MOSCOW, June 18, 2007--The dark cloud of foreboding that has been hanging over me (Chapt. 251, Is U.S.-Russian conflict unavoidable? Probably) was magically lifted Sunday when the landlady, son Dima, and daughter-in-law Olga came by to collect the rent.
Part of my dread was that she was going to tell me that I’m too high-maintenance and to find a new apartment at a time when I can least afford it – after making appropriate repairs to this place.
Instead, they couldn’t have been more pleasant and accommodating. Once again I unnecessarily put myself into a blue funk by imagining the worst.
The high point came when Natasha announced that if I wanted to have the Moldovan, i.e., Igor, live here, they will officially register him and he would have no more problems with the ucheskoviy.
The catch: It will cost another 7,700 rubles, $ 300, a month -- a third again what I am now paying. It would bring my monthly rent to $ 1200!
I am telling Igor that if he wants to come back and live here, he will have to immediately find a job and pay the extra $ 300. I simply can’t afford it.
I’m sure he will agree to it. It would enable him to carry out his plan to earn his high school degree here while getting his long distance education in Moldova as a cook so he can, after a year, get a good job in a Moscow restaurant (Chapt. 247, Russian bear roars again on Victory Day).
No doubt he will be willing, but will he be able to find a part-time job that will pay him $ 300 a month -- part-time because to get his high school degree he will have to attend classes from 1 to 8 p.m. every day. That’s the 64,000 bucksi question.
I told the landlady I’d let them know. In any case, the pressure is off. I can relax. I’m not going to have to find another apartment, and I won’t have to spend several hundred bucksi on legal registration.
The onus is now on Igor.
On top of English Exchange agreeing to continue to provide my visa at no cost to me and my new Bank America card being issued, life suddenly isn’t looming as ominous as it was.
Just the night before, I received a phone call from Moldova. A woman asked for Denis. I said Denis no longer lives here and turned the phone over to Sergei.
It quickly became clear they were talking about Igor. Sergei turned to me and asked me how much money I had sent him.
“$ 200.”
When he hung up, he told me that the woman calling was his aunt. She said that Igor had demanded money from his mother, who of course has none. She said he took her by the collar and demanded, “Give me some money. I want to buy some wine. I want to get drunk!”
I met the aunt, and she’s a dowdy, frumpy, generally unpleasant lump of a woman with a dour view of life and a tendency to exaggerate, so I take with a grain of salt her description of the scene.
Still, it’s possible. If so, I think it reflects his anger and frustration at being back in anus-ville. He had hoped to be there not more than two weeks. My money situation made that impossible. That wouldn’t excuse his violence – if violence it was, but it would make it understandable.
There is literally nothing for a teenager to do in that god-forsaken hole but fuck and drink. He’s already told Sergei that the first option is being well covered, and apparently he has spent most of the money I sent him making sure that the second is as well. But if his aunt was right, $ 200 wasn’t enough.
Living and loving with me in Moscow, he has experienced a taste of life as it could be. Now that he’s back living the alternative, if that can be called living, he must be feeling a sense of panic and despair.
I proposed Sergei’s girlfriend Tanya as a surrogate mother for the child of a gay Russian friend of mine, who has decided he very much wants to have a child and is willing to pay $ 7,000 to the surrogate mother – plus, of course, medical expenses.
He asked me to explore it with Sergei and Tanya. First I asked Sergei what his reaction to the idea was.
“I love Tanya,” was his reply. “If she has a child, I want it to be mine. I plan to spend the rest of my life with her.”
But they agreed to try and find another suitable candidate.
So Sunday, when Tanya left for work Sunday and never came back, Sergei was devastated. She had said she wouldn’t be home because she was going to her mother’s place and wouldn’t be back until Monday.
But Sunday evening, her mother called Sergei and told him that Tanya had gone to Latvia. She had discovered it, she said, when she called Tanya’s mobile phone and Tanya said she was already on her way to Latvia, where she was born and where her father and several relatives still live.
Sergei was shocked and numb. This is the first woman he’s ever loved, his first real girlfriend. He was deeply committed to her, and – so he thought – she to him.
At 3 a.m. Monday, I was awakened by Sergei crawling in bed beside me. He had been drinking vodka and wanted to talk.
“Dane, you’re 70 years old. You must have loved and lost a lot of people. What did you do? How did you bear it?”
“First of all, I cried a lot,” I answered. “Except for that, time, only time, can heal.”
The next minute he was sobbing. I held him tight and hugged and kissed him.
“I’m very, very sorry, honey,” was about the best I could do.
He was soon feeling better and thanking me for it. I at least was a sympathetic ear.
“I want to write her a letter. Come help me write a letter.”
So we sat down at the computer and composed a letter. In the meantime, he had decided maybe she didn’t really go to Latvia; maybe that was just a diversion tactic so Sergei wouldn’t try to find her.
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.
So early Monday morning he took the letter and set out for her café to see if she might still be working there.
She wasn’t. She did indeed go to Latvia because, her mother said, she was exhausted and needed to get away. She didn’t tell Sergei because she was afraid he would try to stop her.
So does the relationship still exist? Stay tuned.
A hint may be that last night he said we would sleep together and turn what was his and Tanya’s room into an office, study, classroom.
But Monday night he went to sleep in his own bed.
Last weekend was a three-day holiday, which would have been great except that it made even more mincemeat of my finances. The holiday wiped out two of my Information-Plus classes as well as my class with Sasha’s friend Lena – a $ 120 bite out of my budget.
As a consequence, I took in only $ 50 last week instead of the $ 200 I had counted on. The gods’ conspiracy is reaching nasty proportions. I’m even toying with the idea of asking Rod if he could use another teacher at English Exchange.
But July should be better. All my Information-Plus classes should be functioning again, and lawyer students Alexei and Masha should be finished with their vacations, so all in all, I should pull in about $ 400 a week, which will enable me to survive normally and start saving $ 200 a week toward my $ 2000 August goal.
Fantasy Peter (see photo, Chapt. 242) and I managed to find time to get together on Tuesday afternoon, the last day of the holiday, and fantasize some more about making a trip together this summer.
We took a short boat trip on the Moscow River from Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University, to a spot near the Kremlin, from which we hiked the short distance to one of his favorite restaurants on Lyubyanka Square for beer and garlic bread.
He has just discovered that his international passport has expired and he can’t renew it until he gets squared away with the military, which won’t be soon. His inability to travel dovetails with my money problems, squelching our earlier hopes for a trip to Europe (Chapt. 242, Is Peter fantasy becoming reality?).
So we discussed places where he won’t need a visa and I won’t need a pile of bucksi -- like Belarussia, St. Pete, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. We’re zeroing in on Minsk, the capital of Belarussia, and St. Pete. We could probably do either on a couple hundred bucksi. Surely I’ll have that much by the second half of August.
But we also did some blue-skying about the long term. I told him about my plans next summer to meet Marco and other former denizens of the House of Beatrice and asked him if he’d be interested in accompanying me. His English is quite good, and I think he’d have a ball, with all my lecherous friends fawning over him.
“I’d love to,” he said – if he can get his passport squared away by that time. What a fun fantasy that would be!
Then we talked about Cuba, a place that is becoming increasingly attractive for me with its low-energy life style and its universal health care. It’s also at the top of his list. So we set a tentative target date to be Cuba bound three years from now.
Michael Moore’s current hounding by the Bushists for filming “Sicko” there is an unfortunate reminder that I must find out what my options are. I think I can go, even as an American citizen, as long as I don’t embark on my journey there from the U.S.
In any case, we continue to stoke our mutual interests and to figure out how we can spend extended time together. A good sign.
Peter wore a low-cut T-shirt, and I was a bit dismayed to see straggly chest hair peaking out of the top. It means he doesn’t have the classic Slav hairless chest and torso. But neither does Zhorik, which doesn’t keep me from finding him very sexy.
It also doesn’t change my fantasy of his piska – medium long and thin and rock hard with the glans completely covered by redundant skin. And I still picture his upper legs and thighs as nearly hairless. Will I really be lucky enough to find out later this summer?
Peter and I discussed Putin and the Russian political situation. He is not put off by the increasing restrictions on personal freedom.
“My life is no less free than it was before Putin,” he said.
And that’s no doubt true. Peter considers himself a patriot. If you don’t disagree with the Kremlin, you won’t feel its wrath. I also suspect he doesn’t read the same things I read – like the increasing use of anti-extremist laws to silence dissenters (Chapt. 252, New crime: opposing Putin) -- because the Russian press is effectively censored by the Kremlin.
I will explore this further with him at our next meeting, and perhaps take some Moscow Times articles along with me to see if he’s aware of some of the things that are happening. I think I will find that he is not.
Probably because of all the summits last week – the G8 summit in Germany and three Russian summits in St. Petersburg – focusing world attention intently on Russia, a peaceful dissenters march was actually permitted to be held in the center of Moscow last Monday during the three-day holiday.
After an hour and a half of speeches by dissenters – including Garry Kasparov and Eduard Limonov -- in Pushkin Square the estimated crowd of 2,000 quietly dispersed.
However, there was one change: They had originally planned to march down Tverskaya Ulitsa, the main drag, to nearby Teatralnaya Ploschad near Red Square, despite the Moscow City Government’s refusal to grant permission.
At the end of the remarkably peaceful rally, however, Kasparov called on demonstrators not to go ahead with the march. “We see [the authorities] are still eager for a bloodbath,” he told the crowd, “so we suggest you should all go home today.”
A similar dissenter’s march was also held peacefully in St. Petersburg two days earlier, during the St. Petersburg summit. Small marches were also held in Yekaterinburg and Murmansk.
It was the last dissenter’s march in Moscow until the fall. Kasparov contended on Ekho Moskviy Radio that the “marches have changed the image of the Russian opposition….It has become possible to establish cooperation between different opposition forces and form the basis of an opposition that would be able to compete with the Kremlin.”
His hopeful assessment sounds a little like the loser declaring victory. Because most Russians think like Peter, I see no possibility for a meaningful anti-Putin movement between now and next March’s election.
Just to show they’re not loosening up on freedom of speech, Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into a week-long “forbidden art” exhibition at the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center.
The exhibit pokes fun at religious and soviet figures, including a painting of Mickey Mouse’s head substituted for Jesus’ that the Russian Orthodox Church finds particularly offensive and has labeled “a civil crime.”
Curator Yerofeyev countered that it’s not the church’s role to decide what constitutes art.
Nonetheless, the city prosecutor’s office told the Moscow Times that “there will be a criminal investigation for showing offensive material.”
It’s déjà vu all over again. Museum director Yury Samodurov was convicted and fined on similar charges for a 2003 exhibit called “Caution Religion” (Chapt. 35, Freedom of religion – as long as it’s Orthodox), whose portrayal of a Russian Orthodox icom with a hole where the head should be and a Coca Cola logo as the blood of Christ also stirred the church’s ire.
Russia is still the worst of 50 companies to do business in, despite $ 13.5 billion in international deals announced during last week-end’s St. Peterburg summit, says a new survey by the World Centers of Commerce published by MasterCard.
The reason is the same old story: Corruption, economic instability, government unpredictability, and legal and political uncertainties.
Of the 50 companies surveyed, Russia was 50th, just below Warsaw, Sao Paolo, and Johannesburg. Top three were London, New York, and Tokyo.
Russian economic authorities blamed it on poor data available from Russia. Russia’s business environment isn’t that bad, you see, they just don’t have the statistics to prove it.
But a lot of people who have been bamboozled by the mafia and the government in recent years would side with MasterCard. Virtually every week there is a horror story of entire companies being stolen with no legal recourse or of authorities confiscating property or manufactured goods for bogus reasons.
A lot of bureacrats’ pockets get lined in the process, so there’s never any criminal conviction.
Even so, a lot of CEO’s praised Putin and Russia in a much-ballyhooed meeting last weekend with the Russian president. But did they praise it because it’s praiseworthy or because they knew what would happen if they didn’t?
Russia appears to be experiencing the same decline of the honey bee as are America and some parts of Europe, where -- according to news reports I have read -- bees are simply disappearing, leaving vast crops unpollinated.
Einstein reportedly once observed that “four years after the bees go, we go.”
The top bee scientist at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has been quoted as saying that "If the bees do not recover, or their numbers don't grow and they are in a weakened state, we could see a worst-case scenario."
Is that worst-case scenario really, as some are suggesting, a national famine?
The biggest problem is that they say they don’t know what’s causing it.
But press reports tell us that “Vice-President Dick Cheney has been briefed,” so we probably don’t need to worry after all. Rumor has it that he plans to invade and democratize the hives.
My student Dima on Friday cited research in Great Britain apparently linking the phenomenon to cell phones and high voltage.
I Googled “bees and cell phones” and found that researchers at Landau University found that bees do indeed refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby, “suggesting that radiation from mobile phones may be at least partially to blame.
“The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously home-loving species from finding their way back to their hives.”
"I am convinced the possibility is real," agrees Dr. George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the U.S. government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the 1990s.
But in all the contemporary American articles I’ve read everyone is simply scratching their heads in perplexity. “Gol-lee, I just can’t imagine. Maybe it’s something they’re using in the fields or genetically modified crops.”
Is the possibility that cell phones are responsible being deliberately ignored? Is our growing addiction to the mobile phone more important than growing food? Have cell phones ascended to the lofty peak of the automobile as being untouchable -- too essential to our daily life to consider curtailing regardless of the consequences to ourselves and future generations?
Anyway, Andrei Sh. tells me that Russia is also experiencing a bee decline, which they’re blaming on “some sort of mutants now breeding which replace regular bees; they are neither bees nor flies.
“In any case, normal bees are a rarity, and this spring father was forced to spray his apple trees with honey so as to attract just anyone to their flowers.”
On the other hand, “a friend of mine who lives in Voronezh region keeps bees there and once or twice a year brings honey to Zvezdny to sell; he didn't say anything about this problem.
“Frankly, I'm surprised this is happening to America….I guess if America meets its Doomsday, it will be due to its science. If the same happens to Russia, it’s entirely due to its ignorance.”
By the way, the cell phone is also suspected of causing brain cancer, killing brain cells (“suggesting that today’s teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives”), and “heavily” reducing sperm counts.
Any way you look at it, we’ve got a problem that – if the British research is indicative – must be resolved rather quickly, cell phones or no cell phones.
I’m now eating dog food – and it’s delicious! Two or three weeks ago, as my Saturday morning student Valera and I sat in the kitchen chatting in English, he noticed that Missy hadn’t eaten her dog food.
Finding food she would eat had become a real problem. She long ago rejected “Pedigree,” and I’ve been experimenting with some large cans of German dog food at $ 3 a can, along with small cans of something called “Ciappi,” at $ 1.50 a can. Sometimes she’d nibble at it. Sometimes she wouldn’t.
Dry food was even worse. It would stay on the plate for two or three days until I would finally have to throw it out. I had to coax her to eat, and often even then she walked away with an empty stomach.
This is serious. You can’t let your dog starve to death in your own kitchen! But I figured if she got hungry enough, she’d eat anything – even canned dog food.
I explained my dilemma to Valera.
“Why don’t you give her what we feed our dog?” he asked. He said they buy bones in the market, make a broth of them, then add rice, pearl barley and oatmeal and cook it into a gruel.
Worth a try. But the market didn’t have any bones the first day, so I opted for chicken. I can buy three large thighs and drumsticks for about $ 1.50. Adding the rice, barley and oatmeal to the chicken bouillon cost a few more cents. It lasted two or three days, so it was no more expensive than the dog food and probably even a little cheaper
She devoured it.
It looks damned good. It smelled damned good. I tried it. It tasted damned good, reminiscent of the best rice pilov I’ve ever eaten.
The next batch, I divided. She got half and I got half.
On the next trip, I managed to find beef bones and did the same thing with them. Except I don’t eat it. It’s too fat. But she licks her plate spotless at every meal.
So now I fix a huge pot of beef gruel for her and a separate smaller pot of rice pilov for me and Sergei. It’s incredibly cheap and incredibly good. You could actually survive on it, and it costs only a few rubles per serving.
If her name were “Face,” would she still have stolen the toilet paper? A couple of non-Russian stories in the news this week are worth taking a look at.
In America, a woman named Butts was caught stealing toilet paper from the county courthouse.
And in China, a local court jailed two builders after they hired a blind contractor to build a bridge which collapsed during construction, injuring 12 people.
I once knew a guy named Butts who naned hus favorite daughter, he insisted, “Ophelia.”
What’s in a name?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #252 - New crime: opposing Putin
Chapt. #251 - Is U.S.-Russian conflict unavoidable? Probably
Chapt. #242 - Is Peter fantasy becoming reality?
Chapt. #35 - Freedom of religion – as long as it’s Orthodox
