Arina says many of her friends think it’s strange that she, as a woman living alone, takes on couchsurfing guests. She begins playing around with a switchblade with great skill. “They ask me whether I’m afraid. Of rape and such things. I have this knife: once across the forehead and you can’t see for the blood. Once through the hollow of the knee or along the inside of the elbow and you can’t move.” She puts the weapon aside, cracks her knuckles, and rummages the next Winston out of the pack. “Want one?”
In superstitious Russia, a sign of the near future, with your fortune depending on the body part affected. The nose: An impending drinking session. The soles of the feet: A journey is in the cards. Lips: You will soon be kissed. Left hand: Money is on the way. Right hand: You will soon meet a friend. Right eye: Tears are coming up. Left eye: You have reasons to be cheerful. Throat: A celebration is approaching. Or there’s going to be a fight. Or both. And if everything itches at the same time: Go to a doctor.
Discreetly trying to change the topic, I ask her why she has a sign on the kitchen wall that says “I don’t want to work” in German. Arina says she finds German a melodious language. She even had a Nietzsche quotation tattooed on her back: “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” She read Thus Spoke Zarathustra for the first time when she was fourteen and it has influenced her to this day.
She is astonished as I tell her that many of my fellow Germans are not so enthusiastic about the sound of their mother tongue. “You mean like in those videos with ‘butterfly’ and ‘science’?” She is referring to the popular YouTube series German Versus Other Languages, where people from different countries pronounce various words. At the end there’s always a German wearing a traditional hat, with a stein of wheat beer in front of him and the harsh tone of a sergeant major, as though he’s spitting out the words:
“Papillon.”
“Butterfly.”
“Farfalla.”
“Mariposa.”
“SCHMETTTERRRLING!”
The Russian language can be both mariposa and Schmetterling, as Arina demonstrates with two ad-lib renditions of poems. The first sounds soft and cajoling (“Shagane, Oh My, Shagane” by Sergei Yesenin), the second hard and staccato (“And Could You?” by Vladimir Mayakovsky).
Russian sounds meanest in the vernacular known as mat, which is extensively used by Leningrad, the band mentioned earlier. I get a small but intensive course from Arina, the contents of which I won’t repeat here word for word in deference to sensitive Russian readers. As my teacher was highly skilled in graphically describing the right situation for using each word, here, at least, is a short extract: “Imagine a friend calls you up and asks you whether you can remember the incredibly ugly girl at the last party. You say, sure, and he says ‘I got her pregnant.’ The only possible reply is ‘Pizdets!’” The word means something like “catastrophe” or “wow, fucked up” but is derived from a vulgar term for a woman’s sexual organ.
For people who want who want to become more familiar with this linguistically not uninteresting universe of curses, I can recommend the Wikipedia entry “Mat (Russian profanity).” Here, we continue with castles and ballet.
Truth No. 10:
The Russian word for butterfly is babochka.
CITY OF BOOKS
THE SUBWAY TRAIN on Line 1 is completely adorned with books. As advertising for a literary festival, the illustrations on the car exteriors recreate the major attractions of the city using books: the Hermitage Museum, Kazan Cathedral, the Bronze Horseman. Inside the train, I get the impression that more people here read novels on paper to pass the time than in any other subway in the world. The number of smartphone typists and book readers seem to balance out.
At each stop the doors rumble open, passengers get off and on, and the distorted station announcements crackle over the internal loudspeakers. Some static humming is followed by a sudden moment of silence, as if the power has been cut, and for a second absolutely nothing happens. Two point eight million passengers experience this unusual moment of silence at every stop, every day. This short pause in the conveyor belt–like passenger transportation system deep below Europe’s fourth-largest megacity is so pleasant that once you’ve experienced it, you almost yearn for it during the ride.
From the stop at Nevsky Prospect I walk along a six-lane road of the same name toward the west. “Once you step onto the Prospect you immediately sense a certain fragrance of cheerful idleness,” wrote Nikolai Gogol 180 years ago, and this still applies today. “Even if you had important business, you’d probably forget it as soon as you stepped into the street.”[6]
The fragrance of idleness smells best in the spectacular Art Nouveau building of the delicatessen Yeliseev’s Food Hall, a paradise for fans of French pralines, caviar, and champagne. For the time being, however, you have to be a little careful at the cheese counter. Since the sanctions were enforced after the Crimean crisis, Russia, as a countermeasure, placed a ban on cheese from Europe. So the opulent displays of Terra del Gusto gorgonzola or Schönfeld Blue turn out to be not fine products of Italian or German cheese-makers, but Russian imitations at pretty high prices.
There are noticeably many tourists from China; for several years now, ever-increasing numbers have been visiting Russia. In the Polyanka souvenir shop, a busload of Far Easterners stock up on a busload of matryoshka dolls, while in the shop window, mechanical wooden bears with balalaikas get into the groove. Here, too, Gogol was right: “Peer less at the shop windows: the knickknacks displayed in them are beautiful but they smell of a terrible quantity of banknotes.”[7] At the end of his short story, rapture turns to disgust as the narrator concludes that everything on Nevsky Prospect is but lies and deception. For him the two-and-a-half-mile-long grand boulevard is a stage for all the facets of human falsity, a place where nothing is as it seems. At least as far as the cheese is concerned I have to agree with him.
I reach the Hermitage Museum, with its green-golden facade. In front of the building are groups with guides holding signs in the air displaying the names of cruise lines: Pullmantur 7, MCS 3, Pullmantur 14, Volga Dream 4. But for today, I skip Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy and Caravaggio’s Lute-Player and instead carry on along the banks of the Neva, on the other side of the museum. In front of a hydrofoil called Meteor 182, which looks like something out of a 1960s sci-fi movie, I meet up with Anna. I contacted her a few weeks previously by email and she promised to show me her two favorite places.
Russian humor has long featured a set of archetypal characters that are known to everyone: Poruchik Rzhevsky, a rude cavalry officer; Rabinovich, a cynical Russian Jew; and Vovochka, the equivalent of “Little Johnny”—a plain-speaking small boy. In the ’90s, another character was added to the list: the “New Russian,” a poorly educated, arrogant businessman who drives a black Mercedes S600 car and got rich under dubious circumstances. Example: The son of a New Russian complains to his father, “Everyone in my class takes the bus to school. I feel like a misfit in my Mercedes 600.” The dad replies: “Don’t worry, I’ll buy you a bus; then you can go to school like everyone else!”
6
Gogol, Nikolai. “Nevski Prospect.”
7
Gogol, Nikolai. “Nevsky Prospect.”