8 Months on the Border of Siberia

I tumbled into Russia in the manner of Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole: full of curiosity, but ill-prepared for the bizarre world which awaited me. I had come on exchange to study Russian, and chose Perm, an industrial city near the Ural mountains, on the assurance that it represented “the real Russia”. Now, looking out the taxi window at the dilapidated buildings, with their chipped plaster and rusted railings, I began to wish I had picked a more inviting city. As the taxi came to a stop in a dark alley, before a graffiti-covered iron door, I realized with growing apprehension that this must be the apartment block where Tatiana Petrovna lived, a woman I had neither seen nor spoken to, but who would be my host for the next eight months. I knocked, and suddenly, Tatiana Petrovna herself stood before me, broad and intimidating in spite of her faded floral shift. "What a nice-looking girl", she said, peering at me through small eyes, and I tried to feel reassured.

I had no conception then of how fond I would become of this bulky, bear of a woman, with her deep, rolling voice, who spoke in gruff commands and chuckled with wry amusement at my lack of Russian common-sense: “Why are you all wet? Doesn’t it rain where you come from? Normal girls carry umbrellas.” “No, we don’t have a fire escape. Just climb down the balcony. Why, are you expecting a fire?” “Why don’t you wash your boots? I wash my boots as soon as I come in. Don’t you know how?” Every two weeks, she would return from work with a new manicure, her nails painted garish shades of neon, or lemon yellow with chunks of glitter, or polish which changed color with the temperature from purple to hot pink. She worked as a teacher, getting up at six in the morning and often not returning until eight at night. Her back ached constantly, but on her off days, I would find her washing the floor on her hands and knees. I tried to do my part with the chores, but I often came home to find she had dusted my room and changed the sheets on my bed.

One night, after several bottles of wine, she called upon me to provide a real-time translation of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. She pounded her fist on the table with each line, growing steadily more excited as she sang along to words she had learned by heart without understanding their meaning, words she had emulated her whole life. “This is a great song,” she told me, and I grinned as I reached the chorus: “I will not lay down and die; I will live.”