I
saw my first Russian girl -- or at least the first one that made any impression
on me -- in Istanbul in 1994. RU$$iAn GiRLs: SuMMeR oF LoVE 2001
I
saw my first Russian girl -- or at least the first one that made any impression
on me -- in Istanbul in 1994.
I was doing an aimless year-long backpacking thing, and I was walking though the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. I saw an incredibly beautiful red-haired girl -- that kind of purple-red that comes out of a bottle, not the natural kind --walk by, all fair skin and sharp cheekbones, jaunty walk and mischievous grin.
I followed her around for a while, but was too shy to try to talk to her. She was with her family, anyway. I tried to take a picture of her but that roll of film had been loaded incorrectly and it didn't turn out.
At one point she looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.
That was it. Soon I lost her in the crowds.
Now of course, I didn't know, at once, that she was Russian. I mean, remember, this was 1994. The Commie Menace had only recently been put down. Seeing them abroad was still comparatively new. At least to me.
I was talking about this with the owner of the cheap hotel I was staying at that evening -- that I'd seen a girl of such beauty my heart had dropped all over the slighty grubby prayer rugs at the Blue Mosque -- and he waved his hand dismissively.
"Ah," he said. "All Russian women are prostitutes."
I think that was the first time I ever considered coming to Russia to work.
Was it always, and all, about the women? I don't know. I was a Cold War child -- I grew up hearing how Russia was the Evil Empire. There was some residual interest there, of course, in seeing the real thing.
I'd met -- and gone out with -- plenty of other Eastern European women over the years in between. Russia, though, somehow that seemed like the fountain of true mysterious female beauty.
In retrospect, I'm not sure what I was expecting.
But as the Chinese say: Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
I arrived here in Vodkaberg, a medium-sized provincial city, in September of 2000. I almost immediately began to hear stories about how the region had the most beautiful women in Russia. This was apparently because Catherine the Great didn't want any other beautiful women around her, and banished them all to this region. (All the hookers, too, I would later hear.)
Certainly there were a lot of them. Some said there were as many as three women for every man in this region. (I don't see how that could be true, but I'm sure the ratio is a bit off, probably because there are so many universities with girly subjects like medicine and teaching in this city.) And certainly they had an interesting dress sense. Leopard skin, zebra skin, gaudy fur coats, short skirts, fishnet stockings, brightly dyed hair, huge earrings. As much cleavage and leg and nipple as could be displayed.
And high heels.
Man do Russian women love high heels. At the supermarket, in a foot of snow, on ice, you name it -- as a Russian girl once said to me, "I feel like I don't have legs if I don't have on high heels."
My first Russian girl -- the landlady's daughter, barely 18 to my 31 -- spent a month pursuing me, two weeks or so dating me, then the next couple of months alternately avoiding me and playing mind games with me. She spent quite a lot of time learning how to push buttons to make me angry -- she frequently made appointments which she didn't keep, showed up routinely 30 minutes late, etcetera.
I look back on myself ashamed. I have since instituted a rule that I will wait for 30 minutes for someone I am having sex with frequently, and no more than 15 for someone I am not.
Most of that winter I was alone. I had a strange one night stand that was more unnerving than exciting with a pretty blonde girl I'd met at a nightclub. She was there with a guy, a very drunk guy with a mustache, and apparently made a point of walking him out to get rid of him and then coming back to dance with me. We sat down and I took her hand, and she started to cry gently. She was so drunk she smelled like a whiteboard marker. I indicated in sign language I was going home, and she asked to come with me.
I asked her, through more sign language, whether she was married or not. She said no. She immediately got in bed with me.
Afterwards, I was watching her out of the corner of my eye, pretending I was asleep. She took the ring off her finger, kissed it, held it in her palm, and curled up to go to sleep.
That freaked me out a bit.
Then the spring came, and after 5 months of winter, your libido can't help but be affected by the warm weather. Mating season began.
I started going out with another student, a gorgeous young blonde who was 15 years my junior. Her I was less hesitant to take up with, actually -- she'd clearly been around the block a few times. She vowed her love to me; she quoted Ricky Martin songs at me.
There were a few things I didn't quite understand about dating in Russia, however. First and foremost is that the man pays for EVERYTHING.
I accidentally insulted this dear young blonde, who we'll call, English Groupie A, greatly when she was going on her summer holiday to a beach resort. She wanted 1000 rubles for extra money for beer and salted fish.
"Do you think your friends in America would pay for pictures of me and my friends kissing in our underwear?" she inquired. (A lot of Lesbian chic going around, that year -- 2001 -- Tatu, the lesbian schoolgirl pop group, had just appeared upon the scene in Russia, both of them being at that time about 15.)
"Uh. . . well. . . probably. . . " I said. But the moral implications lay heavily on my still essentially innocent, square, Catholic mind. I try very hard to be a degenerate, but . . .
Finally I just said I'd give her 1000 rubles and she could clean my apartment a few times when she got back.
Unsurprisingly, she didn't want to see much of me when she got back. In fact she ran off with a professional football player.
I saw her a year or so later -- I apologized deeply to her for thinking that she might like to make her money through honest work rather than as a gift or through becoming a porno star.
Anyway, I wasn't too heartbroken, or even too surprised, because I had sort of been holding her at arm's length a bit. I'd taken the opportunity to get together on several occasions with English Groupie M, another student in the same class as the blonde. She was a mere 13 years younger than myself.
And, well, I have to admit I also took the opportunity to get a few sessions in with English Groupie E, English Groupie M's best friend. They either didn't know or didn't care, or just didn't talk about it.
We all hung out together quite comfortably. On one occasion I went to a nightclub with English Groupie E, English Groupie M, and English Groupie A all at the same time, and we all got roaring drunk on vodka and at various times all three of them alternately dragged me into the restroom or foyer for some brisk making out. The others, as I said, either didn't know, or didn't care. Hell, they spent quite a lot of the evening tongue-kissing each other on the dance floor anyway.
Oh, I felt so evil. I was having a ball. I was the Man. I was the pimp daddy, obviously. I can recall roller-skating down by the river one day looking at three different bite marks from two different women on my torso.
Now I was, all during this time, learning a great deal about Russian culture. The inverse ratio of women to men had left Russians, at least in our city, with very specific ideas about love and marriage. By that I mean that women considered their main goal in life to find a good provider to marry, and to do so before they were twenty. Men wanted to find somebody to cook and clean for them, preferably before they were too much older than 25.
From what I could tell, neither side expected too much in the way of fidelity from the other.
Men were quite open about their mistresses. One of my male students, an extremely geeky type with a dour wife and a six-year-old child, quite openly brought his slatternly drunken mistress to a student gathering, raising no eyebrows except mine.
I did occasionally challenge my female friends about this wantonness. "It's normal," was about all they'd reply. English Groupie E had gone out with a number of rich married men and didn't seem to think much about it; English Groupie M had been banging one of her professors at university.
"Fuckin' Russian girls," became my constant joke. Far from being grateful for all this attention I was getting I couldn't help but bust their asses about it. I made up jokes: "Why did the Russian girl cross the road?" "Because a guy with a European Union passport was standing on the other side of the street." "How many Russian girls does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "None, her rich boyfriend does it for her."
I got quite jealous one evening when the drunken English Groupie E tried to kiss me on the dance floor and I said no because the others were watching, so she immediately jumped into the lap of the geeky male student and started kissing him.
Anyway, it was a pretty intense summer.
Things got a bit slow towards the end of the summer -- English Groupie E went to Turkey and came back engaged (as always) and English Groupie A went on holiday and then took off with her football player. I think English Groupie M went to Bulgaria or somewhere.
So I was left with English Groupie N. She was a bit older than the others -- only 6 years younger than me --and had already been married and divorced, though she had no children. She was studying because she'd won some kind of contest to spend a month in England in some kind of business training program.
We got together a couple times, and she made it clear she'd like some kind of relationship with me. I avoided getting together with her again for this reason. She clearly seemed a bit more stable and level-headed than the foreigner-slavering English Groupies E and M.
I certainly didn't want to break any hearts. My Catholic guilt was beginning to assert itself in strange ways. I spent a lot of time moping around that fall staring out the window at the gray skies.
English Groupie N went to England and returned at the end of September.
Then one cold evening in October she invited me out to dinner. "I'd like to go home with you," she said.
"Well. . ."
"Because I'm about to go back to England and work illegally, and we won't get another chance."
I took her up on that one. I was a bit too ambitious and ended up not being able to come, but she thanked me profusely anyway, saying she'd enjoyed every minute of it.
Nice girl.
She went back to England and nobody has ever heard from her again.
A year later I was at a birthday party and met someone who'd been in England at the same time as English Groupie N on the business training program.
"Not that she came to class much," said the guy. "She'd found a couple of rich guys and was mostly getting taken out and wined and dined and driving around in their Mercedes."
"Russian girls," I said.
"Russian girls," he said.
We drank a vodka to that.