Page 27 - WTP Vol.X#1

was something of a fixer for the academic depart- ment where he used to study and who was employ- ing me, month-to-month, to teach English and what- ever else I could come up with as long as the lessons were delivered in English.
I figured he’d come back eventually. I sat beside the basket of eggs for a while, and then I straightened my clothes and walked to the little tented pavilion around the corner from my apartment and got a cof- fee, even if it was really a packet of instant Nescafe and some scalded milk.
I asked the other teachers if they’d seen Slava after I taught my classes, figuring someone at the depart- ment would know where he was, but no one had seen him. He’d gone missing before. Once, he disap- peared for seven weeks. (I counted, because it meant I had to negotiate the water bill with my landlord, who had somehow made it so that the whole build- ing was going on my bill.) Eventually, Slava turned up at my door with a big box of chocolates in a heart- shaped box. It was August, and the chocolates were Whitman’s, a brand that I don’t think I’d ever seen in the country.
We sat at my little kitchen table and I opened the chocolates while Slava heated water for cowboy coffee, which he insisted was a delicacy instead of
a stopgap. He opened my fridge to take out an egg that he cracked and drained down the sink, dropping the eggshells into the pot with the coffee. “You know that’s wasteful, and it doesn’t even make it taste bet- ter.” But we’d had this conversation before. Slava had his ways, and I was supposed to just go along with them. I bit into one of the chocolates.
“These are terrible,” I said, looking into the pink goo inside the bland chocolate shell. “I’m sorry, I’m just repeating what you’ve always told me, but the choco- late here really is better.”
“Yer tugging my coat tails,” he said in his new English
accent, part Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and part late period Sean Connery. He bit into one and smiled. “They taste right better than clean laundry.”
“So where have you been? Were you back home? Is your family all right?” Slava grew up a couple hours south of town, had a sister and mom still living there, but he wouldn’t introduce me. He’d told me I’d just make his mother nervous if I came to visit, that she wouldn’t know how to deal with having
an American in her flat. It was better for me to not leave the city, where I was unusual without actually being fully exotic.
“I was in Poland,” he said. “With a rum bloke from the Eastside of London.” He brought over two steaming mugs, and we both stirred the coffee grounds on the bottom, wishing they’d dissolve.
“Poland’s in the EU,” I said, and dared a sip from my coffee. “I thought passport control was super-rigor- ous at the border to the common market.”
“My friends what have friends have friends,” he smiled and took a sip.
“I guess I’m most surprised you came back,” I said.
“A bloke don’t blab on his troubles,” Slava said, like he wished he’d held a different hand. “He push on till he finds a door what opens for him.”
Slava’s new accent faded, or at least he reined it in around me. I watched him closely; up until he disap- peared, I hadn’t seen how essential he was to me. When he was back, I started to notice how hard it was for him to be here, where his evident skills,
his good humor, would never be rewarded. I asked around, from my friends in the program and those back home. There wasn’t much I could do, but I downloaded the application for a grant to work as my researcher in the United States, for when I decided it was time to go home.
“It’s only good for a year,” I explained when I told him about it. “renewable for two years after that.”
“Skill,” Slava said and pressed the application papers flat against my kitchen table when I showed it to him. “Three years, that’s more than enough time for me to find some Beverly Hills Housewife and convince her she can’t live without her Slava.” We laughed, and it became a regular thing, for me to coach him on filling out the application after we’d gone over my lesson plans. It would take a while to complete the applica-
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