MOSCOW, Oct. 30, 2003 -- He wants to come by on Saturday evening!
Not even for a lesson.
“Just to chat.”
Over a cup of tea or maybe a beer.
Heart be still!
I was playing cribbage at the kitchen table with Sasha last night when Anton brought the cell phone from the bedroom.
I heard the cheerful, earnest voice of Volodya, the 6 ft. 4 in. blond “Guess-What” student I first met in Turkey four years ago and only a month ago started giving private lessons to!
He was too busy last Saturday for a lesson; and he’s going to be too busy this Saturday too, it seems.
Still, he wants to see me. Just to chat. At 9 p.m. on the biggest date night of the week! You can’t blame my fantasies for raging a bit out of control.
“Don’t seduce him,” advised Sasha this morning, only half kidding, after I had finished seducing him.
“I won’t seduce him – unless he begs me to,” I promised. But I didn’t promise not to hug and kiss him. But we’ll wait and see what the moment brings.
What I really think is that his father is a despicable ogre, and he simply sees in me a father figure that he likes and wants to be non-sexually intimate with.
Whatever his reasons, it doesn’t keep my fantasy from celebrating its own agenda.
Earlier in the evening, Kostya had come by for his English “lesson” – an evening of beer and cribbage.
We got onto the subject of last Saturday’s pre-dawn gunpoint arrest of Michail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest billionaire. Much as I love him, Kostya and I are often on different sides of the political fence. He eagerly backed Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for instance.
Kostya takes the populist view, which polls show is shared to some degree by about 80 per cent of the Russian population: Khodorkovsky is a billionaire who has grown fat and rich off the disgraceful “privatization” of the early ’90s, and he’s just getting his comeuppance.
The problem with that is, there are a lot of other equally (nearly) bloated billionaire oligarchs who aren’t being arrested and prosecuted.
Kostya acknowledges that it’s selective enforcement put into force only after Khodorkovsky had started criticizing the Putin government and funding opposition parties.
But he echoed the Kremlin line that these billionaires should stick to business, and that it was dangerous for them to try to control both the commercial and political worlds. They should stay out of politics.
Also, Kostya agreed that, since the vast majority of ordinary Russians share the same view, it’s a clever political move before next year’s election to nail down more votes for Putin – as if he really needed any more.
The Kremlin defenders continue to insist that “All socially oriented parties should stand up to defend the interests of the people, the state, and the president from oligarchs who have overstepped the mark…. ”
It reads like some of the White House propaganda: Patriotic citizens must defend Bush from those shrill nitpickers who complain about the endless lies he told to get us into the Iraq war.
Many see in the episode an ominous pattern: The first step came with the clumsy shutting down of Gruzinsky’s NTV Channel 4, which was consistently critical of Putin’s Chechen debacle; then another dissenting TV channel followed in its wake, leaving only Kremlin boosters broadcasting TV news – and no Chechen critics; then dissenting newspapers and magazines. And there have been a series of trumped-up “spy” trials against scientists for making available to other governments information, even though it is non-classified and available from published journals.
Thus they see the iron-fisted Khodorkovsky shackling as a logical next step in the re-stalinization of Russia – Stalinism without Stalin; a communist state without the dead weight of communist ideology.
Andrei Shkarubo, A former colleague at Glasnost Foundation, where I edited a daily e-mail news bulletin that tracked the authoritarian crimes of the Russian Government until the bulletin died from lack of funding, counters that what we’re seeing “is not a return to stalinism without Stalin.
Instead, we have “a capitalist order maintained by the savage measures of the secret services…, a classic case of fascism” a la Pinochet.
I find little comfort that we’re entering, rather than the reemergence of authoritarian Stalinism, merely an excursion into authoritarian fascism. But Andrei is a serious and thoughtful observer, and he’s probably right.
It started out as a light-hearted joke.
Sometimes I forget that I’m not talking to American queers with the same perverted sense of humor that I have.
Yegor and I were talking about Kostya, who used to be a student – he and his best buddy Dima – until we began playing poker on Wednesday night instead of studying English grammar.
We had so much more fun with poker than with prepositions and relative clauses that I quit charging them for lessons and we turned it into a regular Wedneday night poker game. When only one of them shows up, we play cribbage.
There’s also a lot of affection between us – especially between me and Kostya. Sometimes I pat or pinch him on the cheek or on the leg, and we let our knees speak braille to each other under the table, and one time as he stood behind me at the computer, he pressed his crotch into my shoulder and I realized he had a boner!
And it was he who suggested that we go to Egypt together next spring – sans his bride of one year!
So I figure if he’s not queer, he’s at least bi – or could be with a little push.
I mentioned him to Yegor this morning.
“Who’s Kostya?”
“He was here last night. He’s the one I’m going to Egypt with and whom I’m going to get drunk and take advantage of” – a standing repertoire joke back in Capitol Hill in Seattle.
But my 22-year-old main squeeze reacted in shock bordering on horror, which I suppose is not surprising considering the fact that he was raped twice as a child – the first time at age 7.
“That’s a terrible thing to do!”
Instead of demoting the whole thing to the joke which it isn’t quite, I said, “Why?”
“Because it’s irresponsible and immoral.”
“What’s immoral about it?”
“Getting him drunk.”
“But he loves getting drunk,” which is true. He’s told me about lots of parties that he’s gone to where he’s gotten drunk and broken his mobile phone, or lost it, or passed out on the lawn. And at our Christmas celebration last year, he and Dima got so drunk they went to sleep on the last metro of the night and had to catch a taxi several miles to get home.
“Besides, sex per se has nothing to do with morality.”
“So the guy who raped me wasn’t immoral?” he demanded.
“Of course he was. If there really is a hell, he ought to burn it. He took despicable advantage of you. Having sex with somebody against their will is absolutely immoral.”
I was beginning to realize what Yegor was really pissed about. The three beautiful Seryozhes who were here at Misha’s going-away party last week returned last night at my invitation to scavenge Misha’s books and drink beer and give me a chance to find out if the one who showed the most interest was as receptive to the idea of sex as he seemed to be the first time we met. We didn’t actually have sex last night, but we kissed and petted and it became quite clear that he’s open to the idea. And I sort of got the idea that the other two weren’t too averse to it, either.
And that’s what Yegor was really angry about.
“You said you’d be completely happy with me and Shurik,” he reminded this morning.
“I am. And if you don’t want me to have sex with Seryozh, I won’t. In fact, I told you that I love you so much that if you didn’t want me to have sex with anybody else, I wouldn’t have.”
And then he switched to the danger of AIDS, which put him on much firmer ground.
“Okay, I won’t have sex with anybody until they’ve had an AIDS test.”
And then we got back on morality.
“Sex has nothing to do with morality. Forcing sex on somebody who doesn’t want – that’s immoral; breaking a commitment to somebody you’ve made a commitment to is immoral. But two consenting adults who want to have sex should be able to, and there’s nothing immoral about that.
“If you can do it, it’s natural,” I continued, parroting the sexual law promulgated by my Seattle artist and author friend, Bruce Harris.
“So you think that having sex with animals is okay?” Yegor demanded.
“Well, I don’t want to do it, but if somebody does, and if the animal doesn’t object, why not? There’s nothing immoral about it. I had sort of switched tracks from unnatural to immoral, but Yegor didn’t notice.
“So you think having sex with animals is natural?”
Oops, he noticed.
“Well, people have been doing it for centuries.”
Yegor was getting frosty: “Well, I’ve found out something about you I didn’t know before!”
“What have you found out?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
Then he added: “What do you think Zhenya is going to say when he finds out you’ve had sex with Seryozh and you think sex with animals is okay?”
“I haven’t had sex with Seryozh. And why on earth are you going to tell Zhenya I think sex with animals is okay? This conversation is between us!”
Hell hath no fury….
At ground level, there continues to be remarkable placidity here despite the Khodorkovsky soap opera. Russians long ago learned the art of survival. The czars and the commissars and the presidents and the markets and the currencies do their mysterious things. You can’t do anything about that. You only hope that by keeping your eyes closed and your nose to the grindstone, you will be ignored and left alone so you and your family will still be eating pelmeni and borshcht and drinking vodka together tomorrow. That, after all, is your Russia.
The Kremlin is a foreign country.
So life for the rest of us goes on pretty much as usual. Kostya went to his new job at the French Societe General bank this morning. Anton went to his job at Interstep mobile phone accessory company.
And Yegor got a call from his lawyer.
The company that translated his Tajikistan passport made a mistake. So because there’s one letter wrong, Yegor must take the three-hour train ride back to Tver, where his lawyer will again meet him and drive him another four hours to Sandovo, than another hour to Milksville to have his formal registration again notarized.
So plus ca change, plus cest la meme chose: czars, commissars, presidents, democracies, oligarchs, dictatorships, revolutions. Through them all one thing remains unchanged, the eternal verity that you can always count on:
The Russian bureaucracy.
Valodya hopes to escape it with an MBA from America. But the road is long and arduous and will require a very long chat on Saturday evening.
Maybe all night?
