To Bathe or Not to Bathe

Our neighbor Kalkan has probably been clean and sober only a dozen times in his life. The last time he bathed in a barrel of water warmed in a wood stove – as is the tradition in our part of the country, where banyas are rare – he came down with a bad cold and vowed never to do it again. We invite him to wash in our banya, but he refuses.

Kalkan – born Vasily Mikhailovich Balakhonov in 1936 – and his wife Maria Ivanovna live in a tumbledown cabin with a leaky roof across the way. Both are avid drinkers. When it rains, the couple crouches under their table to stay dry, rather than fix the roof.

Kalkan wobbles across the way to our house early one morning, swinging each of his long thin legs first out to the side then forward. We are still in bed when Kalkan opens the door. (Knocking is considered rude in the village; only strangers knock.)

Kalkan holds his baggy gray pants with one hand. They have been mended in half a dozen places, except the zipper, which hangs open. I wonder if none of his pants has a zipper, or if he only has the one pair with the yawning hole below the length of cord he uses for a belt, which is apparently untied this morning, hence the hand.

Kalkan complains to my husband Igor that he can’t hear out of his right ear and asks to be taken to the hospital in the town of Suzemka – 40 miles away.

“Vasily, I am not taking you to the hospital,” Igor says.

Igor would never call him Kalkan to his face. Many of the villagers’ nicknames are derogatory or have a veiled meaning. Kalkan never actually accepted his nickname. He was a bastard child. His mother’s first husband died of tuberculosis. She became pregnant with Vasily after sleeping around, but would not reveal who the father was. When Vasily was born, everyone said he looked like Kalkan, the stable hand at the kolkhoz (collective farm). So he inherited the nickname. Kalkan is the word for the pinesap that male wild boars rub on their shoulders to form a protective armor when sparring with other males for mates.

Igor knows that taking Kalkan to the hospital would mean leading him around like a child and sitting there with him all day. Rather than do that, Igor decides to try to heal Kalkan himself. He takes the big black Russian medical encyclopedia from the bookshelf in our kitchen. It is the kind of book that, no matter what ailment you look up, you come away convinced you have got it and, likely, the consequences are fatal.

“Foreign object in ear,” Igor reads to me. “Foreign objects in the ear are most often observed in children, who stick various objects in the external ear canal (paper, fruit pits, peas, sunflower seeds, beads, etc.). Adults typically have pieces of cotton, broken matchsticks, etc. Various insects (bed bugs, cockroaches, flies, etc.) can also end up in the ear canal.  Treatment: Flush the ear with water or fish out the object with the aid of a small hook.”

“I don’t think earwax is a foreign object,” I say. Or is it?

“Okay,” he flips the page. “Here we go. Earwax plug. Accumulation of earwax in the external ear canal as a result of excess secretion of glands found in the ear. Earwax can be detained because of its viscosity, or the narrowness and sinuosity of the ear canal, or if cement or flour dust gets into the ear. The earwax plug is first soft, then becomes hard, even rock-like. The plug can cause other problems if it puts pressure on the eardrum, such as coughing, buzzing in the ear, dizziness, and even death. Treatment: Flush the ear with warm water using a syringe.”

Igor tells Kalkan to lie down on the bench outside. Igor uses a syringe to rinse Kalkan’s ear with what appears to be half a bucket of warm water. Slowly, a wax protrusion begins to emerge in the stream of water. Igor continues to flush and a two-inch-long wax cork slides out.

“When’s the last time you washed your ears?” Igor asks.

“Probably the last time I had a bath in a barrel,” Kalkan says, grinning.

“And when was that?”

“Can’t remember,” Kalkan replies, pleased as a schoolboy that he can finally hear. He takes the plug across the way to show to his wife, but she’s too drunk to care.