Eels and Porgy and Bess

A St Petersburg White Night

At the hotel we checked in, a process involving a lengthy examination of our travel documents: letters of invitations, visas and passports. Our key, attached to an oversized weighty-looking black bulb that could double as a weapon, lay on the counter between the clerk and us. Before we could have it we were to surrender our passports. I looked at my dad and he looked at me. We had never done this before, nor had any one ever asked this of us.

“Are you sure this is necessary?” Dad asked. I could read his mind. He had purchased from a friend a super-fine state-of-the-art money belt that fastened around the waist. This was where he planned to keep his valuables, included his passport. My anti-theft plan wasn’t nearly as high-tech: when I traveled, and even when I didn’t, I dressed like a student who didn’t carry on her person anything worth stealing. So far my strategy had worked.

“Quite sure,” came the firm and somewhat weary reply. “Your passports are safer here with us than with you. And really,” now the clerk’s voice took on some steel, “we insist.” We handed over our passports.

At this moment we heard something like music coming from the lobby level restaurant/bar. “Oh, yes.” The clerk brightened. “You are most welcome—it’s still open and you can leave your luggage here. Lots of business people go in there to have a drink and talk over big business know-how.”

It was all the clerk needed to say and Dad, who does not drink, broke into a jog. What Dad does, is business. He eats, sleeps, thinks, dreams business. All day and all night long, the man problem solves how to start up new businesses for budding wanna-be entrepreneurs, or how to improve struggling businesses that could be run more efficiently. Or how to cut costs on a top heavy business. Or how to gracefully put a business out to pasture and usher a new one in its place. He’s good a dreaming and he’s good at getting people to dream with him. Even people, like me, who would prefer to dream about anything else.

“This will be so fun,” Dad said, simultaneously tugging on my elbow while pulling a chair out for me. The restaurant was a long, dimly lit rectangular room. A shoal of tables, perhaps forty of them, separated us from the band, a sombre troupe consisting of five men in suits stood in shadow while and a woman in a frilly mini-skirt stood in a shallow pool of dusky blue light. They played something like a pop rock tune that now and again featured long accordion solos. The female vocalist, a woman with blond hair that had been dyed black but allowed to grow out, sang as if she were very very angry. And it wasn’t hard to see why: nobody was there to appreciate her talents. Nobody was there, except for the two of us, and the six of them on the stage and a thickening grey-blue cloud of cigarette smoke hovering over our heads.

"This is completely not cost effective.” Dad frowned. “I wonder what the overhead is on this place.”

For several minutes we listened to the band. They played a number that seemed a blend of polka and rock and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Porgy and Bess 1959 poster

“Go ask if they take requests. See if they know Summertime from Porgy and Bess.” Dad said.
“You ask.”
“You speak Russian.”
“No way,” I said. “She looks post-partum. I’m not doing it.”
“I’ll give you twenty roubles.”
“No.”
“Thirty.”
“That’s barely a dollar.”

A young man with an immaculate shin-length apron materialized beside our table. “Yes?” We gazed at him. Dad nudged my foot in a manner far too un-subtle to miss his meaning. I muttered something in Russian about menus and water. The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Let’s speak English. It will just save all of us time and effort,” he said, turning on his heel.

Several more minutes passed. The haze about us thickened. When the man returned with the menu, just one, two ash trays, and no water, he was all business. “We’re basically out of everything. Except for this and this.” He pointed to two items on the menu.

“We’ll take them.” Dad said.

The young man vanished. We didn’t know what we had just ordered and didn’t want to know. What we were learning firsthand was an essential and basic lesson every Russian learns from the moment he or she is born: take what is there with thanks and don’t ask too many questions.

Forty five minutes later the food arrived: marinated eel and greasy bear meat smothered in pickled horseradish. We were so hungry we ate it all without a single question exchanged between us.

one rouble