solstice

Had a great dinner with Charlotte and Mich at an Azherbijanian restaurant, complete with scented water-tobacco burning hookahs at the table. The food and service was great, and I tried another different russian beer, this one called Tinkah. that's not the correct spelling, but this keyboard that i am using although it includes the cyrllic letters, is not set up to be used that way. not that I can see anyway.

i think I am developing a taste for the beer, and it's damned good. Well, David, since I know you are reading this, the next time you're picking up your Canadian at the Toronto beer store, check to see if there's any russian stuff there, and i won't worry about getting any at the duty free.

I had lamb, which was fabulous, potatoes, roasted vegetables, and beer.

last night was solstice, and the first night of the white nights festival. the city did not sleep, not that it does anyway, but last night was even more lively, and apparently it will become even livelier over the next 10 days, especially either tomorrow or sunday, when every student who is in any kind of course "graduates" and they parade down the Nevsky Prospekt, which is closed for the occassion, wearing even more revealing clothing than usual and sashes which say "graduate".

i have to admit i retreated to my room for solstice. i am so tired by the end of the day from running around to museums, cathedral mass, and dinner, that i decided not to go on the midnight boat ride along the canal. oh, but they set those up for us every few days, and there will be more.

in an email to me, Nancy said that a friend of hers was envious that I was to be in St Petersburg for a month, and included a few warnings: watch out for the swarming gypsies, who target tourists, espectilaly women, and have a trick of throwing a baby at you so that you will put out your arms to catch it, thereby dropping your purse. well, most everyone who's reading this will no that i have this nifty little over-the-shoulder bag that requires no arms to carry, purchased with just that warning in mind. however, while i have not seen any such swarming gypsies, i have heard that George Elliot Clarke, eminent Canadian poet from Halifax and now Toronto, was swarmed by four men while walking down the Prospekt with his wife. George was walking minding his own business when suddenly a man stepped right in front of him and stuck his face into his. George turned to go another direction, and another man right there, right in hs face. He turned then to his left, and a third man blocked his way with a menacing glare. And he turned behind to find yet a fourth man blocking him, at which point he just pushed through and rejoined his wife. The men's purpose was to warn him, threaten him; but they did not accosst his wife, although I'm sure they could have.

I heard today that many high ranking officials have been murdered on the prospekt and in fact there are bullet holes in some of the plate glass windows of stores. Additionally, it is not unusual for us to see, while walking along a side street off the prospekt, a smashed in car window, recently minted, or piles of glass beads on the street.

this afternoon I went to a screening of Tarkovsky's movie Mirror, an autobiographical film about his life as a young boy. don't rush out to watch it unless you have a high tolerance for ambiguity, or unless your russian history is impeccable. our guide through the experience, Alexandr Skidan, provided some annotations that made the movie comprehensible, and on Monday we will be discussing the film in terms of the inclusion of passages from Pushkin's letters and scenes from Dostoyevsky. interesting stuff, and I'm hooked.
the screening was in a tiny room that was part of a small independant book publisher in petersburg that started out 20 eyars ago publoishing essay ss only\ The space they inhabit serves as a press that now publishes full length books, screens avant garde films, has art galleery, bookstore, and readings. Each room of the space is very small, and down a narrow sti\rcase and into a space that in canada would not pass fire codes, but it had the feel of secrecy about it which may or may not be necessary any more or again. it's hard to say.

so, bacvk to Nancy's fr4iend, who told Nancy he was envious that I would be here for a month. It is easy for me to understand why he would say that. I've been here a week, and have spent this first week just watching, really, watching and allowing myself to step into the pace of the moving hoards of people who call the Prospekt their home. i just now feel as if i can walk without tripping, and have put out my intuitive feelers enough to sense the complexity and variety of the characters who are out there. Faceless and numberless people are now starting to separate into types, and i can tell a tourist, like myself, at a glance, and that s before they speak english or german or italian. i'm tempted to go more fully undercover, and put on a long dark skirt and envelope my head in a babushka, as I feel, like in most countries i'm familiar with, that women over 50 move invisibly among those who matter more. i like it. imagine what i could do with that disguise? certainly I would avoid standing in the tunnels that go under the prospekt and down to the subways where i would sing russian folk songs with a plastic bucket at my feet; i don't see much interest in that, or in standing at entrances to restaurants that serve russian national dishes, handing out discount coupons for their food. rather, i would stumble quickly but with a slight hobble down the street and onto the bus, where I would pause before stepping up into the bus (no "kneeling" buses here, in St Petersburg, let me tell you in this city for the young) and wait for some slightly younger woman to rush over to help me up the steps, help from the next generation of babushkas who have not yet realized that they are that, who are still young enough to be regretting the stillettos they have stopped wearing because of bunyans and too many turned ankles. yes that['s the other thing i noticed, just walking and watching: turned ankles. one of those amazons striding along and then pop, over she goes like one of those dolls that are held together with string on the inside, but who collapse when you push the base.

so, what i wanted to say really, here was that a week in St Petersburg would be like going to a ballet and listening to the overture and then leaving before the ballet began. I haven't even been the hermitage yet, i'm still digesting the modernists, wanting more tarkovsky, lectures from the russian scholars here who are showing me the mythology of petersburg, the facade, the dreamworld of peter I that has been added to by successive layers of russian imagination. So i understand Nancy's friend's envy, because to have been in petersburg for a week is to KNOW to absolutely know that you have not been in petersburg at all.

i suspect that being here for a month will bring even greater certainty about the insubstantiability of petersburg. already i want to come back.

no blood on the streets this morning.

love you all, Anne