Banya Stories

"You are going to this, right?" Lindsay said on Friday afternoon. We were sitting in the teacher's room, drinking tea. "I'm not going to be the only non-naked person there?"
"Glyn said there'd be a room," I said. "Next to the pool and the sauna. We could hang out there and, you know, drink vodka. And keep our clothes on."
It's traditional, when visiting a Russian bathhouse, to get both undressed and inebriated, but this was a coworker's event, and thus not so much a question of modesty as of survival. The banya visit had been in the works for a long time, and now Masha, one of the Russian teachers, had apparently rented us one. From 11 PM on Friday to 5 AM on Saturday, we would have the run of the place: dry room, sauna, and all.
"I don't know how you rent a bathhouse," I said. "I guess we'll find out."
"Yeah, that's really why I want to go," Lindsay said. "Just to see what it's like…"
At 10 PM, we finished teaching and left work, acquired initial refreshments from the produkti, and met Glyn, the Welshman, at the bus stop. Glyn led us on a vodka-acquiring mission, and then we piled into the #3 bus and rode to the very edge of town, where we found Josh, Masha, and a handful of Russian friends waiting on a muddy path under the trees. Mustered, we walked through the dark to what appeared to be a warehouse. The inside didn't give this impression the lie: on the contrary, there was a large truck, some tools, and a stack of bricks.
"Bricks!" Lindsay hissed at me. "Fucking bricks! Where are we?"
"No idea," I said. "And how does this always happen to us?"
While we were having this philosophical debate, the others were knocking on a metal door in the wall. After a long pause, the door opened on a young woman in uniform, who beckoned us into a shadowy lobby. Masha explained our reservation, and the woman led us through the dark into a cavernous space that turned out to be a mirrored dressing room. A staircase led downwards, presumably to the banya rooms. The Russians began to take off their coats and scarves in a way that struck me as ominous. Lindsay clutched the lapels on her penguin jacket.
"I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it!"
We sidled toward the staircase, but Masha stopped us.
"Take off your street shoes. You might get big fine."
She indicated a sign on the wall forbidding, among other things, shoes and birch twigs. (Birch twigs, of course, are what Russians traditionally use to flog each other in the banya).
I took off my shoes, put on some guest sandals, lest I be rendered sterile by the contact between my bare feet and the cold floor*, and at last went downstairs.
Well, Glyn wasn't kidding when he said we'd rented it out. Yes we had, a whole underground complex consisting of a large room, painted red where it wasn't covered with fake log paneling, red leather sofas, a big projector screen, a pool table, and a stage with a stripper's pole. The whole thing was like a cross between your parent's basement and a brothel.
Up another short flight of stairs was a tiny, icy swimming pool, some showers, and the sauna. Everything was made weirder by the fact that there were only 8 or 9 of us drifting around this big space that was clearly made to be packed full of raucous drunken Russians.
The boys went to play pool, and the girls went off somewhere, while Lindsay and I sat down on the sofa closest to the snacks and vodka. Stepan and Andrei, two slightly awkward young men, joined us, and we all had a kind of stumbling conversation. I tried to talk to Stepan in Russian, but he stopped me.
"You speak English? Easier this way. Is OK, I need practice to speak English."
But he ran out of English shortly afterwards, and the two of them got bored and wandered off
"Let's start on the vodka," Lindsay said. Well versed in the Russian style, she had already poured us out 2 cups apiece, one of vodka and the other of cranberry juice. Drinking straight vodka makes you an alcoholic in Russia, but drinking straight vodka followed by a slosh of juice, or maybe a pickle, makes you not only not an alcoholic, but a really fun and sociable individual.
Then we watched the guys play pool for a while, but soon people began started to go off and reappear in swimsuits. Josh and Glyn showed up in trunks, Masha in a pink robe, and Stepan in an unfortunate Speedo, and all of them urged us to join them in the sauna.
I had anticipated this peer pressure, and packed for it.
"Want a skirt?" I asked Lindsay, and so she put on one of my black miniskirts while I put on the other. I had also had the foresight to wear a black bikini top instead of a bra, so in the end I emerged as a modest but sufficiently unclad partaker of banya.
"Do you think we should take another shot?" Lindsay said. "I feel like we should."
We had another v/c for courage, and joined the others in the sauna.
Well, what can you say about saunas? They're hot. This one was so stoked up that my gold necklace heated up within a minute, and I had to claw it off lest it singe me. We stood it as long as we could, and then ran out to fling ourselves into the icewater pool. Then we drank some more. Then we went back in the sauna. Rinse. Repeat. I feel that this is the kind of sport that drives fat elderly businessmen into cardiac arrest.
-Vasily Ivanovich, where's Yuri Mikhailovich?
-I don't know, have you checked the bottom of the pool?
After many repetitions of this routine, I got too cold and shivery to swim, but too warm for the steam room, and fell back to merely dipping my toes in, and then to sitting on the bench outside the sauna and pressing my back to the nice toasty wall. Everyone was spinning around in the big space, losing coherence as a group, or just coherence period, so I was surprised to come across Josh huddled on the ledge at the opposite corner of the pool.
"What's up?" I said. It felt like the first thing I'd said in hours.
"Oh nothing," he said. "But I think we need to go soon. It's 5:30 and they're just up there watching us. They've been doing it for a while now."
Sure enough, the woman who had let us in and her male companion were standing behind a glass door at the head of yet another flight of stairs, staring down at us like the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.
'Good Lord, that's creepy," I said. "Yeah, we should go."
I located my shirt and jeans, pulled them. Everyone else was milling around in various states of undress and confusion. Across the room, Andrei was carefully, lovingly, blow-drying Lindsay, all over, her hair and t-shirt, my skirt. She saw me raise an eyebrow and shrugged in that helpless, 'well-what-can-you-do?' way.
Masha collected some money to pay the rent, and then we all gathered our things, went out through the warehouse, and fell back into the fog and the rain. One by one people caught their buses and disappeared, until it was down to me and Glyn, who lived furthest away.
"Tell me another story about bears," he said in Russian, referring to a conversation we'd had a few weeks ago.
"I don't have any more bear stories," I said. "There's really not that much to say about bears. But once upon a time I was a caretaker for a quadriplegic woman who also hypoglycemic and always late, and she used to make me give her meals as we went down the highway at 70 mph…"
I was in that peculiar state of post-party clarity where you feel witty and tell (what seem at the time) very funny and engaging stories.
When I got back to my building, the babushka behind the door, the night shift babushka with the dyed orange hair and cat glasses, demanded to know where I'd been and what I'd been up to. I explained that I'd been at the banya with my friends, but she didn't understand my accent. She didn't understand, but she certainly disapproved.
I went off to bed and woke up 5 hours later in a dire state. But at least I knew about banyas now. Sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices in the name of research…

*A common belief. How do you say in Russian, 'I don't keep those bits in my feet?' Never mind, they get so upset that it's simpler and politer just to bow to custom and put some shoes on.