Before I came to my senses, I had a career as a cultural anthropologist. As if that were not enough, I chose to do my research in the Russian Far North—which is not Siberia, but rather east of Siberia, and further north. It was just my luck that Russia opened its borders to nosey field researchers right when I started grad school and closed itself off once I had been chewed up and spit out. I spent my prime adulthood draining my life energy on excruciatingly difficult and maddeningly frustrating trips to my field site. “Don’t waste your pretty,” my chiropractor once said, when he saw me days after my return from a particularly grueling trip. I heard him, but I kept flinging myself back in nevertheless.
In the early years of my scholarly insanity, I was studying the phenomenon of indigenous activism in Russia, which seemed like a curious novelty to onlookers outside of Russia. I later came to understand that it wasn’t so new; there was an elite stratum of indigenous people who had been groomed by the Soviet state to be intellectual leaders of their small internal nations, and they were just going a bit maverick after the regime collapsed and the script got thrown out.
During my first big field trip to Russia, which lasted fourteen months, I spent some time in Moscow chasing down the indigenous leaders who had long since settled into cozy digs there, tokens selected by the regime to represent their people in the brotherhood of nationalities. One of them was quite famous, as he was the first president of the first post-Soviet association of indigenous peoples of the Russian North. He was also a poet. I didn’t read his poetry, but I had read all about his indigenous activism. I played phone tag with him for a while before I managed to get a response about my request for an interview.
“Did you lose interest in me?” he asked, returning my call only when I had given up pestering him. I couldn’t quite tell if it was humility or passive-aggressiveness.
“No! I was afraid you had lost interest in me.”
He asked if I wanted to meet.
“Sure. When?”
“Now.” He gave me his address and hung up.
It was 2:30 in the afternoon. I hadn’t planned on going out that day. But I threw on some street clothes, touched up my face, grabbed my tape recorder and notebook, and beat it to the Moscow metro.
I didn’t ring his buzzer until 4:00 p.m.—I had a little trouble finding his apartment building, since it was in one of those confounding Moscow configurations where a single address has several buildings, and some don’t actually face the street indicated in the address. I was perpetually late anyway, never planning my time well. I felt flustered even though there was no appointed time for this meeting—just “now.”
He buzzed me in from the street and was waiting at his door when I reached his floor, a slender man in slippers, slightly bent, with a shock of white hair. He greeted me silently, with a nod of his head, and ushered me into his living room.
I wondered what to expect of the apartment of an indigenous Siberian who had grown up in a family of fishermen but clawed his way up to a membership in the Union of Soviet Writers. It was cluttered and comfortable. There was a large foyer and living room. A long hallway leading to the kitchen went past two bedrooms and the requisite Khrushchev-style closets for toilet and bath. The walls of the living room—the ones that weren’t lined with bookcases—were decorated with reindeer antlers and animal skins and a portrait of the poet-activist as a young man, dashingly handsome. I had already noted his building was in a nice neighborhood near the center of Moscow, close to one of the major train stations.
We sat down in his living room, and he stole the mic, so to speak, started interviewing me before I could even get out my tape recorder. Who were my parents? Where was I born? When I told him Omaha, Nebraska, he got up and pulled an atlas down from the shelf, flipping through the pages until he found a map of the United States. He poured over it, searching for Omaha. I put my finger in the center of the map.
“Aha.”
Then he started pointing out the places he had visited “in America.” California, Wyoming, Oklahoma. He put his finger on a river near Tulsa.
“I fished there.”
Eventually I shifted the conversation to my ethnographic interests—I had an agenda, after all, a pre-set list of questions that I wanted to get his answers to. But I didn’t get to ask many of them. He sat back and started expounding on the famous Russian ethnographers of old, the revolutionaries who had been exiled by the Tsar to Siberia and turned the experience into an opportunity, becoming famous scholars who defined the discipline of anthropology in the Soviet Union. Vladimir Bogoraz. Vladimir Jochelson. Lev Shternberg. All Jewish. All not-Russian, like him.
I remembered my tape recorder and asked him if I could turn it on.
“Yes, but I’m not going to repeat what I’ve already said.”
So, this was a lecture. I pressed the record button.
As we were talking, I heard the apartment door open and close, and a young man—a contemporary version of the portrait on the wall—passed through the room and headed down the hallway without stopping. He heated up something to eat in the microwave, stopped in the bathroom, and went out again, without a word. My interview subject said nothing to him.
“My son,” he said, after the door had closed.
After about an hour of me checking off my questions as his rambling monologue more or less addressed them (and it was quite good stuff, I was thinking), he suddenly announced it was time for tea and got up from the couch. As he shuffled down the hall, I wasn’t sure if I was meant to follow him.
“Should I come with you?” I called.
“Yes, come on,” he said, without turning.
As I caught up to him, he pointed out the toilet and the bath, and then we wandered further into the kitchen. Having not been invited to sit, I stood by awkwardly as he began to pull food from the freezer and refrigerator, laying it out on the table.
“Patritsia,” he said, “here’s some meat, frozen. Here are some vegetables, frozen. Here are some pasta dumplings. Potatoes and onions are over there. Okay. Cook something.”
I laughed, but he just stood looking at me, smiling mildly. I wasn’t sure I had heard him right.
“I don’t have to eat here,” I said.
“And where else are you going to eat?” He turned and shuffled out of the kitchen.
“And what are you going to do?” I called after him.
“Think,” he replied.
I stood there laughing for a moment. I toyed with the idea of just gathering up my things and walking out. In the end, I cooked. I had sat there taking information from him for two hours, and if he wanted to take labor from me in return, I figured it was a reasonable trade-off.
It’s always difficult to work in someone else’s kitchen, and his was cluttered and chaotic. When I looked in the cupboard for spices, I found all manner of pharmaceuticals. There were bottles of medicine, boxes and bags of various herbal remedies and teas. The refrigerator was jammed with jars and plastic-wrapped parcels of unrecognizable contents.
I unwrapped the meat he had set out: it was liver. Liver and onions, that made sense. And potatoes fried with the onions and frozen vegetables. Keep it simple. I put the pasta dumplings back in the freezer.
I was afraid it would turn out horribly, but it wasn’t bad, actually. When all was ready, I called him back in, and then he suddenly shifted into the role of gracious host. He produced a loaf of sour brown bread from somewhere and shaved off a few slices. He extracted from the cluttered refrigerator a whole smoked fish and sawed it into sections, pointing out the caviar to me as he did so. He set bottles of vodka on the table—one from the freezer, one from a cupboard—and then he went off to get a couple of tall, narrow shot glasses, the kind made just for drinking vodka. Finally, we sat down to eat.
He poured us each a glassful of vodka, asking first if I preferred it room temperature or cold (I took cold). He proposed a toast to our acquaintance, and then downed his whole glassful. Choosing circumspection, I drank about half of mine. The appearance of vodka frankly made me a bit nervous. I liked vodka well enough, as long as it was ice-cold; I just didn’t like getting drunk on it in unfamiliar contexts. I slowly sipped the remainder of my glassful.
He filled our glasses a second time. This time, he toasted to my success. Again, I drank only half my glassful.
“Do you know why Russians always drink the whole glassful down?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Ah! You’re an ethnographer. You should know about these things.”
“I want to know.” He was an informant. He should be happy to be the first to inform me.
“If you don’t finish the vodka all at once, it is a hint that you do not fully support the toast.”
“Well,” I said, “I certainly don’t want to stand against the toast.” I tossed back the rest of my glassful.
He filled our glasses a third time, and I was quick to lift my glass first and toast to his success. He thanked me, and we both downed our glassfuls.
He only filled our glasses those three times; three, and no more. It was enough.
There was nothing left to do but dig into our meals. We did this at first in silence, but the awkwardness of it unnerved me, and I made even more awkward and stilted attempts at starting a conversation, trying to think of questions to ask him that weren’t like interview questions. Suddenly he loosened up—perhaps this is what the vodka was intended for—and he began to talk. Conversationally this time, not holding forth as he had done during our formal interview. And he laughed. He made me laugh.
He talked about what it was like to be an indigenous person living in Moscow.
“White people act like aliens from another planet,” he said. He didn’t say you white people, giving me a chance at redemption. “They’re so strange. And they don’t seem to understand the value of nature. Like they’re stupid.”
He chewed his bread for a moment.
“Then again, some native people aren’t much better. Your Native Americans, they have a concept I like: someone who is an apple. Do you know what that is?”
I did.
“Red on the outside, white on the inside.”
He beamed. “Exactly. You understand.”
We lingered over the meal for an hour, until I felt it was really time for me to go, and said so. He didn’t protest. We moved back into the living room and sat back down on the couch, where I started to pack up my ethnographic paraphernalia: tape recorder, notebook, pen. Suddenly, he gathered up several of his books to show me. Many of them were colorfully illustrated school primers in his native Siberian language, but one was a beautifully hard-bound volume of his poetry. The frontispiece was a picture of him—the same portrait that hung framed on his wall.
“This is my best work,” he said, stroking the creamy paper as I held open the book. “With this published, I can die in peace.”
After a moment of respectful admiration, I closed the book and handed it back to him, and resumed my effort to take my leave. I set my palms on my thighs in a note of I’m-about-to-stand-up finality.
“Live with us,” he said.
I smiled stupidly, again wondering if I had heard him correctly.
“You see we are two men living here with no woman to cook and look after us.”
I still held out hope that he was joking. I feigned a chuckle. But he wasn’t joking.
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Ah.” He nodded.
I got up, and he followed me to the door. I put on my coat and turned to shake his hand goodbye.
“So, you don’t want to live with us?”
“No,” I said, softening the refusal with a forced smile. “I don’t want to.”
He gave me a warm hug anyway.
