When the pairs of bones does not break

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1

On the one hand, we love winter so much that we cannot get enough of it. Therefore, we celebrate the winter holidays twice, including the old New Year - Oxymoron, which easily drives American Slavists crazy. On the other hand - and that is why - in Russia they rarely complain about the heat. Given the latitude, the heat here is considered capital. In short summer, it is accumulated for a long winter, which is crowned with concentrated heat of the holidays. He finds an expression in folk wisdom: “The pairs of bones does not break” and “After the bath, steal, but drink it.” Following these covenants, I am a holy dish to end the New Year celebration season - wherever I end up - in the bathhouse.

Now it seems to me that the most exotic of them was the first - a childhood bath. The initial vaccination of luxury, she, as the classic wrote, was “not needed, but desirable,” because everything that is not made of necessity turns into pleasure, hobbies or sin.

There was no need for the bath: in our old Riga house there was a bathtub on the twisted legs of such a depth that a drunk could drown in it. Hot water, however, was mined using a complex device that was drowned with peat. I completely forgot his sour smell until I discovered that in New York elitist stores on St. Patrick Day, the American Irish were sold to the briquettes of peat-and just because of this nostalgic stench.

One way or another, we went to the bathhouse not for hygiene, but from sophisticated pleasure. The common and unpretentious, it consisted of shops with gangs and steam room, which inspired me with horror, which is understandable.

“No one in my right mind,” I complained, “will not enter the torture nook with unbearable heat, stuffed with bare uncles, pretending to like there.”

“But,” the father explained, “what a blessing to get out of there.”

Having mastered the lesson necessary for compatriots in childhood, I did not miss a single bath in those countries where they are found.

2

I already decided to climb Fujiyama when I was stopped by a translator, by the way, reminding me that one peak could only be seen with another. Having formed, I stopped halfway, reaching lava fields and hot springs. Foreigners, frightened by public bathing, took mineral baths in the room, but I went all the heavy. Actually, washing the Japanese takes a little time and squeezes. But then a slow journey begins on water corridors connecting the odorous pools of different temperatures - from room to steep boiling water. Migrating with a jerking jamb, I passed dark halls with hydrogen sulfide and suddenly saw stars over me. The roof ended, and a mountain sky opened with a cone cut out of white ice: Fuji.

“Not necessary closer,” I said to myself, sailing to the wardrobe.

So I learned to appreciate the countries with violent volcanic activity. Especially - Iceland, which accounts for five earthquakes per day. For these, to put it mildly, inconvenience, the Icelanders received a thermal bath at each intersection, which, given the rarity of cities and the density of the tiny population, is not so much.

The most famous is the blue lagoon. Like everything in this country, it is located anywhere - in the middle of uninhabited and impregnable bumps. The landscape is so unearthly that astronauts trained here before landing on the moon. The more surprise causes azure paradise when it opens after a long and snowy road. Separate swimwear is frightened with such a frost that should be expected from polar latitude, and with distrust rush into hot water in order to emerge happy. Mighty sources are beaten from the bottom, bones soften in mineral broth, snow settles on the head, and you freeze in a long languor, which, like all the best that is available to the body, cannot describe our weak language.

On land, everyone goes thoughtless and peaceful. Not surprisingly, there is no army in Iceland.

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I came to America at a fatal hour for the bath: the AIDS epidemic began. The intimidated people, who in peacetime is afraid of his body (not to mention someone else), saw an epicenter of vice with a distinct homosexual shade in the baths.

A traditional New York bathhouse fell victim to the nesting, which, along with bells and salted cucumbers, Jews from Russia brought to the New World at the dawn of the twentieth century and called it in Yiddish: Schvitz. The last institution of this kind in New York was a lone Russian-Turkish bathhouse, in which I did not find anything Russian or Turkish.

At the same time, it cannot be said that the bathhouse is alien to real America. The Indians knew how to steam in the Wigwams, sprinkling the hot stones - as the friends of the red -skinned - marijuana told me. Not tea to get into a reservation and doubting that they would take me there for my own, I was quietly waiting for me to find a cure for AIDS or cancel public opinion.

Here the good news came to me from the Koreans living on our shore. Their bath culture for many centuries of our ancient. It goes back to the universal natural philosophy for the Far East, which teaches to levite, eat air and be immortal. In these categories, the bathhouse is a factory of Chi's vital energy and a tool of thin balancing of opposite substances - Yin and Yang.

“In the Korean bath,” the regulars told me, “come from the early morning and leave, waiting for enlightenment.”

Not hoping to comprehend the mystical subtleties and magical practices, I myself went at random and studied according to the rule of Buleschik. The bath procedure in Korean requires breathing with heated evaporations of various, mostly precious substances. For this, stone tents with low doors are installed in the spacious wards. The heat reigns inside, light flickers and the particles of important matter invisible to the eye.

I started bypassing with the most expensive - with a steam room lined with pure gold. Behind her stood a small palace of amethysts, in which I felt like a sad by a visit. Then - in the descending one, I breathed with Himalayan salt, yellow clay and white clay with a reed.

The culmination of a bathhouse was a formidable steam room, which was allowed to enter only in the thrown blanket. And not in vain.

I flew back, not having time to look at the thermometer, but I know that the temperature was sufficient to spray the screwed chicken eggs that were traded in the buffet.

I was able to catch my breath only in the ice cave, where I met the same frightened compatriots. From them, I learned about the new Russian bath in Yasnaya Polyana, as we patriotically translate the name of the town of Fair Lawn, chosen by immigrants from the USSR.

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Returning half a century later to the Russian bath, I did not recognize her. During the separation, she got confused with Rome and covered with marble. The entrance to the female locker room was guarded by the stone Venus, for some reason the male was guarded not by Mars, but by Mercury. Inside, everything was, as in nostalgic dreams: familiar, but better.

In one steam room - dry steam, in the other, where you can dousise, wet, in the third - breathe eucalyptus, from the fourth they fall into a font with icy fragments, in the fifth they sit to the touch in a hammam, in the sixth they go barefoot in hot cobblestones. From the seventh - Finnish sauna - diving into the pool to start all over again. And so on until you will interrupt the brutal appetite, which drives everyone to your favorite attraction: dinner in towels.

It is the neglect of etiquette that gives the bath a fragrance of lazy relaxation to bath meals. As in Harry Loss, the bath is packed in another, much more acceptable reality.

The herring is served here not boiled, but fried, and even with mushrooms, soup is called the royal ear from the Golovye, and the barbecue - a chalahach on the bones. I will not say anything about vodka, and I can’t can say anything about beer with already cleaned wobble.

“It’s harmful,” they will tell me, “because such a bath does not heal a hangover, but is a reason.”

“True,” I will answer, “but you can say that about any holiday that is fraught with excesses and therefore so dear.”

When the bathhouse was from poverty, she was kept in a black body and for every day. Now they come here for the sake of catharsis: physiological shakes and refreshments of feelings. This is an opera for the body. Of course, like the same opera, a bath can be hated, but then a list of physical joys, already very inferior to the spiritual, will become even shorter, and life is poorer.

New York