surrender

She is in her underwear, clawing for me. The substitute teacher, a stranger has no idea why E is upset. It is a normal Friday morning for her. For E, it is the day I fly to New York to organize a new visa, to collect toys and new shoes, gifts from her family that will remain in boxes only E will open. But this is not a thought she can connect to right now. Now, she knows I am going and she cannot. She knows she will not see me for a week, and has no idea what will happen within this time. It is a descent into the unknown. No one will wrap her locks carefully in a ponytail when she is brought to school.

She is screaming, sobbing. Her hair a wild mess, I dig into my pockets to find a stray hairband, past the magic rock she gave me, past the lucky pennies. I will lean in and kiss her hot cheeks, explain to the substitute I am going away for a week. She nods in understanding.

The halls smell of warm milk.

I go to the main entrance and speak to Nina Vasilivna for a little while - a brick of a woman with wisps of deeply stained red hair and kind eyes. She talks to me in a series phrases, not questions, almost not listening to me.
"Nothing, nothing." She says. "Nothing will happen. Don't worry."

And then somehow I am on the plane. N is next to me, her face on my shoulder.

I imagine E on the playground in the dark, waiting to be taken home. I imagine her sitting by a window with the cats, looking at the snow falling.

My sister is good. Her child is laughing. Her husband is smiling. My father is here. I have not seen him in almost 8 years. He squeezes me, his beard scraping across my cheeks. I think of E, and how she calls me "yojhik" when My beard scratches her, yojhik, the hedgehog.

My brother arrives the next day. We play guitars in the living room, a circle of men in their socks, playing quietly. I knew I wanted to bring my harmonicas for a reason, and now I understand why. N is smiling her easy smile, sitting with her feet curled beneath her. Everyone is asking her questions. We drink a number of tiny cups of coffee, oggle our watches and try to understand what time it is back home.

E speaks to me with a sad, low voice when I call her. She asks if I can come back tomorrow. I tell her I am buying her pink boots that are good for jumping in puddles. OK, she says, OK Papa.

And I walk down the streets with N's hand in mine, the logic of the sidewalks, the crisscrossing speedwalkers, the ones walking slow and staring up into the heavens. We are part of this, eating magnificent bacon and egg sandwiches, ducking into this place, spreading our legs out somewhere else.

And suddenly Monday morning, writing in a busy group of tables. The only power outlet is surrounded by nutjobs. One guy is playing music that competes with the sound being piped in, a strange competition. N is reading a magazine.

I am not at home. No Arvo Part drifting around a quiet room, a place so easy to collect my thoughts. No, this is NYC, where the kooks and creeps are like magnets for people who want to concentrate for a few minutes. I ask him to use some headphones, and he starts fucking with me. Now, he holds the music player up around his chest, the sound distorting from the tiny speakers. He looks like he has not slept in a week. His face is covered in pimples. I think he waits here by the outlet on purpose, must make him feel important, significant, powerful. I don't think Lady Gaga wants him to be playing her songs this way.

There is no sense in telling a crazy person they are crazy.

I surrender. I imagine my child.

Let's get out of here.

strays

I had thought to take pictures of the stray dogs that lounge on a magnificent strip of green grass next to the Kievsyaya train station. Throngs of travelers make their way past them, through the mudpuddles and the old women selling bunches of red roses. There is a wall of ladies holding up cheap sweaters, fleece blankets, rugs, hats, anything synthetic and cheap you can imagine. Sometimes, something practical like lemons or a kilo of kiwis.

The dogs are filthy, and I never see them eating or even playing yet they are content. They watch the people struggling to find loved ones as they arrive from far reaching cities like Kishinev, all the way in Moldava. They watch wheelbarrows of roses being carted in and sold at a dizzying pace.

But now, it has been snowing and the dogs are gone. The wet rain on Saturday evening turned to great lazy flakes that clung to the branches and the railings. I saw a boy holding a polished snowball in his hand, cradling it close to his jacket as he entered a courtyard. I saw drunken men slipping on the ice that hid underneath the wet snow, landing on their asses and laughing at each other, hands muddy, one guy bleeding a little, then trailing off into a sidestreet.

I used those dogs as a sort of meditation every time I saw them, bringing E to school, or back last week. They made me think of a bit of Russian advice I have been given more than a few times:

Don't ask.
Don't trust.
Don't worry.

A potent series of directions that allows you to navigate through any situation. When I saw the dogs, I turned them into a physical example of these three directives. Somehow, they survive. Somehow, they are not killed. Somehow, they relax. In a way, I aspired to be like them. They helped me.

And now, just as the snow has finally come, they are gone.

The Russian winter is a lesson in surrender. It cannot be conquered. It will destroy your shoes, and your car. It will haunt you. It will not stop for months and months. Filthy, piss-stained snow will accumulate in piles more than ten feet tall. At one point you will forget what Spring is, the same as your child. You will understand summer just isn't coming this year, maybe some freezing rain. The air will grow so cold the hairs inside your nose will hurt. But if you surrender, if you hibernate and keep things simple, you will make it. Forget those magnificent plans to go to museums. Make soup. Sleep late. Conserve your energy. You will need it to take a child to school in the dark, and then back in the dark. There will be no work in January, just empty promises. No money, just bills. This is a marathon, and it will start now.

Don't ask me about winter. I will not ask how are you are. Do not trust the Russian winter. Do not trust people who call themselves friend. Do not trust anyone, and you will survive. You will drink beer down by the river in a tshirt. Don't worry about us. We will be fine. Don't worry about the economy, the value of a ruble. Don't worry about paying rent. Just get drunk on New Years. Kiss your girl hard on the lips, throw your children high into the air until their sides hurt from laughter. Call friends and wish them well. Fall asleep on the sofa, find your bed in the middle of the night as you stumble across strange objects in your path. Dream of the stray dogs, and where they may be.

This is where we live

Pushing gingerly past the wall of boxes by the door I walk E to school. She doesn't want to go. She wants to be at home with me, or sitting next to me in meetings with her magic markers. Her mother has not brought her to school once this year, simply letting her sleep late and then stagnate within the unblinking eye of the TV. She tells her school is bad, and if Dad takes her to school is it because he doesn't love her, and that he is mean.

E knows better than to accept this, but her Soviet-style destkie sad (kindergarden) is often boring. They do a lot of math there. They do a lot of memorization of Pushkin, but the food is good.

Turning the corner onto Studencheskaya she screams all at once, her words gurgling in her throat. She struggles from my arms as I carefully haul her down the street, her snowpants and parka slipping through my fingers. I have to hold her over my hip, her arms flailing wildly. I am completely embarrassed, and suddenly there is no one here to judge me, no babushka to sniff in the air as I pass. Just muddy black SUV's blazing through the intersections.

I ring the front door, and here is her teacher Lubova to let us in. They are practicing for the next school play downstairs today. She takes E with warm firm hands. She knows the entire story. A kind, chubby woman who makes most metaphors with her fist. Walking away, I feel a rush of relief and a cascade of emotions - sadness that E feels this way, anger at the woman who teaches her to hate school, remorse that she does not live in NY and go to my old Montessori school, exhaustion as her crying made me want to burst into tears as well, and pause to thank the world for Lubova and the fierce attention she gives E.

15 minutes later I call and Lubova says she is fine, eating porridge and drinking compote. I am constantly learning that being firm is difficult, but a kind of delayed positive. Of course I could have kept E home from school today and we would have had a wonderful time. But something inside me knows it is much better to find her at the end of the day as a part of the kindergarden symphony, the cacophony of play, the jumbled courage of detskie sad games. Inside this little girl is a skipping record, raw emotions that somehow can be nudged, washed away by randomness. If I step in dog shit in the street, or a car honks we are suddenly OK.

Passing the rinock (market) on the way home, an old woman plunks a cardboard box on the ground where she will sell a handful of beets, potatoes, maybe horseradish from her garden. A wind skitters down the sidestreet and she cannot spread a piece of paper across the top. I stop, and return to her, holding one end without a word as she stares at me briefly, and spreads the mess of mudclotted vegetables across it. I brush my hands against my jeans thinking how I feel just like this woman, trying to spread my own display paper out.

The new apartment is finally ready to receive us. N shuttles me late at night with armfuls of pots and pans, cables, guitars, quickly packed clothes, towels, and all of E's toys. The new place smells OK now. We move from room to room, organizing, planning, imagining. We go back to the old place for a late dinner, and the deepest of sleeps.

On Saturday, E is still with me. She slurps her last bowl of cereal in the old place. Her legos are arranged in an intricate village around me, as I pack my desk up and add it to the cascade of boxes.

"Pop." She says, her mouth twisted sideways.
"Yes?" I say, from the other room.
"Pop, I know what happened between you and Mom." She says.
"Oh yeah?" I ask, resting my hands on my hips in the doorway.
"You had wires that were connecting you, like from your head to her head." She explained. "But now the wires are broken. The wires are gone now."
"That's about right." I say, after a moment.
E starts singing to herself, a quiet little melody.
She begins turning tiny foil candy wrappers into blankets for her dolls.

N is humming in the kitchen of the new apartment the next morning. She is emptying the closets of the bizarre and random collection of dishes that are here, dressed in one of my button-down shirts and a pair of slippers. I hold her. We stare out the kitchen window for a while. A train slithers away in the distance. A curl of smoke climbs lazily from the next building. I breath in, smelling her perfume, my morning coffee and the greasy dust on the shelves.

This is where we live now.

The keys to the kingdom

There were events I cannot describe. There were threats that cut down to the bone with their potential to become real. Snow was banging around the sky, flying upwards as much as down. I missed meals, sleep and taking E to music school. I called every goddamn person I knew and said help. I called strangers, people I had met once two years ago. By some miracle, they remembered us. People were pulling strings, calling on longshots. I threw a hail mary pass every ten minutes, staring out the apartment windows at a sudden white sky. I paced the floor, waiting for the phone to ring. I ate a box of dry cereal in messy handfuls.

And then the apartment was shown to some new potential buyers. It had always been our agreement that I would move out of this funny little place if there was a buyer. On the market for over seven years, two rooms that were once a policeman's office before this became a private building - we never thought the day would come. But it did.

Scrambling to search for apartments and be out the door in 30 days - a curse I would not wish on my worst enemy. I did not want E to become upset. This bright place in the clouds has been the first place she has ever felt truly happy, safe and peaceful in her short little life. This is where she had her first real birthday party, with a room full of children and toys, balloons crisscrossing the walls, ribbons and streamers across every doorway.

I thought to complain about the tiny things, like the internet turning off, or how the faucets tend to spray water all over the kitchen and rarely on the dishes. About how a loose tile in the bathroom forces water into a space under the bathtub, letting out a sweet and rotten smell and maybe that is where those tiny black flies come from. I thought these complaints would turn her, make moving out her idea as opposed to a piano slowly dropping from the sky on us.

I set times to look at new places, terrifying in their snapshots on the internet - macrame doors, ancient red velvet, peeling green wallpaper, bathtubs gone brown with stains. I started going on a night E was not with me, N by my side to cut through the bullshit and the rug selling. I needed the truth, and I needed it fast. The next night, E was with us. She was mildly excited, but after seeing two places she just wanted to go home. Ah, how to nudge the truth towards her without causing her to seize up like the pipes under the sink. I promised to buy her a new bed at Ikea, and we would decorate it with flowers and stars. A small nod of her face, a quiet yes from deep inside her.

One more place, this one by the river. Close to the great Vokzal (train station) of Kievskaya. Massive sculptures, a glass-covered bridge that spans the river. We enter. It is big, a sprawl of three rooms. Old chandeliers. Wacky vintage stereos and drapes but a view of the skyline. Old buildings dwarfed by the blue glass towers of City with their A class offices and the newest Starbucks in Moscow. And in the bedroom, a balcony with a view of the river. The kitchen, a cozy square with a round table. E is exhausted. She just wants to crumble onto the floor with her toys that are not there. The place has that old lady smell, of dust and fuzzy sofas, of food that needs salt. The place is old, tired. But it is warm, and solid.

I sign the lease the next day.

E is smiling. She is ready. N is relieved at least this is solved. She will help me with every detail. She will drive me to Ikea not once but twice, her tiny car packed to the ceiling. She will light candles and the old smell will fade. I still have nightmares to deal with, but at least this is solved. E will sleep here soon, her arms awkward on her pillow. I will cook here soon, smoking up the kitchen, eating from new plates and sipping wine from a paper cup.

I used to think that the number of keys in your pocket is a good indication of how complex your life is. Successful people have very few keys, was my mantra. A number of days ago, I gave back the keys to the office. In my right pocket is the front door key to a friend's home in the USA, a sort of touchstone I can hold on to in moments of complete madness. In my bag are the keys to my sister's place. Now I am wrestling with new apartment keys, old ones as I wrestle boxes in and out. It will get simpler, I keep repeating to myself.

The old place is annoying now. A coat rack falls from the wall one night. It seems there were no nails holding it up for the last 11 months. I lean against the bathroom doorway and tiles begin popping off the wall and clattering to the floor. The cat is hiding. E is laughing in her bathrobe, her hair a wet mess. I can't wait to get out of here now.

E sleeps as I work into the night. Her toys are arranged carefully across the windowsill. I wonder if she will remember this place when she is older. I wonder if the rain falling will turn to snow. I wonder about the bigger problems, the ones that cannot be solved by a bag of money and a signature on a lease. Looking out at the great building, I am happy to move on. I spent many sad nights here, wondering if E was ok. I spent many days looking out at that sky with no idea what to do.

This is where I met N, where she sat and drank coffee and asked me a thousand questions. This is our love nest, our place for pyjamas and coffee. This is where we curled up naked and warm, like hibernating chipmunks.

I pull a sweater around me. There is a draft. I have to fix that window too.

not now

i cannot write today. i want to, but there are much more important things going on right now. i cannot turn an elegant phrase this Monday. The phones are ringing all day, and I must answer them and solve some major issues as fast as possible. E is OK. N is OK. The cat is  - well, she always has a tough time. With luck I will write later in the week, for the first time. Or a double for next week. I promise.

OK, the phone is ringing.

And in my head a song is banging around...

I imagine a moment after this black and terrifying one I am in now, one where I can be silly.