MOSCOW, February 11, 2007 -- When Igor came to bed Sunday night about 3 a.m. I woke up and put my arms around him. He rolled over on his stomach.
“Good night, honey,” I said, kissing him on his shoulder.
“Good night.”
“Honey, when can I play with your cock?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and mumbled something I didn’t understand.
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
He didn’t answer.
Has he changed his mind? Has the “whenever you want” doctrine been rescinded?
If so, this puts everything in a different light. If Igor is erecting – er, putting up -- a sex barrier, it means he’s here as a parasite like his brother Denis, and I have to rethink the whole situation.
Consequently, I was a bit frosty with him all day Monday. I didn’t kiss him in the mouth when he got up and came into the room where I was working on this column. I didn’t shower him with attention and affection. I expressed annoyance and exasperation when he asked me for 20 rubles – about 80 cents – for cigarettes and another 20 rubles to buy more time on his mobile phone.
He was the one who finally kissed me in the mouth. He was especially careful to help me with my shoes and slippers. He kissed me in the mouth several more times before I had to leave for my evening lesson with Masha.
He continued to be attentive when I got home. I could feel his affection. When he finally came to bed at about 3 a.m., I asked if we could talk.
“Honey, earlier you said I could play with your dick….”
He finished the sentence for me: “Anytime you want.”
“But last night, when I asked if you wanted to play….”
“I said ‘tomorrow,’ he responded.”
“Oh. I didn’t understand what you said.”
“I was angry,” he added.
“Were you angry with me?”
“No.”
Then I realized: It’s ‘tomorrow.’
“Can I play with it now?”
“If you want.”
My heart and my dick leapt simultaneously.
I could feel and taste the pre-orgasmic fluid the whole time, especially when I would deep-throat him. At last I detected the slight stiffening of his body, and again thrust him deep into my throat and felt the repeated spurts of semen issue from the seminal vesicle up through the urethra and flood into my throat. Again, it was sweet as honey. I kept my tongue wrapped around his tumescent tool for nearly a minute, as he continued to shoot into my throat.
Then I quickly came myself.
“Was it fun?” I asked, as I held him in the post-coital spoons position.
“Yes.”
Then he rolled on his back. “Do you want me to continue to live here with you?”
He asked.
“Very much,” I replied. “Do you like living here with me?”
“Very, very much.”
“Then we will.”
“Denis wants me to go back to Moldova.”
“What?” I asked incredulously.
“He wants me to go back to Moldova.”
“Why?”
“Because I hit Masha. I don’t like her and I hit her in the face. And he wants me to leave.”
Masha is the tramp that I’ve barred from my apartment because she’s a pushy, obnoxious slut.
“I’d like to hit her in the face, too,” I said.
He laughed.
“I don’t care what Denis says or what Sergei says or what anybody else says, I want you to stay here and live with me. I’m happy. You’re happy. That’s what’s important. Do you agree?”
“Yes, I agree.”
I kissed him passionately in the mouth and he returned it. We repeated it several times.
So my fondest dreams have come true. We have a commitment to each other. He truly loves me and he isn’t just letting me suck his cock to please me. He’s enjoying it too. I think he isn’t comfortable thinking of our love as sexual – and maybe for him it’s not. But it’s sexual enough for him to come in my mouth, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s sexual enough to satisfy all my fantasies.
“I have to find a job,” he said.
“Yes, honey, you do.” Tanya’s mother promised a long time ago to get him and Sergei jobs as guards in a security firm (Chapt. 229), but in the meantime, somebody stole her purse with all her documents, and she is having to replace everything before she can get do her magic for them, which now looks like it will be in March.
“Honey, if you’re going to get this job in March, it doesn’t make sense for you to get another job now, because they wouldn’t want you to start working and then a month from now give you a vacation for us to go to Moldava. It would be better to wait till after we come back and then start to work, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
So that’s the plan: We will go to Moldava for a week around the 8th of March while Zhorik goes to Svetlograd to visit his father and replace the Russian passport he last last year during one of his drunken stupors (Chapt. 199), then we will come back and he hopefully will start work, and Zhorik will come to stay for three weeks.
There was one other thing: Sergei announced last night that he doesn’t like the name Igor, and everybody else calls Igor Ivan, and he wishes I’d call him Ivan or Vanya also.
I told Igor/Ivan what Sergei had said. “But what do you want me to call you?”
“Call me whichever you’d like.”
“Since everybody else is calling you Vanya, and Sergei doesn’t like ‘Igor,’ I’ll call you Vanya also.”
The bad news is that Zhorik’s visit may turn out to be a bit of a juggling act. Of course I want to sleep with Zhorik alone, but what am I going to do with all the other warm bodies? And no doubt neither Zhorik nor Igor/Ivan is going to want the other to know that he is having sex with me.
Sergei and Tanya sleep in one single bed in the other room. There’s one other single bed that Denis usually sleeps in. Of course we have an extra mattress that can go on the floor, which is probably what we’ll do. I’ll simply announce that Zhorik and I want to spend as much time together as possible, and let Denis and Igor/Ivan figure out who sleeps where.
Still, it’s going to be a little awkward at best. I’ve been insisting that Ivan sleep with me, and now we have a commitment, a pact. So why, he’ll no doubt wonder -- if not ask -- does he suddenly get kicked out of bed to make room for Zhorik? He may begin to suspect that he’s really second in line. I did promise Zhorik after all, that no matter who my boyfriends were while he was gone, when he came back, he and I would resume our old relationship (Chapt. 194).
The Russians have a saying which comes uncomfortably to mind: “If you chase two rabbits, you don’t catch either one.’
My blood pressure got a bit of a jolt on Friday. I had come home about noon from Potemkin U., and noticed that the extra mattress which had been under Tanya and Sergei’s bed was now on the spare bed in their room. Tanya explained that their bed had suddenly collapsed and they had had to take the spare mattress out from under it and put it on the other bed.
Okay, no big deal.
Tanya’s brother’s girlfriend – they call them wives here once they’ve settled down to each other exclusively, even though they aren’t married (Chapt. 64) – is taking lessons on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and during our lesson Friday afternoon in the kitchen, I was aware of someone in the bathroom and then of a little extra noise, but I thought nothing of it.
After she left, I lay down on the spare bed to rest before my class with Masha. Missy hopped up on me and forced my pen and mobile phone out of my shirt pocket, causing them to fall to the floor between the bed and the wall.
Shit! I said to myself, and knelt down on the floor and stuck my arm under the bed to try to retrieve them. I felt something solid, which turned out to be an arm. Everyone in the apartment was accounted for. Sergei was asleep on the other bed, Denis was watching TV in my room, and Ivan was on the computer.
“What the fuck?”
Then I heard Andrei’s voice. I pulled the mattress and the board which was supporting it off the bed.
‘What are you doing here? How the hell did you get in here?” I shouted and pulled him to his feet.
“I just want to rest. I just got out of the hospital.”
“Too bad. I don’t want you here. Get the hell out of here.”
“Let me have a smoke and get dressed.”
He and Igor put back together the bed I had torn up to get to him.
I was furious.
He asked Igor for a couple of cigarettes, which I had just bought for Igor that afternoon.
“I bought those for Igor. I didn’t buy them for you!”
“Why are you so uptight?” he grinned. “It’s only a cigarette.”
“Get out of here.”
“See ya soon,” he grinned as he left.”
“I doubt it!”
I went back to the room.
“Igor, did you know he was here?”
He shook his head – rather feebly, I thought. Denis also denied any knowledge of it.
Aha! Sergei and Tanya. That’s why they took the mattress out from under the bed – so Andrei could hide under it without me knowing he was here.
It was time for me to go to my class at Masha’s apartment. Sergei was still asleep and Tanya was working, so I herded Denis and Igor into the room.
“He didn’t get under that bed by himself. Somebody helped him. He’s a thief, he’s a liar, he’s a con-man, he’s a criminal, he’s a hooligan, and I don’t want him in my apartment.
‘The next time I catch him here, I’m throwing all of you out, including Sergei and Tanya.”
Throughout my lesson with Tanya I fumed to myself. Somebody – maybe some bodies – helped him. They were conspiring to thwart my will, while all the time pretending to be my friend. I’m supporting all of them. This is nothing short of perfidy and treachery.
When I returned to the apartment about 9 p.m., Sergei met me. “Igor told me that you’re going to throw me and Tanya out of the apartment if Andrei comes here again.”
‘That’s right. He didn’t get under that bed by himself.”
“I was asleep. I didn’t even know he was here.”
“Is that why you and Tanya took the mattress out from under the bed – so you could hide him under it?”
“No. The bed fell. Igor is the one who hid him under the bed. He told me not to tell you, because he’s was afraid you’ll throw him out. But Andrei threatened him. He said he didn’t help Andrei, he’d call the police and Ivan would be deported.”
Okay, that sounded familiar. He used to threaten Zhorik, too, when he wanted Zhorik to borrow money from me to give him and Zhorik didn’t want to.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“I told him to tell me next time,” Sergei said.
I again told Igor he has to tell me the truth always. “I am understanding and I’m fair, and I can help you. But you have to tell me the truth.”
He agreed.
He told me later that Andrei had struck him in the face to demonstrate what would happen if he told me. His jaw was still hurting.
Next time Andrei shows up I myself will call the police and have him arrested for stealing my camera and my student Svetlana’s mobile phones.
Russia’s presidential election is barely a year away, and everything is being thoroughly prepared ahead of time to head off any possible deviations from the Kremlin script.
Yukos Oil founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, and his associate Platon Lebedev have had new charges filed against them to make sure they stay behind bars until after the election next March.
They could have both been released on parole before the election, but Prosecutors formally accused them last week of laundering $ 25 billion in oil revenues through off-shore companies – an amount their lawyers say is patently absurd and physically impossible under any circumstances.
And in regional elections, the liberal Union of Right Forces party has been barred from fielding candidates in two major regions – Tyumen and Pskov – on charges of technical violations.
Other liberal parties have been banned in Dagestan and St. Peterburg.
There’s been a steady stream of legislation passed over the last 3-4 years to make it nearly impossible for any but the largest parties – those supporting Putin and the ubiquitous Communist party – to meet the requirements for fielding candidates.
Putin is still saying he won’t change the constitution to permit him to run again, and he told a press conference last week that he wouldn’t “anoint” a candidate, but rather would wait until the field of candidates was selected and then express his preference.
But what difference does it make? The script, already written, will be scrupulously followed. The election will be a farce
Beef was almost unknown to most Russians when I first moved here nine years ago. As recently as a year ago, when I was craving a steak I went to the local supermarket to look for one. But all they had in the meat case was an indefinable blob of red meat labeled “steak.”
A couple of years ago I had a group of students in the German hypermarket company “Real.” One of them was in charge of buying meat for the company. He said Russians had no concept of how to cut a side of beef or of what the different cuts were. Part of his job was to teach them.
Maybe he was successful, because all that has been changing; and thanks to Australian exports, beef is becoming much more of a fixture on the Russian menu. I went with fantasy Peter to a low-priced restaurant called “The Rake” last week, and he had a huge steak – granted, not a T-bone and only 1/3 of an inch thick, but still a steak – and potatoes for about $ 7. I had a large serving of beef rib for about $ 10.
And Masha treated me to a roulade of beef roast with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes – the first I’ve seen in Russia – at our “lesson” last Friday night.
Whence are they satisfying this newfound taste for beef? Australia, according to an article in the Moscow Times. Sales of Australian beef to Russia quadrupled last year and are now equal to Australia’s beef sales to all the rest of Europe.
And this is “no flash in the pan,” says Australia’s chief economist Tim Harcourt.
In any case, it will change my diet minimally, because people with high blood pressure should stick to chicken and fish. But it’s nice to know that if I have an overpowering yen for a thick, juicy steak or a medium rare slice of roast beef, it will be the bush country, and not the Bush country, that satisfies it.
The dollar’s plunge in value since Bush’s 2000 election is no secret, and is severely curtailing ex-pats’ buying power around the world. The official exchange rate shows that it’s slid from 32 rubles to the dollar when Bush came into office to about 26.5 now – well over a 25% drop.
But the price of a “big Mac” in Moscow compared to the U.S. shows that the dollar has slid much lower against the ruble than the official exchange rate shows.
According to the “Big Mac” index published by The Economist every January, which measures individual currencies by pegging them to the cost of a single Big Mac hamburger, the real value of the ruble against the dollar is not 26.5, but 15.2, meaning that the buying power of the dollar has dropped more than 50% in the last 8 years.
Big Mac sandwiches in Russia cost 49 rubles ($ 1.85), 42.5 percent cheaper than the U.S. price of $ 3.22, according to the MT.
Maybe I should ask for my pension in Big Macs
Siberian locals were alarmed when yellow, green, and orange snow fell over 100 sq. kilometers in Siberia last week, but the non-white stuff posed no dangers to their health, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry.
They said the phenomenon was apparently caused by dust and soils blown into the atmosphere from neighboring Kazakhstan, and contained no toxic or radioactive materials, despite earlier reports by one local environmental prosecutor that it was “oily to the touch” and had a foul smell.
Residents were initially warned not to drink it or even walk in it. But the ES Ministry says this is nonsense, and no harmful effects have been reported. The problem for the 27,000 affected residents near the cities of Omsk, Tomsk, and Novosibirsk, is that they don’t know which lying bureaucrats to believe.
My friend Slava has been in Omsk on business for about three weeks, and Zhorik, of course, is stationed in Novosibirsk. Neither has reported seeing the technicolor snow.
My new student Anton, a mover and shaker in world transportation issues, attended a high-powered Kremlin-sponsored conference last week commemorating the 125th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the U.S. who is credited with rescuing America from the Great Depression.
Roosevelt’s injection of government into business and commerce enabled him to jump-start the economy, but subjected him to charges of socialism by his Republican critics.
Roosevelt’s “socialist revolution” has, of course, been handily dismantled by Republican presidents starting with Reagan, culminating with Bush’s determined efforts to plunge the country into fascism.
But I digress.
Now, it seems, this hero of the American left is joined on his pedestal of compassionate but resolute statecraft by none other than Vladimir Putin, whose chief of staff, Vlaslav Surkov, likens him to the Democratic icon.
“Like Roosevelt in his time, Putin must and should strengthen administrative control and use the potential of presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis,” Surkov eulogized.
“In the 20th century, Roosevelt was our military ally,” he continued, “and in the 21st century, he is our ideological ally.”
Putin is about as much like Roosevelt as was Reagan, whose idolators conjured up the same kind of laughable comparison.
Determination to make a charlatan respectable knows no moral bounds.
Hey, Mac, wanna buy a camel cheap? No, not a cigarette; a bactrian mammal, a ship of the desert, a horse put together by a committee.
It seems law enforcement officials in the Astrakhan region are faced with a new smuggling threat: A criminal ring is smuggling camels into Russia from Kazakhstan without going through customs or quarantine.
So far, 14 pieces of contraband have managed to walk into Russia without going through the border ritual – for what purpose, officials don’t seem to know.
Which just proves that it is easier to smuggle a camel through the eye of a needle than to figure out why a Russian would want to.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #234 - Luzhkov again vows to ban “satanic” gay parades
This day years ago:
2004-2-11: Chapt. #43 - Racist stabbing follows terrorist bomb
