petersburg — “Prepare to suffer,” Igor says. Wearing only sheets and rented plastic slippers, we enter the parilka and sit on the highest bench, where the steam is most aggressive. Igor shouts to the guy with the kovshek, a giant ladel. “Dabavim!” Throw more water on the rocks. The guy throws. “Dabavim, dabavim!”
A wall of hundred-degree vapour wafts across the small room, searing my sinuses like a hit of wasabi. “It’s a good steam,” Igor says, rising to leave. “Now we begin. Find a place and lie down right away. Soon, I will come.” I drape my sheet across the bench, but I’m not quick enough to lie down before it’s scalding hot.
Igor reappears wielding birch branches, one in each hand, the leaves dripping with water and eucalyptus oil. His sheet is bunched around his waist, and he is wearing mittens and a felt Red Army hat with flaps covering his ears. Igor, as the name implies, is a hulk of a dude: six-foot-two and built like one of boxing’s Klitschko brothers. The homoeroticism of the moment is unmistakable, but in the banya (bathhouse), this is a matter of course.
“Cover your dick,” Igor says.
I cover my dick.
He whips the branches in the air over my body, gathering heat in the leaves. Then he lashes and smacks every inch of me, pausing only to push the leaves into my face for a breath of eucalyptus and to poke my heels with the branches. This goes on for about fifteen excruciating minutes, until the leaves, now dry and crisp, start to burn my skin. “Enough,” Igor declares.
Red and puffy, we hurry out of the parilka. We hang our sheets and dive into a freezing cold pool filled with greenish, leaf-strewn water. Three naked girls are soaking up to their necks. We’re almost too light-headed to notice.
I’ve been coming to banyas like this one on Karbisheva Street for the past eight summers. Before I met Igor, all I knew of the ritual came from Mikhail Zoshchenko’s famous story “Banya.” That piece, a satire of Soviet bureaucracy in which bathers are required to retain tickets for coats and linens on their naked persons, does not depict the theatre of pain inflicted by Igor. This theatre goes back to at least AD 1113, when the apostle Andreas recorded a swipe at the Slavs and their banya:
“They warm it to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day and actually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.”
Lashing aside, the banya is primarily a place to talk and hang out. Igor and I retreat to a booth we’ve rented for a few hours. Seated at a picnic table, we ask the attendant for two foamy glasses of kvas, a traditional malted black-bread soda the colour of cola. Igor has also purchased vobla(a whole dried fish) and several packages of kalmar (squid jerky). I sip the kvas and chew a few strings of the squid jerky, which is like salted rubber bands.
