Cathedrals of the Flesh (14 page)

Devushki
and
babushki
alike rushed to make a line outside the parilka. Gallia, Marina, and I were first in line, and about ten penitents were behind
us. Everyone adjusted their hats to make sure no stray hairs would get fried by the heat. Each of us wore flip-flops to protect
our toes from the hot cement floor.

Natasha opened the door, and in total silence, with all the seriousness and sense of purpose of facing a firing squad, we
entered. The heat above three feet was so unbearable that the women walked in doubled over. Everyone immediately carved a
niche for herself. Some spread their towels on the floor, prostrating themselves on this lower level of heat as quickly as
possible. The alpha women who assumed positions sitting or lying on the benches brought their hands to their faces in order
to filter and soften the steam before it hit their nostrils. In America the heat would have required a billboard-size notice
reading 'Please consult your doctor before entering.' This truly was nostril-singeing steam.

I crouched low and spread my towel next to Marina, who had her knees pulled in tight to her chest in a banya fetal position.
The less skin you expose, the less painful it is. I tried this, too, and it helped a bit. My toenails hurt from the heat.
Growls and groans rose up, a chorus of approval from the other women.

'This is too hot, isn't it? Everyone is suffering. My toenails are going to fall off,' I whispered. At serious banyas like
Sandunovskye, there is a prohibition against talking midsession. If you speak above a whisper, some bossy Russian woman will
invariably hush you with a 'Be quiet. We are trying to relax here.'

'I know, but for Russian women the more excruciating the better. Look at Gallia,' said Marina.

I looked at Gallia, lying two feet higher on a bench. Her eyes were closed, and she wore an intent look of concentration.
'She looks miserable,' I said.

'No, that's her Buddha look. She's in heaven.'

'Well, I have to get out of here. I can't take it.' I crawled down the stairs as if escaping from a burning house. Just as
I was about to stand up and bolt through the door, three women shouted,
'Nyet,'
in unison. Natasha, who was sitting on a bench by the door and rocking back and forth with her eyes closed, explained in
a whisper, 'You can't leave this early in a session. You'll ruin their steam. Just sit it out for another two minutes.' My
skin felt as though it would begin melting any moment, but it was slightly cooler out of the treehouse. I sat next to Natasha,
closed my eyes, and thought about Seneca, who died in a Roman steam room. I could imagine worse ways to go. Then, to my utter
amazement, I heard the cracking sound of leaves hitting skin. Just when I thought this woman was the lone masochist, four
others joined in. These women were out of their minds, or else they redefined warm-blooded. I asked Natasha a question that
occurred to me after watching so many Russian women revel in what were brutally painful circumstances: 'Why are the Russians
so fond of the banya?' I asked.

'Well. . .' She paused. 'I think it's because Russians like extreme situations.'

Finally Natasha nodded at me, essentially dismissing me from class. I slinked out of the parilka in shame. Now the heat-immune
Russian women would all have a story for dinner about the weak American girl who couldn't stand the heat.

Water. Water. Where was the cold water? I grabbed hold of the side of the Japanese soaking tub and splashed water onto my
face and into my mouth (bad form, but I didn't care at this point; I had already humiliated myself as a banya zero). I took
a few deep breaths and tried to steady my heat-addled brain. Then I climbed the stepladder into a soaking tub that looked
like an enormous wooden wine barrel. I bobbed up and down like a cork in the fifty-degree water for a couple of minutes before
the other women started to stream out of the parilka. They were smiling radiantly, as though they had just suffered through
a terrible ordeal but had escaped alive.

To make room for others more worthy than myself, I got out of the tub and caught a glimpse of my body in a mirror on the opposite
wall. My skin was gone. I was red and blue and purple, I was a medical experiment gone terribly wrong. I could see the veins
in my breasts. I had X-ray vision.

Natasha came out with Gallia and Marina and said, 'In a few minutes I'll show you how to use the veynik,' and then she went
out to the reception area to smoke a cigarette. Ten minutes later she returned, carrying her pink bathrobe and white felt
gloves.

'Marina, you hot-blooded Kazakh, are you ready?' I asked. Marina stood up, stretched like a cat, and doused herself with cold
water. There was the undeniable sense that we were about to embark on something difficult and painful, but a necessary and
worthy endeavor. The banya, especially when you add a veynik treatment, is a three-day juice fast crammed into three minutes.
The sweat, while 99 percent water, also contains about 1 percent hard metal, and the heat speeds up your kidneys so that waste
and toxins are processed and released more quickly.

Natasha put on her uniform: pink bathrobe, woolen mittens, and pointy white hat, and she scooped up the silver basin with
two birch veyniks soaking in warm water. She looked like a baker, a housewife, and an elf. I, her apprentice, wore just a
felt hat. The parilka had cooled since the height of the last session's heat. Marina, our sacrificial lamb, lay on a bench
with a cold wet towel wrapped around her hair.

Natasha took a veynik in each hand. She raised the bouquets of birch to the ceiling as if lifting two huge torches to the
sky and shook both hands gently so the leaves trembled and shed drops of water. Then she dropped her arms to her sides and
began moving them in wider and wider circles on top of Marina's body. I crouched next to Marina. I could smell the fresh,
tannic aroma of a damp October morning in Vermont. With each circle, Natasha circulated the parilka's hot air and coaxed the
steam onto Marina's body. All this before any skin-to-leaf contact.

And then -
thwack.
The first blow was to Marina's feet. The feet contain nerve connections to every organ in the body, so it's a good place to
lay that first blow of heat. It sends waves of heat throughout the trunk of the body and allows the body to prepare for the
onslaught to come.

After her feet had absorbed the initial shock, Natasha began beating the branches in quick, rhythmic movements up Marina's
calves and thighs and across her back. She played her shoulders as if they were snare drums. Cha, cha, cha-cha, Cha, cha,
cha-cha. The sweat streamed down Natasha's face, but she showed no signs of heat fatigue. She tapped Marina twice on the hip,
and Marina turned over. Before repeating the same series of lashes on her front side, Natasha dunked the branches in a bucket
of cold water and gently brought the branches to Marina's face so that the cold water streamed down her neck. Marina sighed
with gratitude. Those small injections of cold water are the only thing that makes it possible to endure lying there passively
while heat and steam are heaped onto your body and birch leaves slap your skin, removing the toxins. Or so the folk wisdom
goes.

It felt as if the veynik treatment lasted an hour, though it was probably more like four minutes. It seemed I was going to
learn by watching. For her final coup de grace, Natasha shook the branches, a shamanistic call to the spirits, and then shimmied
the two bouquets down Marina's body to lock in all the purifying steam of the parilka and all the organic goodness of the
birch leaves. Finally, she poured a little more cold water on Marina's face and then helped her to sit up. Marina opened her
eyes; the whites of her eyes were completely clear, and she gave us a weak smile. We helped her down the stairs and revived
her with buckets of cold water before depositing her in the marble tub like a small child.

'I feel at peace,' Marina managed to get out.

'You do this once a week and you never get sick. Really, it burns all the germs right off your body,' offered Gallia.

'Gallia, what time is it?' Marina asked.

'About seven-thirty.'

'We've been here two hours, unbelievable. Alexia, we need to hurry. Simone is expecting us any minute.' Marina then pulled
herself out of the cold pool and proclaimed triumphantly, 'Well, I can end my search for the perfect bath. How about you,
Brue?'

'My perfect bath won't possess the Nietzschean "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" guiding principle,' I said.

We dressed in less than five minutes, which was in great contrast all the young women around us, who were spending five minutes
just coloring one eyelid. We rushed toward Simone's loft apartment. The rain had stopped, and we walked by the small Russian
Orthodox church. The courtyard was empty, and I pondered how different the rituals were - the pomp and regalia of the liturgy
versus the peasant and the profane at the banya. Inside the Russian Orthodox church, the women piled on the scarves to cover
their shoulders and their hair. The faithful require so many accoutrements — icons, robes, vessels for drinking water and
wine. Inside the banya, all that is stripped away and the soul is truly bared.

Simone threw a dinner party to welcome Marina back from her exile. She and Andrew, her dashing English war photographer boyfriend,
had just flown in from Rome with pasta, fresh pesto, and raspberries. Andrew was such the perfect Central Casting version
of a globe-trotting, passport-as-thick-as-a-novel war correspondent that I wondered if Simone hadn't ordered him from a top-secret
Magnum personals catalog. But they had met, I was told, at a banya birthday party that a mutual friend had thrown at the Sandunovskye.
Andrew was instantly smitten and called Simone a few days later. After they'd arranged to meet for a drink, Simone, ever the
ingenue, said, 'Will you recognize me with my clothes on?' Andrew, though he photographs fighting in Chechnya and Iraq, was

An eclectic assortment of friends showed up. First was Sasha, a tall and gangly Russian who told me almost immediately, 'I
don't work, I travel, and I'm not interested in guidebooks that tell me how to live on fifty dollars a day.' Sasha's girlfriend,
Svetlana, cat-walked in five minutes later wearing something gold, shimmery, and strapless. Svetlana was a certain kind of
Russian woman — that perfect cocktail of DNA: the tall, trim, leggy figure of a uniquely well-endowed ballerina and the softly
chiseled face, wide-set eyes, and painted, pouty lips of the typical Slavic stunner. She was gorgeous, and in her mysteriously
quiet way, she spent dinner politicking and power brokering at her end of the table. Then there was Nigel, a dipsomaniac Englishman
who gulped wine, chain-lit cigarettes - his own and Svetlana's - and smiled and purred involuntarily. mysteriously based a
block from the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, but he spent as much time as possible with Simone in Moscow.

As Marina had explained to me earlier, Svetlana was Sasha's
devushka.

'So
devushki
are prostitutes?' I had asked.

'No, I mean, well, not really. They aren't paid to perform sexual acts, but it is understood that in exchange for being supported
in high style, they'll perform, service, satisfy, you get the idea . . .'

'So the
devushka
is like a kept woman or a mistress?'

'Yes, precisely, but with a little geisha thrown in.'

'And is this relationship between
devushka
and patron exclusive?'

'Well, from the woman's end it is. Like last year, Sasha supposedly spent fifty grand on Svetlana's needs, and this buys him
exclusive rights to her affections.'

'How do you know all this?'

'Sasha tells Simone everything, especially since Svetlana's gotten rather more demanding lately. Last year Sasha bought her
a Range Rover. Now she wants to be sent to an art and auctioneering school in London for a year, which would kind of defeat
the whole purpose of a
devushka
relationship. At least from Sasha's end.'

'Yes, a long-distance mistress is hardly a desirable situation. And do they act like boyfriend and girlfriend?'

'Well, you'll see for yourself tonight. Sasha is "physically ob­sessed" with her, but in public they seem rather indifferent
to each other.'

And throughout the dinner party Svetlana seemed to pay more attention to Nigel, while Sasha regaled me with a delightful body
of banya jokes and stories: 'A cell phone is ringing in the banya. Boris picks it up and says, "Yes, of course, dear, buy
yourself the mink coat." The phone rings again, and Boris answers it and says, "You want a diamond ring? Anything you want,
dear." For a third time the phone interrupts them, and Boris answers, "A Mercedes SUV, of course, buy it." Then he holds up
the cell phone and addresses his banya buddies: "Whose cell phone is this, anyway?"'

While Sasha was telling me another story about a bachelor party he'd attended at the Sandunovskye banya that turned into an
orgy, as well as a national scandal that erupted when a foreign minister was caught on camera cavorting with a prostitute
inside a banya, at the other end of the table Svetlana was contributing to Nigel's purring.

I asked Marina later about the bedroom eyes flying back and forth between Nigel and Svetlana. Marina explained the
devushka
logic: 'Well, Svetlana picked up on Nigel being from London and being unemployed at the moment, which she translates into
"independently wealthy Englishman." She was sizing Nigel up as a new patron, one more likely to send her to art school in
London. Nigel could never afford her, though.'

Throughout dinner, talk of the banya animated the conversation. All of the foreigners in the room had their own connection
to the banya and had been introduced by Russian friends, rather than seeking it out as a touristy lark the way foreigners
in Istanbul did. Andrew told a story of a macho
New York Times
war correspondent who was 'wounded' in Chechnya. Some Chechen sources had invited him to join them for a banya. After four
rounds of heat, probably eight rounds of vodka, the correspondent tripped and fell toward the banya's hot rocks and burned
his leg. The burn was bubbling, and he had no choice but to visit the makeshift military hospital. Too embarrassed to admit
it was a banya injury, which is really an admission that you can't handle your alcohol, he told the doctors he'd tripped over
a land mine.