© Irina Borisova, 2016

© Irina Borisova, translation, 2016

© Mikhail Borisov, photos, 2016

Editor Curt Lang

Editor Tod Greenaway

Created with intellectual publishing system Ridero

Part I. Problems with Electricity

How It All Started

The idea of a marriage agency originally came to mind after my lady friend’s request to use my post office box for her sister Galya’s personal letters. Galya, a divorced lady of thirty seven with a sixteen year old son, lived together with her parents. Many people in Russia live with their parents because low wages do not allow them to rent apartments, let alone to buy them.

Living with her parents did not bother Galya much. On the contrary, she found it quite convenient. Her mother was more her son’s mother than she was herself. Her mother also cleaned the apartment, cooked and washed, so Galya was occupied only with her job but her evenings were free – and boring.

Galya liked to visit theatres and other cultural events. She liked company for these outings, so she placed an advertisement in the local personals paper. She wrote that she wished to find a man for «disinterested friendship, visiting museums, theatres and beautiful St. Petersburg suburbs in summer». It was really all she wished. She was incautious enough to write her telephone number in her ad. The telephone started to ring days and nights. The greatest quantity of callings occurred just at night and night fantasies of men calling were rather far from attending theatres and museums.

Galya’s parents were indignant. They demanded to switch off the telephone overnights. The uninterrupted ringing continued for two weeks. However, none of the people calling corresponded to her image of an inquisitive gentleman wishing to raise his cultural level by visiting places of interest.

Galya herself was rather cold and selfish. She had an unfortunate first marriage, and she did not want to repeat her mistake. She did not want to get anybody else to take care of; her life generally quite satisfied her and the last things she needed were marriage and sex.

She removed her telephone number from her second advertisement and asked men to write to my post office box as she did not have her own. I got letters out of the box, and Galya occasionally visited me and took them. As a reward I was also allowed to read all the letters.

Now I can share some peculiarities of Russian mens’ letters. First, many of them were very short, sometimes only a telephone number, a man’s name and the request to call. They were often very poorly decorated, very often written on random scraps of paper torn I had no idea out of what. Letters were sometimes written even on telegram forms picked up I suppose at the Post Office where the idea to write maybe came suddenly to someone’s mind and was immediately embodied.

Some of letters were also long, trying to describe the personality and all the life of the man writing. But true feelings and loneliness were usually hidden under such a deep coating of irony that it sounded more like an attempt to laugh at life in general and especially at the man writing the letter himself.

Again, none of the men who sent letters matched the part of a gentleman escorting Galya to theatres. What all men wished was rotating around all the same, which was absolutely declined by Galya. One person even offered to repair Galya’s country house stove if she had any, if their liaison would be successful. Galya snorted, she had no stove, but I had one that just needed improvement. There was a moment when I seriously thought how to manage to use that man’s offer for free. Then I sighed, understanding that a free repair would hardly work out in this case.

In one letter a man asked Galya sarcastically what she really meant writing about «disinterested friendship». Hinting at something, he asked with irony what particular kind of men Galya meant? Galya understood and appreciated the idea. It was just what she needed. Her third advertisement was a straight appeal for response from just that special kind of men. And the circle of candidates immediately changed: all the men she called that time were really interested just in theatres and museums. Galya was happy: she visited almost all St. Petersburg theatres and concert halls with them in turn. Her life became fulfilling and joyful. At last only one person of all the candidates remained, with whom it was especially interesting to talk about art. He escorted Galya everywhere she wished, they became great friends. One evening, while playing chess together in his apartment, he told Galya his story.

He told Galya about the woman who was too cruel to him when he was just a novice. That lady told everyone she knew about his first unlucky attempt, after which the young man could not try to make another. He became nervous and tense every time, understanding that someone was waiting for what he could not offer. But telling all this, the man felt that it was all quite different with Galya who awaited nothing of the kind. Galya was, in fact, thinking more about her next chess move. He sat closer to her, his voice sounded with affection and Galya did not even have time to move her pawn when found herself in his arms. That attempt was quite lucky. Galya, being a little bit puzzled, did not however forget how many theatres they visited together. Her friend was so happy that he immediately proposed. They married very soon. They said that after the marriage someone saw Galya in the kitchen cooking something. In a year they already had a wonderful baby boy. Galya somehow became his caring Mom maybe because her husband became the most loving Dad in the world.

All that happened from just a letter dropped into my post office box. And it was the first thing I thought about when I needed to start an additional business when our basic one went through bad times.

Anna

When Anna was twenty, she had a Swedish boyfriend, a student working on the construction of a new St. Petersburg hotel in summer. That young man was in love with her and asked her to marry him and leave for Sweden – but Anna also studied at the medical Academy at that time and promised to come to him in a year after her graduation. But an awful misfortune happened to her family that summer. Her sister’s two month old son fell sick in the country where her parents usually spent summers in their small cottage. Anna’s parents and sister drove to the city to buy medicine and be back soon, they left the baby with Anna. The accident happened on their way. Their car collided with a truck, and everybody was killed at once. Anna lost both parents and her sister, the baby lost his mother, Anna’s brother-in-law lost his wife. He remained alone with a baby in his arms and Anna could not leave a desperate man without any help.

They settled in his apartment together looking after the baby in turn. That year was very hard for both of them. All the hardships made them closer, and when Anna graduated her brother-in-law asked her to marry him.

Anna loved her Swedish fiancee who continued to write her regular letters full of love and melancholy. But she also had become very attached to her little nephew and felt sorry to leave him. Her brother-in-law insisted, and her Swedish fiancee had to leave for work to America. Anna had to decide something, but the Swedish man could not come and take her and the child who already started to call her Mom. Besides, when he cried at nights, he smiled when she held him. She gave up and married his father.

Having married, she immediately understood what a mistake she had made. She could not make herself love her husband. She thought that habit would substitute for love but it did not happen. Her husband was a successful journalist with a legal communist newspaper. He worked much, often went on business trips, and seldom was at home. He spent a lot of time in the society of party functionaries, attending their parties, often returning home drunken. He usually was occupied by his own affairs, did not pay much attention to Anna’s mood, and wondered why she was so tired and irritated coming from work.

She was a dentist. Her husband did not know that her patients considered her dentist chair to be «magical»; nobody it seems felt either pain or stress there as Anna was not the kind of doctor asking only «to open/shut your mouth». She always listened to people, cheered them, trying to take upon herself all their pains and fears. She started to carry out a scientific program, but two events did not allow her to get her scientific degree: perestroyka and her own son’s birth.

Perestroyka also ruined the political career of her husband. He could not believe that party values would be destroyed so fast. He gambled wrong, and when he tried to change his political orientation it was already too late. His habit of drinking increased, and very soon he found himself without good work, without money, always drunken.

Anna had to provide for the two boys and non working husband. She was lucky to have a profession by which she could earn something for living even in the new hard times. But she had to work too much. Her elder boy was independent and industrious, helped her a lot looking after his little brother till she came from work. He did not know Anna was not his real mother, despised his always drunken father and when Anna divorced her husband he stayed with her.

Anna was already thirty five when she came to my agency. She was too tired of twelve hours work every day and of living with her ex-husband since they all still had to live in the same apartment: Anna and the children in one room, the ex-husband in the other. She was tired of his drunkenness, awful scandals with broken windows and the visits of police.

Filling in her application form, she indicated only one son, laughing that in five or ten years when I maybe at last manage to give her in marriage her elder fifteen year old boy will be already an adult. «And I do have only one own son!» she smiled, leaving.

But she was lucky much sooner. A respectable Finnish gentleman had great interest in her, visiting St. Petersburg several times to meet with her and at last inviting her to visit his house in Finland.

Anna could leave her work only for a short time, but it was enough for the gentleman to understand she was just the right woman. Anna happily accepted his proposal, but there was one more problem – to explain to her fiancee that she had been flippant to indicate only one boy in her application form and that though her elder son was really her nephew she could not leave Russia without him. The gentleman became very upset. He told Anna that he himself sometimes felt overcrowded in his fifteen room house, that it was quite impossible to accommodate there even two boys, especially since the second boy was not really Anna’s son but had his own father in Russia. The gentleman reproached Anna that she should not be so frivolous: if she mentioned two children from the very beginning this would surely have alienated him at once and would not have brought so many sufferings and troubles.

Anna asked to think but already knew her decision. She returned to St. Petersburg and when her smiling elder son asked her at the station: «So do we go to Finland?» she replied: «No». And she stayed in Russia. Life is a little bit easier for her now since her former husband died from vodka and she does not need to call to the police every day as she did before. She still works constantly, and her application form is still kept in my marriage agency. But not only her elder boy is indicated there now but also their dog and cat – pets without which, as Anna said, she would not go anywhere.

«Let them take me with all my children and animals!» Anna says laughing. «I don’t care if they don’t want to, I will survive myself!» and she cheerfully leans to me, sitting in her «magical’ dentist chair in which patients never feel either fear or pain.