He picks up my boot (for the first time) and suddenly realizes that it is within the realm of his expertise to fix my shoe after all. For fifty rubles I have a new zipper on my boot. I don’t think he chose to fix my shoe because as a foreigner I was suddenly a desirable costumer, I think he felt extreme pity for this girl who sometimes mispronounces the word zipper, which when stressed on a different syllable is also the word for castle.
3) Everyone here has a grandparent with a war story. You think the repetition of these stories would be tiresome or lose their appeal, but it isn’t so. World War II, or as the Russians call it, the Great Patriotic War, left no family untouched. One day I’m in a local museum with two students, who are showing me the irons and toys and tools and banners that filled the lives of their recent ancestors. Nadya, who is tall with blonde hair (the picture of a Russian woman) surprises me by telling me she is Komi. Most Komis I have met fit my picture of a short, brown haired people. As we pass through the hall with pictures of war heroes from this village, in the hushed whisper of a museum, Nadya tells me how her grandfather survived the war to return home and start a family. He was taken prisoner and sent to a camp in Germany. He was experimented on and hurt, and he cried out and cursed in Komi. One of the doctors also spoke Komi, and eventually because of this common language, the doctor would help Nadya’s grandfather escape the camp and return to his native republic.
5) Sometimes I come into work in a poor mood. Usually on Wednesdays, when the work piles up like a traffic jam, and I anticipate the absenteeism and plagiarism and excuse-isms of my students. At 7:55 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, I was not expecting to enjoy my day. A first year student, who usually peers out at me from behind her dictionary and tries to use sad eyes to get out of reading her sentences aloud, unexpectedly walked up to me and with a shy smile handed me a Kinder candy bar. That gesture changed my entire attitude for the day. And I don’t even think she was trying to bribe me for something.
7) Russia has this type of metal garages scattered here and there next to roads and houses and piles of trash. Ten years ago when I first came to Russia, I remember sitting on the train chugging through the countryside and seeing whole neighborhoods of these corroded metal shacks. Keep in mind that the majority of Russians live in apartments without basements or attics and share their homes with many relatives. That doesn’t leave much room for storing stuff. But when I saw the windowless cement and metal hovels, I thought the worst. Do people live in these?! Which doesn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea after some of the living situations I’ve witnessed here, but that’s not my point. On my way to work, I walk past a smattering of these metal garages. After the first few snows, hordes of carelessly acrobatic boys started skipping from one structure to the next, jumping over the one foot gaps and seven foot drops with the effortless thoughtlessness only 8-year-old boys know about. In a mothering fashion unfamiliar to me, I worried about these kids and how one false step would send them sliding and head banging to the ground. As the drifts of snow built, I took reassurance that their fall would be softened. But now there is no snow, no safety net or cushion, just the slippery wet surface of spring time, and yet they still jump unaware of my fretful eyes.