On my wanderings through the city, I retrace my favorite steps, looking for moments which I may have lost. I’m young, so I shouldn’t be losing moments yet, but I find that that old magic of seeing something new slips away. I think its dangerous only to see grime and still air of the city, so I cling to glimpses of beauty--someone’s piano practice drifts to the street, or a soft breeze wanders down the alley from the Baltic. So, each time I pass a corner I try to see something new. Today I discovered the abandoned school of wartime medicine, just a street over from my apartment. But instead of seeing the Admiralty spire glittering from there, I can only see an old smokestack of a factory. It’s as if I am in an entirely different city. The stately wrought iron here is wrapped in barbed wire, and the elegant pillars of the fence crumble from long decades and a war that isn’t as distant in memory as we like to think. The romantic in me can imagine a Petersburg with determined men smoking and leaning against the crumbling fence, chatting up the citizen’s patrol girls, their hair pinned in kerchiefs...
I have found several of these bureaucratic buildings, languishing in a prior era. They are locked in a much grimmer time than the glimmering, 19th century high society evoked by Nevsky Prospekt. Some are museums which no one cares to visit, others are simply forgotten, waiting fruitless for attention. A part of me grins smugly at the thought that they finally stand in line for restoration like the many souls who once queued up within them. This place is surreal enough that I feel, if I walk by often enough, I will uncover some Orwellian bureaucracy for love, or dreams, hidden in the rampant lilacs overgrowing barbed wire and crumbling stone. If I did, I would stand in line with the ghosts to see the head of the department in charge of distributing dreams. I have had too many strange ones since coming here, and I feel the need to bring this to their attention. Since I don’t actually live in Petersburg, or in a novel set in Petersburg, I should be exempt from their surreal jurisdiction. In fact, this whole ‘strange dream’ thing should have gone out of style with Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov--or even before him, with Pushkin and his poor Yevgenii’s mad vision of Peter galloping after him on a bronze horse. But it wouldn’t be the Petersburg experience if the short nights didn’t leave me bewildered. I have a recurring dream that I have the Midas touch--except it is the touch of time, or maybe death, for everyone I touch becomes dust...It’s distressing to see those you long to touch dissolve if you so much as take their hands.
It is probably just a fever dream from my summer cold. I must have caught one traveling, or wandering through the city. Russians seem to think I caught it from the draught, despite it being summer. When I enter a room and mention I am sick with a cold, they fret and close the door and window and discuss the evils of moving air...
I might actually be sweating tea now, I’ve been drinking so much of it. Tea and honey cures everything here; as does boiled milk. So does wearing socks in the house. If it can’t be cured by tea, there’s the apteka--our pharmacy, their apothecary. Going in one does make me think of magic, since you can buy antibiotics and all sorts of things over the counter!
For those of you familiar with Dostoevsky, and wondering about me, I don’t think this is a physical manifestation of some other illness. I think I’m too happy to be actually home-sick.
The thought has entered my mind that I have somehow contracted consumption, and am now living in a novel. I think, I must take a week off from class to go take the waters in the Caucasus and meet an officer in the tsar’s army...
Now that I am here in Petersburg, studying the language, I have suddenly become preoccupied with the Caucasus. It doesn’t help that I’m reading Lermontov, and that I made an acquaintance who also loves that region. As we go over ordinal numbers, boring, ordinary ordinal numbers, I stare out the window and image galloping on a fine chestnut horse through Caucasian mountains--in my mind, they aren’t so different from my Montana ones. I also doodle frequently to try and keep my mind somewhat present; I’m glad the only one my teacher noticed was my line drawing of Alexander S. Pushkin.
I think Oksana, my teacher, understands I’m a bit bored. However, listening to her voice is one of the treats in my day--it’s like silk. Her pronunciation of is delicate--in fact, all of her is delicate, as if she were made of Russian porcelain, down to her artfully painted face and her dark, sleek hair. By comparison I feel showy, brassy, or somehow wild and not entirely collected. I’m not the most attentive student, but she laughs when I joke or chatter in class, since I do so in Russian.. She, like most people I talk to here, commented on my hair--it intrigues me that they all consider it to be reddish, or ‘rijzhe’. It’s not like I know what color it is in English either...
This is a very musical city. I was walking one evening and heard the strains of a Mozart piano sonatina drifting on the breeze. Of course, I stopped to listen; whoever it was played with true feeling. I know from my pianist friends, it is tempting to play Mozart with the panache of Beethoven, but this pianist must have been a kindred spirit. I stood below the window, following a melody home in my mind. It was perfectly uplifting and melancholy at once, an imagined reunion of melody and harmony. Of course, I hadn’t noticed the older man in a grey suit who had also stopped to listen, and of course, I ran into him as I turned to go. I apologized, but he hushed me and said, “It’s nothing, since you were listening well.”
I think as a general rule, Russians do listen well. I saw my first Russian opera live last night, The Tsar’s Bride. It was as fabulous as expected! (I promise I’ll write an actual blog entry on it)
I like to lodge a complaint against my brain. I have regressed to actually speaking English like a little kid, and of course my Russian is barely reaching little kid level. This makes communicating with anyone (and anything) remarkably difficult. In example, I recently said in English, “I know, the other person I have run into having read that book is myself, I mean, only me.” The faux pas in Russian are beyond counting... poor Anna is living in a comedy show with the moronic things I say. In class it’s even worse occasionally, and I feel for our teacher as the students mangle her language-- people become objects, we fail to decline nouns, we make men feminine and women neuter. I have concluded I should just speak less and carry a whiteboard to write on. But even writing is difficult; my first draft of this read ‘apartment’ instead of ‘department’ in all my discussions of bureaucracy.
The museum internship is a surreal experience because I am translating from home. I haven’t done anything that seems like adult work. I finished half of one translation in a week, and while slow, this wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t broken the internet at the apartment. I am now translating, and writing, out of a MacExpress (MacDonalds) which blasts horrific American music from the early 2000‘s--I somehow know all the words, despite thinking I’ve never heard the music before...I inevitably end up with fragments of lyrics in my translation.
Regarding translation, I had an epiphany at a Georgian restaurant today; in fact, I may have found my true calling...I am supposed to find and eat at every little restaurant in St. Petersburg, and peruse the English menus. Apparently, Russians eat ‘Julienne with chicken‘ (poor Julienne) or ‘pork (a cervical part)’. I love to eat, and I can actually read the Russian menus, so it would hardly be work at all. Maybe they’d let me eat for free in exchange for translating them!! But somehow, it saddens me to think the somewhat indecipherable ‘shrimps, which moves in a puff small baske’, might eventually read, ‘shrimp served in a basket.’ It takes away some of the secrecy of the menu...
Side note: Today is also Father's day, and I really miss my dad!
Soon to come: A Musical Review of Tsar's Bride, and the strange international choral festival on Russia Day.
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