone close to the Duma had confided in him that the Duma views the organization, which is headquartered in Berlin, as a real threat and part of an international conspiracy.
With the passage of the anti-NGO law, he is very concerned that TI will not be permitted to register and that they will soon be kicked out of Russia.
Same old story: Kill the messenger.
This day years ago:
2003-12-25: Chapt. #31 - Merry F’ing Xmas from Shurik
