Arriving the next morning, I saw to my relief that Pavlov looked the same as, if not better than, he had in 2005. He appeared to have lost weight, and he smiled brightly as he handed me a long-stemmed rose. We headed off the metro speaking English together, though he struggled to come up with words. I offered to speak Russian, but he said he wanted the practice. So we chatted amiably, if slowly, on the metro, and by the time we arrived at the Krishna temple I was feeling at ease with him.
Arriving at the temple, he said, “Hey, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, asking if you had a husband.”
“Don’t worry!” I replied, smiling. “Let me explain: I am married, but I don’t have a husband. I’m married to a woman.”
Pavlov looked stunned, cocking his head to one side. “Wow, OK,” he finally said. “So… who’s the man?”
Now I was stunned. Had he misunderstood? “Neither of us,” I replied. “There is no man. We’re both women.”
“Yeah, but I mean, who’s the man in the relationship?”
Now I was annoyed. “Neither,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice. “That’s not how it works.”
“Ah, OK, OK,” he said, grasping my irritation. “So, let’s go in!” he chirped. He held the door for me, and we entered the lobby of the temple.
Of all the people I’d worried about telling on this trip, Pavlov hadn’t been one of them. As a jazz-funk musician, and a person who’d demonstrated plenty of openness to new ideas, he seemed like the kind of guy who’d be chill about it. I was dismayed, but also realized I’d made an unfair calculation. Why should I assume that a person who’s grown up in an anti-gay society, who may or may not know any openly gay people himself, will automatically be accepting of it?
We took off our coats and shoes and headed into the main part of the temple. He walked me around, showing me the statue of the Swami and offering me some kind of milky liquid meant to purify my system, which I declined. Then he walked me into a small side room, where the special ceremony was about to begin.
The room was filled with young women in colorful, flowing skirts, many of them wearing scarves as head coverings. They sat in a circle around a low, round table laden with trays of apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes. Pavlov, dressed in a bright yellow Hugo Boss shirt and yellow knit hat, and wearing round glasses with no lenses in them (a fashion choice, he said), sat in a corner behind the women. Apart from Pavlov, there was one other man in the room, a young, silver-haired guru in a beige robe, wearing a string of beads around his neck and a long thin braid down his back.
I sat down cross-legged among the women, and the guru opened the service by gesturing to Pavlov. “How many years ago was it?” he asked. “Seven?”
“It was sixteen years ago,” Pavlov replied, then pressed his hands together in a prayerful pose.
“Sixteen years!” the guru announced, shaking his head in wonder. “Sixteen years ago, this man was hit by a bus in Thailand. He was almost killed, but we prayed for him here, and now look! He is healthy.” Pavlov smiled and nodded his head, as the women pressed their hands together. He’d told me in 2005 that he credited Krishna for his recovery, and it was clear that this was taken as truth at the temple too.
The guru starting chanting, singing prayers from a book. He lit a fire in a square bowl on the table, and every few minutes he tossed on a spoonful of oil, causing it to flare dramatically. Each woman had been given a metal bowl filled with seeds, and at periodic signals from the guru, we tossed handfuls onto the altar. I’d never been to a Krishna ceremony before, and I found the rhythmic chanting mesmerizing—all the more so because it was in Sanskrit, so I couldn’t understand a word of it. Staring into the fire, I found myself sliding into a more tranquil state than I’d been in for weeks.
I could have sat like that for hours, watching the fire leap and the seeds clatter onto the altar, but about ten minutes in, Pavlov took my arm and whispered, “They’re opening up the altar. Come see.”
When we’d entered the temple, a long curtain had obscured the main part of the sanctuary. But now, the curtain had been thrown open to reveal an ornately carved wooden altar, with colorful statues, portraits of the Swami, and a decorative wrought-metal screen with lotuses. Pavlov picked up a double-sided conga drum and started to play, while others joined in with chants and singing.
Pavlov had begun his musical career as a drummer, and his skills were apparent. For the next 20 minutes, he cast a rhythmic spell over the room as devotees prostrated themselves on the smooth wooden floor in front of the altar. He played with a fluidity and ease that belied the complicated rhythms he was producing, and as I watched him sway and chant, his eyes closed in apparent ecstasy, I could understand why he was so drawn to this place. His face was utterly relaxed, more so than I’d ever seen it.
After the services were over, we popped into the vegetarian café. Someone in the temple had handed Pavlov a coupon for two free lunches, so we went through the cafeteria line and got our meals: beet salad, tomato soup, stewed chickpeas, and fruit compote. As we sat at a table, Pavlov piped up, “Priyatnovo appetita!”—bon appétit, in Russian. “Do you know this phrase?” he asked. It was as if he’d already forgotten that I speak Russian.
We talked for an hour over lunch, but whenever I asked about his life now, he kept returning to the past; he never seemed to tire of talking about Zvuki Mu, Brian Eno, and the events of the eighties and nineties. I kept trying to guide him into the present, as I was truly curious about whether he was performing and recording anymore, and if not, how he made a living. But nothing worked; he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, focus on the here and now.
Then a woman walked up and started whispering to him. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I heard his reply: “I wish I could help you, sister. But I can’t. I’m in the same situation, haven’t worked in six months.”
Aha, I thought. Perhaps this was why he didn’t want to talk about the present. I felt bad for having pressed him, and decided to back off the questioning. And just like that, he brought it up himself.
He told me that six months ago, his Funky Time radio show had lost its sponsor, the audio company Sennheiser. “We’ve been searching for a new sponsor, but they’re hard to find,” he said. “But I have some meetings set up.” He also told me that the Intel gig had ended a few years ago, but that he was continuing to play music and work as a DJ. And then he turned back to the digressions of earlier, going on a long tangent about how he became a vegetarian, the perils of eating meat, and how I should purify my system if I wanted to have a long life.
At last, we finished lunch and walked to the metro. Looking for conversation, I brought up the unusual wallpaper he’d had in his living room back in 1995—a view of New York City’s Twin Towers at night. I asked if he still had it.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s still there.” Then he asked me where I’d been on September 11. I told him I was living in Washington, D.C., and that my then-girlfriend worked a few blocks from the Capitol building. At first, she hadn’t realized the gravity of the attacks, and I’d had to convince her to leave work and come home—which she’d had to do on foot, as all public transportation was shut down in the chaos. “It was a terrible day,” I told him, then added how depressed I’d felt for weeks afterward.
“I saw a documentary,” he began, and in a flash of dread, I knew what was coming. “It proved that it wasn’t bin Laden who brought down the towers. It was a plan by the American government…” I felt the air go out of me. Of all the difficult conversations I’d had with Russians on this trip, this was the one I simply couldn’t take. I could readily admit that I didn’t know exactly what was going on in Ukraine, and that I wasn’t an expert on Vladimir Putin or Kremlin politics or international relations. But this 9/11 truther stuff simply unhinged me.