“Tell me, Leonid,” she said. “Who is G. P. Ustinova?”
Leonid’s face darkened. “Galina Petrovna is our geochemist,” he said. “I used to know her quite well. You know, we have a ‘laboratory romance’: she just married Ivan Alexeich, who also works here. There, on her desk, is his photograph.”
“Oh!” Nina looked at the photograph of Ivan. “He’s very handsome. But excuse me, Leonid. I have to go.”
“What? Don’t you want to wait for your relative, Professor Bazhanov?”
“Forgive me. I can’t wait anymore. Please don’t tell anybody that I came here.”
Before Leonid could say another word, Nina was gone.
? ? ?
Hi, Selin!
I got your message about the Iranian flick, but it’s already 7:00 p.m. Sigh. My weekend is going all right, except I feel kind of sick and I have incredible mounds of reading that is not getting done. And my tae kwon do promotion is tomorrow. Yesterday I tried to do an artistic project, but it’s hard with the time pressure and with the lack of privacy. I really like Val and Fern but I need to be alone when I’m playing around with stuff. Anyway. I hope you’re enjoying the movie and it didn’t turn out to be about some Iranian potato farmers. Sorry I couldn’t come.
Your Svetlana
P.S. By the way, I dreamed you and I were shooting paint bullets at each other from toy guns in the middle of Memorial Drive and we were having a great time.
Hey, Selin,
I heard that you dropped by—but I was soundly asleep. I’ve been sick, but now I’m sort of OK. Is there a showing of the movie anytime later than 7:30. If there isn’t, I’ll go at 7:30, but if there is, that would be better because I’m trying to get some reading accomplished.
Hmm, I see that you’ve been studying russkii. I’m impressed. Other than my Charlemagne reading, I’m done with work. Horaay! (Is that how you spell horaay or is it with two o’s.) Anyway, I also see from this paper that you’re about to get into trouble again for not going along with your linguistics book’s ideas. Sigh . . . some things just don’t change, huh?
Today I gave blood and during it I had this weird fantasy about being strangled with a tube full of blood, curving around like a viscious intestant. It really freaked me out. Who knows where your blood goes. My blood is going to be inside someone else’s brain. The blood that fuels my thoughts will fuel someone else’s. What a strange penetration. Anyway. I really wanted to chat with you, but I guess you’re off doing who knows what kind of a wild beagle project in the cold, the dark, the rain . . .
Let me know about the movie times. I’ll be in my room . . . reading . . .
Your Svetlana
Hi, Selin.
There is no way in hell that I am going to make the movie tonight. I have 180 pp about the Carolingian Renaissance that I’ve got to read tonight and that is not happy. Sigh. Our cinematic plans just seem to be very ill-fated, huh? And it’s all my fault, too. I’m consumed by guilt—something you’re so familiar with (ha, ha). I’d say that we’ll go to the Gogol one on Friday but by now I’ve learned not to promise anything.
This pink paper is pretty cool, by the way. I hope it’s OK if I use a piece for the lowly utilitarian purpose of writing you this note. (I purposefully chose a piece with a tear in it.) Just to keep you up-to-date on my dream life, I dreamed my sister was in a yoga accident and someone said she looked like a squirrel in a blender. Pretty weird, huh?
Oh, here you are, wearing a cool yellow sweater. I admire your bright colors.
Svetlana
? ? ?
I was running low on money so I applied for a job at the library. When I told my mother about it, the phone went quiet for a long time, and even before she started talking, I could tell she was furious. The reason she worked so hard was so that I could devote myself to my studies and not worry about money; if I needed more money she would borrow more from her retirement and mail me a check, and if I really wanted to feel useful to society, there was nothing like community service. I was immediately embarrassed for having wanted more money. Money for what—more ugly shoes, more depressing movies?
Out of guilt, the habit of listening to my mother, and an interest in second-language acquisition, I signed up to teach ESL at an adult education program in a housing project. It turned out that they already had enough ESL teachers and what they needed was people to teach high school equivalency math. I wasn’t particularly interested in high school math acquisition, but nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment.
To get to the housing project, you took one of the medical school shuttles to some part of the medical school, walked past about fifteen hospitals, and then literally crossed some railroad tracks. I had never been to a housing project and had somehow expected it to look makeshift or cobbled together, and there was something terrible in its institutional solidity. You saw that the buildings had always been depressing, they were depressing in their design and construction, and would continue to be depressing, perhaps for hundreds of years, until something powerful knocked them down. Patches of overgrown grass resembled a comb-over on the head of a bald person who didn’t want to see reality. Every surface was covered with graffiti. There was nothing colorful or playful about the graffiti—it was the same illegible scrawl repeated over and over and over, like a nasty thought you can’t shake.
The classrooms were in a residential building with an abandoned stove in the front yard. I went upstairs to the rooms set aside for the adult education program. There was a “lobby” with a children’s miniature table and chairs, even though there were no children in the program. On the table were a sign-in sheet, a dead spider plant, and a dead spider. On a shelf in the closet lay a stack of marbled composition notebooks and a box of unsharpened Ticonderoga pencils.
My student, Linda, came ten minutes late. She was about my age, thin, with lilac-colored metallic lipstick and matching nail polish. She handed me a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it. It read: Linda needs help with fractions.
We went into the smaller of the two classrooms, and sat at a folding picnic table. She showed me the page in the book she was supposed to learn. It was a chart, for generating fractions.
Numerator
Denominator
Fraction
1
2
?
1
3
?
1
4
?
But it seemed like she had already learned the chart, because when I wrote in some more numerators and denominators, like 2 and 3, she was able to sit them on top of each other, like ?.