Atlantica - 01.02.2006, Síða 34

32 AT L A N T I CA
moderate vodka consumption, he explained, “keeps the age down.”)
Maxim knows he has his proverbial work cut out for him promoting
his hometown.
“When I say, ‘Imagine Russia,’ what do you imagine?” he asked
me. We had moved to a restaurant called Ginger for our good Russian
kitchen. It looked Moroccan, the first page of the menu was Japanese,
and I was eating tagliatelle.
I decided not to say ‘vodka.’ He is sure Westerners, at least, conjure
up pictures of pickpockets and panhandlers, one-sided images propa-
gated by the foreign media. I became interested in my pasta. Of course
the city has crime, he said. “It’s a city of six million people. Some people
have different jobs.”
Maxim has big ideas for what he would like to do to help St.
Petersburg’s international image, like stationing student guides through-
out the city, and creating a global marketing campaign depicting the real
people of the city, not just the gold domes and canals.
“You want to see the real Russian underground?” asked Maxim at
one point during dinner, a marked departure from the spin he had been
giving on his hometown.
I wasn’t sure what the Russian underground was, and I was pretty
sure I couldn’t keep up, but we decided to meet the next evening. “Just
bring a bottle of vodka,” he reminded me before I closed the cab door.
-20˚C AND FEELING FINE
By the next morning, temperatures had dropped further. I usually max
out after an hour or two in museums, but I was happy to have an excuse
to hide inside all day, wandering through the Winter Palace and the
Hermitage’s collections, the Russian Museum’s traditional Russian folk
costumes, and the mosaic domes of the iconic Church of the Savior on
the Blood.
Later that night, as promised, I found myself on my way under-
ground, smashed in the back seat of a taxi the size of a Volkswagen bug.
It was me, Maxim, his girlfriend Dasha, and his ex-girlfriend, Ekaterina
Chtchelkanova, also a former dancer with the Kirov Ballet, but more
internationally known for her role as a Hungarian woman on death row
in the film “Chicago.”
Katya, as she goes by, wore a full-length mink coat and was trying
to get directions on her mobile to a photographer’s apartment. Maxim
was doing the same, and the taxi driver was examining a map. We
were roughly two blocks away from our destination, but nobody knew
exactly where it was.
After this went on for a good seven minutes, Katya closed her phone
and looked at me. “So welcome to Russia, basically.”
We found the address and walked into the cavernous belly of a
decrepit apartment building, up crumbling cement stairs, to the work-
ing studio of St. Petersburg photographer Alexander Kitaev. Kitaev lives
in a district west of Nevskiy Prospekt near the Yusupov Palace, where
Rasputin was famously murdered. He has been photographing the
architecture and vistas of the city in black and white for decades.
Dasha got to work preparing the vodka table. She laid out a plate of
a hard cheese and bread and another plate of thick slices of salami. She
poured a round of shots for everyone, and encouraged me to take a
piece of cheese or salami to eat after.
We stood in a circle facing each other, toasted, tossed back our full
glass (a requirement) and bit into our fatty snacks. I had made it past
round one. Dasha poured another immediately, and a third shortly
after that.
Most of the work Kitaev showed us, kept in carefully catalogued bind-
ers, was taken in winter. Most people I asked found winter and summer
to be the city’s best seasons, and everything in between just okay. As
we sat in his crowded studio, he brought out binder after binder of his
affair with the city.
“People who were born here pass by this beauty every day and don’t
lift their heads,” said Katya. “He did.”
The discussion quickly turned into a love fest for St. Petersburg – how
friendly the city is, how once you have lived here, it is hard for any other
city in the world to impress you. The vodka, the sausage, the vodka, and
the cheese continued to be consumed in rotation, until suddenly, the
second bottle was nearly gone.
I tried to duck out of the goodbye round, but Kitaev pulled me
back into the little drinking circle, saying something in Russian. Katya
laughed, and translated.
“It’s something like, if you do ‘A’, you’ve got to do ‘B.’”
Fair enough. I tossed B back, and we walked the two blocks back to
Maxim’s for our sobering round of pelmini to complete the ritual.
When I finally leave for the night, it is –20°C, and I’m warm. Okay, not
warm, but I can walk down the street without muttering curses to myself. The
moisture in the air freezes as it moves, falling in silver drifts under the street-
lights like someone has thrown a handful of glitter over our heads. The cars and
street are covered in the city’s silvery dust.
Apparently, this is how you end the night in the Russian underground – or at
least in St. Petersburg – in good company, with something heavy in your stom-
ach, and one or three last rounds. It’s been three short days, but I’m sold. If it’s
good enough for two Kirov ballet dancers, it’s good enough for me. a

ST. PETERSBURGa
026-033Atl206 StPeter.indd 32 21.2.2006 12:55:29