I am naked except for a pair of sandals and the brown felt version of Gilligan’s hat. My host brother, Kiril, back from Cadet School for the holidays, is unadorned in the exact same manner, except he is wearing a dark blue ski cap. Oh, he’s also beating me with birch branches.
I’m told this is a Ukrainian tradition.
I probably shouldn’t have told my host mother, Lorissa, that I had a sore throat, because she had been making me gargle five times a day with a mixture of water, salt and iodine. Stranger still, she thought that the perfect cure for me was a visit to the neighbor’s banya.
The banya, or bath house, is a 2,000 year old Slavic tradition that goes like this: you sit in a sauna for a while, then you go into a steam room, then you get beaten with a bundle of leave-covered birch branches, then you dive into an ice cold pool, and then you repeat. And this is from a culture where my host mother yells at me if I go out into the cold too soon after drinking hot liquids, go outside with wet hair, or walk on a cold floor without wearing socks.
I asked Kiril, as we walked to the banya, how this was supposed to make me feel better. “It is supposed to rid you of evil spirits,” he replied. If I was an evil spirit having to go through all that, I wouldn’t stick around, either.
Have I mentioned before that Ukraine is the country where Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born? It is from his name and his writings that we get the concept of “masochism.”
***
The banya was a stand-alone structure that had been hand-built by the neighbor out of mortared white brick. It was fifteen feet long and four feet wide. A wide pipe jutting out of the corrugated metal roof leaked ashy smoke into the sky. This should be interesting, I thought. Walking across a plank to its door, Kiril opened it and we stepped inside.
Directly in front of us was the banya’s heart: a massive iron stove burning hunks of scrap wood. To the left was the room with the steam room, shower and pool. To our right was the sauna, and in it were three teenage boys sitting and relaxing in their underwear. Good, I thought, I get to keep my underwear on.
After introductions, the teenagers moved into the steam room to let us have the sauna, but not before stripping off their underwear. Okay, I thought, I won’t be keeping my underwear on.
Kiril and I took off all our clothes, put on our sandals and hats, and then sat in the dry heat to talk.
Ten minutes later, we were in the banya’s other room. One quarter of the room was taken up by a wooden enclosure, the steam room. I could hear the three boys beating each other in there with the birches, loud painful-sounding thwacks. The concept of three naked guys smacking each other in a steam room does have homoerotic undertones, so feel free to insert a gay joke here.
I was not looking forward to getting beat with branches. I’d once attended a bondage party because my then-roommate had been DJing had it. Curious, I had allowed two leather-clad women to tie me shirtless to bench and whip my back. I discovered then that S&M was not my thing.
The “pool” was on the left, a hole in the ground lined with cement, barely four feet deep, two feet wide and six feet long. It also had no water in it. Between the pool and the steam room, a showerhead jutted out of the wall.
We waited for a minute before the three teenagers came spilling out of the wooden room, thick plumes of steam following them. Kiril and I went in, him holding a big cup of water and a bunch of birch branches covered in wide, flat leaves. After closing the door behind us, I sat on a wooden bench while Kiril put the birch branches in a pot of water to soak. He then poured water from the cup into the upturned mouth of a piece of pipe running to the furnace.
Steam filled the room. I was informed the steam was over 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and I believe it. The skin on my face was burning. After a minute it was simply too hot for me to take, and I had to quickly leave the steam room before going back in a minute later, keeping my head down and out of the scalding steam gathering at the top of the room. Kiril sat upright, eyes closed, head in the steam, ski cap on his head (“to keep in the heat”, he had said).
Sweat poured out of me, off of me, running down me and pooling in the plastic sandals on my feet. Kiril and I talked, sucking in huge breaths between sentences, the air heavy and thick and burning my lungs. We talked about language and Ukraine and America and places we’d been and places we wanted to see. And then, fifteen minutes later, we exited the steam room, panting.
The birch branches, Kiril said, would come later.
The next step was a quick shower in tepid water before going back to the sauna. The teenagers were always one step in the process ahead of us, and so were going back into the steam room as we were moving into the sauna. They left behind on a table some salo, three empty bottles of water, an empty bottle of vodka, and lemon rinds.
We repeated the sauna/steam room/shower process two more times. By the third time we were in the steam room, I could run my hand down my arm and dead skin would be pushed ahead of it, gathered into white gunk.
Finally, Kiril reached for the birches. Taking them out of the pot of water, he held them over the steam rising out of the upturned pipe to heat them up, and then told me to turn around. I did, and he began hitting my naked back and butt with them. They didn’t hurt, just gave my back a pleasant tingling sensation. Every ten hits or so, Kiril would push the branches against me and run them down my back, as if trying to scrape the evil spirits off me.
He told me to turn around and then told me to cover my groin with one hand and my heart with the other. I did, and he began beating my stomach and chest, my face turned up and to the side, eyes closed. By the time we were done, the floor of the steam room was littered with leaves, some clinging to my skin and hair.
We went out for another shower, and then back into the steam room again, where I commenced to beat him with the birch branches. He then hit me again with them for good measure.
At this point, I still didn’t understand how this was an experience that could enthrall an entire culture for over two millennia. Gasping for breath from swinging the birch branches over and over in the steam filled room, lungs feeling char-broiled, I still didn’t get it.
We left the banya, and Kiril switched on a nozzle in the pool. High pressured water shot out as if from a fire hose. Kiril stepped into the pool, directly in the path of the spraying water, one hand over his genitals, the other over his heart. He rotated around, lifting his legs to get them into the spray, and then he hurried out of the pool.
When I stepped into the spray, the water was so cold that my chest seized. The freezing water felt like a thousand pricking needles on my steam-cooked skin. I could feel every spot where the birch branches had hit, a mental image of overlapping lines, glowing red, etched over the length of my body. I did a few quick rotations in the spray, lifted my legs as Kiril had done, and then hurried out.
We went back into the steam room and sat, both of us gasping for breath, steam expanding lungs that had seemingly shrunk and disappeared moments before. I felt light-headed and near to passing out. And then I did feel it: a sort of full body high, skin tingling as feeling returned to it. My head cleared out and I felt very awake, aware, serene. And in that moment was the secret of the banya.
We weren’t finished: the last step was to exit the steam room, soap up and do some serious exfoliation with a sort of plastic Brillo pad. Kiril asked me to scrub his back with it as hard as I could. Yes, we were both still naked, so go ahead and enter another gay joke.
He scrubbed my back in turn, there was shampooing involved, and then we were done. We got dressed and stepped out of the banya. I was surprised to see ice-covered asphalt outside, had forgotten that it was still the middle of a Ukrainian winter. Maybe that’s why what the purpose of a banya is.
Kiril took a home-canned jar of pickled peppers to the neighbor as thanks for letting us use the banya, and then we went home.
After a banya session, you’re supposed to eat a filling dinner and then go straight to bed. I did this, feeling on the edge of exhaustion after gulping down the food and three glasses of water.
When I woke up the next day, I felt as great as they said I would.