MOSCOW, Dec. 19, 2003 -- So far this winter, 127 people have frozen to death on Moscow’s sub-freezing streets. Almost all of them were either alcoholics or homeless – which is often pretty much the same thing here.
The Russian word for bum, “BOMZH” is strikingly similar to our own, leading you to think maybe there’s an etymological connection somewhere. But BOMZH is actually an acronym standing for “no registered place to live.” Since the fall of communism, the city is full of homeless alcoholics shuffling around metro and train stations begging for money and trying to keep warm.
Their faces are often scarred and bruised from fights among themselves or beatings by police. I watched a homeless woman being battered by a cop one day as she cowered behind a door to the metro. The “monkey,” as the cops are often called here, repeatedly rammed the swinging door into her already swollen face until she finally shuffled out of the entrance onto the street.
We have bomzh in our courtyard. One of them often managed somehow to make his way into the stairwell of our apartment building last year looking for a warm place to sleep. The wafting stench of stale shit would always let me know immediately when he was there.
I saw him walking stiff-legged one freezing night. Poor bastard, I thought. On top of everything else, he’s hurt his leg. And then I got close enough for my nose to tell me that he wasn’t hurt; he was just trying to keep the fresh diarrhea off his leg.
The sad and humiliated eyes underneath his slouched hat said everything. But who wants to be the one to offer him a bath and a clean change of clothes? I like to think I’m compassionate and empathetic, but I make no pretenses of being Mother Theresa.
Climbing the stairs to my apartment, I couldn’t look at him as he tried to shrink unnoticed into the wall. I could only hold my nose.
I haven’t seen him this year. Maybe he’s one of the 127?
I’ve seen several of them lying motionless on the freezing sidewalks. One had his head raised stiff and parallel to the sidewalk. Was he already dead? Probably. Other times I’ve seen the plastic sheets spread out under the gaze of bored cops.
You get inured to it after while, shrug your shoulders, and call it population control of the undesirables.
How do they get to be homeless? Some of them are refugees. But most of them are just alcoholics. After the state gave everybody the apartment they were living in soon after the collapse of communism, a lot of alcoholics swapped their apartments for booze – some knowingly, some by criminal chicanery.
It can happen to you easily enough when you’re stone cold sober, as it did to me. And if you’re drunk, it’s a practically an engraved invitation.
Well, we’re going to Prague. We found out on Thursday – day before yesterday – that Shurik and Anton got their visas and we will fly out tomorrow morning at 11:00.
I was beginning to sweat whether Yegor would make it. He had gone to his aunt’s in Sandova in the Tver region to spend some time with her, since he will be in Prague for Christmas and in a gay club for New Year’s.
The evening of the same day we found out we’d be going to Prague, humans -- at least human nature -- invaded my paradise.
Shurik and Anton had been circling and snarling at each other for a couple of weeks. It all started over access to the Internet, of all things!
When Anton had the flu a couple of weeks ago, he spiked a worrisome fever and, in the middle of the night while Shurik was chatting on the internet, decided to call an ambulance.
He asked Shurik to get off the chat line for a few minutes so he could call.
“Use your mobile phone,” Shurik had countered callously.
So Thursday evening Anton planted himself at the keyboard promptly at midnight, when my free time begins. Shurik asked if he could get to it for 15 min. “to check my e-mail.”
“No. You wouldn’t let me get on it the other night to call the ambulance. You told me to use my mobile phone.”
So Shurik retorted with a “pa-shyol na-khyi” – roughly equivalent to “fuck you.” Anton responded by addressing Shurik with an “a” ending, effectively calling him a pansy and a great insult to a virile 19-year-old, even if he is a pansy – part-time.
Shurik’s response: “I can beat your black ass”!
Oh-oh! The “b” word, roughly equivalent to calling an American black a “nigger.” Anton lunged for Shurik. I dashed between them and largely succeeded in holding them off from each other, but the damage was done! An unforgivable insult and the labeling off Shurik as a racist, a bigot, someone prejudiced against the dark-skinned natives of the Russian Caucuses.
At least that’s how Anton is painting it.
Yegor and I were supposed to be roommates on the trip, and Shurik and Anton, but Anton came to me yesterday: “I don’t want to room with Shurik on the trip. You and he can be room-mates. I want to room with Yegor.”
Understandable. Shurik certainly felt the same way. But I was planning to spend a lot of time with Yegor and to have a lot of sex with him, since he and I haven’t had much quality time together.
But on Friday afternoon – two days before we were supposed to fly out of here –Yegor still wasn’t back from his aunt’s. He had, however, called on his mobile phone about 4 p.m. saying he was just outside Moscow and would be home soon.
“Whew!
The first thing I told him was that “the boys” had had a fight.
“So what’s new?”
“No, a real fight. Fists!”
Why?
When I told him about the “b” word, he looked shocked. “He called Anton a black?!!”
Yegor and Anton huddled a lot that evening.
When it came midnight, time for my free internet access, it for some reason refused to connect.
Shurik was sure Anton had sabotaged it. Anton insisted he hadn’t touched it, and I believe him.
In any case, the Internet didn’t work.
So while Yegor and Anton continued whispering, Shurik and I had sex.
But I hadn’t had sex with Yegor for a week or more.
So later we had sex.
In our euphoric post-coital warmth, Yegor said, “I want to talk to you after we get back. I don’t want to ruin our Prague trip; so I don’t want to talk about it now. But I hope you’ll be fair.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
“I want to talk about what happened between Shurik and Anton.”
Have you talked to Shurik about his side of the story?
“If you’ve noticed, I’m not talking to Shurik.”
“Why aren’t you talking to Shurik?”
“He called my friend a black.”
“How can you make a judgment if you haven’t heard both sides of the story?” I asked incredulously. You have to get his side of the story, too.”
“I will.”
A little later, he added, “Shurik wouldn’t call me a black because I’m your boyfriend, but he knows he can get away with calling Anton black because he’s not your boyfriend.”
I was disappointed for two reasons: Perhaps the biggest was that Yegor is not as fair and impartial as I thought. Getting both sides of the story is absolutely essential to any pretense of justice.
Secondly, the “B” word was hurled in a context of mutual anger and spite, and each was doing his best to insult and anger the other. It’s the most effective word he could think of, just as calling Shurik a sissy was the most degrading thing Anton could think of to call my macho little 19-year-old sex partner.
It seems clear what is about to happen.
So this will be hanging over me like a cloud on our Christmas trip to Prague.
Merry Christmas.
While Bush strutted this week over the capture of Saddam Hussein, Russia’s Pres. Putin was reminding his annual nationally televised Q&A audience that “There were no international terrorists under Saddam Hussein,” and repeating his contention, shared by many, that “Anything done without the Security Council’s blessing cannot be recognized as fair or justified.”
In a surrealistic reversal of roles with the “Evil Empire” of Reagan days, Putin urged the U.S. not to act unilaterally, reminding that empires of the past had often come acropper from “feelings of invincibility, grandeur, and infallibility.
“I hope, I very much hope,” Putin continued, “that this does not happen with our American partners.”
Me too.
