MOSCOW, May 29, 2008 -- I’m churning inside.
Sasha just told me he’s going to rent a room with a friend and will be leaving. It will cost him 4000 rubles a month – about $ 175.
He asked me if I could lend it to him. I told him I don’t have it, which is mostly true.
“Why are you getting a room?” I asked.
“Zhorik’s coming home, right?”
“Yes.”
“So you two can be alone.”
Sergei came to me last Sunday night. “Dane,” he said. “Katya and I want to rent my bedroom for a couple of months. We’ll pay 10,000 rubles.”
That’s a third of my rent. Worth considering.
“What about Sasha and Igor?”
“Don’t tell Igor that I told you, but he told me that he’s planning to move in with his girlfriend. I was surprised. ‘But Dane loves you very much,’ I told him. But that’s what he’s going to do, so he already has a place to stay.”
“And Sasha?”
“He has a place to stay too. So when Zhorik comes, it will just be you and him in your room, and Katya, Lyosha (her brother), and I will be in our room. We’ll be responsible for our own food.
“We’ll pay you 10,000 rubles day after tomorrow.”
But day after tomorrow has come and gone. And the day after the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after the day after tomorrow. I asked him about it today.
“In not more than a couple of days.”
So when Sasha told me he was going to rent a room, I was visibly shaken. “Are you terribly upset?” he asked.
“Don’t tell Sergei that I told you this,” I said. “But I doubt that they’re going to have the money. And if they don’t have the money, I don’t want them living here, and you can stay.”
“Katya will have the money,” Sasha assured me. “I don’t know about Sergei, but Katya will have the money.”
Sasha promised he would continue to visit me. But that’s not the same as sleeping tucked into my arms in the spoons position every night.
On Monday I had a chat with Igor in the courtyard. I told him what Sergei had said the night before. “Is this true?” I asked.
“No. I’m not planning to move in with any girl. Sergei just wants to get rid of me.” Igor had told me a couple of days before that he couldn’t continue to live with Sergei, but I had told him to be patient, because Sergei had said he was going to move before Zhorik came. But now that’s out the window.
Igor was silent for a moment.
“I’ve thought about going back to Moldova. Denis (his brother) is in prison, and Mama’s in the hospital with epilepsy. She has it worse than me. She’s a Class One invalid,” which means she gets about $ 50 a month from the state – certainly not enough to survive on.
“Can you help me?” he asked.
“I can give you the money to go there and back,” I said, “but I can’t give you money to live on. I don’t have it. I don’t know how much I’m going to need for Zhorik,”
So Igor is completely up in the air. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do. I don’t either, but I won’t hang him out to dry. I’ve told him that I’ll find a way to keep him and take care of him.
In the meantime, Zhorik is incapacitated with a severe cold. I sent him 10,000 rubles – about $ 400 – for train tickets and travel money. He’s planning to leave Novosibirsk on the 5th of June and arrive here on the 8th.
He asked for another 2000 rubles – about $ 85 – for souvenirs (“I know how you like souvenirs,” he said.) And he’s also had to use about 1,000 rubles to buy medicine. But I was only able to send him 2000 rubles. “I don’t need souvenirs,” I told him. “You’ll be my souvenir.”
I’m overjoyed (I think) at the prospect of being reunited with Zhorik. But I’m sad – bordering on grief – at the thought of losing Sasha.
After Igor broke up with his nymphomaniac last week -- temporarily, as it turns out -- he was depressed and withdrawn. Sasha had said he was visiting friends and wouldn’t be back that night, so I invited Igor to Il Patio for some beer and pizza – and vodka.
To my disappointment, between headache, stomach ache, and a badly bent heart, he was in no mood for sex when we went to bed about 11:30.
When I woke up about 3:30 and felt a warm body on the other side of me, I thought it was Missy. But as I shook loose from my torpor, I realized it was nearly 6 ft. long and had arms and legs.
I rolled over: “Sasha?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About half an hour.”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
I put my arms around him, and we kissed passionately. “I’m drunk,” he said.
We kissed again, sucking lips and deep tonguing.
“You’re my honey,” I said.
“And you’re mine.”
I’ve been giving him English lessons. “I love you,” I said.
He didn’t respond immediately, but a few seconds later, he said, in English: “Dane?”
“Yes, honey.”
“I love you. I will love you forever.”
“Dane,” he continued, “I’m so grateful that you took me in and let me live here.”
I hugged and kissed him again. Sergei had told me that he had been sleeping on the streets, that he found him sleeping in the train station. I have no doubt that he is grateful, and he very freely expresses his gratitude. And love.
“Sergei said he is moving,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He said you were going to live with him.”
“Yes.”
“I’m very sad,” I said. “I would like for us to continue to live together.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow when I’m sober. I’ll explain why I’m moving.” There was a several-second pause. “Zhorik is coming, right?”
“Yes.”
“We will talk about it tomorrow.”
“We have an expression in English,” I continued. “Alcohol is the oil of the tongue.”
“When I was a child and had to go to children’s summer camp, I had to learn 100 proverbs. We have a Russian proverb: ‘What the sober man thinks, the drunk man says.’”
I thought back a few seconds: “I will love you forever.” What the sober man thinks, the drunk man says. He is kind, responsible, and dependable, and he loves me. And I love him. But he doesn’t want to interfere in Zhorik’s and my relationship.
Zhorik had damned well better be worth all this. In ten days we will know.
Russian drivers are as furioius about the high price of gasoline as American drivers – maybe even moreso, because they’re paying more for it, even though Russia is pumping gas for much of the rest of the world.
When the price of gasoline in America was temporarily parked at $ 3.60 a gallon, or about 80 cents a liter, gasoline here was 97 cents a liter, nearly $ 4 a gallon.
And for the Russians, like the Americans, it’s just one more boost in the rapidly rising cost of living and the soaring rate of inflation, which is now running at about 15%
On Saturday, May 24, there was a protest in about 20 cities across Russia. A nasty, driving spring rain kept the Moscow showing to only about 200.
More protests are expected, and “they won’t be so lucky the next time around,” one cab driver told the Moscow Times.
“The specter of spreading protests, and the expectation by citizens and analysts alike that inflation will only continue to grow, threaten to put a quick damper” on the “overwhelming popularity” of newly-elected Pres. Dmitriy Medvedev and his boss, Prime Minister Putin, speculated the MT.
But with Medvedev’s election safely under its belt, the Kremlin can – and will – pretty much ignore the growing dissatisfaction. But it’s the little things, like the price of bread and rent and gasoline, not human rights or freedom of speech, that bring Russians to the streets and the brink of revolution.
It will be interesting to watch just how angry they become over the rising cost of gasoline and the horrendous current inflation rate. At what point – if ever -- will the tinder spark?
We’re on the road to finding out.
Medvedev has promised to combat corruption! Wow! So what’s new? Putin also promised to fight corruption and it grew measurably worse under his tutelage.
But there is a slight difference: Medvedev is actually heading the task force that is going to at least pretend to try to uproot it.
How much of a difference will that make? Speculation varies widely. Some think it will actually help and that we’ll be seeing a difference within a couple of years. Others say it’s so endemic and so entrenched as the very foundation of Russian business, that it will be 15 to 20 years before we see a difference – if ever.
In the meantime, there has been one positive development: Medvedev has also called for a sweep of the courts, which has already begun with the firing of one of the judges on the Supreme Arbitration Court for “alleged involvement in crooked real estate deals,” the Moscow Times reported.
Medvedev, a lawyer and former law professor, has several times spoken out on the need to establish the independence of the Russian judiciary, even at one point referring to Russia as “a country of legal nihilism.”
The suspended judge, who frequently sat on cases involving Moscow real estate deals, was fired because in 2004 she received help from City Hall in swapping her apartment for two others and in buying another apartment at below market price.
Just two days after she was sacked, perhaps emboldened by the move, another judge on the same court testified in District Court that a Kremlin official, Valeriy Boyev, had warned her that if she didn’t change her ruling in an another case involving a Moscow real estate deal, she would lose her job.
“I was told unambiguously that…I’d face problems” unless she reversed her ruling, she told the District Court. Her allegations fingering Boyev have since been backed by other judges.
Ironically, her testimony came in a libel suit Boyev brought against a popular radio program hosted by Vladimir Solovyev on which Solovyev declared “there are no independent courts in Russia,” although there are “courts dependent on Boyev.”
Solovyev was absolutely on target. It’s common knowledge that there are no independent courts in Russia, and that they are controlled by the Kremlin. Whether Medvedev’s sally into this minefield will ultimately prove effective in restoring some independence to the judiciary is impossible to say.
One can only hope.
With Zhorik headed home, I can quit sweating the possibility – very remote, but still a possibility – that he might take the path of 341 of his fellow soldati last year and off himself.
I know through Zhorik’s experience that conditions in the Russian Army are generally subhuman and intolerable. If I hadn’t sent him about $ 20 a week last summer, he would have starved to death because he couldn’t eat the pig slop they were served in the mess hall; and just last month he had a bout with food poisoning from self-same mess hall.
And when a heavy oxygen tank fell on his hand, they didn’t bother to x-ray it for nearly a week, although the pain was excruciating and unremitting. He has gone AWOL several times and got caught once. It cost me $ 400 to keep him out of the brig.
And during his first few months he was physically abused in the hazing to which new recruits are routinely subjected. It was the result of such hazing that caused the amputation two years ago of one young soldier’s legs and genitals.
So it isn’t any wonder that 341 of these scared and helpless kids – who view themselves as virtual prisoners -- saw death as a preferable alternative to continued life in the Russian Army.
So what prompted 115 American soldiers -- 18.8 per 100,000 in a volunteer army -- to take their own lives last year, an increase over 102 the previous year, but not as many as the total projected for this year?
It certainly wasn’t the food. It wasn’t the hazing. It wasn’t that they were swept up in a draft over which they had no choice.
Could it have something to do with morale and the realization that they are the fascist invaders in a conflagration carefully stage-managed to hide the fact that they are fighting the world’s first resource war so their countrymen might continue to drive their 10-mile-per-gallon SUV’s and warm their hands over their gas-fueled fireplaces in the summer with air conditioning at full tilt?
But even their sacrifice isn’t doing the job as gasoline in America heads towards $ 4 a gallon, with two-to-four-year forecasts in the $ 10 to $ 12 range.
Of course, the Army surgeon general’s psychiatric consultant
prefers to explain it a little bit differently: “We see a lot of things that are going on in the war which do contribute – mainly the longtime and multiple deployments away from home, exposure to really terrifying and horrifying things, the easy availability of loaded weapons and a force that’s very, very busy right now.”
What-ever!
Dead Russian soldiers! dead American soldiers! Embarrassing, inconvenient, and quickly-forgotten reminders of their nation’s shame. A damned pity they can’t be court-martialed for their insolence!
See also related pages:
Chapt. #284 - Apprehensions mount as reunion with Zhorik nears
Chapt. #282 - Tanks again rumble on Victory Day
