The Ahasfer Game: The First Novel in the Michael Fridman Trilogy

By Grigori Gerenstein

If the boy is the father of the man and his culture is the mother, the boy should be married to his culture. Otherwise, the man they produce will be an illegitimate bastard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491800126

Grigori Gerenstein

Grigori Gerenstein was born in Russia, from where he immigrated to Israel in 1973 and then on to England in 1976. In 2004, he returned to Russia, where he lives now, working as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswire and a number of other international news services. In 1975, Grigori’s collection of short stories The Fall and Other Stories was published by Harper & Row in New York. He has published a number of books, including a collection of Russian stories, The Terrible News, A History of the British Bank of the Middle East, and The Ahasfer Game, the first novel in his Michael Fridman trilogy (by a POD publisher). In 2003, he won the Royal Geographical Society’s Journey of a Lifetime award. Grigori made a BBC documentary and spoke to the Royal Geographic Society on his journey to the Russian Arctic Circle town of Norilsk, where most of the world’s precious metals are mined. Grigori served in two armies, the Soviet army and the Israeli army, and has been engaged in a variety of professions, including scientific research, street cleaning, lexicography, jazz playing on a trumpet, competitive cycling, metal and oil trading, journalism, as well as acting in the theater. He went through a few failed marriages before hope triumphed over experience and he found the woman who could make him happy, which was the reason why he returned to Russia, the place he had made such an effort to get away from. Grigori has completed his Michael Fridman trilogy (Adventures of the Wandering Jew), including The Ahasfer Game, Armageddon According to Mark, and Lucrezia Borgia European Marriage Center, and is halfway into his fourth novel, Machiavelli’s Boss Boris. His main interest is people as products of their history and culture. In our everyday life, whether we are conscious of it or not, our outlook on life, our very grip on reality, and our decisions are determined by everything that has happened in the history of our civilization, and we ignore its lessons at our peril. As one of Grigori’s characters puts it, “If the boy is the father of the man and his culture is the mother, the boy should be married to his culture. Otherwise, the man they produce will be an illegitimate bastard.”

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2013 by Grigori Gerenstein. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/19/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0011-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0012-6 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

PART 2

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

PART 3

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

PART 4

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

PART 5

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

CHAPTER 78

EPILOGUE

To Rosa, Isabel and Yulenka

with all my love

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

M Y PET FLY, GEORGE, IS a lousy chess player. He keeps circling over the black pawn, insisting I take it with my knight, totally oblivious of the fact that the knight is the only piece protecting my queen from being taken by the black bishop. It’s a pretty basic concatenation of causes and effects; but George, being a fly, finds it above him. I take the Mickey out of him and he flies off in a huff and throws himself at the window pane a few times, just to make me feel bad. A sensitive little bugger, George. Artistic temperament, you see. That’s why he likes Berlioz so much. George and Berlioz are absolute soul mates. When I play Simphonie Fantastique, you will not find a happier fly this side of the Urals.

Another thing George is partial to is a good bicycle race. He and I watched the Tour de France and loved every minute of it, especially the mountain stages. We cheered Miguel Indurain up the mountains. Well, I did. George can’t cheer. But every time I cheered, George took off from my knee and did a couple of his aerobatic tricks in the air.

George also absolutely adores it when I play my trumpet. First he was wary of it; but when he realised it represented no personal danger to him he was all for it. I put on Louis Armstrong’s Blueberry Hill and help Louis along with little passages between his phrases. Then we play solo together, with Louis going much higher than I can ever dream of while I mess about in the lower octaves. George circles over my fingers, trying to guess which valve I’ll press next. But the greatest fun for him is to fly inside the trumpet and dart out in mock panic, pretending he’s escaping from the jaws of a crocodile or something.

George is easily the best pet I’ve ever had. He is friendly but he doesn’t pester me when I work, only appearing when I close my computer. He doesn’t make a mess and doesn’t stink the way dogs do. What he eats is a mystery to me, not to mention his sleeping arrangements, but it’s something I don’t have to bother about; a great quality in a pet. George will beat a dog and a cat hands down.

The only thing I am not sure of is whether I should take George out for walks or perhaps flights. I open the balcony door and offer him the panorama of Moscow apartment blocks outside, with a dark smudge of forest far beyond them in the distance. But George is no fool. He is keenly aware of his limitations. He knows perfectly well that he is no homing pigeon. Fly out once, get confused, lose your sense of direction and where are you? You join the army of the homeless. He flies a couple of laps round the room, lands on the wall and gives me a look of wisdom, which I have to confess I do not posses. I wish I had George’s brains.

George does make me think. He is a living creature and, as I have watched his habits closely for some time, I can confidently state that he is not haunted by his past and he has no fear of what the future may bring. I know you’ll object to this but the fact remains that I like being around George.

The only time I saw George show any sign of stress was when another fly, almost double his size, flew in one day. I decided he was an uncle of George’s from a provincial town, Desmoines or Berdichev, on, what I hoped, was a short visit. They messed about for a bit and then they had a fight. God knows what past family troubles they were on about. There was a bit of throwing themselves at the window pane. George’s uncle was a very rough diamond indeed. After having said his bit, however, he left, thank God.

How and why George came into my life isn’t clear. He just was there one day, a fly on the wall, watching me, sizing me up and pretending he didn’t care. I had the normal impulse to squash him but something stopped me and I knew what it was. He radiated peace; he really did not seem to care.

I also knew why his name was George. There had been an original George, a prototype. A human George.

CHAPTER 2

T HE PROTOTYPE GEORGE WAS A walrus of a Californian. He was large, had a white moustache, and moved and spoke with deliberation. He used amazing words, like insecurity, identity, affection, emphatic imagination, so you felt you were in a high-quality novel where life was not treated as a joke. He listened in such a way that you felt you were saying something significant. And then he would offer an interpretation of your feelings. That was the most striking thing about him: he spoke about feelings.

We were in London then, in the late-1980s. People didn’t speak about their feelings in London in the late-eighties, not then anyway. It was considered an embarrassment. And there was George, looking at you with peaceful eyes, pulling at his moustache and saying you must be quite anxious about this or that. He knew exactly what it felt like. Your first reaction was to issue a flat denial; but then you somehow felt that solving whatever problems you had was within reach. You only had to admit you had feelings. Jesus, what a relief it was! It was like finding a public toilet in Piccadilly Circus.

London is a place where destinies and fortunes are made. I arrived there in the dry June of 1989, having spent three years in Israel after a painful emigration from the Soviet Union. My very first encounter on British soil was with a passport control officer, and he made me think hard about the purpose and meaning of my existence; not quite the grilling one is to get at the Pearly Gates, but pretty challenging, still. Indeed, how do you explain to this Bangladeshi-born British official the purpose of your visit? I want to touch my cultural and spiritual roots? Not good enough. I want to steep myself in the values that make my presence on this earth tolerable? Whatever, but are you able to finance your stay in the UK? I don’t know. I haven’t tried yet. Are you? Just give me a chance to find out. I’ll be very happy to come back to your booth in a few years’ time and give you a detailed progress report. Maybe then you and I can together figure out the purpose of my visit.

It was an added humiliation that I could hardly understand a single word he was saying. Now I realise, of course, that his English was nearly as inadequate as mine at the time. But at least I was trying to read Shakespeare.

At first sight, London struck me as a place I would like to stay in; even more, a place I would’ve liked to be born in. You get to be born in London, you get a goodish start in life, I thought.

But everyone has to count his own blessings. Now, take for instance, the moment I came out of the airport building and lit my first cigarette on British soil. Wow! You know, there are moments when you’re happy and you don’t know it. Only later you realise—that’s it, that’s what I live for: the purpose of my visit, so to speak. This moment was that moment.

Then I rode in a taxi to the West End of London and saw the sun-scorched parks which by repute should’ve been green and fresh. There were people serenely sunbathing on the yellow grass and rubbish was in the rubbish bins.

The taxi driver was saying something incomprehensible about the bloody government and Liverpool beating Everton and I felt free, detached, uninvolved.

CHAPTER 3

A ND THEN I STEPPED RIGHT into No. 12, Sleidburn Street at World’s End. World’s End is actually the end of Chelsea; but I guessed to the denizens it really felt like the end of the world. It was a street of shabby terrace houses off King’s Road.

There was no floor inside the front door, causing me to hurt my shin rather painfully. Inside there was a strong smell of creosote and a dishevelled young woman, who I presumed to be Nina, with a screaming baby in her arms. Nina, my landlady to be, handed me the baby and screamed into the depths of the house, Bezukhov, go and wash your hands this very instant! She did look a bit mad.

Nina was about a stone heavier than was good for her; but the extra twelve kilos had been distributed about her frame with such easy elegance that it was quite an effort of will to take one’s eyes off her curves.

I know, I know, she said when I opened my mouth to explain who I was. Can you change Natasha in there?

‘In there’ was a kitchen piled up with unwashed dishes and tools of the building trade.

I cleared a space on the table with my elbow. I had never changed a baby before, so now was the time to try. As I unpeeled the soaked cloth the baby stopped crying and started gurgling pleasantly. The deposit between her legs was pretty impressive. As soon as there was silence Nina rushed in, alarmed. She examined the baby with suspicion and was mollified.

Found yourself a handsome boyfriend, have you, Natasha? she said giving me a look. Welcome to England. You’ll do well here. The tap’s over there.

The baby loved the warm tap water. She and I got busy adjusting her fresh nappy.

Nina came in again, dragging a boy of about seven. Come and meet Uncle Michael, Bezukhov. Say hello.

The boy said hello from behind her back. He was dressed in an amazingly clean suit.

Why not Pierre? I asked.

She rolled up her eyes, having to explain for the thousandth time. His so called father is Pierre.

Right, I said meaningfully. I see the picture.

I hope you don’t find it too awful in here, she said. I bought the house cheap; but, as you can see, it needs fixing. A friend of mine from Bath is doing it. He’s having a treatment right now, so it’s all hanging fire.

I hope there’s nothing serious with him, I said.

Well, he’s an alcoholic.

Oh, I see the picture, I said again.

He’s an artist too, she added, I used to be his model.

I’d love to see the picture.

You naughty boy, she giggled. You can look at the picture all you like. It’s on the landing. Come, I’ll show you your room. Alex will be here at about six. He’s still busy with his violins.

Violins? I didn’t understand.

Yes, he’s a violin maker. Didn’t you know?

No, I thought he was a translator.

Well, he was, but I always knew he had marvellous hands, ever since he made love to me the first time. I always told him he must do something with his hands. Then an old violin maker moved into the office next to the one Alex was renting and Alex began to help him. It transpired that he had a talent for making violins. The old man taught Alex all he knew, and when he died Alex took over the business. He’s just beginning to make an impact.

On the landing there was indeed a nude painting of Nina; but it was in such a lurid green colour that I said I’d much rather stay with the original. It was easy banter and I liked Nina. She was a fighter.

My room was painted dark red. There was a mattress on the floor, a paint-splashed chair next to it and a radio with a tape recorder; that was all.

I love it, I said, It’s the beginning of a new life.

When can you make the first payment? she asked simply.

Right now. I pulled out a 20-pound note. Is it alright if I stay six months?

You can stay forever, she said.

The two upper stories of the house had been decorated, but in a strange way. There were patches of different colours on the walls—red, green, orange.

We have painting parties, Nina explained. You get a section of wall and a brush—do what you fancy. Isn’t it fun? Bezukhov, don’t go down the stairs. There’s that hole in the floor there.

The bathroom was black and dark lilac; but the cool water in the tub was welcoming. It was a bit odd, though, that, despite it being the cradle of the industrial revolution, the news hadn’t yet reached England that a mixer for hot and cold water had been invented.

Having washed myself, I unpacked, which basically meant I took out my trumpet.

CHAPTER 4

I HAD LEARNED TO PLAY the trumpet as a young man in Moscow and ever since it had been a solace. I always had it with me wherever life threw me, and I had a few tapes to play to, depending on the mood of the moment: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, or Miles Davies. My first encounter with the activity was somewhat peculiar, like so many things in my life.

One day, as I was walking down a street in central Moscow, I was accosted by an interesting-looking man who desired a match to light his cigarette. What impressed me most was the fact that, apart from carrying an elongated box which presumably contained a saxophone, the man was wearing a leather tie. A man in a leather tie was as unimaginable in a Moscow street at the time as an alien because the command economy simply did not manufacture leather ties.

We got chatting and he said his name was Boris and he was a jazz musician, another unimaginable circumstance, as playing jazz was illegal, a disgusting capitalist perversion. Having sized me up with a few deft questions, Boris enquired whether I had any presentable clothes. As it happened, I did have a new green suit, especially purchased for me by my father for the recent wedding of my cousin, Rita.

Excellent, Boris said. I’ve got a little job for you. You do nothing and all the girls are yours.

What seventeen year old could say no to such a proposition? So, at five p.m. that day, I met Boris in a side street where a small crowd of people with musical instruments milled about in expectation of something. Boris dove into the crowd and reappeared with a guy laden with drums of various sizes in tow, another guy hefting a double bass, and one of the thinnest people I ever saw, who was carrying nothing at all.

That’s the band for tonight, Boris said, introducing me to the guys, who regarded me with tolerant indifference. Boris handed me a trumpet case saying, This is your instrument for tonight. I’ve removed the mouthpiece so you don’t blow it by some mischance. You just stand there, swaying from side to side. Make it look real and you’ll be alright.

Boris, it doesn’t make sense to me, I complained.

It will make sense when I pay you three roubles, he said. Just stay at the back and pretend you’re playing.

But people will see I am not playing, I cried.

Don’t worry, he said. They’ll be so drunk they won’t be able to tell a jazz band from a symphony orchestra.

Then, some shifty looking individuals appeared in the street and Boris went into a whispered conference with one of them. He came back saying we got a job at a dancing club at a place the name of which was new to me.

It’s only sixty miles from here, Boris said.

Thus I entered the exciting, murky world of illegal dancing and jazz playing in the very heart of the Communist paradise.

The six of us trooped into the underground, travelled to a railway station and got on a train.

The dancing club was a largish room filled with employees of the near-by meat packing plant to such an extent that they couldn’t really dance in the usual sense of the word. A mass of bodies, pressed together, swayed in semi-darkness in sweaty transports of sexual frustration. As the last molecules of oxygen were burnt, the room filled with a mixture of meat-packing aromas and alcohol-laden breath.

The thinnest guy I had ever seen turned out to be a piano player of extraordinary talent, and Boris surprised me pleasantly with his beautiful sound. We played only slow blues as anything faster would have caused a stampede with many casualties. Well, they played and I pretended to play, still not knowing why I was doing it. Boris was blowing his heart out with his eyes closed and the artery in his neck bulging outwards, ready to burst.

A policeman came up on the stage and was given a fiver by Boris to turn a blind eye to our criminal improvisatory activities.

The music went on and on, and it was like a small island of heaven with hell all around it. And if I thought it was hell, I hadn’t seen anything yet because the real hell was yet to come.

As the crowd became progressively more intoxicated, it began to show hostile tendencies towards the well-groomed representatives of the musical intelligentsia on the stage. Shouts of ‘Bloodsuckers’ and ‘Bloody Jews’ could be heard from the crowd, and, eventually, the men unglued themselves from the women and attempted a disorganised charge on the band. The most able of them seemed to pursue a particular purpose in trying to kick in the double bass.

I was truly amazed by what happened next. It turned out that the drum set was especially designed and constructed to meet this very kind of occasion. The musicians took it apart in seconds and made a neat formation around the double bass, beating the advancing savages over the heads with the metal sticks.

In other words, great fun was being had by all. The shifty-looking guy who had brought us to the place squeezed through the crowd brandishing a wad of roubles and gave Boris the honorarium for our performance, counting the number of musicians on his fingers. That explained the innocent little scam I was involved in.

Then there was a running battle out in the street and all the way to the railway station, with the most dedicated of the assaulters even getting on the train with us. But by that time they had run out of steam. Someone produced a bottle of vodka, which was shared in perfect harmony by all parties involved. The general consensus among both the dancers and the musicians was that the evening had been a resounding success.

I personally felt truly inspired by the music and the danger and the girls, the mad intoxicating energy of it all. So when Boris asked me whether I was willing to repeat the experience I said, Just try to keep me away from it.

You keep the trumpet then, he said.

I got home at about three in the morning, happy, smelling of vodka and dripping blood from an insignificant cut on my forehead. My mother was waiting for me with the lights turned off for dramatic effect, meeting me with the usual if-only-you-know-how-you-make-me-suffer refrain. When she saw the blood and smelled the vodka she went berserk, snatching the trumpet out of its case, throwing it on the floor and dancing on it till it became nearly flat.

Many years later, when I had children of my own, I began to understand what she was trying to tell me.

Don’t worry, Boris said the next day when I showed him the mangled trumpet. There’s a guy in Moscow who can fix that.

He told me a story of this teenage blacksmith who arrived in Moscow from a village in the Caucasus a few years earlier. When asked by some careless musician whether he could straighten out a dent in his saxophone he said, Sure, no problem.

In a few days he presented the horrified musician with a saxophone that was no longer a saxophone but a straight pipe with all the valves intact, which could still produce a reasonable sound. Since then the guy became a famous master, serving the entire Moscow brass-playing community. And he did indeed do a beautiful job on my trumpet, and my career as a jazz musician began.

For a while I was happy with pretending to play. Mostly it was the trumpet, but occasionally a saxophone with the reed removed, a trombone or even a piano. But when the novelty began to wear off I demanded that Boris show me the fingering on the trumpet, which he gladly did. A few months and a few tormented neighbours later, I played my first dances, and ever since the trumpet had been the one thing in my life that never failed to give me comfort.

CHAPTER 5

A T PRECISELY SIX O’CLOCK, THE house was shaken to its foundations by a male scream of pain. I went tumbling down the stairs to see what was going on and saw a plump little man thrashing about in the hole in the floor just inside the front door.

Fuck, shit, vomit, wonk, he was shouting. Nina, come and help me out. I nearly smashed the champagne bottle. When is this shit going to end?

Nina shouted from upstairs that she was feeding Natasha.

The gentleman thrashing about in the little grave was none other than Alex Bergman, the Alex Bergman the KGB would’ve given their wisdom tooth to lay hands on and the CIA would’ve given their month’s supply of Coca Cola to get rid of.

I didn’t know Alex Bergman personally. A mutual acquaintance in Israel had made enquiries on my behalf as to where I could stay in London cheap and Alex said his girlfriend could accommodate me in her new house as she needed the dosh. All sorts of stories about Alex circulated in the emigrant community, but briefly this is what it boiled down to:

As a senior languages student at the Moscow State University, Bergman started producing a hand-written magazine satirising the Communist regime. The KGB promptly got on his tail, and, just as he was about to be arrested, he managed somehow to get enlisted as an interpreter with a delegation of Soviet machine-building officials to East Berlin. Once there, Bergman got on a tram and went across the border to West Berlin, where he surrendered himself to a puzzled German policeman, asking the poor man for political asylum and telling him he had arrived from the Soviet Union by tram. Then he got into the clutches of the CIA who kept him in a small room in Berlin for a year, egging him on to confess that he was a Soviet spy. He didn’t because he wasn’t. So they let him go in the end. They suggested a tour of lectures in the United States to describe the horrors of life in the Soviet Union, but he declined. He settled in London and began publishing articles of left-of-centre nature in various publications, which confused his CIA minders no end.

The dickheads just can’t figure out whether I’m red or not, he told me later. They don’t understand how I can escape from the Soviet Union and embrace Socialism at the same time. They’re just too stupid to see the difference between the two, so they still suspect I’m a Soviet spy.

The CIA gets easily enraged at things they cannot understand, and the outcome of it all was that they were preventing Alex from getting any official job. So he did technical translations, mostly the manuals for western tractors and things supplied to the Russians. He could manage a dozen languages fluently. The work was soul-destroying but paid rather well. And apparently now he’d gone and started making violins.

I extricated Alex from the hole and we shook hands.

Let’s drink this to welcome you to London. A man who hasn’t lived in London hasn’t lived at all, he said popping open the champagne.

We drank out of tea cups and Bezukhov and Natasha were allowed to take tiny sips. Nina told Alex how I had changed Natasha’s nappy, which did not impress him at all. He was not curious about the mechanics of child raising.

We’re also celebrating my first success, Alex told us. The principal of the Royal Philharmonic has bought my violin, and now I have four definite orders and six possible ones.

They say Alex’s violins sound like Stradivarius, Nina boasted lovingly.

I’m taking Michael to Dumpling Inn, Alex said. I must show Michael London.

Nina started protesting but the taxi, which Alex had ordered in advance, hooted outside.

Soho, Alex said to the driver and we were off.

King’s Road was where Sloanies shopped for clothes in posh little shops, Alex informed me. Sloanies were rich girls living in Chelsea and South Kensington. They were called Sloanies because of Sloan Square at the head of King’s Road, which was the nerve centre of their shopping operations. The mysterious creatures, well shaped and well groomed, promenaded down the street in small groups, and I wondered what kind of life could produce such perfection.

Further down, King’s Road was blocked by crowds of ‘unter mensch’ concentrating around pubs, some of them screaming and fighting.

Supporters of Chelsea FC, Alex said with disdain. A second-rate football club. They must’ve lost yet again.

Incredible, I said, Sloanies, football supporters, all in the same street and at the same time.

That’s England for you, Alex enlightened me. The upper classes here feel embarrassed, probably about something they did in the distant past. So they mix with the lower classes in public. But it’s all only for show. The moats around their castles are as deep as ever.

In the restaurant, the Chinese waiters met Alex like a long-lost brother. Another friend from Russia? they cried.

They made it sound like ‘Lhasa,’ and Alex assured them that I was a personal friend of the Dalai-Lama.

There were a lot of Chinese people inside and outside, where the street was decorated with red arches and dragons studded with multi-coloured light bulbs. The incredible smell of food made me drool.

We’ll have half of Peking Duck, fried dumplings and chicken with cashew nuts, and two beers, Alex said to his best friend, the waiter.

‘‘So, what are your plans in London?" Alex asked, wiping the sweat off his face with a napkin.

To tell you the honest truth, Alex, I am not sure, I said. "I spent a lot of emotional energy preparing for this trip and it all seemed quite clear—I was going just to have a look, to see what London was like. Was I going to return to Israel? Maybe. I simply never thought of it. Israel always felt like a stopgap. I just can’t get excited about something that happened two thousand years ago. Anyway, not to such an extent as to stay there forever with Ethiopians in one happy family. Honestly, I don’t have much in common with them. Now I’ve only been here for a few hours, but some strings in my heart have been touched. You see, it all seems so solid, settled here. The houses look nice and the trees probably will, too, when the heat wave’s over. It feels peaceful. I keep thinking I would’ve liked to have been born here. I’ve seen children returning from school, people coming back from work, old people chatting outside Marks and Spencer’s.

My life’s been such a mess; same as yours, no doubt. You know how I spent my last few years in Russia. I gave up university and the prospects of a good job and went to work as a janitor. I wanted to write poetry and fiction, but I wanted to do it my way. So there was no place for me in the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia. So where am I now? I’m thirty two with no marketable skill and no place that feels like home. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t have missed it all for the world. After all, I have a book of short stories published by a major US publisher. But then I come here and see people who are so at home, so settled, just because they were born here and stayed in this one place all their lives. It is very unsettling, to say the least. People here appear to be at peace—a totally unfamiliar experience to me."

All true, but the impression is misleading, a delusion. You’ll need work. I can always get you translating work, Alex, ever the practical