All Russians Love Birch Trees

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I didn’t want this day to begin. I would rather have stayed in bed and kept sleeping, but the laughter of the fruit vendor and the rattle of the streetcar invaded our bedroom through the wide-open window. Our apartment wasn’t far from the central station, which basically meant that in our neighborhood there were streets better left avoided, with discount stores and huge erotic cinemas. Here—between an old Chinese Laundromat and a left-leaning youth center, whose visitors often mistook our front door for a urinal—was our home. Our apartment was ramshackle and rundown, but cheap. Every morning at about five o’clock, fathers, brothers, and cousins unloaded their vans beneath our windows. They slammed their doors and assembled their stands, drank tea, roasted corn on the cob, and waited. They waited for the street to fill so that they could advertise their fruit in automated singsong voices. I tried to follow their conversations, but mostly just understood a bit here and there, or fell asleep again.

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