The next day I woke up feeling somewhat better, and Liz woke up feeling horrible. I didn’t know the extent of her illness until she wrote on a piece of paper how she was feeling, how she couldn’t talk and he throat hurt and her sinuses were clogged. I tried to make her comfortable, but I figured the best thing to do was let her rest. I was definitely not a hundred percent either, and very tired, so I just napped around mostly. Sometimes I watched Sasha a little as he slept. He was very handsome, and there was not much else to do.Later Sasha asked me to come down and talk. Because I was kind of sick and insomniac and hungover, trying to speak and understand Russian was like a prolonged mental root canal. But we managed to have a pretty good talk. I asked what his job was, and he just said the Russian word for ‘war.’ He was in the army, too, and not too happy about it. He said he was from Smolensk and had a wife and small son. He said there was a lot more to buy in the new economy, but less money to buy it with. He picked up my full-color guide to Moscow that my mother had bought me and noticed that it had cost $30. Volodya said pointedly, “Thirty dollars for that book? Thirty dollars--that is my pension. That is what I get each month to live on.” He laughed, not bitterly, but ironically.
Sasha said all the changes and words and ideas the government throws around are just theoretical, and most ordinary people don’t feel it much. He said the newspapers are all propaganda and advertisements anyway, so nobody really knows what is going on. And it’s true, independent media barely exists in Russia. All the major TV and radio stations and papers are owned by political parties or corporations with direct political interests, much like in America.
I’m kind of lost as to what happened later that night and the following morning, except that Sasha got out at some town that night. I thought of getting out and seeing him off, but I figured he wouldn’t really care if I did, plus he probably had family waiting for him, and it was really cold out there and I wasn’t dressed. I said good-bye to him in the hall, and he seemed to expect me to go out with him. When I didn’t, he looked almost wounded, said a short good-bye, and turned and left.
I felt bad for hours after that. Hadn’t I learned the custom by now? If you make a friend, you see him off at the station. I was the only friend he had made since Liz was sick and Volodya was passing out. And what if he didn’t have someone out there waiting for him? I felt bad for a long time.
Day 10--Illness and a Tall Dark Ally