Long Made Short

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I can be such an egotistical self-righteous pompous son of a bitch; unaccepting, nonaccepting, I can’t think of the right word but it’s what I so often am and all of it’s what I was again. Moscow, my wife and I, she to research a book she’s anthologizing and introducing, I just to accompany her and see a city and be in a country I’ve never been to, and it’s really just the extra airfare, since restaurants are very cheap and the hotel room’s the same for one or two. She — Marguerite — speaks Russian, will be working all day in libraries and with Russian contacts so, through a colleague in America weeks before we left, got an interpreter for me for the five weekdays. Svetlana shows up at our hotel at nine, half-hour before she’s supposed to. I’m squatting in the little tub, reach over and push the door shut, and Marguerite lets her in. I overhear them: Good mornings in Russian, then “Please, if it’s possible, everything in English from now on. I want to sharpen my interpreting facilities even better from your trip, and I’m planning of visiting America in a year. And my earliness — tardiness? — earliness is because the metro got here faster than I thought and was less crowded than expected. Then our brave police downstairs let me up with a wave when I thought I’d have more difficulties. And I didn’t want to walk around in the slippery cold or sit in the dreary lobby with everyone blowing smoke and sturgeon fumes on me and talking in their loud German and English and American voices, present employers — employees? — excluded of course. I had a stroke, you see, two years ago. Recovered from this side being paralyzed to where I could barely walk. Twelve almonds a day, a healer from Kiev said — the doctors could offer no medicine but time for me.

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