Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

A month has passed since I landed here, I said to myself, and it’s time that I get in touch with my mother’s carer. When I was in Montreal I called every few days and always got the same answer. There had been no change in her condition. A phone call to Israel from St Petersburg required me to follow a route along which I could spot anybody following me; an anonymous conversation from a phone booth nowhere near where I lived or worked; and a quick exit route I could use before a team of snoops from counter-espionage were summoned by their eavesdroppers who’d have traced a suspicious conversation. I assumed that calls to Israel would be regarded as suspicious. I didn’t call.

The thought that Orit would have loved this beautiful city much more than she at first loved Beijing crossed my mind just once. Crossed, and never returned. Orit too began to be a distant and ethereal memory.

IPREPARED BREAKFASTS in my apartment. Most of the products I was used to were to be found in the little neighbourhood grocery shop–though they looked somewhat different and their taste wasn’t the same. Now and then I was surprised by packaging that made me think it contained a certain item only to discover later that it was something else altogether. Before the outward journey I had taken a quick course in Russian. But whoever thought that I was in a good enough state to acquire a new language was sadly mistaken. I continued to be confused by the interchange between Latin and Cyrillic letters which, though written identically, sounded entirely different. Nor was I able to memorize the sounds of various letters which only a combination of characters in English or Hebrew sounded close enough, such as the ‘che’ for Tchaikovsky or ‘tse’, or ‘shche’. Not to mention the letters that look like the numbers 6 and 61, the first softening the letter preceding it, the second giving it a harder sound. Only the ‘sh’ that looked and sounded as if it had come straight from Hebrew seemed ‘user friendly’ to me.

The elderly couple who owned the grocery shop didn’t know a word of English and despite their show of geniality and their desire to assist a new customer, the help I got was fairly limited. The English–Russian phrase book was only a very partial solution to my inability to communicate.

The small shop mainly stocked beers, wines and bottles of vodka. In a corner was a counter with fruit and vegetables but my focus was on the huge selection of sausages and salted fish. Now that I didn’t have to speak to anyone, certainly not kiss anyone–women included–my morning menu had changed and consisted of an omelette with various kinds of sausage in it, salt fish, and a rye bread that was both full grain and very filling.

After this satisfying meal I would make my way by metro and foot–and on particularly cold or rainy days by taxi–to my office. I loved the metro ride, enjoyed looking at the passengers. Most of them didn’t have the Slavic faces I was expecting to find and there were even some dark-skinned people from the Republics of the former Soviet Union. I couldn’t but notice the civilized behavioural code, the outcome of either an effective education or of a totalitarian regime. People talked quietly, boarded the train in silence, got out calmly, everyone minding their own business. Young people gave up seats to their elders and the handicapped, a courtesy I too benefitted from when a young woman got up and offered me her place–a gesture I found to be a tolerable indignity.

I preferred not to change trains and not to wander around the metro’s tunnels. Though in the army I had been quite a good navigator, in St Petersburg’s labyrinth of subterranean passageways I discovered that these skills of mine were worthless. I was never able correctly to guess the direction from which a train would be coming or its route of departure, where to go in order to catch the other line, or on which side of the road I would find myself after climbing up from the depths of the earth. The signposting in Russian hardly helped. Instead, I got out at the city centre station and walked from there to the office. But with the arrival of autumn and the sharp drop in temperature, I discovered that the distance between Nevsky station–on the blue line 2 from my house–and the office, made walking far too painful an experience.

Though the heating in the office building worked, it wasn’t enough to warm up the frozen expanse. I switched on a heater to thaw my feet, lit the kettle, and made myself a cup of coffee to thaw my insides; there were days when I didn’t even take off my coat.

Only once I’d got a bit warmer did I work at the computer. Getting on line took two or three attempts and when I finally made it I began to search for tenders in various places that were of interest to us, leafed through catalogues, requested and offered prices. Three tenders and three price bids a day was the target I set for myself. No less. We request your best possible offer for a heating system, I wrote when a Russian firm caught my eye in a catalogue or on the internet. And when the offer was received I forwarded it to merchants all over the world and added a very small percentage in commission which I was also prepared to waive if the customer pressed.

I made small deals with Russian manufacturers, bought goods from them and sold these on, mostly to buyers in the ex-Soviet Republics. After a while I began to participate in tenders for goods in Western countries as well. I was also willing to absorb a small loss so long as the books showed a profit and I could demonstrate to the authorities in Russia that my stay in the country was justifiable and even rewarding. Now and again I also managed to make genuinely profitable deals and got a real kick from doing so.

I got to my office at nine in the morning and counted the minutes until midday when lunch began to be served in the restaurants. I often ate at the Babi Saabi, a Japanese eatery close to my office which attracted very few tourists. The food was to my liking and after the futile hours in the office on my own I was happy to see live faces. It was also warmer there than in the office. I didn’t talk to the other diners. From time to time I spotted Canadians there, but nobody knew anything about the national identity of my cover story and I didn’t feel the need to either strengthen it or put it to the test.

Further down the street was an Italian restaurant. Once I was eating there when a group of Israelis came in. I barricaded myself behind the pages of a magazine, fearful that someone might recognize me. Of course I would have denied being me but then I would be just like the troubled couple who were counselled to have a romantic meal and took the recommendation a step too far: her knife fell to the floor, she bent to pick it up, and he jumped on her. The counselling worked for them, but they’ll never go back to that restaurant.

Returning to my cold office I would usually find that at most just one email had arrived in my absence.

I idled away the time till four or five in the afternoon, and then went back home. There too the heating wasn’t particularly effective, and I was forced to kill quite a few hours in the cold before going to bed and lulling myself to sleep. Mostly I spent this time reading or in a small, neighbourhood restaurant on the far corner of my street where I regularly had my evening meals.

The restaurant, it seemed, was once the living room of its proprietor’s home. Now a door linked the small kitchen at the back of the restaurant to their apartment. There were only six tables, lined up in two rows, and I usually sat at the innermost table, away from the window from which a cold draft blew in.

The proprietor, cook, and waitress, was Mrs Vashkirova, a big-bosomed lady who, for my own amusement I nickname La vache qui rit, an allusion to the laughing cow that appears on a range of French cheese products. I hadn’t yet understood the phenomenon which gave rise to so many Russian women having such large bosoms whereas their sisters in northern European countries are for the most part relatively flat-chested. Vashkirova succeeded in learning my culinary preferences by trial and error. It took about ten evening meals for me to sample the majority of the dishes on offer. With the little Russian at my command I managed, during this period, to ask for more salt and less oil, as well as some other refinements until finally my desired fusion of ingredients was achieved. Because the dishes were prepared especially for me, I waited longer than the other customers, a delay that suited me fine. I found it pleasant to sit in the cozy restaurant, redolent of cooking aromas which were far removed from the smells that used to come out of my mother’s kitchen. The place was generally half empty, so no one was bothered by my occupying a table for a good hour or more. I even began to bring the book I happened to be reading to the place.