“But you didn’t know that,” I teased Oleg. “You thought you’d found the perfect woman.”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “What I really thought was, If I marry her, that record will be mine.”
We eventually cleared the dishes away, and I counted out stacks of brightly colored poker chips for everyone. I started shuffling the cards, and everyone oohed and aahed over my ability to do the bridge shuffle, a skill that would impress exactly no one back home. I explained the rules of Texas Hold’em, and within minutes, the cards were flying. Sveta especially liked one quirk of the game, the part where the dealer must “burn” a card, placing it facedown before turning up the next one—in theory, a protection against cheating. “Burn and turn” is a phrase one often hears at poker tables, but in Sveta’s rendering, it became Byoooorn… and tyoooorn!
The next three hours went by in a drunken blur, and by the end, Sveta had a mountain of chips and the rest of us had none. This wasn’t entirely beginner’s luck: she was impossible to read and unpredictable in her play, two great traits for a poker player to have. “Next stop, the World Series of Poker!” I said, and she gave a pert little nod.
“Liza, can we play tomorrow?” she asked. “I want to win again.”
The next morning, I had a hangover—my first of the trip, a minor miracle considering how much drinking I’d done so far. I slept until 10 a.m. on the foldout couch in the living room, while Oleg and Sveta tiptoed around; it was Sunday, so neither of them had to work. Every so often, Oleg would squeeze past my bed to get to the balcony, where he smoked one of the multitude of cigarettes he went through daily. In the sober light of morning, he reverted to the nervous energy I remembered from earlier visits.
“Are you planning to go back to the farmer, in the village?” he asked me. I told him I was. “Are they expecting you?” I said no, that my preference was just to show up, as I’d done at the lighthouse in Vladivostok, as that made for a better story. Oleg shook his head. “I think you should call them,” he told me. “I don’t like the idea of you going out there alone, with no one to meet you.”
I tried to convince Oleg that there was nothing to worry about. The farmer, who would be in his early fifties now, was undoubtedly still living with his wife in the house they owned in Galtai. And if by some strange chance he wasn’t there, his siblings and cousins also lived in Galtai. I knew the idea of my going off alone made Oleg nervous, but I was reluctant to change my plans for the sake of assuaging what felt like an overblown fear.
But that afternoon, when we checked the bus schedule, we learned that the only public transportation to Galtai was a minivan that arrived in the village at 6 p.m.—and there were no return minivans to Ulan-Ude until the next morning. So, not only would I be arriving unannounced at dinnertime, I’d also be stranded for the night if for some reason the farmer wasn’t there. I realized that Oleg was right: I needed to get in touch with the farmer.
Though Buyanto had a telephone in his house, I’d never bothered to get the number. I did have contact information for his son Beligto, though. In 2005, Beligto was a 20-year-old college student in Ulan-Ude, and he’d given me his cell phone number and e-mail address. But when I dialed the number, the man who answered wasn’t Beligto. And the e-mail I sent to his address instantly bounced back.
Now what? Ten years ago, I’d have been out of options. But now, I realized I could search for Beligto on Facebook. Within minutes, I found him, though judging from his page he was an infrequent user of the site. I sent him a friend request and private message, including my cell phone number, and then Oleg, Sveta, Alyosha, and I settled in for dinner and another night of poker.[5]
All day long, Oleg and Sveta had been talking about how excited they were to drink beer tonight. I couldn’t figure out why this was such a special event; what was so extraordinary about having beer? And for that matter, why was I the only person who seemed to have suffered any ill effects from the rivers of vodka we’d consumed the night before? These people really loved to get their drink on, which in Russia was saying something.
Sveta laid the table with homemade pizza, leftover chicken, and sliced smoked fish, an ideal array of salty foods to accompany this greatly anticipated beer. Oleg put five liter-sized bottles on the table: four Heinekens, and one bottle of something called “Red Dragon rice beer.” This was his favorite, though apparently nobody else liked it.
Then, Oleg fetched two of the largest beer steins I have ever seen. They were from Germany, in the shape of boots, and each one held enough beer to drown a good-sized squirrel. He poured a bottle of Heineken into the first, and the liquid came up to about the boot’s ankle. He emptied another bottle into the second boot and gave it to Sveta, and when we toasted and started to drink, the curve in the steins caused a loud sloshing sound to emanate from the toe: sploosh-sploosh-sploosh.
“Let’s eat!” Sveta said. “I want to play poker.” We quickly wolfed down some pizza, then moved the plates to the side so we could get to the game. The next hour was a riot of clattering poker chips, sploosh-sploosh-sploosh, and byoorn and tyoorn! But as the evening wore on, with no word from Beligto, I could see Oleg’s brow starting to furrow. We began talking about what other options we had for finding him.
“How about vKontakte?” Alyosha asked. Of course! This was the most popular Russian social media site—the Russian Facebook, as it were. Alyosha was active on the site, so we paused the poker game so he could search for Beligto. After a moment, he turned the laptop screen toward me. “Is this him?” he asked, showing me a photo of a square-jawed young Buryat man with close-cropped hair. “Yes!” I said. Alyosha sent him a private message that included my cell phone number—and about an hour later, my phone rang. It was Beligto. He gave me his father’s cell phone number, and that’s how I was able to let the farmer know I was coming.
I couldn’t help but compare this to our adventure 20 years ago, when Gary and I had ventured into the countryside with nothing more than that letter handwritten in Buryat. Social media and cell phones had truly changed everything, even in the most remote places on earth—places like the tiny village of Galtai.
SIX
Galtai: Slaughter and Feast
Buyanto Tsydypov was in his white Volga sedan, driving along a dirt road outside Galtai on a bright September morning in 1995, when he suddenly whipped the steering wheel to the right. In the backseat, I flopped over onto Gary, and as we bumped along through a grassy field, I wondered where we were headed.
The field was vast and rolling, the sky an endless canopy of blue. Although the grass we were racing over was more scrubby than lush, there was a rough beauty to the untouched landscape. In the distance, sheep grazed on a hillside, and as we approached, Buyanto coasted to a stop and turned off the engine to avoid scaring them away. “Let’s go,” he said to the man in the passenger seat, his brother-in-law Zhinat-Dorgo. The two of them got out of the car and began walking slowly toward the flock.
Suddenly, they broke into a run. Buyanto charged toward a young sheep as Zhinat-Dorgo skirted the edge of the flock, trying to keep it from scattering. For a few exhilarating minutes, Gary and I watched the men maneuver and dodge among the animals, finally corralling the one they wanted. Buyanto, a sturdily built 33-year-old, grabbed the sheep around its neck and wrestled it to the ground, while Zhinat-Dorgo hustled over with a rope. Working as one, the men tied the sheep’s feet, immobilizing it. Then Zhinat-Dorgo lifted it up and carried it to the car, as Buyanto popped the trunk. I watched with mouth agape as he tossed the animal in the trunk and slammed it shut. “Let’s go!” Buyanto said, for the second time in ten minutes—but this time, he was smiling proudly.
5
I wasn’t keen on having the farmer’s son stumble across photos of my big gay wedding, but it was too late to worry about that. Also, for as nervous as I’d been at the beginning of the trip, now I pretty much expected everyone in Russia to parrot some variation of the line, “I’m OK with it, but don’t tell anybody else.”