He’d talk and talk, then stop abruptly, staring at me in futile anticipation of a laugh. This happened a few times, and his disappointment was so profound that I decided next time to laugh regardless of whether or not I got the joke. Soon enough, Oleg launched into yet another anecdote, and when he was done, I burst out laughing like I’d never heard anything so funny. “I’m not finished!” he said, sounding hurt. Whoops. To my frustration, and Oleg’s confusion, I never could seem to correctly guess when to laugh at his jokes.
Sveta was goofy in a different way. With her carefully curled blonde hair, thinly plucked eyebrows, and closet full of business suits, she looked the part of a put-together bank executive. But at home, she threw on a housedress and drank like a pro. She was forever cocking her head and offering wry asides to whatever Oleg was saying, often while elbows-deep in whatever she was making for dinner. I felt so comfortable with her that, in 2005, she was one of the few Russians I told that I was gay.
Sveta was a devotee of cupping therapy, which involves placing small bell-shaped glass cups on the skin, then using a vacuum to create suction and pull blood to the surface. In theory, this treatment—which humans have practiced for thousands of years—relieves pain and muscle discomfort. It can also result in bright, round bruises. On David’s and my last night with the couple, Sveta, fueled by numerous shots of vodka, merrily vacuumed the little glass cups to her forehead and cheeks, dancing around and laughing uproariously while Oleg shrieked for her to take them off so her face wouldn’t bruise.
Arriving in Ulan-Ude for my third visit, I was ready once again for smooth jazz and silly good fun. Sveta and Oleg did not disappoint.
Oleg picked me up at the train station, and when we arrived at the apartment, Sveta was in the kitchen, wearing a blue housedress and with curlers in her hair. She was making chebureki, a Caucasian staple of meat fried in homemade pastry dough.
“Liza!” she exclaimed, and pulled me into a hug. “I’m so happy to see you!” I embraced her tightly, touched by this heartfelt greeting, but characteristically, Sveta then threw a curveball. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she said, “because we need you to teach us how to play poker.”
Well, this was a non sequitur. Perhaps Russians assume that all Americans know how to play poker, just as Americans supposedly assume that bears wander the streets here. But though Sveta couldn’t have known it, I’m actually an avid poker player, and not having played in a month, I was hankering for a game. Oh, yes, this was going to be fun.
Oleg went into the living room and retrieved a slender silver briefcase. “We have the poker chips,” he told me, “and we’ve tried to learn by reading books, but we don’t really get it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s easy. I’ll teach you.”
As I soon learned, Oleg and Sveta were total gamers. They’d spent most of their free time over the last five years playing billiards, eventually getting so serious that they were playing up to eight hours a day on weekends. “We even bought our own cue sticks,” Oleg said. “We had to go all the way to Irkutsk to get good ones.” They’d spent hundreds of dollars on their custom-made sticks, he told me, which they left locked up at their local pool hall, the Kovboi.[3] Sveta had set a goal of playing in competitions, but after so many hours spent practicing, her back started giving her trouble. They wanted to learn poker in part because they could play at home, sitting down, which would be less taxing on Sveta’s back. We agreed to have our first lesson after dinner that night, with their son Alyosha, who was now 32, joining as our fourth player.
Sveta spent the afternoon cooking, preparing a feast of roast chicken, lamb bouillon, eggplant layered with tomato and cheese, sliced smoked fish, and chebureki. As the dinner hour neared, Oleg broke out a bottle of samogon, homemade vodka made in a nearby Old Believers village.[4] We drank toast after toast, and although I’d been drinking pretty steadily since arriving in Russia a month earlier, this was threatening to turn into a night of epic consumption. I knew I should slow down, but Oleg kept on pouring shots, so I kept drinking them.
I asked the couple how their lives had changed since we’d last seen each other. “Well, we fell in love with Thailand,” Sveta purred. They’d gone four times in a three-year span, mostly beach vacations in the wintertime, when Ulan-Ude’s temperatures plunge below zero Fahrenheit. “It’s where I got this dress,” she said, pointing at her blue shift that, I now noticed, was decorated with elephants. They’d also gone to China recently, she said, to buy new furniture for the apartment; everything is so cheap there, the savings made up for the cost of the travel. I recalled that Sasha had purchased Richard Gere in China, and I marveled again at how common it was now for Russians to go on shopping sprees there.
The couple wouldn’t be taking any trips abroad for a while, Oleg said, because of the ruble crisis. “It’s hard to make ends meet,” he told me. “Our salaries are the same, but prices are higher.” And the newspaper business, in which he’d worked for decades, was in particularly bad shape; as the head editor of Buryat Youth, he now spent as much time worrying about the paper’s finances as its editorial content. Sveta was still working at the bank, and even if she wanted to leave, she couldn’t, “because I’d be afraid to lose my pension money,” she said. I asked how her situation now compared to that of 1995 and 2005, and she didn’t hesitate. “Now is better than 20 years ago,” she told me, “but Soviet times were better than now, because you always knew what was what.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Back then, you knew the price of everything, what would happen at work, exactly when you could retire, and what your pension would be,” she replied. “Now, everything is more difficult. There are unknowns. There weren’t before.” Of all the complaints I’d ever heard Russians make about the post-Soviet era, this was the most prevalent: people missed the certainty of the USSR years, when the basic necessities—salary, education, health care, pension—were (for the most part) guaranteed. This was understandable, especially in the midst of the krizis, when each new day might bring a sickening drop in the value of your savings and your salary.
We reflected on that thought for a moment, but neither Oleg nor Sveta could stand being melancholy for long. “Do you want to hear a funny story?” Oleg said, breaking into a grin. I feared another incomprehensible joke was coming, but instead he started telling the story of how the couple got together, back in the early 1980s.
They’d been introduced through friends, and when Oleg went to Sveta’s apartment for the first time, he was surprised to see that she had a Billie Holiday record. Few Soviets knew much about American jazz, and fewer still owned any jazz records, so he was impressed.
“Wow,” I said, and turned to Sveta. “You were a jazz fan? You two were obviously meant to be together.”
“Ha!” she said. “I had been looking around at the record store, and when I saw Billie Holiday, I thought, Ooh! Black American lady singer. It must be disco! When I got home and put it on, I was so disappointed.”
3
The Kovboi, or “Cowboy,” is decorated with American-style touches, such as big black-and-white photographs of Clark Gable and Jayne Mansfield, and a giant statue of a cowboy in a checked shirt, wraparound shades, and a ten-gallon hat.
4
The Old Believers are a religious sect that splintered off from Russian Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. There are numerous Old Believers villages scattered throughout Buryatia, including the village of Tarbagatay, which offers tourist excursions and, oddly for a religious sect, homemade liquor for sale.