The Smelly Season

Playing with reflections, mirrors and my own shade.

Suddenly it came – perhaps with the ‘wind of change’, comrades – making its way through the hot, stiff midday air, with a little help from a feeble, yet fresh brush of air, it reached my exceedingly sensitive nose and instantly I knew: it’s that time of the year again. According to the calendar it is known as ‘summer’, but in Russia we prefer to call things by their right names: the smelly season. And today, as this sweaty wave of aroma came upon me, I could not help but to ponder for a short while on the philosophy of personal hygiene a la Russe. During 70 years of Soviet Union, here they didn’t sell any deodorants [the first time I heard this I was shocked], they didn’t have washing machines, let alone detergent [once again, shocked], and most people lived in communal apartments, which meant having to share a bathroom with an average of 5 other people, making morning showers more a matter of luck then personal choice [this makes me feel bad for complaining about having shared showers with half of Asia – China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, check!]. If people here still smell like this now – with all of the sanitary luxuries of modern life mentioned above – then how did they smell 20 years ago? Though being a writer of a no means meager imagination, not even my mind can fathom the widths such an odor must have reached, the depths it must have crawled out of, the facial expressions it must have caused fellow passengers on the trolleybus to make… but then again, maybe not? Maybe there were no strained lips, no frowning noses on the public transport during the hottest days of May back in 1973? Sometimes it seems to me that Russians are immune to all stenches, good and bad alike. They relentlessly shower in J’adore Dior before stepping out of their house (seemingly obliviously to the fine and finite rules of perfume wear – to accent your own body odor, not to stain the walls). Their stomachs never turn upside down when they approach doors of the university dining hall, which is the very spot where I always asked myself one of the ‘cursed questions’: why did I choose a Russia – a country where everything reeks – when I have such a highly responsive and perceptive nose?

Come on, cut this country some slack! For Christ’s sake, they’re only just getting used to it! And don’t be so hard on other people – turn the other cheek (and your nose in the other direction)! After all, Russia smells a lot better now then she did when I first arrived.

Anyway, more importantly ‘the smelly season of 2008’ is finally coming together for me. I got letters of approval from both the Swedish Embassy in Moscow and the dean of my faculty back home at GU [Go, Slavic Languages, Go!] that I’m all set for taking three exams in Russian literature there on the 16th of June. I’m still not very well-prepared, though all I do is preparing for the exams, yet I am not disciplined at all, despite making a schedule for my preparations yesterday and swore to stick to it. I want to ace it, but I’m not really doing what I should be doing to ace it. I need to get up earlier in the morning, stop working so much and start going to the library and get my act together. I haven’t yet figured out how I’m going to get to Moscow, since I don’t have much time I figure I’ll just catch a flight, which is also cheaper [in the complex world we live in today] than taking the train.

Yesterday I went to the office of my favorite airline – Aeroflot *cough, cough* - and bought tickets home and back here. I’m flying out early on Monday the 30th of July, arriving in Stockholm in the afternoon. I hope I’ll get to spend the night at Malin’s new place in the capitol, before heading down to my family in Gothenburg on the 1st of July. We’re going to celebrate our joint July birthdays, and try not to think about how old we are…

On the 13th of July I’m off to the states. My plans for this trip are grand. I’m flying into Los Angeles with my father, where we’ll go visit my friend AnnMarie a couple of days before her wedding [which is July 19th and I’m going to be one of her bridesmaids] and hopefully do some wine-testing for my birthday on the 16th. My father then leaves me and I’ll go to see Betsy in San Francisco. There I’ll have a couple of days channeling Allen Ginsberg and visiting all the books store I can eat and enjoying her intelligent company, before going north to see Aaron in Portland. Maybe he’ll pick me up in San Francisco, maybe I’ll take the bus there. I’m going to stay with him for a whole week – yay! – and we’ll go to Seattle for the weekend. Then I’ll hopefully be flying from Portland so that I can be on time in Los Angeles for my flight back across the ocean on the 30th of July. Not only am I going to see many of my friends and relax and spend time with my father, but I have another reason for being so psyched about this trip, too – I’m going to buy one of them red VAIO Sony laptops with 250 GB for a little more than a 1000$!

Between the 8th and the 16th of August I’ll be taking part in the course for teachers of Swedish as a foreign language abroad at a school on Tjörn, an island located not far from Gothenburg. I recieved a mail about it from the Swedish Institute two months ago, and I applied straight away, because I think it will be an awesome way for me to actually become more like a *real* teacher, but I didn’t think I would actually get an invitation, since it’s for free with only a limited amount of places. A couple of the students from my Swedish group here at Ural State will be attending this school’s summer course for foreign students of Swedish at the same time, which will be even greater. I hope I can talk my mother into letting me have them over for dinner in Gothenburg [they’re very kind, mother, good kids, and they speak Swedish too! You can have det goda samtalet with them all the way, I promise!].

On September 6th I have two finals in Russian grammar. God, I hope I get the time I need to prepare.

On September 10th I’m flying back to Yekaterinburg, back to Russia and everything starts over again – with one tiny little change: I will be in the Master’s Program, I’ll be teaching two more Swedish classes and I won’t have to worry about preparing for any exams at Gothenburg University anymore because I will have graduated!

If I keep my tongue in the right mouth, that is…

Mother

The brave woman washing her car on a lost highway somewhere in Ukraine during the summer of 2004 on the picture above is none other than my mother, aka the coolest, the best, the most kick-ass woman on the face of the Earth. And she now has a blog to prove it to the world with: http://www.tantbastant.blogspot.com/ Sadly it is in Swedish, thus cutting the maximum toll of readers to a staggering 10 millions... Anyway, if you can then - enjoy, comrades, enjoy!

Message

I will die without you.

I’m feeling emotional, comrades. I watched a trailer for the movie “The Kite-Runner” [based on an amazing book that opened my eyes on Afghanistan and kite-running] and I cried. I watched the Sean Penn written & directed movie “Into the Wild” and I cried. I took a walk in the park yesterday evening and listened to Mariah Carey’s “I Wish You Well” and thought of a person who was my closest friend in childhood but mistreated me and I cried. I thought she was my friend on Facebook but it turned out she wasn’t and then I added her only because I wanted to have the opportunity to delete her from my friends list, but now it seems to me that we were friends on Facebook before but she was way ahead of me and deleted me from her list first. ‘Pray for those who mistreat you’ sounds very easy when you’re not doing it and ‘turn the other cheek’ something you can only take lightly until you’ve turned cheeks so long you’ve run out of them. I have given this some serious thought and come to the conclusion that I must forgive her once and for all because now it no longer has anything to do with her, but the wound she left inside of me. She was the cause for my inferiority complex, but since she hasn’t been around for at least two whole years to push me down, to ruin my self-esteem, then why am I still feeling like I don’t deserve anything of all the good things I’ve got in my life? Why am I still scared when people like me and tell me that they like me that they’re only liking me because they don’t know who I REALLY am, and if they knew then they wouldn’t like me at all? I got to deal with this. And helping me are the words: ‘If you want God to forgive you, first you must forgive those who have sinned against you’. And it hurts and it takes and it grabs and it doesn’t let go and it holds on and it bites and I don’t understand and I want to scream and I want to get back and I want her to feel my pain (see the thing about Facebook above) and I want to… just be free. Get rid of her once and for all. I never want to see her again. With God I can do it. Jesus, you’re always there for me.

And yet my number one in the Holy Trinity was, is and remains The Holy Spirit.

Tolstoy said: God! Jesus?

Dostoevsky said: God? Jesus!

I say: God, Jesus? Holy Spirit!

In other news, me and my more handsome half have decided to move in together starting September 2008. At first I was very excited. I even searched for a suitable marital bed at IKEA. I think I found the perfect one. Now I’m in panic. Everyone else seems to deal with relationships so easy, everyone’s getting married with no issues at all, but I’ve got serious problems with letting people into my life and space and time, even after such a long relationship. I need privacy and I can’t cook and in general I suspect I am big misfit and unfit for society though I can hide this under my surface of respectability and with a little help from my high IQ. Anyway. I’ve got lots to deal with. It’s just a little too much right now. On the emotional level, you know, comrades. Of course you do. You wouldn’t be comrades if you didn’t, right?

Whoa!

Though this picture was taken on 'Victory' Friday in Nizhny Tagil, I had just as good a reason to grin as wide and happily today - my mother told me that I recieved the scholarship from Svenska Institutet [The Swedish Institute]! They're giving me a whopping 85 000 Swedish crowns for my next Academic year of 08/09 at Ural State, that's 13 833, 51 US dollars, 9 027,67 Euros or 317 875,84 Russian roubles. Wow - this means so much to me I don't even know where to begin, but I guess the main thing is that I'll be staying a fifth year in Russia!

Victory

World of Climate. Nizhny Tagil. No further comments.

Yes, on Friday the 9th of May it was my favorite [Russian?] holiday of the year – Victory Day! I bet there’s no need for me to further explain my inclination for patriotic speeches or why binging on all sorts of alcohol from beer to cheap perfume in public places attracts me so. Me & my more handsome half left Yekat to spend the non-working-non-study-day in his hometown of Nizhny Tagil, two hours up north, where we watched military parades on TV, sipped on red wine, ate cake, listened to the president of Russia, Dimochka, and his pal Vovochka, discussing wars past and wars future. On TV they showed nothing but good old Soviet war movies and good new Russian war movies while on the streets the ‘provincial youth’ [youth in the Russian province being a diffuse age between 15 and 45] were enjoying themselves on the day off with a wide array of spirit fluids and a heavy dose of tobacco smog. I decided to celebrate this year’s Victory Day, my fourth such holiday within the Russian Federation [before coming to this country I had no idea there even existed such a day, but this was due to me being Swedish and therefore I should be forgiven this ignorance], in a very special way – by going to the hospital. If you know me, which perhaps not all my comrades reading this do, but those who do they really know that I am terrible afraid and awfully scared of hospitals and doctors and nurses and practically every kind of disease as well as body parts in general, external as well as internal. I can’t deal with blood and I can’t deal with the smell outside of hospitals and I can’t even look at the veins of strangers without feeling nauseous. That’s why I decided to celebrate my favorite holiday by doing my least favorite thing in the world – going to the hospital for a medical check-up. Actually it wasn’t anything like it sounds. It didn’t have anything to do with the tanks on Red Square. Sorry. On Wednesday a weird, heavy headache began inside my head, and on Thursday morning, when I had to get up at six in order to get ready to give three English lectures on the Faculty of International Relations at Ural State, it was so bad that I almost threw up. But I gave the lectures, and I did pretty well, despite the headache [it’s not a new job of mine or anything like, I’m just filling in two weeks for Polina, a teacher of English who had to go to the states for a conference], but the real hideous thing began at night on Thursday, when I and my more handsome half arrived in Nizhny Tagil. My neck hurt in a strange way, kind of like a suffocating feeling, and I had a hunch that it was probably due to low blood pressure, or something like it, but I wasn’t completely sure. All I knew was that I was afraid to go to sleep because I might not be able to breathe in my sleep. Anyway, on Friday night I convinced his mother and sister that I needed to see a doctor – a very, very odd decision being me – because I didn’t know what else to do. We went to a hospital which didn’t really look like a hospital at all, but more like a couple of worn-down rooms with green/white painted walls and the same white sheets as in the dorm where I live, and this helped to calm me down. We arrived and I explained my ailment to them and their first question was: “Is she pregnant?”, to which my more handsome half answered: “I hope not!”

Anyway, if nothing else at least I got the chance to lay naked in the satme room as a drunkard just picked up from the street because he had suffered a hard hit against his head. They gave me a cautious check-up while he refused to say his name and I swear that the guard protecting him tried to catch a glimpse up my thighs several times and the oldest nurse told me my shoulders were “broad and strong” while the other nurses tried their best at understanding my Swedish passport. In the end they decided that my blood pressure was low and my heartbeat irregular [funny enough, the doctor I saw the day after said my blood pressure was perfectly normal and my heartbeat too], and that I am likely to be suffering from osteochondros which seems to make no sense to me at all after reading up on this disease in Swedish and English. My neck still hurts, though not as bad, and the headache is not as heavy as it was before, but it’s still there. I don’t know what it might be, but I’ve decided to go to a private hospital here in Yekat on Monday, since my father offered to pay for it. I might even take the time to ask about those strange white spots I have in my eyes, and the occasional ‘dim’ that I sometimes get in them.

Back to victory, though. It was a victory for me on Victory Day because I didn’t cry when I had to give blood from my finger for the blood test. I did cry when they wanted to put a shot up my ass, but never mind – baby steps, baby steps, comrades.

Also I have downloaded all of John Mayer’s albums and he has the sexiest voice I can’t help it I get almost an orgasm no male musical artist has ever had this effect on me before, on the way to Nizhny Tagil I rode the marshutka with my more handsome half and I got a double-orgasm because I was listening to John Mayer with my head in my more handsome half’s lap.

Gogol

Picture taken today, May 7th 2008, in Зелёная роща. I'm still trying to get over my fascination with the color green after more than six months of only nothing but grey in Russia. The other day I was reading a biography about Gogol and it is obvious that I must have been him in a former life. The likeness between me and Nikolaj is striking and terrifying and disturbing to the point of chills down my spine - this must mean that I will also end up burning the sequel of my masterpiece in a foreign land, misunderstood by each and all, while still a virgin and disgusted by the opposite sex... oh wait, that last thing sets us apart, and might be the one thing capable of saving me from the same tragic fate as the unique 'Ukranian' writer.

Tomsk

Whose nose did I get a hold of on the shores of Tom’ [the river that gave the city of Tomsk its name]? Why it’s everyone’s favorite short story & play writer Anton Pavlovitj Chekhov!

It is really healthy to take a look at your life from someone else’s perspective every now and then. My much needed week away from Yekat, with one day in Novosibirsk, three days in Tomsk and one day in Omsk, was just that for me – a look at my own life from many other people’s perspective. I don’t want to jinx anything but I have to admit – I’m really happy with where I am right now in life, and what’s more: I’m really happy with who I am right now, with the person I’ve become through all of this, with the help of all this, despite of all this. Of course I was glad to be back in Siberia only because it is just that – SIBERIA! – the one place not only in Russia but on this planet Earth that makes my soul smile [I can actually feel my soul smile in Siberia, I know it makes no sense, but that’s sometimes the way it is – senseless but still smiling], but it was more than just being back there, where I used to live. It was something new, something altogether now and here. I hadn’t been in Novosibirsk since the summer of 2005, the city where I smoked my first joint and confessed my first love [not at the same time, thank God], and though much has since changed, I was surprised at finding my way around the city center so easily during the early morning hours. The streets in Siberia are still wide and straight with grey, soft asphalt, the buildings are low and painted in bright pastel colors, nothing opens before eight in the morning and the young boys from Tajikistan cleaning the streets at dawn don’t whistle after you though you can see it in their eyes – that they would had you been walking down their Lenin Prospect in Dushanbe.

I caught the five hour commute train from Novosibirsk to Tomsk and arrived there at about 10 at night. It was dark outside when the train stopped and my cell phone didn’t have any connection [I have the crappiest company in Russia – Utel (Uralskaya Telekompaniya) – they cut me off after Ishim and I was without connection for one week… which was rather good actually] so I had to borrow the phone of another lost soul waiting outside the central station where there was but a marshutka yet not even one single taxi. Yes. Small town [population Tomsk: half a million] in Siberia: what else do you except? After all I succeeded in getting on the marshutka and making my way into town, where Nina, my professor Aleksey’s friend with whom I was going to stay, met up with me. Nina turned out to be a middle aged very determined and even more successful architect married to another one of Aleksey’s friends [though he was away on a business trip while I was there] without kids but with a strange looking tiny dog to make up for it. She frowned a little when I told her that I was a vegetarian, but other than that we got along great and she took care of me like any mother would have – she cooked breakfast for me in the morning, sneaked a snack and a fruit into my bag for the day and then served me dinner when I got back in the evening. She and her husband have an amazing apartment in the center of Tomsk with windows looking out over the river, with an open fire place and the first decent looking kitchen I’ve seen in Russia so far [and that’s not saying a little].

The “Review of Scientific and Artistic Works by Foreign Students Studying in Russian Institutions of Higher Education” as the whole thing for which reason it was that I traveled 27 hours by train eastwards, was way better than I had ever expected. It surprised me in a highly pleasant way, comrades. Mostly I have the rather negative impression that nobody [okay, a few, but not very many] foreign students in Russia are serious about their studies, and more often than not it seems to me that they’re either here because their parents want them to or because they want to make crazy money one day and what better place to start that crazy money-making machine but in Russia? Now it is clear to me that many students in Russia take their studies seriously, and that there are people here who want to achieve more than just mastering the six cases so as to be able to sell tofu on the Chinese market outside Krasnodar. The first day, on Monday, all of the works sent into the competition was put up on show in a gorgeous building called ‘International Culture Center’ and there were so many people there, including a couple of TV channels and kids from 42 countries and 52 universities – I was the only from Europe and, as it seems to me, the only natural blonde in the room. A cute boy drenched in perfume from Tunisia tried his best to pick me up and take me out but I proved unflirtable that day, and sneaked away from him and everything else after two hours to go to another university [the review was held at the Tomsk Polytechnic University], Tomsk State, where Magnus, my professor back home, had hooked me up with his friend Olga Mazajeva, a professor of philosophy.

And that’s when things started to get interesting!

First off all – walking around the campus of Tomsk State, though the weather that day was far from at its best [it snowed in the morning!], I fell in love with it all, everything was so beautiful, so… Siberian cosyish. It is the oldest university in Siberia, and one of the best universities in Russia, but what’s more – it’s housed in a couple of big, amazing white buildings on a large campus made up several small parks in between, and it’s nothing like the cramped campus-lacking building of Ural State along Lenin Prospect in Yekat. It took me a while to find the philosophy faculty, but it didn’t matter, it felt so great to just be able to slowly walk around the campus and enjoy everything, including all the bright faces and all the kind people who helped by showing me the way. Siberia is the nicest part of Russia. The first time I asked for directions, an old lady wished me ‘all the best!’ and the second time a young man went straight to using the informal «ты» instead of the official form «вы», which is simply unheard of in the Urals. I did get acquainted with Olga, a very nice and serious woman, and not only with her, but with two of the faculty’s aspirants and three of the masters students. Dina and Kirill, the two aspirants, showed me the town for two days and followed me around with one of the most impressive cameras I’ve come across so far in life, something that resulted in an extensive series of high quality pictures of a red clad me wandering around the streets of Tomsk. I look like very grown-up and very official, though it shows that I most of the time was rather funny [mostly by the smiles on the faces of the people around me, but then again, I am known for making jokes most of the time]. Both of them were really nice and interesting people, but since Kirill was in charge of the camera, I got closer to Dina than to him. And she gave me the most far-reaching look at my life from a different perspective that I’ve ever received. When we parted ways on Tuesday evening, she said to me: «В тебе мне особенно понравилось то, что ты живешь тем, что душа просит». I never thought of it that way, because for me it would be strange not to, but I guess she’s right; it’s not something that everyone can or even wants to do. I don’t know how to explain it, and maybe I shouldn’t even explain it, just like there’s no reason for anyone to know what was in the letter that I wrote when I found that house in Novosibirsk and that I stuck it in [her] door and that I didn’t leave a number or even my e-mail but I just left it at that… I just wanted to say thank you. And in Tomsk I can’t explain what it was about meeting Dina that made me realize so much about myself and my life, I just felt what I felt and for that I am thankful to her.

On Tuesday morning I attended the conference and did a crappy report about my thesis on Dostoevsky. But it didn’t really matter that it turned out bad because the best thing about the conference wasn’t the fact that I entered the stage, as it usually is not only for me but for everyone involved [haha], but the fact that I got to listen to so many intelligent foreign students and their inspiring reports. There are some truly brilliant people out there and it got me all worked up for about three hours – I really want to achieve more in the academic sphere! Then I went with Kirill and Dina to the NKVD museum of political repressions and that was terrifying and interesting, as I had hoped it would be. Later in the afternoon we went together to the closing prize ceremony where my crappy report received third prize and where my thesis on Dostoevsky got an award for «проявленный интерес к русской культуре».

My last day in Tomsk, on Wednesday, I went with three Italian girls, one Austrian chick, a Korean boy, a student from Switzerland and his parents with two of their friends to visit the famous artist Leontij Usov, who made the Chekhov statue that I’m pictured with above. He’s a very, very talented man, a painfully gifted soul, with so many wonderful creations, but oh so sold-out! It hurt me to see that, to see someone with a gift waste it to make money, though of course I must try to understand – everyone’s got to live, and art doesn’t really sell when it’s from the depths of your soul and not ordered by a millionaire no matter how you bend or turn or flip it around.

Early in the morning on the first of May I left Tomsk and the ground outside my window as I watched Siberia fly past was covered with snow… strange! Even for these northern areas. And now it’s spring again. I arrived late at night the same day in Omsk, after taking two commute trains [the worst way of seeing Siberia, trust me, but also the cheapest way, take my word for it], and went straight to Galina’s apartment. I hadn’t seen her since September 2006. I’ve changed a lot, but she’s changed even more. It was so great to see her again… But what happened between us in her apartment after midnight is only between the two of us, and I won’t get into that. Because it doesn’t matter. I won’t write it down anywhere, not even in my dairy or on my notebooks on in a poem, I’ll hope I’ll forget, and that she won’t remember. I didn’t put down one single sentence about our last meeting, and yet I remember all of it as if it had been yesterday. Isn’t it strange when it’s like that? And I know I will remember what happened in Omsk a couple of days ago though nothing really happened at all, there was only silence and her words and my words and what seemed like two old friends only sharing a bottle of red wine after not seeing each other for almost two years – and yet, in what wasn’t said, in what wasn’t done, that’s where the real story is. That’s what really happened – what didn’t happen and what will never happen. That’s what it is – what is not and will never be. We were born on the same day of the same month in the same year and I don’t think two people can ever share a stronger bond than that. Though I guess you could try, comrades.

I came back at 5.30 on Saturday morning and was met at the train station by my more handsome half. He’s family. And that’s why it was coming home. I came home. Right now this is home – this, right here, Yekat, like it or not, want it or not, but it is what it is – home…