Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 19 – 2161 words
Columns :: From Russia, With Loves -- to Prague

MOSCOW, Oct. 28, 2003 -- Comments:   Ratings:
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Zhenya returns
First snow of the season & trip to the tourist agency



MOSCOW, Oct. 28, 2003 -- When Yegor and I met Zhenya at the Kurskaya Train Station this morning at 6:48, there was unmitigated joy.

“I’m so glad to be back. I missed you a lot,” Zhenya said, as we hugged and kissed on the platform.

When we got home, the first thing he did was pull out a piece of artwork he had made for me – a kind of an abstract painting rendered even more abstract by the pattern of threads which he had painstaking woven into the work. The kid’s got real talent!

After we had had a cup of coffee, and before I left for my 8:15 class in Moskovskiy Teleport, we were again – maybe still – hugging and kissing, when I reminded him: “Over the phone you said, ‘I love you.’ Is that true?”

“Yes,” he said, and kissed me again.

“I love you too,” and we kissed and hugged some more and did a little dance in the kitchen.


The first snow of the season fell three days ago, on Friday, October 25, exactly two months before Christmas, which our re-assembled “family” – 22-year-old Yegor, 24-year-old Anton, 19-year-old Zhenya and 70-year-old me -- will be celebrating in Prague.

We had narrowed our travel options down to three:

1) A bus tour for about ,000 for the three of us: Advantage: cheap, leaving us more money to spend in Prague; we’d spend New Year’s there; Anton could also afford to go with us. Disadvantage: we’d have to get transit visas through Belarus and Poland, meaning more red tape; and spend three days in cramped bus seats getting there and back..

2) a plane tour for about 00. Advantage: We could spend New Year’s there; 3 hours’ travel time; an international flight, which neither Zhenya nor Yegor have ever taken – Zhenya has never even been on an airplane. Disadvantage: Expensive, leaving us to prowl around Prague on a shoestring budget. Not fun. Also Anton couldn’t afford to go with us.

3) a plane tour for about 00. Advantage: relatively cheap; international air travel. Disadvantage: We wouldn’t spend New Year’s there; Anton still couldn’t afford to go with us.


Why is New Year’s such a big deal? After the communist revolution, religion was essentially banned throughout the Soviet Union. The traditions of gift-giving and holidays were allowed to continue, but they were shifted back a week to New Year’s. So a dozen years after the collapse of communism, we still don’t have Christmas trees in Russia; we have New Year’s trees. And people don’t buy each other Christmas gifts; they buy New Year’s gifts. But like Americans, they also use the occasion as an excuse to dance all night, get shit-faced and make passes at other people’s wives – or husbands -- and acquire even more massive vodka hang-overs than usual.

Western (the Russians call it “Catholic”) Christmas day, December 25, continues to be ignored. In fact, it’s just another working day. If you want to celebrate it, you have to take a day off to do it. The Russian Orthodox Christmas, on the 7th of January, is strictly a religious affair, and if people observe it at all, they do it simply by going to the pageantry of a Russian Orthodox mass – much like a Catholic Christmas mass except with even more gaudy gold, pomposity, and mock piety.

So gays, especially, like to celebrate New Year’s by going someplace exotic to dance all night, find new sex, and get shit-faced and hung over.


So, we’ve picked our exotic destination, but how are we going to get there?

Yegor, Zhenya, and I discussed the pros and cons. The sensible compromise seemed the 00 plane trip. Instead of celebrating New Year’s in Prague, we could observe Western Christmas there and celebrate New Year’s at a gay club after returning to Moscow. We’d still get the experience of the plane flight and the Prague Christmas season, which is supposed to be beautiful.

Still, one of our “family” members would be missing. Anton couldn’t afford more than 0 -- 0 short of the actual cost of the trip.

Yegor, always the compassionate and caring one, the brooding mother hen, came to me almost on his knees. “Do you think you could possibly make up the difference of 0 so Anton could go with us? We are family, after all, and there will be sadness and bad feelings if one of the family is left behind.”

It was my turn to bristle – not because Yegor wanted me to give Anton 0 to make the trip, or because I minded giving it, but because Denis, the skin-flint, miserly son of a bitch that Anton’s head over heels in love with is too f---ing cheap to give him the 0. He’s going to the Arab emirates with another boyfriend! To hell with Anton. So Anton isn’t even my boyfriend, but I’m supposed to do for him what his piss-ant boyfriend won’t so he can make the trip with us.

And Anton still pants around after him like a june bug after shit.

“Are you annoyed?” asked Yegor. “If you’re annoyed, you shouldn’t do it.”

“Yes, I am annoyed,” and told him why.

“But of course, I’ll do it.” For all our tumultuous relationship, I still love Anton. Damn it! In fact, I think my anger stems as much from the fact that he has a boyfriend as the fact that that boyfriend is such a selfish, arrogant, narcissistic asshole.

Anyway, the next step was to traipse the 15 minutes to the travel agency, which – like millions of other shops and businesses that serve the Moscow public – was hidden away in a basement that we almost didn’t find. Moscow rents are horrendous. So stores and services hole up in basements, hidden courtyards, anywhere they can find that they can afford.

We spent an hour filling in forms. As an American citizen, I don’t need a visa to the Czech Republic, but Anton, Yegor, and Zhenya do. There’s still a doubt as to whether they will all be able to get visas – Yegor, for instance, doesn’t have a Russian internal passport. But the tour agents were optimistic.


The temperature has hovered around freezing for the last several days. Yesterday it was hovering a degree or two above. And as we walked back through our courtyard, just a hundred yards or so from our door we heard a crack from somewhere above and something unceremoniously bopped Yegor on the top of the head. Ice scattered in every direction.

Fortunately, it was only a medium sized chunk of icicle that in the warming sun had released its grip from the eave of our pre-revolutionary building. It didn’t draw blood or knock him out. But it did issue a serious warning: Don’t walk too close to buildings in the wintertime! Every year a few Muscovites have their brains befurcated, courtesy of the plummeting ice stilletoes that are hurtled without warning from the roofs above.


Zhenya agreed to celebrate his first day back by fixing a mushroom-potato soup, and I would fix a spaghetti-chicken dish, the recipe for which Anton had brought with him from the Caucuses. It’s really quite good and quite simple. You saute onions and mushrooms and eggplant in olive oil and dried basil – with a couple of heavy splashes of tobasco sauce -- until the onion is squishy soft but not burnt. You pan fry the chicken – also in olive oil. In the meantime boil a pound of thin spaghetti. Put the drained spaghetti into a big serving dish, adding a little olive oil to keep it from sticking; then pour the onion mixture over the top. De-bone the fried chicken (optional), cut it into chunks, add any pan juices that are left, and mix the whole conglomeration together. Other vegetables could be added, like corn, tomatoes, mixed veggies. Green beans would be especially good, but Anton doesn’t like them, so I don’t.

It’s a little heavy on oil, but I comfort myself that it’s olive oil, so it doesn’t count. Besides, I’ve lost 18 pounds since my birthday, so I can afford a little splurge.

Vanya, my Nizhny Novgorod Ann Landers substitute whom I’m putting through the university there, was in the kitchen while I was cooking. He had flown in on Saturday for the weekend to see his boyfriend Tolya and pick up his November allowance.

How can an impoverished student afford to fly the friendly skies of Aeroflot? Because under the absolutely zany and illogical pricing structure, he can fly as cheap as he can take the train – each way!

But on Saturday he discovered one of the downsides of air travel: Seems the snow plow had broken down and they couldn’t clear the runways till they got the snowplow fixed, which didn’t happen for another six hours. “Only in Russia!” ranted – quite accurately -- the Western travelers with Lufthansa connections in Moscow.

Because we had expected Vanya in the morning, everyone was out of the apartment when he finally arrived in Moscow at 3 p.m., so he had to walk the streets for another four hours in the windy chill till I got home that night after a sneak visit to Seryozh’s – one of the three at Misha’s “wake” -- apartment. We didn’t have sex, but we spent some quality time together.

Vanya’s still getting over the cold he caught.

“What are your plans for tonight?” I asked him as I stirred the spaghetti.

“Tolya has invited me to spend the night at his apartment.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know yet.”


“Well, it would be nice if you spent the night somewhere else, because I want to sleep with Zhenya tonight.”

He smiled.

“By the way,” I asked; “In your letter to me, why did you say Yegor would cause me problems?”

He smiled sheepishly. “I had Yegor mixed up with Zhenya.”

My gawd! He almost caused a break-up between me and Yegor and maybe World War III because of a misprint!?!?

“Why did you think Zhenya could cause me problems?”

Vanya replied that because Zhenya had been chatting with Yuri in the kitchen, he thought Zhenya must be as much of a moron as Yuri. I explained to him that Zhenya was talking to him for the same reason all the rest of us occasionally do – to be polite. Zhenya can’t stand him either.

After supper came the whispered question from Yegor: “Where are we going to sleep?”

“Well, if you want me to, I’ll sleep with you. But I know you don’t like to sleep with me because I crowd you too much.”


“You sly old dog; I know you want to sleep with Zhenya; so why don’t you?”

“Well, of course, I’d like to, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Vanya obligingly flitted off to spend the night with Tolya, so about 11:30 we kicked Yuri out (yes, our nuisance charity case is still a daily fixture), and I made the bed in the living room – the one that used to be Misha’s -- and crawled under the covers to wait for Zhenya.

And soon we were snuggling and hugging and kissing, and my fingers were once again exploring the velvet-smooth alabaster that he had rendered even more breath-catching by shaving his pubes – his body was now completely hairless and exquisitely beautiful!

We held each other for a long time afterward, and repeated the ritual this morning.

“Did you swallow?” demanded Yegor after I had gotten up and crawled into bed beside him.

“Uh-huh.”

“You promised you wouldn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. I promised I wouldn’t with Seryozh, but Seryozh and I didn’t have sex. I promised that Zhenya and I would both get AIDS tests – and we will, as soon as have some extra money.” The Prague trip deposit and the extra 0 for Alan and the 0 for Dima
had drained me.

“So you’ll get the AIDS test after you’ve swallowed, he snorted.

It would have been too difficult to explain that if Zhenya was going to infect me, it would already have happened from the sex we had before his trip; and that if he were going to infect me now it would be through a break in the gums which not swallowing wouldn’t do anything to prevent; and that he had already explained that he was not promiscuous. So I didn’t even try.

Yegor’s absolutely right to be concerned, and I told him that. And I suspect he won’t have sex with me until after Zhenya and I have gotten the results of our tests.

But in any case, it seems clear from our interactions over the last two days that Zhenya really does love me.

I just hope he doesn’t love me to death. I have no doubt in my mind; still, it will be a relief when the tests come back negative.