Madness! Hooliganery! Yorscht!

Madness! Hooliganery! YORSCHT!

My new American friends invited me to a concert on Friday night! Auktsion was playing, a new-jazz experimental group maintaining a steady reputation of awesome since the early eighties, with a special guest on the contrabass: the bassist whom I had drunkenly asked, in October of last year, if he would like to jam sometime. К сожалению, he said, Я очень занят.

The law students (Americans + 1 Il'ya, from Moscow) met me at the metro with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of beer, neither with caps, both juggled around the group. Matt had an umbrella; he twirled it in drunken arabesques and passersby gave us a wide berth. At the concert we danced and drank, offended our neighboring concert-goers and made friends with some, and grew thoroughly sauced as the night progressed. As I was standing talking to Matt and Will, a young man sidled up to us with a grin on his face. "Hello," he said, and we decided to become friends. This is Mitya: his English is well-thought, delicately accented, humorous and irreverent, full of surprising words. He is a translator; he makes puns and bi-lingual jokes. He plays the ukelele--"What? You play the ukelele? I play the violin!" Immediately we were all invited to jam with him and his friends on Palace Square after the concert, and we exchanged phone numbers.

The show ended; we trooped back to the metro. "Where are we going?" Natalie wailed. No time to explain--we dashed up the stairs, wreaked a brief tornado of havoc on my apartment, leaving it in shambles with my violin and accordion in hand. We searched for Mitya on Palace Square, found him sitting in a circle of friends above which hovered a giant, luminous white balloon. "He's a magician," Mitya explained, indicating the swarthy, elegant-looking fellow, dressed in a flowing white tunic and pants, who was maneuvering the balloon. We played Beirut and the Beatles, drunkenly out of tune, and I got in a fight with a saxaphonist who apparently plays on Palace Square every night; he didn't want to play with us, but we wanted to play with him.

The Americans began to droop, and fried with fatigue we said goodbye to Mitya and his troop, bought another bottle of champagne and some wine and limped back to my apartment. We climbed onto my roof to greet the sunrise, yelling at the dawn. As 5 in the morning drifted in, it found everyone asleep on the cool red metal of the roof, except for me and Il'ya, having a playful bi-lingual conversation about art and history and god-knows-what.

On Sunday night, Mitya called to invite me to another gathering of friends; they would meet to play music in the park, and "If I had time and a wish" I should join them. Monday I puttered around all day, just waiting for the evening. I went for a run, then bought some wine at Aromatniy Mir, to share with the musicians. I played violin and accordion all afternoon, hoping to make up for my awful drunken playing on Friday night. I lay in the sun at Usupovsky Sad, writing and reading and feeling my skin caramelize, and finally returned home, dressed, and hopped a bus to meet Mitya and his friends. Meet them I did, in the park on the University Embankment, all dressed cleanly and crisply, with moistly twinkling eyes and bright smiles and smoky voices, a ukelele and a guitar and a shaker made of a gin&tonic can filled with sand or pepper. We had all come prepared, and the music was lovely. We passed the bottle of wine, passed the guitar around, passed the violin even, and someone brought a satchel full of beer, and I slathered myself in lotion against the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears & ankles. Oh the evening! Melodies, harmonies, tunes familiar and strange, singing deep, joyful, mocking, sometimes quiet and heartfelt. When the repertoire dwindled we finally packed up our instruments as the sky was dimming, and walked along the embankment--to Palace Square! someone said. To the roof of my apartment! I quipped--and that's where the group parted--Volodya was going to the train station, back to Moscow, and everyone wanted to see him off. Mitya and I continued to my apartment to sit on the roof, and we drank pomegranate juice and ate olives straight from the container. We spoke both English and Russian and leaned back to look at the starless deepening sky. It was late; he had missed the last metro train and the bridges had already opened to allow naval traffic. I offered him my extra bed.

June 13th, Tuesday--I spent the day in a daze, exhausted and unenthusiastic. Woke up early, 7:30 AM, to Mitya fumbling with the lock on the door; got up to work my magic with the finicky device. I didn't try to go back to sleep, but instead made phone calls to the evening across the ocean. My voice was heavy with sleep, thick with regretted cigarettes and wine swigged from the bottle, my skin was crisping on the windowsill, and I said goodbye to Dove with the plan to go to a vegetarian Hare Krishna cafe near Ploschad' Vosstaniya for breakfast. I showered and dressed and took the metro to Ploschad' Vosstaniya; the cafe was closed, so I strolled around looking for somewhere to grab breakfast. I had cold borscht and Grechesky salat at a somewhat sleazy Cafe Sahara on Ulitsa Vosstaniya, then made my way back to my apartment trying to shake off the otherworldly feeling within which I was wrapped. I took my time, contemplating how little I wanted to keep my scheduled meetings. At home I laid down for a few moments before nenthusiastically gathering all my equipment again and heading out to meet Vera Svetlova at Ploschad' Aleksandra Nevskogo. We strolled through the cemetery at the Aleksandr Nevsky Lavra, and did a short interview in the cafeteria there. She spoke with a lisp and flowing, graceful gestures, and repeated my questions back to me, and echoed the same sentiment I've heard many times already: "Russian" is a tradition based on adopting foreign ideas and modifying them; matryoshka dolls (Japanese), Icon painting (Byzantine), even the Futurists & avant-garde (Italy).

We rode the metro back to Sennaya together, and I finally managed to take an hour's nap before getting back on the metro to meet Ivan Khimin at Ploshcad' Muzhestva. He immediately insisted we speak on ты, and we walked half an hour in the sweltering sun to his studio. The neighborhood reminded me of Primorskaya, all tall grey buildings and wide empty streets. The studio was on the 5th floor of a building that appeared only half-constructed; the whole length of it is one long hallway littered with paintings, sculptures, debris, connecting bleak fluorescent-lit studios. A dozen or more artists work there. bought cold Czech beer and then drank it on the couch in the corner of his empty studio, pressed against the wall to stay out of the sun. He spoke blurred words and I didn't catch half of it, with my mind sprawled flat on the open roof, sizzling, with my mind swaddled in cotton and sweating feverish, with my eyes drooping and straining to focus. He was very nice, but I kept yawning; I nearly fell asleep. It feels as though the weekend was interminable, like I'm still in the clutches of that exhaustion. Maybe it's the heat (a baby on the bus smiled at me so sweet). We rode the metro back and he said goodbye at Mayakovskaya, and I went home to sleep and hope that my days continue suchly!