In St. Petersburg, intrepid explorers hop between rooftops, enjoying a stunning perspective on the Northern Capital
“Roofing,” or roof exploration, is a peculiarly Petersburgian pastime. Of course, people venture out onto roofs everywhere all the time, but only in Piter does one have such freedom of movement between heaven and Earth. Which is why the Northern Capital has roughly 10,000 “roofers,” for whom roofing is not simply a hobby, but a personal zone of freedom and self-determination, a lifestyle alternative on par with downshifting. One need not fly away to Goa to escape from the office slaughterhouse. A bit of skill and daring is all you need to turn into an elf for five minutes a day.
“Don’t get distracted, watch your feet, use your whole sole to maximize traction, step on the seam between the sheets,” Andrei Dubrovsky instructs in a soft monotone. He is leading my crash course in roofing. “You let your foot slip, and then we’ll be scraping you off the sidewalk. That’s better. We’re lucky the roof isn’t wet today.”
It’s little wonder he is calm: he’s stopped counting the number of times he’s been to this roof. But how am I to watch my feet, if St. Isaac’s Cathedral is looming before me in all its historic-architectural majesty? A legendary Petersburg address: Gorokhovaya, 3. The Mecca of Petersburg roofers. Put simply, “The Roof of the World.”
To tell the truth, I do not love Piter. It’s a museum built on a swamp. A capital with a provincial destiny – or perhaps just the opposite, now that the Constitutional Court has moved here from Moscow. Nowhere to cut a corner. You may feel like strolling, but all the right angles tell you to march, plunging you into forlorn reminiscences of Moscow’s Krivokolenny (“Crooked-Knee”) Lane. You get the idea.
But here, at Gorokhovaya 3, something inside me shuddered.
It may have been the feeling that I could reach out my hand and touch Isaac’s. Yet this proximity clashed with the vision of tourists strolling through the colonnade down below: not really tourists – just insects.
An optical illusion. But what an extraordinary illusion! Piter in the palm of my hand, and all of its granite visibly flat, like Plato’s face. No, this is not the morbid granite of cemeteries – this city’s granite is polished and animate.
In short, this vantage point presents an entirely new city. Its right angles dissolve, its geometry softens – it resembles my best jacket, worn inside out. And, it turns out, it’s not uncomfortable at all when worn that way. The Hermitage no longer domineers with its overabundant gravitas. The Admiralty’s golden needle does not seem quite so pointed, when viewed from seven-stories up.
If you know where to look, you can see the whole Cathedral Ring from the Roof of the World: Isaac’s, St. Sampson’s Cathedral, Savior-on-the-Blood and the blue-and-gold Smolny Cathedral in the distance. It takes the breath away.
From far away, I hear the cries of seagulls and the cheers for Zenit. Zenit just scored against Bavaria. But Andrei does not even turn his head towards Petrovsky Stadium. On the roof of Petersburg, one does not discuss such crude concerns as soccer. Roofing is an elevated pursuit, in every sense of the word.
“Roofers” are not fond of their label, calqued into Russian from English, but no native analogue has yet been found to replace it. From the Russian word krysha (“roof”), many terms have been suggested – kryshaphiles, kryshologists, hare-kryshas – yet none has yet won wide acceptance. Simply put, we are the explorers of roofs. There are five of us here today: Andrei, Bulat, Maxim Nikonov, myself, and Alexei, the photographer. Five is a crowd. A mass approach does not work for roofing, a solitary pursuit.
Bulat heads straight to the “optic tower.” From such towers, built on the apartment-building roofs especially for that purpose, besieged residents exchanged messages during the war. This tower offers the best city panorama. Two ancient chairs with ripped upholstery grace the tower’s interior.
Someone has calculated that, to see every single object on exhibit at the Hermitage, one would need more than a lifetime. That is because, while you were visiting one room, the objects in other rooms would change. It’s the same with Piter, Bulat ponders aloud, sitting on the chair. The city changes constantly. A familiar roof offers new vistas, time and time again. There’s shiny new sheet metal in one place, and in the other, the satellite dishes have either been removed or stolen, suddenly uncovering a lovely view of the Moika river. Elsewhere, a new story has been added to a building, and where once there was a view, now it is no more. Metamorphoses. There are no such things down below.
Bulat is just a bit over 20. He graduated from a technical college, the name of which is difficult to pronounce. Now he works with computers.
Bulat steps on the tin sheets. Upon contact, Bulat and the tin sheets produce an absence of sound. Soundless movement across the roof is a core principle. Thou shalt not disturb the tenants. That would cause problems. They’d lock the attic. Or weld it shut. Or put a lock on the building door, or change the access codes. And then, farewell to the panoramas.
“Why do you come here?” I ask Maxim.
“To sit and think.”
Maxim combines two professions – teaching at a university and logistics consulting in a small company.
“It’s a good place to think,” Bulat agrees. “Down below, everyone is minuscule and vain.” He gestures indeterminately toward the moving pixels of cars and pedestrians. “They cannot even imagine what beauty remains hidden from them in such proximity.”
“You know what I think?” Andrei says. “The world is built on a vertical axis. There are spheres of goblins, people, demigods, and then the heavenly, divine sphere. The roofs are the border between heaven and Earth. One can feel like an elf when sitting here.”
Andrei is clearly abusing his status as an academic. But I find it endearing.
Sometimes – rarely – goblins may venture into the elves’ space. On such occasions, trouble is sure to follow. Once, while exploring the roof of the Navigators’ Club, Andrei ran into a band of hooligans. And ran for his life.
“It was sheer chance that they happened to be there. They’re from the dark side. They love cellars and dungeons and don’t get out into the sun. It’s senseless to climb onto a roof to get high or wasted. That’s the stuff of the underground. Junkies never leap from the roof, drunks don’t slip and fall down, and there’s a reason why they don’t: they simply don’t come here.” The thought seems clear enough. The attic is a twilight zone. The roof is a solar domain. One problem with this view: the drastic shortage of sun in Piter. At most, three or four dozen sunny days a year. The natives view the very concept of a “sunny day” through a thick prism of irony. But I got lucky. One day of my stay, the sun shone continuously for two hours and ten minutes. And I noticed that, when suddenly ambushed by the sun, the natives appear a little flummoxed. They just don’t know how to deal with such an anomaly.
“So, the elves… Isn’t there something slightly misanthropic about your hobby?”
“To withdraw from others is not the same as to dislike them. The roof is a place where one can always be alone.”
Even if right next to you there’s someone else, who also came out and sits there alone. There’s downshifting, when people sell everything and move to India to smoke pot; there’s also a kind of short-term upshifting: one climbs up, sits down, and feels better. I know people who go on the roof at lunchtime, to retreat from the white-collar rat race. The roof takes on the role of therapist. You sit, you calm down. Before you know it, you forgive your boss and decide not to bash his head in.
“Isn’t there some saying… ‘There is no greater love, than to spit down from above’ – ”
“A spit always returns from whence it came,” Andrei remarks.
A common stereotype: a roofer must always have a camera. There is a grain of truth to that. A significant number of roofers go there to photograph Piter. For some, photography is a big facet of their lives. They will shoot the city from the same point, at different times of day and of the year, through the various veils of snow, precipitation and smog.
Some can even be heard saying, “I won’t go today, I forgot my camera.” Ideological roofers scorn such an attitude. “A good roof will forgive you if you don’t take pictures,” they say.
Thinking of roofs as animate is another quirk of roofers. A roofer may say: “the roof has embraced me.” This is likely to mean the following: he came up to the top floor, saw an oversized lock hanging on the attic door, tried a random key from his bundle, and it worked.
“The way you treat the roof is the way it will treat you. You leave a mess, it’ll throw you off. You treat it with respect, it’ll reveal a secret to you.”
Maxim has never been thrown by a roof. But Andrei has. He got there once in damp weather, made the wrong step and tumbled. Trying to grab hold of the roof, he scraped the skin off his hands, but it was his good fortune that the roof was under repair. One of the construction workers caught him. That worker turned out to be a migrant laborer from Tajikistan. The incident turned Andrei into a zealous internationalist. It also made him picky about his shoes. But, like all other roofers, he has no special equipment – not even a rope.
Suddenly, we all smell fried meat.
We begin to play a game: you stick your nose into a vent and try to guess what they’re cooking down below. It smells like pork à la française. Someone must be cooking professionally. It turns out that, indeed, there’s a European restaurant on the first floor. And now, there’s also the smell of instant pelmeni. Why not? This is an apartment building after all. And this other vent – I would have done better to not have sniffed it at all. It appears to have some connection to the toilets. Quick, back to the kitchen vent, to get rid of the stench permeating my nose.
Unexpectedly, the roof of the World is populated by six with a guitar. Lord, how beautiful they are, how young, and how drunk. They’re students from the Union University. Liberal arts majors. Freshmen. Our national humanities team.
“Come on, show me that famous aesthetic of yours!” cries a young man from Oryol.
“Here it is,” the girl from Kazakhstan responds to him loudly, sweeping her hand over the rusty gutters and the pigeon eggs lying at their feet and incomprehensibly refusing to roll off the edge of the roof.
“Pigeon eggs should be blue.”
“No, white.”
An argument ensues. While arguing, everyone photographs the eggs. No one thinks of crushing them. Here I understand the profound humanity of photography. If there had been no camera, they might have crushed them. But, having photographed, one no longer feels the urge to destroy.
“How can you smoke Lucky Strike?!“ Urengoy charges. “Japan has succumbed to this Lucky Strike of yours. Stop smoking Lucky Strike!”
“What does Japan have to do with this?”
“The vultures of imperialism dropped a bomb. Production got a boost. Their economy took off, and Americans got to smoke expensive cigarettes.”
Apparently, one must think globally when on the Roof of the World.
At their age, people are usually preoccupied with themselves alone. It makes me jealous.
Zenit scores again, and the seagulls go crazy.
“Your team just scored,” I say.
“Our team is all here,” Andrei answers.
It is doubtful that the Zenit fans have any interest in roofs. If they did, they’d certainly leave some graffiti as a testament. But their preferences seem to run towards asphalt, rival fans and run-ins with the militia.
Roofers never clash with the militia. There’s been only one arrest in connection with roofing: three people had gone to a roof; two were our native roofers, the third was their Dutch friend, a photographer. Some tenant ratted them out, and a militia dispatch arrived in short order. As luck would have it, the TV was repeatedly showing segments about Denmark and the Chechen congress going on there, headed by Zakayev. The Dutch photographer was accused of espionage, our guys – of assisting him, naturally. But shortly, a man from the FSB showed up, looked the roofers in the eye, reprimanded them in a fatherly fashion and let all three go without even looking at the pictures they’d shot from the rooftop.
I, by the way, have noticed something curious about militia: a militiaman in Piter will address you naturalistically: “Muzhchina” (man). A Moscow militiaman will say to you: “Uvazhayemy“ (my dear man, sir). But there is more respect in the Petersburg militiaman’s “man” than in the Moscow militiaman’s “respected sir.”
Every true roofer needs contacts who can be useful in the “roofing business.” Andrei, for instance, knows a good many such people, and it helps him get to such roofs as no one has yet visited. For instance, the roof of the Hotel Astoria – thanks to his girlfriend’s father, who works in security there. I’ve had the honor of going to a showcase roof: Aptekarsky Lane, the studio of Victor Tikhomirov, a painter and a friend of Andrei’s. Apparently, the studio occupies what used to be a humble attic.
“Alexei,” Alexei introduces himself to the artist.
“That’s not good,” the artist replies. “My worst enemy’s name is also Alexei.”
In the corner is a punching bag. Against the backdrop of the paintings, it looks conceptual. The artist glances at the bag, as if envisioning the other, hostile Alexei embodied in it.
The studio offers direct roof access. You open a window, and there you are. Savior-on-the-Blood Cathedral is so close to the building that its view refuses to fit into the window: either the cupolas are cropped off, or the porch gets obscured. I put my foot through the window, feeling as if I am about to step onto the cathedral.
Over there is the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, and there, it looks like Venice in the spring.
Roofing is a hobby with a peculiarly Petersburgian flavor. The compactness of the historical center creates conditions that are ideal. In other cities, one cannot just hop from one roof to the next. Also, Piter’s roofs are often flat and conducive to moving about. Quoting a certain 19th-century French gentleman (let us not name him, as he only wrote bad things about Russia), St. Petersburg is a flat city with buildings that age 400 years in a single century.
Of course, people get out on roofs in other cities too. But nowhere has roofing become a mass phenomenon on the same scale as here. Muscovites, Petersburg roofers say, also have a different motive:
“You always try to get higher up, to go somewhere no one has been before. We, on the other hand, look for the best views. That’s Moscow in a nutshell for you. Understand?”
“Not really, to be honest.”
“Well, it seems like you, Muscovites, always want to prove something.”
In Petersburg, no one is ever sure of anything. You hear all the time: “it seems,” “if I’m not mistaken.” A Muscovite is always certain. To say “maybe” is to show one’s weakness, to lose one’s mojo – a humiliating, morbid thing to a Muscovite.
“Ah, I see. Hey, Andrei, why don’t you take foreign tourists on the roofs with you? Two or three excursion routes, a moderate fee in Euros – ”
Many exaggerate the differences between Petersburg and Moscow. But everyone can agree on the Muscovite‘s manic pursuit of profits. We are on the roof of the Rector’s Corpus at St. Petersburg University. From here, there is a fantastic view of the Neva. I am expected to be bowled over by aesthetic arrest. But what’s going through my head is: “Couldn’t we open up a little sky bar, name it ‘Chez Karlson*’ and hang advertising banners right over there, above the traffic lights?” On the other hand, if not for greed’s constant itch, people would simply exterminate each other. Thus viewed, consumer society is indeed the most moral. We argue for a long time on this topic. Where else could one talk about such things, if not on the university roof?
Every true Petersburg roofer has his own roofs, with his own views. Such roofs are only shared with friends and loved ones. People share combination-lock codes and keys as if they were candy. There are roofs where you don’t bring random strangers. Some succumb to proprietary instincts and hang locks on attic doors leading to their favorite roofs. The roofing community frowns upon this, but understands the impulse.
Andrei has a dream: to go higher than the angels.
“See those angels, just above Isaac’s colonnade? Then the dome, and then a viewing platform. Nowhere left to go, nothing else above it, just the cross and the sky. That’s where I want to be.”
Maxim has no such dreams. He is content with the already accessible roofs. When I ask about his best roofs, he does not name the exact addresses. He says only “near the Mironov Theatre.” This is proprietary behavior: God forbid, the journalist will print this, and hoards of heathens will come rushing to the secret roof.
Roofing is an amorphous movement. Roofers communicate mainly via the web. They form small, autonomous groups, and often have but a virtual acquaintance with one another. There’s a café called “By the Stone Bridge,” and they gather there. But one can’t really call it their meeting point. It’s all fairly irregular and devoid of sectarian zeal. There is no central office, no membership fees. Roofers consciously resist organization.
“We all know where that would lead. One fine day, a fat man in a tie would come, make us all join United Russia and march under the party banners.”
According to some informal figures – I haven’t been able to figure out who counted and how – there are roughly 10,000 roofers in Piter. But figures are meaningless until you go to the roof yourself. The people below don’t know this, but there is life up above street level. Not just photography, but romances also happen here – indeed, there is no better way to charm a girl. On the way to the Roof of the World we came across a memorial plaque to Sergey Dovlatov, sporting a caricature portrait with a huge beard. For some reason I remember how Dovlatov wrote that, in order to make a girl like you, you must simply photograph her constantly.
The roof is a sight of meditation and moderate drinking – up to 13 proof – a destination for excursions and a place to make friends. Bulat and Maxim, for instance, met on a roof. The first encounter gelled into a lasting friendship. They began to travel together, even went as far as Vladivostok.
To get to an average downtown roof in Petersburg, one needs considerable stamina. The multiple flights of steep stairs will test anyone’s cardiovascular system. Those who have persevered up those stairs will understand. Usually there are no elevators. And when there is an elevator, it takes two skinny Tajiks sideways, or one adult Russian with a small child. But overall, roofing is not a high-adrenaline pursuit; it is quite far from anything that could be called a sport. It is the refuge of the young intelligentsia.
I hear Zenit score another goal. The seagulls go mad.
Besides his “own” roofs, a Petersburg roofer must pay homage to a handful of cult roofs: the Roof of the World, the Raskolnikov House at the corner of Grazhdanskaya and Stolyarny Lane, Tolstoy’s Courtyard, and Five Corners.
We are moving towards the city center. The closer to the center, the more severe are the buildings, the more expensive the lunch combos advertised out in front of the restaurants. And here comes Tolstoy’s Courtyard. It is a compact, essentially Petersburgian space delineated on all sides by buildings of medium stature. A gentrified well with flower vases hanging, pendulum-like, in its arches. One of the most prestigious places in the city, witnessed by the glossy Lexuses and Jaguars, overseen by the tender gaze of a parking attendant from his glass booth. One never knows with Tolstoy’s Courtyard. The attic is sometimes unlocked, sometimes locked. The first obstacle we must overcome is the courtyard entrance, barred by a metal fence with a numeric keypad. This is easy. One only has to wait for the arrival of someone who knows the code. We go in, and then try our luck at each of the building’s “black entrances.” A Muscovite would not know the difference between a regular entrance that would never lead up to the attic and a “black entrance,” used in the imperial past by janitors and house staff. These “black entrances” are the ones with roof access.
There is another keypad on one of the doors. Andrei looks closely at the keys, trying to judge by their discoloration, which are pressed most often. He pushes each key, figuring out which are softer than the others. Meanwhile, I pretend to be speaking on my cell phone, supposedly to a friend in the building. Periodically, I raise my head, waive and gesticulate, covering Andrei, who figures out the code within a minute and a half. He shakes his head: a minute and a half is far too long. But he quickly finds a reason to forgive himself: there used to be a three-digit code here, but now they’ve added a fourth – hence the delay.
We go inside. Some simple minds seem to live here: on the wall, we read a large notice, almost a poster: “In an effort to keep trespassers out of the building, the following access code is to be used by tenants…” We write down the code, just in case, and head up the stairs.
“The elevator doesn’t go to the second floor, didn’t you know?”
Two large sacks with white powdery stuff decorate one of the landings.
“What’s that?”
“Hexogen, most likely,” they joke. They can joke about such things – nothing prominent has yet been exploded in their city. On that subject, the various anti-terrorist programs, along with the city’s tercentennial celebration, have complicated roofing in Petersburg. Many centrally located attics have been shut, some of them permanently.
Another nuisance are the newly rich, who, evidently in an effort to protect themselves from snipers, seek to occupy all the high-altitude real estate, sometimes buying top-floor apartments together with the attic space. They will never let you onto their roof, whether you ask or don’t ask. But find a normal person, and he may open up the roof for you. “At the Raskolnikov House we asked ten people, and no one would open it up,” Andrei says. “But the eleventh person opened it. The trick is to be at once moderately impetuous and modestly cordial.”
A system of corridors. An ancient, convex refrigerator piled high with paper miscellany. The writings of Asmus [Valentin Asmus, 1894-1975]. More antiquities: doorbells that are rung by a crank handle.
At the attic door, we run into a homeless bum’s private domain. The owner is not here – only his smell. The rags are strewn all about, like a still life. A pack of cigarettes, a yellowish bottle of moonshine, a quilt, a good glossy billfold. All of it – inside a lacy, wrought-iron cage.
The attic. Some sort of a mega-lock guarding the last exit. You can’t pick a lock like that. The roof does not embrace us this time. Well, we’ll try again some other day. Petersburg roofs all have this quality in common: sooner or later, they open up.
Back to the street. Even down here, we can tell that Zenit has just scored its fourth – and final – goal. Bavaria is crushed, like the Swedes at Poltava. It smells of swamp and the famous dried and salted fish – koryushka. The seagulls go down, exhausted by all the soccer.
“Our team just scored,” Andrei and Bulat say, almost in unison. RL
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
