My best friend in Russia is called Rumpelstiltskin.
The first date
I first met Rumpelstiltskin two weeks ago. I hadn’t known exactly what to expect. After all,
it is not every day that someone introduces themself under the alias of a fairy-tale
dwarf, known for his penchant for spinning straw into gold and trying to steal
first-borns. Rumpel and I had, like most of my
friends here, met online: my university hasn’t started yet and I have to find
some sort of social outlet to practice my Russian and meet weird and wonderful people.
She had seen my post in a LGBT+ group and decided to invite me for a walk,
saying that I sounded like an interesting person. She had told me her real name
before the meeting, but I forgot it almost immediately. As a result, I decided to let my
mind run loose with possible Russian-sounding nicknames for Rumpelstiltskin:
Rumpachka,
Rumpovka, Rumpanskaja, Alla Rumpolovich, Stiltsky, Rumpichka, Rumpalaika etc.
‘I’m a very
lonesome person,’ she wrote, ‘mainly because I have some very odd interests.’
‘What kind
of interests?’
‘I like chess,
drawing, reading… and investigating the biographies of serial killers.’
Given that
my mother also loves serial killers, this seemed like a perfectly natural
thing. After all, I had spent much of my childhood reading some sort of
children’s book, whilst my mother read magazines about the gruesome murders of the
week or watched programmes on the television about people who hacked their lovers to pieces with
pencil sharpeners. As a result, Rumpel seemed positively homely.
I was
intrigued and replied that I also spent most of my time alone: dreaming,
reading, writing… nbut since I arrived in Russia I was mostly sitting on facebook
desperately clicking refresh for messages from home or sitting on VK (Russian
facebook) looking for the love of my life/friends/social interaction and, of
course, eating pickled gherkins from the jar. YUMMY. I thought we would be a good mix: we’re both
quite odd.
Rumpel and I began to talk, but unfortunately I couldn’t
understand a word she said. She has a soft voice and there was a lot of noise on the street. Moreover, it always takes me at least a few minutes to get used to a new person
speaking Russian. This is one of the most frustrating elements of learning a
language. You can know 95% of the
words that a person is saying, but for the first while you might barely
understand a single sentence. It takes a certain period of time to get used to the rhythm of a
new person’s speech: to figure out where one word begins and where another
ends, to distinguish real words from fillers, and to get used to that person’s
slang and idiosyncracies.
We walked
to an abandoned bench and sat down. I can’t remember much of the discussion, but I recall that at one point she turned to me and said, in a very calm voice: ‘You are
very strange…. I like it. You don’t talk straight away. You allow lots of
silence’.
I told her that I hoped it was an ‘easy silence’. A silence that has
meaning. It is much better to be still and peaceful together – whether thoughtful
or with clear mind – than to fill up time with nervous fillers and small-talk.
This is one of the thing that annoys me about England: there are lots of people
(and of course I know this is a generalization) who can not handle silence. It
makes them sweat. They fill it up with weird babbling about the weather or politicians or Cheryl Cole. To me this is as if someone has recorded an ultrasound scan, turned
the volume up and put it on reverse: it can be cute and endearing to watch
someone babble nervously for a while, but ultimately it ends up pretty useless.
As a result, I tend to just sit in silence, thinking, analysing what someone said, and, to be fair, probably giving either a meaningful or intimidating stare. In
any case, my silence is almost always well-intentioned.
My dearest friends back in England seem to
appreciate this: one of them often tells about how she loves to sit
side-by-side with her bear-hunting Russian grandfather, just peacefully being,
never feeling the need to speak a word to fill up time or space. Just sitting,
wrapped in his deep masculine taciturn love, thinking, feeling, reading and being.
Peace.
We took a seat on the swings. Moved. Talked. Laughed. And opened to each other. She has a good
heart and a hard past: something which seems to be a common theme for a lot of
my friends. I fell in platonic love from the first meeting.
The second
date
Rumpel
invited me for tea in her little apartment, which she shares with 3 other
girls. She had told me at the first meeting that she felt like an ‘outcast’ in
her apartment: the girls often sat in the kitchen smoking – a very common
Russian pastime, and she felt that it was difficult to integrate or find common
topics. She had to share a bed with one of them in a tiny room. (These
conditions are normal for Russian students.) Luckily, by the time I had met
her, she was feeling much more positive: she had bonded and integrated. The
main reason for the unexpected bonding was the washing machine: when put on a
cycle, it has a habit of jumping around, with the result that it might pull
itself out off the power cable. Consequently, when doing washing loads, the
girls are forced to sit on the washing machine to stop it from jumping away.
To me, this
seemed like the perfect bonding tool. I imagined two girls walking one after
another into the bathroom in stern silence, unwilling to look at each other in
the eye. They then elegantly take their respective seats on the washing machine
– pulling up their skirts, adjusting their hair and pretending to busy
themselves with their phones. Finally, as the washing machine makes its first
jitters, one of the girls looks at the other and without losing her icy glare
tentatively says: ‘I suppose we should talk, then’. The door closes on the
scene.
40 minutes
later, the door opens again and we see the girls thoroughly dishevelled, having
been bounced around like a bareback bull ride. They are now smiling and bonding
over their adversity. GIRLS TRIUMPH OVER WASHING MACHINE, the headlines would
read.
On this second date, an Armenian came to visit.
At this stage, I had met more Armenians than Russians in Krasnodar (maybe by
coincidence, maybe because they are more willing to meet up with a random Irish
man from the internet) and so I decided to tell Rumpel and Armenian no. 5 that
I had invented a new turn of phrase for the Russian language:
«Куда ни
кинь, есть Армянин» -- “Kuda ni kin’, est’ armjanin” -- ‘Everywhere you go, you’ll find an
Armenian!” (It rhymes in Russian.)
Rumpel and
I proceded to drink tea, whilst the Armenian got drunk. He was very friendly,
but also intimidatingly beautiful. He had the bad boy image down to a T. He
had just the right amount of piercings to be intriguing and edgy, rather than
simply metallic. He also had a habit of blowing fantastical smoke patterns into
the air from very sexily pinced lips. After a while, realizing that he was
drunk and wouldn’t care, I asked him why he smoked so provocatively – turning his
head away from me slyly and blowing dragon puffs. He replied that he was smoking
that way to keep the smoke out of my eyes.
‘A gentleman!’ I thought and melted
to the floor. I think my organs are still lying somewhere in a puddle at his
Adonic feet. It also didn’t help that he then decided it was time to go to sleep in Rumpel’s bed, but, having spilt water over himself, he needed something to
wear. Rumpel offered him her tightest shorts which he appreciatively put on.
Watching a drunk Armenian Adonis take pictures of himself in the mirror,
hysterically laughing, strutting and flaunting his legs and other parts in
female hot pants, shall remain in my memory as one of the oddest, funniest and
most strangely erotic things I have ever seen.
The third date
On our
third platonic rendez-vous, Rumpel and I decided to sit on a gate outside her
apartment complex, near one of those beautiful neglected Soviet-style play parks,
watching the sunset. She told me about a man she had met the night before. A
fan of impulsivity, she had decided that she would go visit him, despite the
fact that they had only ever talked online before. He was an Armenian male
model (YES. ANOTHER ARMENIAN. I’VE LOST COUNT.)
Looking at his online pictures, I didn’t think
he was particularly pretty, but Rumpel disagreed fervently and told me he was
also an Adonis. Apparently he liked to
talk about clothes -- he was a little bit obsessed, she indicated.
Nonetheless, somehow they found common ground and the conversation lasted until
late: they smoked shisha, watched films and listened to music. Maybe the late
night got to him – or maybe he was overcome by passion -- in any case, by the end of the night he
started to act very odd.
‘I’m
wearing make-up today…” Rumpel told me, “Did you notice? It’s because he likes
to suck.”
“He likes
to suck? What does he like to suck?”
“He likes
to suck skin.”
At this
point, she showed me some pretty holocaustic love bites, and I start to assume
that they had had ‘relations’ and he had got a little too frisky. Nothing out
of the ordinary, I guess.
‘He nobbled
on my ear, too. But it was painful and I didn’t like it.’
Well, not
everyone likes an ear nobble. Far enough, I thought.
‘So…’ I
said suggestively, ‘how was the rest?’
‘What
rest?’
‘The… sex.’
‘Oh. We
didn’t have sex. We didn’t even kiss. He just nobbled my ear, sucked my skin
for quite a while…and then I went home.’
A strange
man, I concluded. But we all have our fetishes.
Our
conversation then moved inside. Our voices grew lower and sadder and we started
to talk about her dream of living in the forest, far away from civilization.
‘I
want to practice sensory deprivation. I have wanted to try it for a long time
now. You know, you can live for 20 years
without food, if you just drink water and don’t move. If you don’t move for 20
years, you don’t need food. I’d like to try that.’
‘Are you
sure you’re willing to sacrifice life for that kind of meditation?’
‘I like
being alone. And, afterwards, you will either turn insane or come out as one of
the purest and wisest human beings that has ever existed. I think I’m willing
to take the risk.’
I wondered
whether she would ever achieve this dream and whether she would actually be
willing to give up her life of spontaneity and extremes in the future. Part of
me also wondered – perhaps a little patronizingly – whether this desire for
sensory deprivation was a response to trauma in the past or a deep-seated dissatisfaction with what life is today: the pressures of living in the first world, when the
basic survival criteria on Maslow’s pyramid of needs have been fulfilled all
our lives long, and the only thing left is the trauma of our own social
interactions and our own mind.
She told me
she had been sent to a psychological institution for chronic stress. They had
locked her up there for a month, but it had only made her feel worse. The only
advantage was that she made good friends with a schizophrenic, whom she now
occasionally visits.
‘I used to
cry every night in those weeks before I went to the psychological hospital. It
was a relief. It was a painful time, but when I cried, I released the stress,
the negativity… if only for a while. When I went to the hospital, they forbade
crying. They said it was disruptive. When I cried, they would tie me up tight
to a bed, so I couldn’t move. It was uncomfortable. After a month I left the
hospital and now no matter how hard I try to cry, I can’t. I have no way to
relieve my stress. It’s been 4 and half months, and I still haven’t managed to
let the emotions out or to make a tear.’
This, my
friends, is the Russian approach to psychological care in the 21st
century.
I asked
Rumpel why she thought that they had insisted she shouldn’t cry.
‘Russians
live in a cult of taking everything. They suffer because they feel they have to
suffer. If something bad happens, they might protest online, but not on the
streets. People will judge you if you show too strong emotions in public. In
public, you have to have a very official, normal personality, so as not to
bother anyone else. It is expected that everyone acts normal – as if they where
under perfectly normal circumstances – even when the circumstances are far from
normal, even when we are undergoing deep traumas.’
Our deep
conversation was interrupted by a phone call. Rumpel started to laugh, and then
suddenly announced in an angelic enthusiastic tone:
‘WE’RE
GOING TO GO TO A GAY CLUB TONIGHT!”
‘What?’
‘Lera
just phoned. She wants to go to the gay club. And we’re going with.’
‘But you
said you don’t have your passport?’
‘Oh,
yes, well, it’s at home with my parents…. But I think I should try to get in
without ID anyway. I’ll just put on lots of makeup to make me look like a whore
and then I’ll put on really high heels. It should work!”
Giggling at her spontaneity, I
pulled out a bottle of wine from my bag (yes, I’m always prepared, it seems.).
‘Do you have a bottle opener?’
‘No. Just use nail scissors.’
I’m not really sure how you are
supposed to pull a cork out with nail scissors, but Rumpel was busy tartifying
herself, so I decided to just hack the cork away. Needless to say, it was
pretty messy and I ended up with a strange solution of white wine and thin
chunks of cork. We drunk it anyway. We needed the courage.
After an hour or two, we got in
a taxi to meet Lera outside the club.
Lera turned out to be a very
strange girl (like everyone I’ve met here), and I don’t quite understand how
she thinks/ticks, but she was very friendly to me. Rumpel told me that Lera worked as a prostitute. "Well, she doesn’t like to think of herself as a
prostitute, but she goes on dates and has sex with old men for 'gifts'."
For the first prostitute I’ve
ever met, she seemed pretty positive. She had
very enthusiastic dance moves and kept us upbeat. The club was a bit
overwhelming for me, however.
Firstly, there was nowhere to take a break from
the pumping music. In the UK, I’ve become quite a fan of going out onto the
street to the smokers to breathe some (relatively) fresh air and talk to
complete strangers. In this club, people smoked inside, I couldn’t hear a thing
and if I had gone outside, I would have found no one. The bouncer also only
opened the door on request. I think it was a security issue to protect against
homophobes, but in any case, it meant that when he went off on a break or
decided to make a call, we were all essentially locked inside a tiny
smoke-filled club full of drag queens whose act consisted of encouraging strip
teases, wearing ridiculous and funny outfits and lip synching Russian pop
songs.
After a
while, a sleazy middle-aged man with a straggly fringe came up to me and physically
shook me, breathing his hot voice down my ear –
‘You’re from Holland, right?’
he said .
‘No, I’m
from Ireland.’
‘Ah, do
you speak Russian?’
‘Yes,
but it’s hard to hear you.’ I said reluctantly. I really couldn’t think of
anything I would want to do less at that point in time than talk to that man. I
was tired and ready to go home. He started to grab me.
‘LEAVE
ME ALONE’ I said and turned to Rumpel.
At this
point Rumpel activated her endearing bitch mode and told him to go fuck
himself. He didn’t oblige. In his disgusting sexism, he took her anger as a
sign of ‘female feistiness’ – this wasn’t a rejection to him, but just some
sort of flirtatious resistance. Nonetheless, I could tell Rumpel would destroy
him with her sly tongue, and destroy him she did. I’m pretty sure his testicles
slid right back up into his body. If he had any to begin with.
He then turned
to Lera and we were forced to wait as she seemed to enjoy his company. They
talked for over an hour, laughing and charming each other, whilst Rumpel and I
sat at a table, half-hoping we would fall unconscious from the smoke fumes and die
peacefully in our sleep.
Eventually Lera came back and said it was time to go.
We waited about 10 minutes for the bouncer to open the door – he had to be
completely sure that we had a way to get home. It turned out that the sleazy
man had kindly decided to pay a taxi to take all three of us to our places of residence. However, it
wasn’t a normal taxi: but rather just an individual who had decided to drive
around clubs in the middle of the night in the hope that people would pay him
to take them home. His friend sat in the front passenger’s seat, out of his
face on beer.
I
reluctantly got into the taxi. I didn’t even know it was a taxi, but I trusted
that Rumpel probably wouldn’t let me die. The drunk passenger friend of the
taxi driver insisted on playing music at deafening volume, and even though we
protested, he continued. I think he thought we were just wimps who couldn’t
handle DA PARTAYYYYYYYY.
In any
case, Lera told them to drive her to her ‘female friend’s house’. On the journey, the drunk passenger
continually made us down beer (although Rumpel managed to refuse). On arriving
at the street, Lera phoned her friend: ‘Hey Pasha, where is your house?’. This
solicited a strange reaction from the taxi driver and his friend, given that
Pasha is a male name. ‘What are you trying to trick us with?’ they asked. ‘Ammm…’
Lera sweetly said and invented some sort of implausible excuse that left them
charmed and satisfied with having met such a 'cute girl'.
Once
Lera had left, the drunk passenger turned around, looked me in the eye and
asked:
‘Are you
a homosexual?’
I had no
idea what to say. I was pretty scared that he might beat me up and turn out to
be a crazy homophobe. But before I had time to think of a reply, Rumpel was
already explaining:
‘Yes, of
course, he is. We just came from a gay club. It’s quite fun, really’.
He then
stared at me once more, wide eyed, and just when I thought he was going to tell
that he thought I should be gassed and deported, he spoke the following words
in the most serious of voices:
‘I
respect you.’
I was
pretty damn relieved and very happy to have found an overweight, drunk
masculine Russian man who wasn’t homophobic. LUCK OF LUCKS!
He then,
however, started to ask me the typical weird Russian questions.
‘Where
do you come from?’
‘Ireland.’
‘Ahhh,
Holland. What’s life like there?’
‘NO.
IRELAND.’
‘OH,
where’s that?’
‘It’s an
island. It’s near England.’
And this
point, Rumpel added, trying to help: ‘He’s from Northern Ireland.’
‘Ahh, I
get it. There’s Ireland and Northern Ireland. And England and Northern England.’
‘Well,
no, not quite…’
‘Tell
me, are you a Jew?’
‘Ummm…No.’
‘But you
don’t look Irish.’
‘But I
am Irish.’
‘Are you
sure you’re not a Jew?’
‘Yes.’
‘C’mon,
if you’re a Jew, you can tell me.’
‘I would
tell you, but I am actually not a Jew. I’ve never even met an Irish Jew.’
‘You’re
probably Jewish.’
‘Well,
if I’m Jewish I don’t know it yet.’
He then
told me the name of some obscure Irish band and took the fact that I didn’t
know they existed as further evidence that I was a Jew.
Nonetheless,
he was happy to meet me and wished me successful as I stepped out of the taxi,
slightly confused about everything that had happened in the last 24 hours, but
relieved to feel the fresh air, the cold night and the promise of a bed.
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