Third Rome

The Krylatskoe line of the Metro имени Ленина - in the name of Lenin - ran above ground most of the way, and it was not heated. I lived at the end of the line. In the winter, I always hoped to sit or stand between two furred women. The rounder, the more generous and maternal, the better.

There was a man who walked from вагон (car) to вагон, selling invisible ink pens. "For state secrets, or cheating on exams," he said in the high point of his pitch. Another man sold a pamphlet called Правила движения - the rules of movement, literally, but more specifically, the rules of driving. He said the passages that had changed since the previous edition were highlighted in yellow. A third man sold glass cutters. He carried pieces of glass with him in a suitcase, and demonstrated the power of the glass cutter there in the middle of each вагон. At the end of his rounds he was left with shards.

Nixon's state

Nixon's roads are paved with Ronnybrook butter. His bell sounds with extinct coins.

In the mornings, he cannot get warm enough. He perches on the furnace and sloshes down his tea. He remembers his dream of a patchwork field seen from the sky.

"Look at those lovely houses," he sighed in the dream, to which some stranger said, by way of comfort, "They're only roofs."

It was very cinematic. The sinner in him waltzed.

To favor

"When you spend a lot of time with someone," she said, "you begin to favor them."

"Do you mean like old men favor their good leg," he said.

"No," she said, "I mean you start to look like them." She studied herself in the dusky train window. "Every time they visit you, they leave a trinket in your house. Every time you visit them, you take something home in your pocket. And then you begin to recognize yourself everywhere," she said.

Fish Dream

Mornings, she held the fish of her dreams struggling slippery and slappery in her arms.

The iconic lot on Caton was actually a sloping embankment, up which she scrambled. It always rained, it was always verdant. Boys in unique situations burst into airy rooms hugging grocery paper bags full of just-plucked spinach leaves. Women were sweet tooths. They took apart pens - the insides were a kind of Twizzler candy. They leaned out windows and sang at things, herded cats in warbly voices.

Two long narrow verandas, like piers, nearly met in the center of the lot. The distance between them was an arm's length. It gave new meaning to the phrase, "room for error." Covering letters changed hands, here. "I tried not to tell," said one. "Some tender notice you gave," said the other.

"You have to write," he said, "because you're not good at anything else."

Seventh Continent

In the Krylatskoe branch of Седьмой Континент - the Seventh Continent - a supermarket in Moskva, there stood three автоматы. These machines were similar to Metrocard vending machines. You used them to "put money" on your cell phone, that is, to add money to your account balance. Many people were on this system; fixed monthly plans were rare.

One day all three machines were available. I chose the one in the middle. A lady - another customer - came up to me and asked whether the other two machines were broken. "I don't know," I said. "So why are you using this one instead of the others," she demanded.

I turned this over in my mind, winding my way through the courtyards of the tall blue-faced apartment buildings that composed Krylatskoe. When I first moved to that neighborhood, they all looked the same to me, but in some weeks time, I was able to distinguish mine. Letting myself into the lobby that day, I thought, "Why this one, instead of the others?"

Loophole

When Nixon summed his daily calories, he did not include food he'd eaten at someone else's expense.

Nixon in Manhattan

The most obscene gesture Nixon observed in Manhattan was that of hailing a cab. People did it by stepping into the street without bending their legs at the knee. They shot out an arm without regard for passersby. They peered into the distance with a peeved or sullen or blank face. What got Nixon most was how they dropped off the curb, as off a short pier. The pier was so short, thought Nixon, it would not reach the nearest subway entrance, that is, two blocks.

He was amazed they were never hit.

Repertoire

Every morning, Nikolai seized Nixon's mug and took a sip of his coffee. The mug said, "It's not easy being me, but somebody's got to do it."

On those rare occasions when Nikolai was absent, Nixon poured a little coffee out on the ground, for Nikolai. "L'chaim," he muttered.

When Nixon imagined what the office would be like after he left, he actually imagined the office without Nikolai. Which did not make a lot of sense. Nikolai quizzed Nixon about this.

"The watertowers are imitating Monet's haystacks," said Nixon.

"Don't be specific with me," threatened Nikolai.

"The snow makes it look as if the city's lit from underneath," said Nixon.

"For love of Elijah," swore Nikolai.

Nixon's voice

Nixon did not have an inside voice. He did, however, have a voice inside him.

The voice was a stowaway. The stowaway was a bird - specifically, a nuthatch. It was a nut with its hatch ajar.  "Крыша поехала," say the Russians. "There goes the roof," they say.

The voice was a bottle inside a ship. The ship was wrecked by the pointy elbows of homesickness.

When it came to logic, Nixon was a one-hit wonder, a nonsense-prince.

Morning

"The bus! The bus!" yelled Nikolai.

"Too soon! Too soon!" yelled Nixon.

They were, together, the kind of irreproducible error that drives the tech support people crazy.

Mrs. Taylor and she says...

"Have Spells? Can't Hold Money? Want Luck? Come to see Taylor as many others do from far and near. Don't tell her, let her tell you. See her in the morning. Be happy at night. This woman does what others claim to do."

--Excerpt from a flyer found on the seabound Q

Lady M., revisited

Elena Mikhailovna - not Pavlovna - was my first host mother. The day I arrived, she gave me a bowl and a mug, rimmed with painted bees, for which she designated a spot on the counter. She ladled oatmeal mush or buckwheat (or the mystery soup of the day) into my bowl. Her glasses slipped off her nose; she shoved them back like Sisyphus. When I had excused myself, she called her teenage son, Kiril, to the table, and served him. She herself never ate, as far as I could tell. She liked to stand with her hands on her hips and lecture me about the dangers of Paris, where, she said, men reached out of cars and snatched the pocketbooks of pedestrians. "Hold it close," she said. 

In the kitchen there stood a washing machine. Elena M. said it didn't work. At first I took her word for it, but I grew suspicious when I came home to find that all the sheets and towels had been washed and the machine still throbbed, its forehead streaked with condensation dew. But I didn't have the nerve to pursue the matter. Without complaining, I washed my clothes by hand and hung them on the clothesline strung across the kitchen between the two refrigerators.

Yes, there were two refrigerators. Elena M. only ever took food from the first. I opened it when I was home alone one day, and found it empty. She had inexplicably transferred the food to the second fridge. To further complicate the situation, there was only one bucket for the entire household, so often my laundry was held up for days while Kiril soaked his grimy clothes.

A very inside joke

When Sergei Alekseevich wished to excuse himself from the table, he would say, "Я - удаляюсь."

His verb of choice was the reflexive of the verb, "удалять," meaning, "to delete."

This was a joke I had with myself - that he was deleting himself from the room at the end of every meal.

House-museums

Sergei Alekseevich was a psychologist. He harbored strong feelings against the house-museums and museum-apartments that charged admission throughout greater Russia. "It's unhealthy," he insisted, "to maintain a shrine of someone's home and belongings after they die," he said, "even if they were a famous painter or novelist."

I visited those homemade museums a fair bit. The grandmothers who operated them made you wear shapeless felt slippers over your shoes, so that you would not scuff the floors. The walls were generally hung - crammed, even - with paintings. You could not approach the wall - sometimes you could not even enter the room. So you stood on the threshold, trying to match a painting with its caption, printed in tiny font on a single sheet of paper.

When you burst into the street afterwards, you felt all the more alive.

Rare tea

One day Elena Pavlovna found herself explaining to me that her particular name and patronymic, "Elena Pavlovna," is a rare combination. Her husband, Sergei Alekseevich, said that "Larisa Pavlovna," on that other hand, is more common.

Then Elena Pavlovna chimed in, "Actually, I don't know any Larisa Pavlovnas, so maybe it too is a rare combination."

Every morning they brewed a pot of tea, which they used all day. (They would take some of the strong stuff from this pot, and add newly boiled hot water.) Usually by evening the original brew was too weak to make decent tea. Then the family said, "Чай не работает - The tea's not working."