Thus begins some hitherto unblogged memories of my experiences with the sprawling monster that lives beneath
I never focus on him, but he’s fully within sight. Maybe he never looks at me, but how to reconcile happenings with random chance only, I’ll never know. The gray cap, gray windbreaker, and even grayer pants. The white-blue-red patch of Mother Russia starkly contrasts the grayness beneath. I know him too well, and he doesn’t know me at all. All this doesn’t explain why I knew everytime when he wants to stop me in the dim underground tunnels leading to the trains.
Here comes the standard greeting, the standard salute. I’ve long found humor in all of this, so I’m ready, and I always salute back. Not the snap-to-attention salute that I’d give Lt Col W, but the one I returned to scared Lackland cadets at the end of the day, when they were annoying me for the last time until before the next sunrise. But today was different. There was more juice in my balls. I knew why he stopped me, but I wanted him to say it. I deftly pulled out the navy blue passport and handed it to him so he could read the English italic letters on the front. The impressed expression made by his lips was my first victory.
“Where did you think I was from?” I dared him, triumphantly smiling.
“I thought very little about that.” Damn right you did. Was that a nervous smile?
Keep looking for the discrepancy you’ll never find. Surprise, I even know enough Russian to answer your little desperate questions.
Then I saw the ring on his finger. He’s a husband. Old enough to be a father, it appeared. If there’s rent-seeking on his mind, I can understand. But not from me, and not today. Not anyday. I wanted to ask his name, buy him a beer, talk about life as a police officer hated by his own people in a country terminally ill from corruption, talk about his wife and kids.
But I had no time. I wasn’t going to miss the last day of class.
1 comment:
Nothing, I went to class...
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