We talk about the Winter Olympics, which Russia will host in 2014. “Someone will get a lot of money,” Igor says, “and we will be in deep shit. It’s the usual thing.” We talk about women: “The girls here don’t understand that I am alive. I am not a slot machine. They only understand how to take.” And since Igor is having some issues right now, we talk more about women: “I am trying to figure out whether she is the shadow or I am.” He tears the vobla in half and removes its liver, about the size and colour of a golden raisin.
“Eat,” he says, handing it to me. I pop it in my mouth and swallow with more kvas.

A story about a friendship between two men developing over ritualized nude violence has certain overtones, I realize, but this is how Russian men — and, I can only assume, women — bond. As for me, a Westerner, I have noticed that it can be much easier to develop trust with someone you have no hope of fully understanding than with someone from your own culture. I’ve gotten to know Igor mostly in this place.

He is twenty-seven. He took English in school but has refined his language skills working in Petersburg bars frequented by foreigners and prostitutes for the past eight years. I have personally witnessed him chugging 200 grams of vodka, four shots in one. There is not a single friend back home whom I would allow to beat my naked body with birch branches in a wooden steam room.

I ask Igor what banya means to him. “It’s cool, man,” he says. “Just relaxing.” Then he thinks for a moment and asks if I feel the rebirth.

“Yeah,” I reply.

Igor orders a shot of vodka and offers me one. I decline and call him out: he once told me that whatever I do, I should never drink vodka in the banya. A good friend of his died after passing out inside the parilka. “This is not alcohol,” he says. “This is medicine. This is cure.”

“Don’t fuck my brain,” I reply, borrowing one of Igor’s favourite English expressions. I am already brutally hung over, something the banya is exceptionally good for.

He shoots the vodka and clanks the glass on the table. “We are now entering Heathrow Airport by jeep!” he exclaims.

We return to the parilka. By Igor’s standards, three cycles from steam room to pool are required to get the desired effect: skin spiderwebbed with blotches and a mental state of absolute relaxation in which you must struggle — I mean really try — to maintain consciousness.

We sit again on the highest bench. “That’s why people are coming in banya,” Igor says. “Probably they even doesn’t think about it. But somebody, for entertainment like with their friends, to drink some beer, to talk and stuff without the girls. . . . They still didn’t realize that their lives are beginning again.” He hops off the bench to splash more water on the rocks. “Probably it’s true.”