| MAY 19 - 25 // COPYRIGHT 1997 THE ST PETERSBURG TIMES |
F I V E - C O R N E R S
By Charles Digges
IT IS odd enough for me to get a call from back home in the States, and usually they come only on occasions of great alarm - a horrible accident for instance, or some other catastrophic news. But a message from my father I got on my answering machine the other day was worse than even I would have anticipated, and brought me immediately from a sitting to a standing position.
"Hi Charlie, it's your dad," he began in his characteristic Missouri drawl.
"In about a month, some friends of your grandparents are going to be making their way over to Petersburg and, well, we thought we'd give 'em your phone number so you could show 'em a good time."
My vision blurred and the voice receded as if spoken from the bottom of a well. I don't know when he called or where the message ended, because the blood in my body went immediately from my head to my feet.
It's really not all that traumatic, surely. But any long term escapee from their home country - especially one willing to flee all the way to Russia - is working to get away from at least something, and these little visitations from relatives and other vague acquaintances can be a hell of a psychological jolt.
There is little hope of turning them back once they have bought the tickets, hassled the visas and decided they are coming. And even though you have had nothing to do with their decision to intrude on your life, you naturally want them to enjoy themselves, even if most people think that enjoying themselves means getting you to waste all of your time shuttling them around to different sights.
Fortunately, there are ways you can maximize their time without having to lay eyes on them for longer than the time it takes you to get them from the airport to their hotel. A guide as follows:
Fun With Maps
Instead of meeting them at their hotel to lead them out on a day of excursions, supply them with a map and tell them to come meet you.
I once lost my own brother for nearly a day in this fashion. As he called from various sights in the city, trying hopelessly to navigate the Cyrillic street names on the Russian-only map I had given him, he got an edifying and thorough tour of St. Petersburg's historic center.
As he would desperately call me at my office - which he was trying to find - from various places where he had managed to get lost, I would ask him to describe his surroundings to help him orient himself.
"I'm standing in front of a big green palace near a river," came his answer at one desperate interval.
"Congratulations," I told him. "You've found the historic State Hermitage. Now continue straight down the river and turn left," I said, buying myself another three hours.
Olga The Blokadnitsa
If all else fails, rent the services of any babushka over 60 to tell your relatives/acquaintances about the 900-day Siege of Leningrad over tea in their hotel room for an evening. Anyone who has heard the story knows it takes at least 900 days to tell and you also remember how reluctant you were to stand up and leave, even when dawn came creeping through the curtains. They will be equally reticent to leave and will thus be off your hands for approximately a week.
The Reality Treatment
There is another kind of visitor beyond the simply clueless who will be harder to shake - that visitor who comes with an agenda of seeing the "real" St. Petersburg, the one which can't be found in the guidebooks and thus requires your seasoned experience to find.
I once had a visitor of this variety who couldn't leave my arm for a second in his search for gritty reality. So I showed him. We started with the toilets at Moskovsky Railway station before proceeding to Apraksin Dvor where a man who was defecating on the ground tried to sell him a hat. From there, we took a cab to a brothel across town in a car that so briskly jolted over the potholes that he dislocated his shoulder. Arriving at our destination, we were greeted by a corpse collecting flies on a bench. The cop assigned to guard it said it had been sitting there for two days. Originally scheduled to stay for a week, my friend left after three days.