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On a Russian calendar, the first day of the week is Monday. It's a logic I've come to accept. The first day of the work week is the start of a whole new cycle. This particular Monday, in late November, starts like most others in my apartment on the third floor of a five-story apartment building, in the small town of Kavalerovo. ^[1]
 

The insistent beeping of the alarm clock comes well before the sky has begun to lighten. I manage to "snooze" three or four times, even though I only have to complete one simple task before falling back into bed. Finally, I drag myself out from under the warmth of my blankets and out of the pocket of heat created by the space heater next to my bed. I slide my feet into my slippers and shuffle across the gray linoleum floor of my apartment to the bathroom. I pick up the cord and plug it in. A small spark arcs between the prongs of the plug and the outlet as it snaps into place. After checking to see that heat is rippling through the water around the metal coils, I shuffle back to bed and reset the alarm for 2 hours later.
 

Last night I filled the tub with water and put my hot water heater in place so that in the morning all I would have to do is plug it in to have a hot bath waiting about 3 hours later. The frame for the contraption is a long stick, which spans the bathtub diagonally. Two immersion heaters (larger versions of the metal coils you can use to boil a cup of water for tea) are hanging off the stick, attached with twist ties, and plugged into an extension cord that runs out of the bathroom to the outlet in the hall. My apartment building has hot water taps, but the last time hot water came out of them was early January of this year. All summer nothing was coming out of them at all, but now there is "hot" water, which is slightly warmer than the cold water, and useful only for not freezing your hands while washing dishes or clothes. It's not just my building either. In Russia central heating and hot water are provided (or not provided, as the case may be) by the town, with water heated in a central location and piped around to all the apartment buildings.
 

After getting up at a somewhat saner hour, with the sun already peeking around the side of the almost identical 5-story soviet era cement block of an apartment building across the yard from mine, I have my breakfast and bath. The kitchen is chilly, since there is only one space heater and only a little heat from the main room seeps into the kitchen. The town-heated radiators are barely room temperature this week, which means they are being heated, since until now they have been the temperature of the frozen ground outside, and actually stole heat from the room. The bathroom by now is warm and steamy like a Russian bathhouse. I let the water heat up more than it has to, then cool down a little, so the water will heat up the room as well.
 

After a good long soak, my clothes go on in layers-- long underwear, woolen socks, a woolen turtleneck that I brought from home and a black suit-jacket and slacks that I bought here. I bought the turtleneck in one of those catalogues that sells clothes for young professionals, and it seems to be telling me it would prefer be dry-cleaned. It used to hang to my hips, but is now threatening not to make it to my waist, and the sleeves are halfway up my lower arms.
 

I have the luxury of a long morning on Mondays and Wednesdays, since on those days I work at the private linguistic center at the local library. Our classes are timed for kids getting out of school in the afternoons, so they don't start until 4 pm. At 11:15 I have a guitar lesson at the local music school, a 15 minute walk from here. At 11:10, of course, I'm just pulling on my boots and coat (both long, leather, and fur-lined for the Russian winter). The bolt-style lock on my apartment door clicks into place behind me, and I lock the other with a key.
 

It's three flights down through the stairwell and it must be the cement walls and small, dingy windows that make the air the bone-chilling cold of the inside of a cave. The entryways to soviet-era apartment buildings are all like this. It was my first culture shock in Russia, as we entered the 12-story building in Vladivostok where I lived for two months with a host family during training. When you walk through the doors of an apartment building in America, you consider yourself indoors. Even if it's dingy, the building materials are indoor materials (plaster walls, wood or linoleum floors, maybe even carpeting), and it's generally lit and heated similarly to the rest of the building. In Russia, the stairwell and landings leading to apartments seem to be considered outside. Similar to, say, a porch. The walls and stairs are solid cement. Maybe in years gone by more of an effort was made to keep them freshly painted. My entryway here used to be blue and white, and some of it still is, but the paint is chipped away in wide swaths, leaving the bare gray cement gaping through.
 

The graffiti too has become part of the background-noise of my life, barely registering in my vision. When I first came I was fascinated by the graffiti, which is just as frequently in English as in Russian. Hollywood has been effectively imported in this part of the world. The teenagers, even if they're failing English, know a nice selection of four-letter words and sometimes they even spell them correctly on the walls. The rest of the English graffiti is mostly names of bands. They tell me that under the stricter discipline of the soviets, there was no graffiti at all.
 

When I step outside, I'm surprised as usual by the freshness of the air, the cheerfulness of the sun on the snow. Inside the cold is draining, but outside it is right and proper, even energizing. The sun is so bright here in the winter, and the snow so often fresh, that it always feels like a holiday-- that elusive, greeting-card perfect "White Christmas."
 

The path I take to the music school is mostly along the main street in town, named for the explorer Arsenyev who charted many parts of this region. I pass the bus station-- a huge parking lot which I wouldn't recognize as a bus station except that's what I know it is. On the other side of the bus station is the open air market, where vendors brave the coldest winter winds to sell frozen solid bottles of cooking oil and slabs of meat that lie in open baskets. It's never too cold for the outdoor ice cream vendors, who have business even when the temperature is pushing 30 below.
 

I continue down the sidewalk now covered with packed snow until April, where parents pull the youngest children along on wooden sleds with metal runners. The buildings I pass are a crazy juxtaposition of styles. Traditional village-style one or two story buildings, usually in dark or vivid colors and often with ornate wooden carvings decorating doors and window frames, mingle freely with pre-fab cement apartment buildings. These are painted sickly, pallid colors and their facades probably looked "crumbling" almost as soon as they were built. Most of them are 5 stories, the tallest that the Russian building code allows without installing an elevator. A Russian can tell when one of those buildings was built by glancing inside one of the apartments. The apartment buildings from any 5 or 10 year period followed the exact same few floor plans all across the former Soviet Union. Tiny shops can be found in odd nooks and crannies of these buildings.
 

I pass the park, built on the site of one of those Stalin prison camps that used to be so plentiful in the Russian Far East and Siberia. Of course, there's nothing remaining to show it was once there. Now there are some bench-lined paths through the trees. At a central point, hardy, athletic-looking statues of the male and female soviet worker salute each other across the path. The playground, in long disrepair, has been reduced to twisted scraps of metal which children still somehow manage to use as swings, carousels, and jungle gyms. ^[2]
 

Past the park is the central square, with its most prominent feature, as in most former Soviet towns, a statue of Lenin, hand outstretched, leading the way to a bright communist future. Vladimir Ilyich is painted a gaudy, cheap silver color that strikes me as irreverent. Behind Lenin is the stately "House of Culture," a sort of community center with various music, dance, theater and art studios and clubs. One of the things I like most about Russia is how seriously people take the arts. On either side of Lenin are two "snow mountains," the best thing about Kavalerovo in the winter. After the first snow that stays, these monstrous slides are dragged out of storage somewhere and set up in the main square. Someone pours water over the slide part until there is a good layer of ice that will stay for the winter, and from November until March, from morning until night, there is a steady stream of kids climbing up the wooden steps and "wheeeeee"ing down the slides.
 

On the far side of the main square, behind a tasteful grove of pine trees, is the technical school, which offers training in practical professions from mining to auto mechanics to accounting for secondary school graduates (for some professions you have to have finished 9 grades, for others all 11). The top of the white building sports rusted, meter-high letters reading, "study, work, and be victorious like Lenin."
 

I cross the street after the square, and cut across a parking lot to reach the Children's School of the Arts. I have great respect for the children I pass in the halls coming and going from their musical instruments, voice, or studio art lessons. The programs follow rigorous state standards. The piano course, for example, is seven years of two lessons a week and regular examinations, with 3 years of once-a-week lessons in a secondary instrument. The studio art students, who unlike the music students can't necessarily practice at home, spend ten hours a week in lessons, above and beyond their normal school days.
 

My own lessons have nothing like that kind of rigor. I am not learning classical guitar, just to strum along to folk songs. When I stop outside the guitar classroom, I can hear the sounds of the same few notes being plucked over and over again. Although I am almost 15 minutes late, the student before me is still there. I stick my head in to let the teacher know I've arrived. After another 5 minutes or so, I can hear the sounds of belongings being gathered up and a coat being put on. Yuri Nikitich would never scold me for being late, or for not having practiced enough. I'd be surprised if he ever scolded anybody, which is an anomaly, since Russian teachers and really Russians in general do a lot of scolding. Yuri is a quiet, middle-aged man, with two daughters and a wife who does enough scolding for two or three parents. He usually has a benign and often slightly befuddled look on his face, and sends the visual signal, "Don't mind me, I'm just playing my music and minding my own business." Several nights a week he plays the keyboard and sings in a cafe in town.
 

When I first arrived to take lessons from him, he was a bit nervous and didn't know what to do with me, since I spoke Russian pretty badly. The first thing he did was draw me a picture of a guitar and label it with all the names of the parts. Then he drew a person and labeled the parts most vital to explaining how to play the guitar (fingers, nails, wrist, elbow). I did a lot of nodding and smiling. Now I'm past the initial awkwardness both with Russian and with the guitar, so we interact easily.
 

"Haven't seen you in awhile," Yuri remarks, smiling benignly.
 

I smile back sheepishly. It's true-- I'm an on-again, off-again sort of student. When I'm on I'm on with a passion, and we usually start two new songs (one Russian and one English) every week, but other times I might not show up for weeks at a time. It usually starts because I go to Vladivostok for the weekend, and when I come back I haven't practiced, then I have an extra busy week catching up with all the stuff I usually would have done at home on the weekend (like lesson plans), so by Friday, my second lesson of the week, I still haven't practiced. Without the stimulus of the Friday lesson I go another weekend without practicing, and so it goes... My relationship to every pursuit is to work in bursts like that, so by now I just accept it about myself. As long as I'm making progress, should I worry that I'm not the slow and steady type? Anyway, this time I'm sure I'm going to turn over a new leaf and practice for an hour ever day from now on (at least for the next couple of weeks). ^[3]
 

I open up the song I've been working on lately. It's Paul Simon's "The Boxer" and it's the reason I've been absent for a couple of weeks. I just can't get the quick fingering and when I don't get instant results I get discouraged. Time for something new. If I can't conquer it, move on and come back to it. I've brought a tape with me of the Indigo Girls' "Least Complicated" and the words and chords that I got from the internet. Theoretically I could probably sit down with all of this material and figure it out for myself, but it's so much easier when Yuri does it. He doesn't have his earphones today, so I leave the tape and he gives me a simple, popular Russian song that I can probably learn by Friday. Today he writes the song in my notebook himself. We used to go through the laborious process of him dictating the words and then correcting my numerous mistakes, which was time-consuming and frustrating, but necessary because Russian cursive is so quirky and so unlike printed text that until recently I couldn't reliably read anyone's handwriting but my own slow, careful script. The chords are easy. We sing the song a few times together so that I will remember the melody and pronunciation.
 

I'm Yuri's last student before lunch, so we leave together, chatting pleasantly about music, Yuri's daughters, and my life back in America. If you only knew what a breakthrough, what a relief, what a joy it is just to be able to chat with someone after so many months of having only the bare necessities of linguistic competence.
 

I have a couple of hours at home before my lessons at the linguistic center. Since work seems to expand to fill the time available (Or is it that the time available steadily decreases until there's just enough left of it to do the work?), I spend that time finalizing my lesson plans for that day and the next, writing them out in the notebook that I refer to while I teach.
 

Leaving my apartment at about 3, I follow the same route to the library as I took this morning to the School of the Arts, as far as the central square. My Linguistic Center classes are timed in such a way that, no matter how late I eat lunch, I will be hungry some time during the classes. On the way, I stop at one of the numerous little grocery stores to pick up a Snickers bar for a boost between classes, and a large bar of chocolate to bring to Irina's tonight.
 

The public library is on the same side of Arsenyev Street as the central square, two buildings after the Technical School. It shares a building with the Technical School's dormitory that has rooms for teachers and students alike. My friend Raisa, an English teacher, shares one room and a kitchen with her 3 year old son and his father on the 3rd floor. The library is on the first floor, and our Linguistic Center is in a small conference room. I go first to the little store, a part of the library itself, which sells books and school supplies and is equipped with a copy machine. We have a contract with the library that says we get photocopies for one ruble (about four cents) per double-sided page if we bring our own paper. Without this arrangement photocopying would be a strain on my finances (the going rate is 4 rubles for a double-sided copy). That's with my Peace Corps "living allowance" which is well below American minimum wage (that's why I'm called a "volunteer") but still some orders of magnitude more than the median Russian "salary". That is, when Russian workers are paid at all. Salaries have been unreliable at best since the Yeltsin years, sometimes nonexistent for as much as 2 years at a stretch.
 

Today's photocopying is sure to take a good twenty minutes. We use materials from a variety of textbooks, and we couldn't possibly expect the students to buy all of them. Actually, we probably couldn't expect the students to buy any of them. The price of 20 rubles per 40 minute lesson (yes, that's less than a dollar) makes it possible for students in a wide range of financial situations to attend the Linguistic Center.
 

There is no line today, so I greet the clerk (in Russia it's obligatory to exchange a verbal greeting—a smile and nod don't count), and start making my copies. I'm sure I was formally introduced to the clerk once, back when I was meeting ten new people a day, most of whom had one of 20 or so common first names combined with one of 20 or so common patronymics. Later, when the sounds of the Russian language grew less foreign, I was embarrassed to ask the names of people I had already been interacting with for months. Now I feel I'm well past the statute of limitations, and have given up on ever knowing her name. Perhaps it's this that makes me a little awkward with her, and her a little distant from me.
 

The clerk is wearing a heavy sweater and a woolen skirt. A small space heater by her feet with glowing orange coils is making a valiant attempt to bring the tiny room up to room temperature.
 

"How do you like the weather?" She wants to know today.
 

"It's fine," I tell her brightly, "I come from the northern part of America, so winter doesn't scare me." In this, my second year in the Peace Corps, the number of times I explain this each week has gone down to 2 or 3. To Russians, the climate of all of America is like L.A. or Orlando.
 

"Really, do you get snow where you live?"
 

"Yes."
 

"But not as much as here."
 

"Sometimes." I think I have exaggerated the upstate New York winters a bit in the telling. When confronted with the Russian winter machismo, I can't help but defend the winters of my youth.
 

"How's your apartment?" She asks.
 

"Cold," I laugh, "How's yours?"
 

"The same, of course," she chuckles. Laughing is the usual and appropriate response to a difficult situation here. There are so many difficult situations, one woman explained to me, that if you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry. There's only one possible attitude that will keep you sane: "No heat? Funny! No money? Funny!"
 

"I don't know why you stay here," The clerk tells me.
 

I give her a cheerful smile, "I like it here." Even on the days when this is the furthest thing from how I feel, I know it's important that I keep saying it. And on the whole, it's true. What would be the point of allowing myself to complain to people who don't know the big picture, and allowing those complaints to sift through the rumor mill until the whole town thinks that I'm miserable and want to go home? If I really wanted to go home, I would.
 

Eventually I finish making my copies, and pay for them. I haven't made quite as many as I really need to because the copier is running out of ink again. When I approach our classroom there are already students waiting at the door, although class doesn't start for another 10 or 15 minutes. I alternate classes with the Russian teacher I work with. Today the first class is mine, because on Mondays she teaches school in the village of Visokogorsk 40 kilometers away, and barely makes it back on the bus by four. Irina Leonidovna is the director of the Linguistic Center and its only other teacher. It's really a pretty informal operation. Just the two of us teaching some classes. But she is meticulous about bookkeeping and taxpaying, unlike a lot of her competitors, and her prices make it clear that she's more interested in offering a service to the community than in filling her own pockets. She requested a volunteer mainly for the village school where she works, but because they were unwilling to sponsor one, my official place of work is the Linguistic Center, and she is my official sponsor. The library pays for my apartment and utilities, and Irina herself provided a lot of my furniture. The Peace Corps doesn't make a habit of giving volunteers to private organizations, but Irina made a good case.
 

She rents the room from the library only for the 8 hours a week that we have classes, so we don't leave anything there. There is talk of our getting our own room in the library where we could set up a resource center, but so far Irina hasn't been satisfied by the terms that the library offers. Something about sure we could have our own space with a locked door and bars on the windows... but could we share it just once a week with a wood carving class? "Right," said Irina, "So we write grants and get a Xerox machine or a computer, and then it gets ruined by wood shavings."
 

I unlock the door to the room and the students help me set up the chairs and tables the way we like them, in a sort of semi-circle conducive to discussion. The room is red-carpeted, with some modern art pieces on the walls that match the all the colors in the room so well they look like they were planned as part of the decor, but apparently they are an exhibit. Occasionally they are replaced by exhibits of local photographers or craftsmen. The temperature here is no higher than in the town's apartments, and the students take their hats off but keep their coats on. The room is small, no bigger than an average-sized living room, but after the first enthusiastic two or three weeks of the year, none of our classes have more than 8 students on any given day, sometimes as few as one or two show up. Attendance is a little better with the younger kids, where the parents come to the lessons with the kids. It makes planning lessons difficult, but there's not much we can do about it since they are private lessons and the kids can choose whether to go or not. Every couple of months Irina gets on the warpath about attendance and announces to every class that three absences, without calling to say you're sick, and you can forget about coming back. But she never follows through on it.
 

The first group is called "advanced," although their level barely matches their description. We don't have a test, we just offer a description of what each group is about, and kids can sit in on different groups and choose their own level, or come to more than one group in a day for no extra charge, because Irina likes hard workers. The students in the "advanced" group may or may not have a great knowledge of English, but they want to use it to converse. Once everyone is assembled and my watch shows 4 o'clock (Leyla told me it was time to start 2 minutes ago and Inna insists we have another 3 to wait, but what are you going to do?), I begin by greeting them and asking everyone how their weekend was. This exercise is only fun with this group, because they always have something interesting to say and they really try to express themselves.
 

Polina, a tall, lanky, slightly nerdy 9th grader, tells me her weekend was "not interesting. I clean my flat and do my home task." If they're not thinking about grammar, every conversation reverts to present simple tense. They also learn British English in school, so they use words like "flat" and "home task."
 

Grisha, a quiet but hard-working 10th grader "watched television and went to the forest with my friends."
 

Leyla, also a 10th grader with a high ponytail of cascading dark hair, who always looks like she ought to be in some teen fashion magazine, announces that, "My weekend was very, very bad." Her usual pattern is to smile winningly, tell us she had a terrible weekend, then recount some tale of woe, usually arguing with her boyfriend. This weekend it's more tragic than usual. "Today I lose my brother's... (aside in Russian: how do you say driver's license' in English?) ...driver's license."
 

"Oh no," I say, "that's awful. Do you think you can find it again?"
 

"No," she says, putting on a cute pout, "It really lost."
 

"Can he get another one?"
 

"Oh. It really difficult. It's need to take exam again. He will very, very angry with me."
 

"Oh dear, that's really too bad," I say somewhat helplessly. I turn to Inna, a cheerful blonde 10th grader from the nearby village of Rudny. Inna can speak only in separate words and sentence fragments, but is really dedicated to learning to speak because she plans to move to Canada after college where she has an aunt. I say, "I hope your weekend was better than Leyla's."
 

She giggles. "Yes... My... weekend... good."
 

"What did you do?" I try to draw her out.
 

She stammers a little and turns bright pink. "Wow, she's blushing," I say in Russian, "Maybe it would be better not to ask?"
 

The class laughs, Inna giggles. "Yeah..." she agrees. I'm not sure if I hit the nail on the head or if I just saved her from having to put together an agonizing few sentences about her weekend. In any case, sometimes it's fun to be a young teacher, especially in an informal setting like the Linguistic Center.
 

Inna was the last, and we can begin class. There are a few more kids signed up for this group, but today's turnout is average or better. Irina comes in about halfway through the class, red-cheeked from the brisk walk, cold air still clinging to her parka. She pulls off her gray knit hat, making no effort to smooth the clumps of hair that stick up at odd angles.
 

She's wearing low-heeled boots, black slacks and a polar fleece sweater. Irina is not a typical Russian woman. I'm pretty sure she doesn't own any dresses or skirts at all. She wears slacks or jeans all the time and no cosmetics at all. Russian women are known for putting incredible amounts of time and energy into their looks, even when they're struggling financially. Most of Irina's fellow teachers wear skirts and high-heels every day, use heavy make-up and more often than not dye their hair. Irina's thick brown hair is cut short in a minimum-maintenance style. She has that hairstyle in every picture I've ever seen of her, going as far back as first grade. Her all-business attitude makes it clear that she simply has better things to do with her time than spend hours in front of a mirror before going out. Most female Peace Corps Volunteers in Russia find themselves under fire for their utilitarian dress and conservative approach to make-up. Irina applauds this quality in me. She's never once suggested that I should consider wearing a skirt to school. On the contrary, she's reprimanded me the few times I have-- "What are you doing with bare legs! You'll catch your death!" (For the record, the two or three inches between the hem of my skirt and the top of my high boots was covered by no less than two pairs of thermal tights.)
 

The next class is Irina's. One or two more kids arrive, but mostly the kids from the advanced class stay for the second one. It's a class designed for preparing for graduation exams, and I'm always glad when it's her day to teach that class because I'm not as familiar with the exams as she is. I also find the preparation mind-numbingly dull. It involves a lot of memorization, not just of facts, but of whole pre-supplied essays, on topics like "Moscow, the political, cultural, and economic center of Russia," or "Education in Great Britain." I don't know why they pass students who have obviously memorized these texts that I'm sure all the examining teachers know by heart already, but hey, it's a different system of education.
 

While she teaches I sit off to the side and review my notes for the next couple of lessons, catch up on some preparation for tomorrow. My next group is our least advanced group of older students. We're using a really good American textbook called "Interchange" with them. Irina has been wanting it for years and my mother, a teacher herself, managed to find it for her. It's a conversational, practical approach to English that I really like. Unfortunately, these are our least motivated students, and working with them is not always inspiring, despite the material. At the end of this class Irina always tells the students, "You'd better leave quickly. I'm about to let in the torpedoes."
 

"The torpedoes" are our first class of little kids, this year's beginners. All of them are either in 5th grade, just beginning the public school English program, or still too young to take English in school. In Irina's opinion, this class lives up to her affectionate nickname disappointingly poorly. These kids are too passive. Clearly their parents are forcing them to take English because it will be useful. They are also a shy bunch, and there's nothing Irina finds less interesting than a shy kid. She prefers torpedoes. Her favorite students are the ones that jump out of their seats and yell out of turn, the ones other teachers call "discipline problems", but whose energy she has the ability to channel into enthusiasm.
 

The Beginners are hers today, and I watch as she tries yelling and cajoling, enticing with videos and pretty pictures, prodding with competitions, anything she can to get these kids to wake up and show some interest. One little boy in the front row, the youngest, at age 7, looks like he's about to swallow his own face from the lips outward when she descends on him, demanding that he stand up and answer questions from the class. His mother, sitting in the back, is watching with a similarly horrified expression, not sure whether to reprimand him for not answering, or jump on Irina for handling him so roughly. I know a lot of parents don't exactly adore Irina's particular style. Her feeling about this is that if they don't like it they can take their kids somewhere else. I have to say I often cringe myself watching her in front of a class. I go back and forth between admiration of her ability to get kids excited about learning, and discomfort with how she terrorizes the kids that she can't seem to excite. There's an element of this terrorizing in most Russian teachers, and many will go a lot farther than Irina in telling the whole class how a kid is lazy or useless or even worse, stupid. No matter how overwhelming she can be, she agrees with my American upbringing in that she has a moral problem with making such blanket statements that might discourage a kid forever.
 

The next two groups are the most fun of the day. After the Beginners Irina turns to me and says, "Now here come the real torpedoes." The kids that come in next are in their third year of English with Irina, and are mostly the same group that started with her two and a half years ago. This class and the one after it are the only groups that really feel like groups. The first two in the door, shoving each other as they vie for the seat closest to the teacher, are Artur and one of the Vanyas. Artur wins, mostly because he's not willing to abide by the rules of a fair fight and give up the seat when Vanya obviously got there first. Vanya takes the second seat, and the other Vanya sits next to him. Irina and the parents in the room like to call them Vanya White and Vanya Black, names derived from their appearances. One is fair-skinned and blue eyed with platinum blonde hair, the other tan and brown-eyed with dark hair. Next comes Rada with her wide, serious eyes. She started at the Linguistic Center in this group's second year, and caught up by attending the first and second year groups at the same time. She still sits in on both groups, although she is by now nowhere near behind in this one. Rada's grandmother was the director of the library when I started working here, although she's since retired. In my first week on the job, I remember an adorable six-year-old Rada looking up at me with wonder, after Irina had to translate something she said to me into English, and asking, "How can you be so big and not know how to talk?"
 

Blonde, freckled Krisina takes her place next to Rada. Sasha, a full two heads taller than the rest of the class, takes the furthest seat from the teacher, and I notice that her latest friend, whose name I can't seem to call up, didn't come with her today. Sasha joined the linguistic center this year, and like Rada goes to two groups at once. She's in 6th grade, so she could have chosen to be one of the youngest in our weakest group of older kids, but this is probably a better placement for a hard-working and enthusiastic student like her. Still, she must feel awkward, surrounded by so many second and third graders. She's the only one in the class who doesn't have a family member present to walk her home in the dark and to help her study later. Probably because of this awkwardness, she's dragged several different friends with her, always finding someone new when one leaves, but never convincing any of them to stay for long.
 

"Are you ready for the lesson?" I ask them, once they've stopped taking their hats off and rifling through their bags. I thoroughly enjoy the responding chorus of "Yes, I'm ready for the lesson!" said at such volume that if I were a cartoon character I'd be bowled over backwards with streaks of wind inked around me. ^[4] "Who wants to answer questions today?" I ask. "Okay, Artur." I choose him automatically as his hand shoots up first, realizing a second too late that I should really wait for someone else. Artur manages to get himself chosen for this exercise about 80% of the time. He's a good example of Irina's favorite type of student. He started taking English with her when he was only five. He's a genius, and he knows it, and it's exciting to watch his mind work, but I wouldn't want to have him in a class of 30, because he seems to think he's the only one here.
 

"Okay everyone, ask Artur questions." He stands in front of each kid in turn, and each asks him a question using any of the forms we've studied. In this group it's rarely an old standby like "How old are you?" They prefer being creative with simple forms like, "Do you like liver?" or "Have you got a monkey?"
 

The classes go so much faster now that I've got more of an idea of how to plan a lesson. I rarely have those excruciating last 5 minutes that are as long as the rest of the class combined as I find I've reached the end of what I have planned and cast about for something to keep us occupied. This was always the worst with the little kids, since the class was full of parents and I could tell the parents noticed that I was winging it, and on shaky wings at that. Today I keep an eye on the time and manage to leave time to assign homework by the end of the lesson. The little kids actually do the homework we assign at the Linguistic Center, despite our confusing system whereby I assign homework for my next lesson, although there's a lesson of Irina's in between, for which she assigned homework at her lesson.
 

The third years file out to be replaced by the group that is in their second year with us at the linguistic center. The beginnings and ends of lessons are always a scramble. There are no scheduled breaks between the 40 minute lessons, and we try to give every group their money's worth, so the transitions have to be as efficient as possible. Irina explains that if we schedule five minutes for transitions, that's almost another hour a week we'll be paying rent for. It hasn't been too crazy since we started alternating lessons. We played around with the schedule some until we arrived at that solution. It really gets to be a marathon, though, if one of us is sick and the other has to take all six classes in a row without a break. ^[5] Rada and Sasha stay in their seats, since they also attend the second year group.
 

By the time our lessons are over, it's eight o'clock. The library has long since closed, and they have to leave someone on duty every Monday and Wednesday night just to lock up after us and turn on the burglar alarm. After lessons at the Linguistic Center, I usually have dinner with Irina, although I'm not usually in the mood to socialize, since it's my most stressful time in the week. We have lessons Monday and Wednesday afternoons and Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Because of this clumping, I have a lot of free time, but when I'm busy I'm really buried. Even so, Irina's mother insists on having dinner ready for us when we get out of classes, and I think she would be offended if I didn't go. She always tells me, "It'll only take twenty minutes. Just eat and run. You have to eat, don't you?" But, like all visits in Russia, it never quite works out to just twenty minutes.
 

Despite her shorter legs I have to really walk fast to keep up with Irina on the way home. By this time the sky is as dark as midnight. As we pass the house of culture I'm glad for our fast pace, eager to get as far as possible from the line of dark-colored cars parked conspicuously in the center of the square, in front of the statue of Lenin. Foot-high letters that seem to be on individual cardboard cards are spread across the windshields of the cars. They form the word "ARROW" in English. By now I know, because Irina told me, that this is a meeting of the local "mafia". I don't know how closely the set of organizations Russians describe with that word parallel the Italian model, or to what extent they are organizations at all. Russians seem to use the term fairly loosely, to describe anyone who gets money illegally. But these guys at the Arrow meeting are clearly some sort of organization, and I can't help wondering as I pass if they know I'm a foreigner and if they think I might have something they could use. So far they haven't taken an interest in me, and I try to show as little interest in them as possible.
 

Irina registers no reaction at all to the mafia. It would be beneath her pride to seem afraid of them, even if she is. When she tells the stories about her few encounters with them the person I hear talking is the scrappy tomboy she never quite grew out of being. She was as blase as possible when she described how one day a dark car pulled alongside her and a man with a gun told her to get inside. Knowing this wasn't a person to mess with, she did, and they took her to a house on the outskirts of town where one of the local bigshots was gravely ill and ordered her to translate his prescription, which for some reason was in English. After she did, they offered to pay her, but she refused since she would usually do something like that for free, and ever since they've been inclined not to hassle her. She says some of the kids in the linguistic center are children of mafia, but she won't tell me who, and I'd just as soon not know.
 

Just past the square, we pass the park, which is completely dark and the lack of streetlights makes us pick our way a little more slowly along the icy sidewalk. "Wednesday is payday," Irina remarks, "So we'll have worse attendance than usual. Of course, as usual, I'll have to chase some people down at home. I just don't have time for that. And you know, the poor doctors and teachers who can barely scrape together the money always pay. It's the businessmen who can't be bothered." We pass a couple on the sidewalk, and they look at us strangely. Irina has a louder voice than most Russians, and she tends to speak her mind whatever the issue wherever she happens to be at the time. I don't have a particularly loud voice for an American, but Americans in general are a pretty loud people, and when Irina and I are walking together we tend to make quite a bit of noise. We chat about the students and the classes all the way back to her pink 5-story building and up the four flights of stairs to her door. As soon as she turns the key in the lock I can hear her mother bustling out of the kitchen to meet us.
 

Lyubov L'vovna is seventy years old, and she has the same loud voice and sharpness of manner as her daughter. When she greets us Lyubov is wearing a flannel button-down housedress in a floral pattern with another similar dress in a clashing pattern peeking out from underneath. She has five or so of these dresses, in various weights from winter to summer, and she wears them in various combinations, often with her one sweater over them, and rarely wears anything else except for very occasionally sweatpants when she's doing heavy work on her dacha. Despite her long silver braids and floral patterns she has the same toughness and no-frills straight-forwardness as Irina. She and her daughter are both small in stature but solidly built.
 

"Dinner isn't quite ready," Lyubov L'vovna is saying, "the potatoes need a few more minutes. Just go ahead and wash your hands and have a seat. They'll be quick quick quick. I know you're both tired and hungry."
 

A few minutes later I'm helping carry steaming pots and pans from the kitchen out into the... other room. Irina and her mother (and her father until his death six years ago) have shared this one room plus kitchen apartment for years. This kind of close quarters would be appalling to most Americans but, by necessity, is quite common here. It is somewhat embarrassing to me that it is about half the size of the apartment I have to myself here in Kavalerovo. Irina sits and waits while we bring dinner. She doesn't consider cooking or anything related to be her job, and for a long time tried to convince me to sit and be waited on in her house, but my conscience finally wouldn't let me. Tonight the various pots and pans contain sauteed chicken, fried potatoes, and white rice. There's also a bowl of home-canned cabbage (something like sauerkraut) and a store-bought fresh cucumber, something you don't see on most Russian tables this time of year. Irina's mother isn't a fancy cook (she could hardly be, with only a two-burner electric hotplate to cook on, and no oven), but they like to eat well, and relative to their means, they spend quite a bit on quality and variety of food. "Of course, it's not much," Lyubov L'vovna apologizes, "Really, a very poor dinner, but we make do the best we can, and what can you expect, in times like these?"
 

She always says this, and I always tell her, "It looks good to me. Nothing poor about this dinner." I think it's a kind of social expectation that she put down the food and I assume what I'm supposed to do is disagree. I had a slavic grandmother, and she always used to do the same thing.
 

Lyubov L'vovna pulls a stool up to the table, and sits and talks while we eat. It still makes me uncomfortable that she doesn't eat with us, but she says she doesn't like to eat so close to bedtime. "Yes," she says as she settles onto the stool, "What more can you expect in times like these? We get by somehow, somehow... but if I'd ever thought that I would be living this way when I was seventy years old... You know, Kavalerovo used to be a beautiful town."
 

"That's true," Irina chimes in, "Foreign guests used to call it Little Switzerland.'"
 

"Little Switzerland," Lyubov L'vovna nods sadly. "We had everything... everything we needed. The stores were full and we could buy anything in them."
 

"We could buy a kilogram of mandarin oranges," Irina puts in, "go home and eat them all and the next day buy another kilogram if we felt like it. Or a liter of juice, go home and drink it all and the next day we could go back and buy another liter." I thought about the boxes of juice lined up on the shelves in my kitchen at that very moment.
 

"But that was before Yeltsin and his thugs destroyed the country! Before they robbed us blind, before they sold this country in pieces!" Lyubov L'vovna's voice rises almost to a shout and she gestures with her fists to indicate the destruction. "We don't have a government now, we have a bunch of thugs. The Russian people need the communist party. When they were in power, we had what we needed. Now we barely get by. My pension is four hundred rubles a month. Do you know what that buys? It's barely enough to eat!"
 

"Enough!" Irina cuts her off, "Do you think she wants to hear our troubles? Don't listen to her. Russia is still a great country."
 

"I just think she should know. I think she should know the truth about life here," Lyubov L'vovna protests.
 

Irina snorts, "She knows what life is like here! She sees it herself. She knows that life is just fine here. Isn't it, Lisa?"
 

This is my cue and I nod dutifully. Not just dutifully-- I enjoy that I can live here and not complain too much.
 

"There's certainly nowhere I'd rather be," she goes on, "Life is interesting here! What would be the fun of living someplace where every time you turned on the tap you knew the water would come out, and every time you flicked the lightswitch you knew the light would go on? How boring it would be if everything was predictable and routine like that. I know I wouldn't want to live in a place like that!" ^[6]
 

After dinner, Irina and her mother insist on walking me home, even though I live in the next building over and it's only ten o'clock. Lyubov moves slowly, and sometimes leans on a stick, but during the growing season she still walks several kilometers every day to and from her dacha-- not to mention what she does while she's there. Irina's father was dying when they acquired the dacha, and Lyubov built all the fences and the special structures necessary for growing certain plants, all when she was past the age of sixty. The three of us put on our coats and Lyubov locks the apartment door behind us, shutting out the last rays of electric light.
 

"Did you bring your flashlight?" Irina's voice asks me out of the dark.
 

"Um... no."
 

"Again? Ha! Well, anybody got any matches?"
 

All the way down the stairs, Lyubov lights one match after another, shedding a feeble light just adequate to see our feet dimly. You'd think that after so much experience, I would anticipate this moment and put my flashlight in my bag on the way out the door in the morning, but the Russian sense of immediacy ("It's not dark now, so what do I need a flashlight for?") must have infected me. Or maybe I'm just in denial. Every day, I expect that there will be lights on the stairs, and maybe half the time or less there are, but I keep expecting. Every landing on every floor of this and every apartment building has a socket for a lightbulb, these lights are supposed to be turned on at night. I have never figured out who is supposed to supply the lightbulbs and who is supposed to turn them on. As far as I can tell, they are supplied and turned on by whoever thinks of it, and summarily removed by whoever has a lightbulb burn out in their apartment. Sometimes the more persistent paint the lightbulbs they supply red or some other color that makes them unattractive for use inside apartments.
 

As we crunch across the snow and ice between our apartments, I try to hang back and keep Lyubov's slower pace as she chooses her steps carefully. It's easy, when I don't think about it consciously, to fall into racing ahead with Irina, who I've finally learned will hang back if I do because what's the point of walking me home without me? It's amazing how much thought I've given to the puzzle of how to walk with the two of them, who never seem to walk with each other. More than once, we've made a comic trio-- Irina 20 feet ahead, Lyubov 20 feet behind, and me in the middle trying not to seem like I'm choosing one or the other, as I try to stay neutral in their frequent arguments.
 

They say goodbye to me at the door to my entryway, leaving me to walk the few feet alone for which I'd most like company. I'm not afraid in the dark streets, just alert, but the entryway to my apartment building gives me pause at night. I'd never admit it and ask for an escort right to my door, but as I take my leave of Irina and Lyubov I brace myself.
 

My apartment building, like most, has double doors. They're both wooden and without locks. Between them is a square meter or so of unlit space. From the street I can see through the windows into the entryway that tonight there are two lights on-- the second floor and the fifth. One below and one above my third floor landing. As I open the first door I can see a faint light shining through the cracks between the wooden slats of the second. The wind whistles through those cracks in the winter, but the light is not enough to see the handle of the second door, lost in the blackness of the dead space between the doors. In my own private ritual, I plunge forward, splinters of wood snagging on my mitten as I scrabble to find the handle and tear the second door open before the first slams behind me, closing me into the darkness.
 

Emerging from blackness into dimness, I almost run up the stairs. There's enough light in the entryway to see the keyholes of my double locks. As always I have to move the key to the bolt back and forth in the lock several times. I press my shoulder to the door and practically fall into the apartment, my hand already shooting up to grope for the lightswitch, when the key finally catches. The light flickers on and off again as I tap the stubborn switch into place. When I'm satisfied that the light will stay on, and the bolt has snicked back into place behind me, I let my backpack slip from my shoulder and thump to the floor. My adrenal glands start to settle down.
 

All my life, I've never liked to be alone in the dark. The same active imagination that I'm so glad to have most of the time turns on me at night, turning its efforts to the exaggeration and mystification of every dark corner and every flicker at the corner of my eye. I remember when I was fifteen, as I lay in my bed with the covers over my head, wondering how I would ever live alone when I could hardly venture into the basement of my own childhood home after sunset. Of course, as I grow up I do what I have to do, and the shadows obediently shrink back into the corners most of the time.
 

I shrug out of my coat, which by the end of the day seems to weigh about twenty pounds, and zip out of my tall boots, which I turn as far inside out as I can and place on the floor, insides pointed towards the space heater. I'm afraid to actually place them on the heater as other people put their shoes on the radiator on better-heated days, after I found lines across the rubber soles spaced at the same interval as the heater's edges. I'm fighting a losing battle here. Even if I borrow a friends' special boot dryer they never stay dry for more than five minutes after I go outside. I got them at an outdoor "Chinese Market" in Vladivostok (so called because many of the vendors are Chinese or of other Northeast Asian citizenship and most of the goods are made in China and brought illegally across the border into Russia) only about a month ago and they've already been repaired once.
 

I wish I could tell you that the next thing I do is go to bed, but to tell you that I had all my preparation for Tuesday done by Monday's Linguistic Center lessons would be dishonest. It has happened, but it is not typical. So I pull out my Happy English textbooks and my lesson-plan notebook. My lessons tomorrow will be at the secondary school in the village of Visokogorsk, a 40 kilometer bus-trip from Kavalerovo. My plans for tomorrow are basically done-- actually, Irina helps me a lot with the plans for the school. We have to communicate on who is teaching what since we are both using the same textbook with the same classes, and since she knows the curriculum so well, she often ends up just telling me how to run the lesson. What I do on my own is come up with listening texts, usually from my own experiences, that use the vocabulary and go along with the themes we are studying. I've left the grunt work of looking up the words I'll have to translate on the board tomorrow for this late hour.
 

This job used to take as much time as the rest of my planning combined, when my vocabulary was very limited and every word was new, painstakingly copied from the dictionary letter by carefully-formed letter. The next day in between classes I would just as painstakingly copy each word from my notebook to the board, and hope that Irina would have time before the kids came in to correct the mistakes that were inevitable as I copied long strings of, to me, senselessly strung together letters of a foreign alphabet. Amazingly, it was this process rather than any intentional studying, that taught me to write in Russian. By now, I can write the most often repeated words from memory, and many others I can guess correctly, although I still use the dictionary to check. So I'm not up nearly as late at this as I was, say, a year ago, and I rarely experience the two-o'clock exhaustion and despair as I finally allow my eyes to drift closed right where I sit, succumbing to the defeat of knowing that I will neither be prepared nor have slept enough.
 

Before I go to sleep, I pack absolutely everything I will need into my backpack, including a package of Ramen noodles for lunch. I lay the clothes I'm going to wear tomorrow out on the living room chair. This doesn't take a lot of thought, since they're the same clothes I just got out of as I changed into the terry-cloth sweatsuit that I sleep in. Only the long underwear will be clean tomorrow. One volunteer wrote up the "Top Ten Ways You Know You've Been In Russia Too Long" in our volunteer newsletter, and one of the ways was "You're embarrassed if you're seen wearing more than three outfits in one week." There is nothing here like the American expectation that in any given two-week period (increase or decrease period depending on age and job status), we'll only see a given shirt once, and certainly never on successive days. This has a lot to do with the fact that the average Russian has a lot less clothes than the average American, and a lot to do with the fact that doing laundry is a much more labor-intensive process. Most people in this area still do it by hand.
 

I'm feeling conscious enough tonight to even fill the electric teapot with water, and put a mug next to it with a teabag and spoon already in it. This reduces the amount of thought that will be required of me to zero, which is about what I'll be able to handle when my alarm goes off six hours from now.
 

Turning off the lights as I finally make my way to bed is another little ritual of mine. I have to sleep with a light switch within reach, so I've pulled a standing lamp over to the sofa bed where I sleep. On the end-table, also within reach, are my tiny travel alarm clock and my flashlight, just in case I wake up and the power's out. I switch off the lamp, wait a few minutes, then switch it on, look around, and switch it off again. I've done this for as long as I can remember, several times a night if I'm spooked. Tonight I'm not, so I do it rotely, not checking any particular corners or piles of clutter that in the dark might have seemed ominous.
 

The sofa-bed is in the corner of the large room, that is probably supposed to be a living room. I sleep here, because I found it impossible to sleep in the small room that seems intended to be a bedroom. I lie in such a position that I can see out the door to the room, through the foyer, to the main door to the apartment. Needing to be able to wake up and see immediately that this door is closed isn't related to my childhood monster-in-the-closet style fears. A lot of volunteers have had their apartments broken into. Many have metal doors or at least two wooden doors, as I had in my first apartment. Peace Corps safety codes don't require this except on the first floor of a building, but I still don't feel entirely comfortable knowing that all that stands between me and the outside world is a thin slab of wood and the few chunks of metal that hold it in its frame. Of course, seeing it when it happens won't help me any, but knowing at a glance that it isn't happening right now makes me rest easier. When I slept in the bedroom, I found myself imagining that any distant thump was my door being pried open, and occasionally actually getting up to check.
 

Clicking the lamp off for the second time, I barely have time to allow my mind to wander before sleep overtakes me.
 

lisa: Another question, now that you've finished: What kind of a first impression of my life in Russia does this leave you with? Those of you who have read this before know that I've ommitted some characters from Monday. I decided to save them for a later day, because I thought they made the first impression too negative. Do I still have this problem? I have great respect for Russian culture and people, but I'm not sure it comes through well enough here. samira: Lisa, a few thoughts. First, no, I do not think that you are too negative or disrespectful. At the same time, I am not sure that a love of or respect for Russian people or culture comes through either. BAsically, this seemed flat. Now, maybe it is that there is not much detail, but I think a lot of the problem has to do with the way in which you have structured the chapter. You have written your observations, in a very, "First I did this, then I did this," way. You share thoughts and observations, or give some of your reactions to things, but you fail to give us a reason to care, unless we are already interested, becasue we are friends of yours or potential volunteers or something along those lines. I have one or two ideas about how you might manage to make things more compelling, some of which are major and some of which would be more minor (but also possibly more effective). In this, you tell us a good bit about your superficial reactions. Push it farther, go deeper. Why are things (or why do you suspect) they are the way they are? When you talk about your fears of the dark apartment and your need to turn on the light, it is unclear whether you are always like that or whether you are only like that in Russia. If you are only like that in Russia, can you say more about why? Analyze more. I think that the main problem is that there is little or no development to this story. I understand why you decided to work with a week, to keep the project from being mamouth, but it means that we do not get to see relationships develop. We do not see the young, inexpert Peace Corps volunteer gain experience. There is no story arch, and that is more interesting. I want to know more abotu your someimes prickly relationship with your mentor. I want to hear more about those begining guitar lessons. Let me see things as they really develop. Maybe that means changing the structure. You might try thinking of particularly memorable events and writing vingettes about those events and then choosing a good way to link them together. That might mean discarding the week format, though it also would avoid detailing every day. Alternately, if you are dedicated to the week format, you could show more development in your awareness and relationships through flashbacks. I would also try to show more and tell less, if you will. In any case, I would avoid thinking of your days as representative of all your other days and make them engaging scenes on their own. Does this help? samira: One other thing-- there are some really nice lines of description. If it would be helpful, I can go back and pick out/point out lines that are particularly nice and that I would like to see kept. laura: Hmm, I disagree. I like the week format, and think that maybe this chapter seems flat to Samira because it's the first chapter, not a free-standing piece. It makes me want to read moremoremore, and maybe see greater analysis/overview after Sunday's chapter. Add comment