It is midnight in the Russian capital.

The 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni film, "The passenger," stars Jack Nicholson, a journalist who swaps identities with a dead arms dealer in the midst of African desert. In a famous scene in the last hour of the slow-blooming movie, Nicholson is speeding down a road in Spain, in a convertible with its roof folded. A lovely damsel (Maria Schneider) is in the passenger seat. What are you running away from, she asks him, for by now they’ve been through several cities. Look behind you, he answers. She turns around until she is kneeling on the seat, and looks. The wind stirs in her eyes and hair, the trees are relentless in their array, and the road is empty and endless. The shot tries to collect, contain, consume this unraveling ribbon. Meanwhile, behind the wheel, Nicholson smiles, or doesn’t smile: memory conveniently holds mum, makes moot the point.

I watched "The passenger" in May in the half-empty тайный кинотеатрик во дворе near the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moskva. Though the place had been revealed to me in my very first days at the university by a kindly Russian literature major named Vera, I only began to frequent it in winter, and I had no occasion to speak of it, let alone dub it "the secret tiny movie theater nestled in the courtyard," until the spring installment of Americans arrived in February via Middlebury’s study abroad program. They quickly coined the name. The theater was an underground operation: a hundred chairs and a movie screen in the basement of a building that looked like every other building in that block’s brood, the Soviet equivalent of a housing project. The door swung unmarked. The repertoire of old, foreign films for a mere dollar or two each repeated throughout the year. Evening screenings were sometimes crowded, whilst daytime séances often boasted a mere three people. The audience of "The passenger" thinned as midnight approached and the film carried on.

Meanwhile, months earlier, at a New Year’s party held prematurely on the twenty-third of December, the guests, among them some very shady boys in unwashed sweaters, appeared to be in it for the long haul. At the helm of the gathering swayed Julia, the friend of a friend. Around the table, a game of matchsticks was underway. It consisted of passing an unlit match around the circle, from one pair of lips to another, without the use of hands. When the match had come full circle, it was broken in half, and a second, riskier round began, as the radio blared a pop-rock song called “Выхода нет” ("There is no way out"). Later I would associate this trap with the Jack Nicholson scene. The punchline of the story is that I fled; accosted by protests on the threshold, I hurried into my salt-licked boots and coat. From the unlit staircase, I called out that much like Cinderella, I had to leave before midnight, else. Else what, they asked; else my hair turn to straw, flung I, in retort. They seemed unfamiliar with the fairy tale. When the man in the radio said shortly thereafter, “В русской столицы полночь.,” [1] they were once again absorbed in their barbaric game.

[1] It is midnight in the Russian capital.