Cathedrals of the Flesh (10 page)

Early the next morning we set out for Isthmia, walking single file through tall grass and prickly scrubs, past groves of orange
blossom and lemon trees. I was filled with the giddiness of anticipation. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I
was expecting a kind of clarity, a visual image of a bath, remnants of
something
for my imagination to riff with. While most people go to Rome to glimpse Roman baths, I'd ventured all the way to the Peloponnese,
in search of something richer: a Roman bath with Greek roots.

All my rosy expectations were shattered, however, as we made our way through an opening in the pockmarked fence and tramped
down a long, gentle slope that led into the valley of the Isthmian ruins.

Garrett pointed to a southern part of the valley. 'There it is.'

'Where?' I asked, seeing only an empty valley with odd clumps of stone overlooking a ravine. 'There?'

'Yes, there,' he said comfortingly.

I could tell that he was used to dealing with students disappointed by the fragmentary remains of archaeology. But why hadn't
he told me last night that this was all there was? I'd seen aqueducts in southern France and wandered into decaying coliseums
and always been dazzled by the remains. But Isthmia's Olympic Village was nothing more than a field of rubble. My mind was
spinning. Where were the marble riveted walls I'd read about? Where were the furnaces, the columns, and the plunge pools?
In short, where was the bath? These couldn't even be called ruins; they were more like the ruins of ruins.

Students in T-shirts and Tevas wandered around under a sun so scorching hot that we were like ants under a seventh grader's
heat lamp. My throat felt as parched as the cracked ground, and I had no water to tide me over until lunchtime. I'd finally
arrived at the much-anticipated bath and all I was thinking about was saliva generation. Around Dr Christopher's waist hung
his trusty holster of water; every time he took a swig from his one-liter jug I got thirstier.

I should say a few more words about Dr Christopher and the perils of asking him questions like 'Where is the bath?' I'd never
met a real-life Jekyll-Hyde personality until now. His actions, allowing students rare access to his site and research facilities,
displayed an altogether Jekyll-like good intention. His insuppressible Hyde side emerged in his disdain for those less intelligent
than himself, which was just about everybody. What began as cute, witty stories and charming Socratic questions turned taunting
and degrading when the students lacked his intuition or the confidence to venture an answer.

Christopher might point to some circular cuttings in the earth and say, 'What do you think caused these cuttings?' Loud silence.
'Was it a spaceship?' he'd ridicule. 'Perhaps, but probably not.' Long pause as everyone examined their shoelaces. 'Well,
of course it was a door! Those are the grooves caused by the door opening and closing.'
Of
course! He floated in a transmillennia bubble. 'Look at me,' he'd exclaimed. 'Archaeologists can walk through walls.' And
as he'd walk from room to room, where once there were walls, I wondered which period, antiquity or the modern day, was more
alive in his mind. Who was more real, Herodes Atticus, the man reputed to have built the Isthmian bath, or the twelve of us
standing in front of him on this sweltering May day?

Christopher took us on a dizzying tour of what would have been the
tepidarium
(warm room),
caldarium
(hot room),
frigidarium
(cold plunge pools), and the underground alcove where the hidden slaves fed the furnaces. I took notes in my small orange
notebook, citing the irregularities in where the drain channels connected, the mystery surrounding the destruction of the
bath. Fire? Earthquake? Christian destruction? We simply don't know. Dr Christopher addressed all the questions raised by
physical remains of the bath.

So relentless was his attention to evidence, evidence, evidence, that when he asked, 'Does anyone know what this room would
have been used for?' I answered: 'The
frigidarium?

'Why?' he asked.

'I don't know, it just has that. . .
vibe.'
Garrett suppressed a laugh, and Christopher curled his lip. I knew it was a word he'd hate.

'Lucky guess. You're right, because this was a ring-style bath, where the bather would progress in a circle from warm to hot
to cold. From the placement of this room, we can deduce its purpose.'

'What did the Romans do inside the bath?' I asked Dr Christopher, hoping he might detail Roman habits and lifestyle and not
just their brilliant engineering.

Dr Christopher informed us that they had found strigils inside the bath. Strigiling, in addition to sweating, was the main
caldarium
activity. The strigil was an odd device used for cleaning the body that the Romans copied from the Greeks. A strigil, usually
wrought in iron so it wouldn't bend, looked like a cross between a sugar spoon and a meat hook. After working up a healthy
glow, the bather would rub a sand-and-olive-oil mixture onto his body. Rubbing this gritty substance on the body exfoliated
all the dirt and dead skin, then the bather would start scraping the sand mixture off his body using the strigil. The sand
and olive oil scooped up by the strigil was then flicked onto the walls, where it was believed to add a curative effect to
the surroundings. Even though modern medicine might tell us otherwise, I would have preferred ancient levels of sanitation
to the present-day bathrooms of the Rooms Marinos.

We walked through the banquet room, covered by a protective tarp weighted down with pebbles, and stepped over the fifteen-inch
remains of a wall into room one. The archaeologists have assigned numbers to each room. 'Everything must have a name,' Dr
Christopher would repeat six times daily. If you had no idea what an object was used for, it might become 'piece five found
in basket four of trench two.' Rather than make any assumptions about what a ceramic shard or a room was used for, everything
was classified according to location. Archaeology is an art that doesn't allow for editorializing.

Room one, Dr Christopher explained, was probably the
apodyterium.
Athletes and Poseidon's pilgrims — Isthmia's main customers would pass into this room after paying the
balneatorzt
the door, who, if he was a nice guy, would bid them the customary
bene laves
(bathe well!). In the
apodyterium,
a large rectangular room with benches and overhead cubicles, street tunics or competition garb (unlike Greek athletes, Roman
athletes did not compete in the nude) were replaced with lighter cotton bathing tunics and wooden sandals to protect feet
from the hot marble floors. Bathers would deposit their valuables, street sandals, and sesterces in the cubicles. Rich customers
could afford to leave slaves to watch their belongings, but most people had to take their chances, and theft was common.

This Isthmian bath was surprisingly grand and ornate considering its backwater location. Yes, it lacked the epic proportions
of the Roman imperial
thermae
(the Baths of Caracalla in Rome were a thirty-acre palatial waterworld!), but Isthmia wasn't Rome after all, it was an Olympic
outpost used every two years as well as a destination for Poseidon-worshiping pilgrims. Like the three other Olympic sites
- Olympus, Delphi, and Nemea - Isthmia had to have a large bath complex for athletes, spectators, and pilgrims alike. But
where the Isthmian baths surpassed the other Olympic baths, and raised so many questions among archaeologists, was in its
enormous banquet hall with a magnificently wrought monochromic mosaic, the largest and most accomplished in the eastern Mediterranean.

Tomorrow we would be indulged in our only 'digging' responsibility. We would shovel away the pebbles, remove the protective
tarp, and water down the mosaic to reveal the enormous rectangular nautical tableaux. Depicted in tiny black-and-white squares
were a small army of Nereids riding Tritons. In the center, Eros drove a dolphin while other dolphins playfully leapt about
with eels, lobsters, squid, and octopi. The subject matter was standard stuff for a bath situated next to a Temple of Poseidon,
yet the execution and scale were quite sophisticated. More romantic theories suggest that after Herodes Atticus' younger lover
drowned, Atticus was looking for an appropriate tribute.

Isthmia's gargantuan banquet hall also pointed toward the future role of baths in the eastern Mediterranean according to ancient
bathing scholars (a surprising hotbed of study) like Fikret Yegiil, dubbed Mr Roman Bath. The Roman
thermae
evolved differently in different regions of the empire. In the East, the
thermae
was slowly transformed into the more introverted hamam, an inward-looking building suited to a modest religion. The central
room of early Islamic baths, aka hamams, was a large banquet hall used for socializing or cultural activities. Here in Isthmia's
luxurious banquet hall, with its decorative mosaic and massive statues — a room obviously designed for social instead of athletic
interaction - we see the first hint of a changing bath architecture, a small nod to future hamams.

Studying the Isthmian dig's field notebooks was fascinating intellectually, and for a day or so I even fantasized about enrolling
in archaeology graduate school. But the study of baths wasn't as interesting as the practice. As John, the only hothead among
the Baptist students, said after Dr Christopher waxed for forty minutes on exactly what the Temple of Poseidon would have
looked like 1,800 years ago: 'Well, it's not here now. Let's go eat.' I was starting to relate to that sentiment; there was
only so much time I could give to suspending my disbelief about walls, arches, and domes that no longer existed.

I realized that my trip had reversed the flow of history — from Istanbul to the Roman world. I was time-traveling back through
the empires: Istanbul to Constantinople to Byzantium; then, sidestepping down the Dardanelles, I'd encountered the destruction
of the pagan world, the riches of the Roman-occupied Peloponnese, and the innovations of the Greeks. I had arrived two thousand
years too late. The Roman bathing scene was in ruins, and the Turkish scene wasn't far behind.

It was time to leap ahead to the contemporary havens of public baths, where spa culture was still communal: to Russia, to
Finland, to Japan. And why not? I no longer had a job, and Charles promised to come and visit. Yet again I extended my return,
enjoying the continued liberation from the trivial worries of home - Did I lock the door? Is it garbage night? All of life's
business was in able hands with Charles. Bills would get paid; the apartment wouldn't burn down. I was free to explore my
fascination with public baths, the physical spaces, the swirl of activity around them, the secret parts of people that emerged
when inside. This was no longer just 'taking the measurements,' as Marina and I had done in Istanbul. This had turned into,
well, the search for the perfect bath.

russia:

vodka, sex, and banyas

A banya without steam is like cabbage soup with no grease floating on top.

— Old Russian proverb

Perhaps the march of time would be less marked in Russia. The Russians are certainly proud of their Russianness, and perhaps
this nationalistic pride translated into holding on to village traditions like the banya. I had always heard that there were
four prerequisites to being Russian: weekly visits to the banya, drinking either too much vodka or none at all, easy access
to cheap caviar, and the right to enjoy your suffering. Russians suffer with style. In America, suffering veers toward self-pity;
the Russians, however, manage to imbue suffering with nobility.

My great-grandfather Isidore Sirota was born in Belarus, often referred to as 'White Russia,' before immigrating to New York
City at sixteen years old. Izzie was not the vodka-drinking, caviar-eating, long-suffering variety of Russian. He did, however,
carry with him, from old country to new, a lifelong appreciation of the
shvitz,
the Yiddish word for a banya. The banya, which translates as 'bathhouse,' transcends its literal definition and its humble
architecture — a dark-wooded hut containing a furnace of hot rocks. Moreover, it inspires a distinct way of life with its
own menu, accoutrements, appointed hour, ceremony, and ritual.

I lived with a Soviet TV journalist turned fiction writer turned tour guide named Irina. No patronymic, just Irina. According
to Irina, journalists shed their fathers' names in classless togetherness. Irina was a miniaturized aging Bond girl of the
Ursula Andress school, a petite blond with wide-set small brown eyes and cheeks that resembled split-open peaches. Twenty-five
years ago she must have been a knockout, and there was still an unmistakable feistiness in her eyes and the way she sashayed
around in her high-heeled black boots.

Irina had perfected the art of spin. When I stepped into her tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment, hyperventilating and disoriented,
she greeted me with a Cheshire cat smile and the loud impersonal boom of a tour guide: 'Welcome to your beautiful home.' Of
course, I couldn't help but smile back, grateful to see my first friendly Russian face and to have a place at last to put
down my suitcase. I ignored the moldy beer factory smell and quickly slipped off my shoes, as the guidebooks instruct. But
the guidebooks also say your host will offer you slippers, and Irina didn't. I was stumped.

She toured me through the apartment, smiling like a delirious Vanna White: 'This is the kitchen, where I will serve you a
delicious breakfast every morning. Now come, I will show you to your beautiful room.' I followed her down the short, narrow
corridor with peeling rose-patterned wallpaper. 'And this is your wonderful room. Now I leave you to put away your things.'
I looked around my beautiful, wonderful room, with an old, fusty leather sofa you might find in a 1890s train station, dusty
bookcases, and a bed designed to produce instant insomnia. I flicked on the switch to the crooked chandelier. Only one bulb
illuminated. Thank God for white nights. I looked at the solid oak writing desk. Home office. Sweet. Then I looked at the
bed more closely: a one-inch-thick foam futon on top of a blue plastic frame. I sat down and the frame teetered and almost
buckled under my weight.

How did I end up in this person's home? I wondered to myself. It was disorienting for me to be here, but I imagined how scary
it must be for Irina to open her home to random foreigners. It's not as if the host organization that brokers these home stays
does any sort of background check on those of us drifting through Russia.

Irina bounced in and wanted to give a tutorial on locking the front door and using the bathroom. If there was ever a time
to be happy I was doing research on public baths, it was when I saw Irina's bathtub: small and stained reddish brown by the
rusty water. I knew my search for the perfect bath was not going to end in Irina's apartment. At first I took the water stains
as a good sign, a sure sign that there was indeed water, but when I saw the rate at which water trickled out of the faucet,
I realized it was a miracle that this tub had water stains at all.

My banya research must start straight away. The next morning, I showed Irina my list of St Petersburg banyas that I had heard
or read about (a dozen or so of the fifty-eight listed banyas in St Petersburg): Kruglye, Banya #50, Banya # 5 1 , Banya #24,
Banya #45, Nevskie, Yamskiye. During Soviet times, all banyas were state owned and operated and were identified by numbers
instead of jazzy names like the Comrade's Hot Rocks. Indeed, under the Soviets the banyas proliferated in much the same way
the Roman
thermae
had two thousand years before. Down at the Politburo, the Soviet leaders joked, just as the Romans had, that the decline and
fall of the Soviet empire was directly related to the explosion of banyas and the ensuing debauchery and heat-induced laziness.

The reason behind the 'banya for the masses' plan was quite simple: Going to the banya was a classless weekly pleasure enjoyed
by all Russians. Building palatial sweat lodges with tiled pools for comrades to sweat together helped perpetuate the myth
of the Utopian Soviet state. Not to mention that the banyas were an ideal environment to purge oneself of the toxins that
sadly became a fact of life under communism.

Irina scanned my list, smiling, looking nostalgic, and nodding her head.

'So many banya memories. I haven't been in years.'

'Where should I go, Irina?'

'You really want to go? These places not Western. Nobody speak English.'

'Well, maybe I'll pick up some Russian.'

Irina cocked one eyebrow at me. Over breakfast that morning, she had labored to teach me some simple Russian phrases and was
less than dazzled by my linguistic abilities. I had studied Romance languages in school — French and Italian - but the unlikely
bunching of consonants in Russian was unutterable for me.

'Go to Tchaykovsky,' she said with characteristic certainty. 'Walk down Nevsky Prospekt to the Fontanka River. You'll see
two bronze horsemen, there should be four, but two are getting fixed. There take a right and walk for a long time, past Anna
Akhmatova's house, past Peter's Palace in the park, then you'll see it on your right. Wait, first I call and make sure it's
not free day.'

'Free day? Free day sounds good.'

'No, not good. Not pretty. Each banya once a week have free day for poor people. Not nice time to go.'

She called the banya, and it was a regular fee-paying day.

'Watch your dress.'

'What?'

'I have my dress once stolen at Tchaykovsky banya. Oh, it was a terrible picture. There is me, after banya, naked and looking
like a duck, and the banya lady she steals my new flower cotton dress. Oh yes, a very terrible picture. I walked home naked
in my coat.'

I hit the Nevsky Prospekt with a backpack full of banya essentials: little plastic bottles filled with soap, shampoo, and
conditioner, and my faithful green rubber flip-flops. They had trudged through nearly fifty hamam visits in Turkey, and now
they were about to be exposed to serious banya heat.

I walked up the east bank of the Fontanka River, a seven-kilometer river that draws an arc around the heart of St Petersburg
and comprises the popular tourist stomping ground known as 'within the Fontanka.' The Fontanka is a wider, more magisterial
tributary than the shaded, ambling, canal-like Moyka, where Tolstoy had his home. I reached the point where the Fontanka flows
into the Neva, the huge river that hems the city to the south. In the winter, Russian parents still dunk their newborn children
through holes in the icy Neva in an ancient rite, a pagan peasant baptism reputed to improve the child's heartiness if it
doesn't kill him first. Just before the vortex of the Fontanka and the Neva, on the western bank, I saw the gardens of Peter
the Great's humble brick-and-stucco Summer Palace, his first imperial dwelling just an unpretentious cut above the wood cabin
he lived in previously. It would take only four years for him to bury his peasant values and build himself the Versailles-inspired
Peterhof at enormous expense.

With no time to dawdle at cultural relics, I promptly took a right on Tchaykovsky Street and right there, just as Irina promised,
was a sign advertising Banya #17. Despite the end of communism, the banyas still lack more individual names, though people
refer to them by their location. But I was learning that this is a common Russian phenomenon. Russians don't devote thought
to coming up with clever names for commercial establishments. Instead of christening one's private business with a catchy,
memorable name that might lead to an identifiable client base, Russians settle for names like
obuf
or
producti,
meaning, respectively, 'shoes' or 'products.'

No bustle or vestige of human life animated Tchaykovsky Street, and I feared that the banya inside would be as abandoned as
many of the hamams I visited. Once off the city's main boulevards, St Petersburg felt empty and desolate, like people inhabiting
the set of a movie that finished filming long ago. I walked into an enormous darkened lobby with what has to be the world's
largest coat check. Rows and rows of naked hangers wound back into emptiness. But there was no attendant and there were no
coats. Directly in front of me, an old woman sat scrunched up on a stool behind a plate-glass window. She was the only life
form in the lobby. I couldn't read the Russian sign, so I just walked up to her and whispered, 'Banya?' in a way that sounded
unintentionally conspiratorial.

'Da, banya.'
She nodded while staring down at the pages of a thick paperback. I expected her to name a hugely inflated price. Most Russian
institutions, like the Kirov Ballet and the Hermitage Museum, have a separate set of prices for Westerners, and it's often
ten times the Russian price. But at the Tchaykovsky banya, the price was 3 rubles (roughly 10 cents) for everyone.

After collecting the tiny fee, she waved me upstairs, as if our transaction were an ordinary occurrence. I expected her to
recognize how far off the beaten path I'd traveled or at least to act mystified, as the hamam ladies had, when I turned up
day after day. But the Russians are as introverted as the Turks are extroverted.

I wandered upward in this cavernous building, like the colossal public schools built in the 1950s and later demolished because
they were lined with asbestos. Signs in Cyrillic bounced me from room to room until I saw two women in their mid-twenties
with flushed faces and damp hair. 'Banya?' I asked.

'Da, banya,'
and they pointed to a door on my right and walked on.

I had reached my destination. My first Russian banya. Fifteen women were staring at me. Fifteen people giving me the once-over,
glancing at my purple shoes and khaki capri pants and registering my otherness. Having satisfied their curiosity, they went
back to their preening.

I disrobed quickly. Once naked, my otherness disappeared. I wanted to be one of them. I had read about the Russian ideal of
sobornost,
roughly translated as 'togetherness.' Travel writer Colin Thubron in
Among the Russians
explained how this concept of
sobornost
goes back to the
obschina,
the old Slavic village assembly, in which decisions had to be unanimous. To dissent was to proclaim yourself a heretic. Collective
unanimity prevailed over the individual. I remembered one of the slogans of the Communist revolution: 'If you are not with
us, you are against us.' Perhaps I was being too literal to view the banya through this lens, but there is something of the
town assembly in the banya proceedings. And as I was about to learn, if you deviate from banya etiquette, the Russian women
are not shy about correcting you.

The whole washing room, the
moechnaya,
as it's called, was abuzz with incredible female energy. Mothers braided their daughters' hair. Women walked nude and purposeful
about the room. They tended proprietarily to silver buckets, fed their bodies or large bowls with a hose, stood for long intervals
under showers, or washed the soap from their bodies using bowl after bowl of water. Women shaved and masked and plucked and
preened. Every woman demonstrated what seemed to be her own intricate and personal ablution. The comforting country smell
of hay fields after a long rain pervaded the room. I traced the smells to herbs and branches stewing in plastic buckets all
around the room.

I showered (rule number one, 'Wash before bathing,' prevails everywhere) and watched people look at me. Mostly they were trying
to figure out how to talk to me. One old babushka came up and started speaking a flurry of Russian. I gave the polite universal
shrug for 'Forgive me, I do not speak your language,' and she started pointing to my watch and shaking her head no. I tried
to mime, 'It's waterproof Still she would not let it rest. This was my first taste of the Russian fanaticism for rules and
strict protocol. The watch came off.