Notes from the 19th floor

On Tuesday I made it to Kazan just barely. My beyond lovely host in Moscow woke me up, made me toast and helped to strap the 50 pounds of books I was certain I’d need to my back. I wobbled my way to the taxi dragging my overstuffed suitcase in a deeply sleep deprived and over-cognaced state. Only once I’d crashed into the back of the cab and was hurtling through the busy streets did I realize just how teetering on the brink of sick I might be. The smog seemed to have lifted a bit so there was far more traffic than the previous days. I looked at the clock and relaxed into the seat having timed the trip just right. That is, until the driver got a phone call. On his end I heard in Russian, “A girl, to the airport, no, no, shit.” He looked back at me snarling as he wheeled the car down the next side street, “Did you call this cab?” “My friend called this cab.” “Well, this cab was for Patrick Bowman. Are you Patrick Bowman” “No, but my friend called. Is this Prestige taxi?” “No” he glared and handed me a card for “Triumph taxi.” “We have to go back.” “But we’re half way to the airport already. I’ll miss my flight” “This is not your cab. I’m now 30 minutes late to get Patrick Bowman.” Perfect, I thought, I had no cell phone, no entry back to where I’d been staying and was now going to have to battle the traffic back to the center only to endure it all over again on a redundant trip to the airport. Stopped at a traffic light poised to retreat the driver looked at me in the rear view mirror. I did not have to make any effort to give him a pathetic stare back. “Decyat-pyat-tisyach rublei” he said. “What?” I said. He took out a pad and scrawled out “1500 rubles” “to the airport” he said. “Yes, yes, of course” I said, pleased that for once the Russian hyper-capitalism in which everything has a price was about to work in my favor.


The taxi dropped me at the airport where I wobbled through the bureaucratic endeavor of registering and checking my luggage for my Siberian Airlines flight to Kazan. I’d paid twice as much for this ticket on the tip that Siberian Air, or S7 as it’s marketed, had a far better crash record than any other domestic Russian airline due to the fact that they chiefly employ fighter pilots who survived the Afghan war. I got to the gate without incident but once there realized that the world was spinning. The cognac and conversation with the writer from a well-healed monthly I don’t read the night before had been a huge mistake, not only for the state in which it’d left me but more so for the embarrassing 6am intervention from my bleary-eyed hostess it’d required to put an end to his unwelcome advances. Thinking back on it as I fought off sleep at the S7 gate, afraid of nodding off so deeply that the plane would leave me behind, I shuddered with mortification. I vaguely remembered mouthing off to the writer about the past year’s elections in Albania and UN Resolution 1244 among other pedantic things thinking I was being supremely interesting while he must have in all actuality been staring at me like a cartoon coyote with a flank of meat in the bubble above his head not listening to a word of my half-baked political rantings. I’d proceeded to call W— on skype in my delirium though I couldn’t recall a word of our conversation and then sat in the bathroom on the cool tile in front of the toilet for an hour hoping I’d regurgitate at least part of the alcohol coursing so potently through my veins, all the time watched closely by my hostess’s two owls who’d been moved into the bathroom to accommodate Frederick the visiting cat. The apartment had been packed full of expat refugees from the smoke and heat of Moscow’s aberrant heat wave and the ensuing forest and peat bog fires that had left a cloud of ash to shroud the city and I was the only one who’d managed to abuse the vast generosity of our hostess by making a drunken nuisance of myself.


Following the thunderous applause for our pilot upon landing, I restrapped the dead weight of my backpack to my person and made my way to find Vanya Shupenko holding a Kazan State University sign for me. He was tall and lean with big olive eyes and wiping back streams of sweat from the back of his neck with his handkerchief amid the crowd of passengers and their waiting relations also sweating profusely and stinking up the small box of the low ceilinged airport. I shook his hand and he apologized for the inadequacy of the airport claiming that within a year Kazan would have an A class airport and international flights to match the stature of the city. We made our way through the dry hundred degree heat unheard of in temperate Kazan until this year. I sat in the front seat and attempted to reign in and buckle a six foot long slack seatbelt around me until Vanya shooed me into the back seat saying that he was replacing the seatbelt tomorrow. We rolled down all the windows and the hot air assailed my face as refreshing as a hair dryer and made such thwappingly loud noise along the highway that I learned no more about Vanya than that he did odd jobs for the university. We passed grey beehives of bloc housing repeating themselves and billboards filled with MacDonald’s advertising which for some unseemly reason looked unbelievably appealing. It was a long unscenic drive to the center. Vanya pointed out the metro that had been built for the millennium anniversary of the city of Kazan in 2005. It had six stops none of which according to the map he’d given me would help at all in my getting to the university in the morning. You wanted to live like a real Russian, Leslie, I reminded myself as the whining voice in my head started protesting how remote my own beehive bloc was going to be as we bypassed the center of town and continued north over the dry Kazanka river. “Do you know anything about my host family?” I asked. He took his eyes off the road to consult a sheet of paper and said “Her name is Aygul. Her father’s name is Ayratova.” This complied with but did not add to the information given to me by the Swedish company who’d arranged for my stay. “You should probably ask for another family,” Vanya deadpanned, “This one lives very far away.”

the neighborhood

Eventually Vanya’s car limped up to the stand-alone bloc that would be my home for the next ten weeks. Adequately grey and Soviet with crumbling stairs and a thick metal door covered in non-sensical graffiti, it certainly met my “live like the Russian everyman” standards.

my new home

Vanya rang up to Aygul and thus begun the full frontal Russian assault that is immersion by home stay. Chatter chatter chatter, nonsense nonsense nonsense, eat eat eat, eat more eat more eat more is pretty much how it goes on an unending loop from waking til sleeping. This is to say nothing against Aygul herself who is a lovely woman somewhere in her late-40s to mid-50s, thin and brown-haired with big Tatar cheeks and blue eyes framed with Asian lids. She bustled me into the house and had me deposit my bags on an enclosed balcony off of the living room then sat me down on a sofa and gave me homemade compote when I asked for water. I reached out to pet a very petite long-haired black cat who’d sidled up in front of me but she exclaimed “Don’t touch Blanche, she doesn’t love anyone but me” just as the cat let out a tortured howl in my direction.

Blanche, the cat who hates me

Aygul proceeded to show me the shelves of the TV cabinet in the living room where I would put my things and it only then occurred to me that I would be inhabiting the living room with its thick green covered sofas and decorative stuffed animals and would be sharing this small one-bedroom with only Aygul, that is, living like a normal Soviet, ahem, I mean Russian. I scanned the shelves for photos of a potentially dead husband among the stuffed animals but found none. Aygul bemoaned the heat and pointed a tiny cylinder of a fan that she called a “conditioner” as if it promised more than the hair dryer effect at me, which provided very little relief and certainly no “conditioning” in the western sense.

the "conditioner"

She then went about the business of host-mothering which revolves primarily around food and overfeeding. She cut a fresh salad of cucumber and onions from the garden of her dacha where she explained her 26 year old daughter Vera who works at the university would be living during my stay and threw in with them homemade pickles and store bought tomatoes. She then heated up a plate of rice and cutlet, a surprisingly delicious lump of grey meat somewhere between a hamburger and a meatball, not unlike the McDonald’s version thereof I’d coveted on the way in. She rattled on about different students she had hosted and after mentioning a German girl who had not wanted her to watch her eat she left me in the kitchen somewhat awkwardly alone to enjoy my meal. Ten minutes later she returned to begin the process of making tea and laying the table with candies, cookies and chak-chak, a kind of sickly sweet honey covered rice cookie I’d had in both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that looks not unlike the post-Soviet Turkic equivalent of a rice crispie treat. I of course disappointed her with my inability to consume everything on the table but scored points by accepting some of her homemade currant jam into my tea.


I actually felt a bit better after the meal and the tea but given the intensity of the heat and the hangover I begged for the possibility of putting a little sleep on the agenda. She shuffled me back to the living room where I assumed I would be staying but then we just sat awkwardly again on the couch. Finally she said “you should sleep in the comfortable bed with the conditioner” and led me to the small bedroom also decorated with stuffed animals including a massive puppy dog with a furrowed plush brow sitting atop the (faux) gold lame bedspread. I couldn’t imagine how a man had ever lived in this apartment and simultaneously understood why one might leave it. I was still unclear whether this would be my permanent bedroom and found it particularly inconvenient that all of my belongings were now on a balcony off of the other side of the house rather than within arms reach on the balcony off of the bedroom.

"my" bedroom replete with stuffed dog

Aygul encouraged me for the second time to take my bra off because there was no man around in front of whom to be embarrassed as if this were the ultimate state of affairs. I complied only after she left the room, around 5:30pm and fell into a very deep almost fever-ridden sleep that lasted until the sun came in through the window the next morning.