Yellowhammer

I dart through foot traffic, my eyes stolidly fixing to a building growing bigger.  As I approach it, it fills my vision, and it is all there is.  My toes and hands freeze, and the frost that condensed in my beard numbs my jaw.  Mucus had begun running within moments of leaving my apartment complex, and now it has frozen into a sickly greenish-yellowish color above my lip.  The thaw can’t come soon enough.  When you’re this cold, you’d gladly set fire to your shoes, and melt yourself a pathway through the frozen waves of drifted snow.
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The rumbling beneath me steadily flows, like thunder rolling down a night sky a hundred miles tall.  Sunlight from beyond the tunnel embankment strikes the train carriage’s windows at forty miles-per-hour, and suddenly I’ve reentered the city.  A concrete fence capped by spiraling razor wire keeps the city outside and its functions above; no, no, the train is still underground.  Decrepit buildings alternate with fresh-faced facades, and brazen onion domes curl upward and at a clear day.  Clouds run from a cold this cold.

Natasha is waiting in a library off of Kolomenskaya, toward the south of the city on the Green Line.  It’s a forty-five minute commute, and I spend it justifying to myself my rate.  One thousand Rubles per academic hour is the going rate for a native speaker of English, true, but the idea of making the equivalent of fifty dollars an hour causes me to squirm in discomfort.  On one hand, I consider the reasons that make me uneasy: perhaps I don’t know as much about English as I should, perhaps she can’t afford it, perhaps she’d rather have a teacher of British English.  Russian learners tend to prefer a British English teacher–apparently, my dialect is wrong.  Perhaps, much like a twenty-something breaking up with their childhood sweetheart, she doesn’t know how to end our relationship, and my glaring obliviousness to her plight is driving her deeper into financial ruin.  On the other hand, I consider the reason why I’m across town on a Saturday afternoon: I desperately need the money.

Traffic contrasts against the train; some vehicles struggle to keep pace, and others streak by, their drivers’ attention held by the urban sprawl oozing outward.  It reminds me of a fat man’s paunch, falling farther and farther over and down from the helpless constraint of his struggling belt.  A pack of wild dogs frolics in the snow, their gait made an arcing gallop by the depth.  They stick their muzzles in the terraced drifts, before abruptly pulling them out and shaking them free of snow.  A particularly pitiable, mangy mutt sits next to an exhaust pipe on a fast food restaurant.  We’re all struggling to keep warm.  The ventilation system begins to belch snowflakes into the train carriage, and they shine.  They float like dust motes, like wintry fireflies.
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No one looks sideways as they hurry about their day; it’s too cold to do anything but mind your own business.  Curiosity is best left to comfort.  Along Tverskaya, a small group of soldiers in coal-gray, knee-length frocks stand stock still at Triumph Square, and the exhaust escaping their lips is proof of life.  I wonder what they’re doing.  I also wonder why so many Russians wear hats that don’t cover their ears; perhaps ears frostbitten black is a Slavic tradition.  Behind them, a statue of Mayakovsky poses, his bronze left arm cocking his coat open.  He seems oddly like a model from a staid catalog, the type from which your grandpa would order a flannel coat.  His blank eyes stare above my shoulder at his Metro Station, and I hurry by toward the office.

As I draw even with the imposing statue, I trip to my knees, grunting in pain.  I figure that I’ll have one scrape, maybe two, a bit of chapped flesh torn–even through the denim of my jeans and the quilted cotton of my long johns.  To my left, a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years-old, also rests on her knees.  Her filthy coat rests misshapen on her thin shoulders; I imagine it a hand-me-down.  Her cheeks and nose are cherry-red, and the tears in her eyes shimmer as crystalline as the canyon of sky along Sadovoye Kol’tse, an alley of open air that ends with one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters–it claws upward at a clear day.  The Rubles in the cup in front of her dully swallow the light; I wonder if a person could retrieve their hand from such a iron-toothed trap.  I cannot hear it above the Square’s tumult, but as the copper-plated steel of a ten-piece joins her collection, I know it makes a shiny, splashing sound.

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Amateur mountaineers grapple along the slanted rooftops, wielding shovels.  Pedestrians skirt sidewalks cordoned off by tape striped red and white, minding the small, shovel-sized avalanches that plummet twelve stories to the ground.  Occasionally, a wary gaze fixes on the skyline; although it’s too cold for icicles to start falling, experience has conditioned people toward caution.  Seventy-four people died from falling ice last year, sometimes impaled by icy stalactites six feet long.  The corralled, solitary people silently–always solitary, and always silently–and guardedly step into the street, as an odd collection of pricey sedans and Soviet-era shitboxes blaze and bluster past.

On the walk to Kaspersky, there are children everywhere.  There must be a school around here, somewhere.  They trudge past, their teeny faces stained red by the cold.  As I approach the bus stop, I notice a figure through the glass wall.  A young child–nine, maybe ten–is staring closely at him, muttering something in Russian.  He is passed out drunk.  When I am a few feet from him, I realize that he is probably dead.  The heated foyer of Kaspersky cannot come soon enough; I cut across the terraced waves of drifted snow, cutting a path as if my feet are on fire.
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I don’t like riding the Metro late at night.  It’s clean–well, as clean as mass transit comes, I think, because it closes every night at one o’clock.  But there’s some safety in numbers, and the only thing congregating in numbers on the Moscow Metro late at night is drunks.  Or, in the particularly odd case of tonight, stray dogs.  There’s a bedraggled drunk man fast asleep at the front of the carriage, so I take a seat at the back.  It’s him, me, and a German Shepherd puppy asleep about four feet to my right, it’s jet black nose kept warm by its unkempt paws.  As we arrive at Begovaya, the doors automatically slide open.  Two more dogs trot on.  Quite suddenly, humans are outnumbered by stray dogs in that carriage on the Purple Line of the Metro.  Octyabr’skoe Pole can’t come soon enough.
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The flickering glowthrows the silhouette of its candle against the porridge-colored wall; when the flame illuminates it, it’s the yellow-red of a yellowhammer at the far edge of the sunset.  The thick and wearing cotton of a high school football sweatshirt hangs loosely from her shoulders, my last name and number emblazoned across the back; she likes to wear it, because it makes her feel feminine.  Her bird-boned frame is a blown-glass hummingbird in a bit of packing paper.  She moves about the room, sometimes leaving for the kitchen bearing some morsel–typically cheese or chocolate.  It’s wonderfully domestic, and the moment threatens to pass.  As she places some knickknack or keepsake away in the nameless furniture at my feet, she glances over at me and frowns quizzically.  "Why are you on top of the covers?"

I smiled back.  "Because I’m finally warm."