the Phlog

And we stuff ourselves into the little kitchen – there are only small kitchens in Russia – cram ourselves into the little ground-floor room at the end of the dark house, and Zaur is getting nervous with the importance of the moment, and he’s fumbling with the cutlery, throwing knives and forks on the plates, starting sentences but never finishing them because he runs out of words and he’s on the next thought anyway, protesting at my bottle of ice-cold vodka, taking out his cheap, grand-looking bottle of some sort of wine he calls cognis (but it isn’t cognac), emphasising its French origins (even though it’s plastered in Cyrilic), shoving the plate layered in cheese and salami at me, shoving the plate covered with slices of dark tomatoes and scallion and kinza and cucumbers, and fumbling with the broken wooden lid of the bread box and then opening a fresh packet and throwing a handful of slices at me, and pouring a massive helping of cognis which we drink as if it were vodka: straight down in one shot followed by a desperate grab at a cucumber to numb the shock. And we’re going on like two dyadushkas talking about the good old days when men were men, and leaders were strong, and his heroes were people like Brezhnev, and Stalin, and de Gaulle, and JFK, and Indira Gandhi, and then he’s on to Indian movie stars and how Hollywood is only about superficial special effects, but the Indians, back in the days when the Soviets were dubbing their movies, were actually smashing their knuckles against each other, and the movies brought the people together. And Zaur, in his little hole in the wall flat sitting in the dark with the little television high up on the tall cabinet and the Irish Setter at his feet, Zaur knows he doesn’t have much because the job never paid and he isn’t going anywhere except for a walk around Kashirskaya with Fred – “Fredka is my best friend!” he yells under the table, and Freddie looks like he’s dying but he’s wagging his tail at me like a puppy and my heart is bleeding and I say yes, Fredka is such a good dog. And Fredka is clambering out from under the table and onto me and onto the sofa and I’ve got more dog hair than linen on my pants and I’m half-patting half-holding him away from my salami and cheese and kinza because I need them between the shots of the cognis.

And Zaur married a Russian-Ukrainian woman in Moskva a long, long time ago, a “failed experiment” as he puts it, and she got cancer and was in the rak centre which you can see from every window in Kashirskaya, and the story trails off somewhere there and I thought she died but it seems he left her. Or perhaps she left him. He says he should have married an Indian.

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