“In my second life, I will be a large black woman in Liberia. I know this.”

On Friday, I arrived in Moscow at 8:00 am, greeted at the airport by Simon, one half of the British couple I am renting my apartment from. Tall, sandy blond, late 20s, kind of goofy looking with glasses, Simon helped me carry my absurdly heavy suitcases to the Aeroexpress, a new, fancy train system they have from the major airports to the metro now.

I couldn’t get over how modern it was, getting a ticket from an automated machine, riding on a train car that could easily be mistaken for the London tube. This was I stark contrast to the last time I tried to travel from the airport back to Moscow, in January 2009, when all that was available was the electrichka, a Soviet-era hold over that looks like a gutted cattle car with hard, wooden benches nailed to the floor. Since they didn’t announce the stops, and it had been after over 24 hours of straight traveling (In the worst flight itinerary ever: Belfast to Dublin to Paris to Kaliningrad to Moscow), I ended up getting off at the wrong stop in the dead of winter. It was still dark outside, I wasn’t appropriately dressed for the weather (as I’d just spent a week in Spain), and snow was piling around my feet as I realized, standing on the platform alone, that there were no buildings in sight. As I felt the feeling begin to leave my toes, all I could think was “Jesus Christ, I am going to freeze to death out here and street dogs are going to eat my frozen body,” which despite sounding like hysteric exaggeration and/or a Jack London novel, was a legitimate concern at the time. After 15 minutes, and completely losing feeling in my feet, another electrichka came by, I hopped on, and ended up back in Moscow where I proceeded to sleep for 15 hours straight.

Anyway, on the super modern awesome Aeroexpress, Simon told me a little about how he and Anne, his fiancée, ended up in Moscow. Anne’s mother is Russian and when the two of them were students in university in the UK (Simon was at Oxford, they were barely scraping by, so they decided to move to Anne’s family’s dacha outside of Moscow. Dachas are country homes that almost all Moscow residents have, and can range from literal shacks in the countryside to two story homes. Anne’s dacha was somewhere in between, looking like a giant barn and lacking running water. Anne and Simon lived there for 9 months while they both found work in Moscow. Simon worked for various English language schools around the city, eventually leaving his last school because the headmaster was a psychotic woman who treated all the teachers she hired terribly. Wasted at a wedding in Russia, Simon got talking with this guy Jamie, a fellow Brit, who had a strong background in education and who was thinking of starting his own tutoring service, thus Simon’s English tutoring business was born, teaching wealthy kids how to ace the exams needed to get into UK prep schools and colleges. Simon said that in the beginning, their clientele included some oligarchs, which he always felt uncomfortable about, and at times, scared to work for. The shit really hit the fan when one of Simon’s tutors got an odd feeling about a fourteen year old girl she was teaching and looked up the family online. It turned out the dad was one of Interpol’s most wanted for kidnapping his daughter from her American mother in the US and bringing her back to Russia. After that, and a few other similar stories, Jamie and Simon focused on mainly upper middle class families - those that could afford their services, but also did an honest day’s work for the money they paid and not, you know, kill people for it. As their client base began rapidly expanding, they realized they really needed to hire more tutors.

One of their best tutors is Olesya, a former nuclear physicist during the Soviet Union and a fellow teacher/defector from the shitty school Simon & Jamie last worked for. Olesya did all sorts of classified research on nuclear weapons and reactors but began to hate working on things that were meant to kill people. So she left her research position that was funded by the government. She was then courted by the Americans and the West Germans, who wanted her for essentially the same thing the Russians did, so she turned them down as well. She finally settled on teaching math and physics part time and ended up at Simon & Jamie’s company as their head math & science tutor. Simon was telling me as we walked to the apartment, that we actually live near a hidden, live nuclear reactor, which Olesya told him about, as she recently visited it on a research project. Apparently, the people who work there keep animals of varying sizes and type in cages beneath the reactor to test the levels of radiation emitting from it, and, like the canaries in the coal mines, if the animals bite it, well, Chernobyl Round 2. What a comforting thought.

Petrushka in his apron/vest

When we got to the apartment, I met Anne, Simon’s fiancée, who has long brown hair, hipster glasses and awesome style usually involving converse sneakers. She and Simon are renting me the apartment this summer because they are returning to England to get married at the end of June. They also introduced me to Petrushka, the cat I am taking care of all summer. He is black with a white neck and white paws, and just a week earlier was neutered, so when I got there he was wearing this ridiculous contraption that looked like a cross between an apron and a vest to keep him from ripping out his stitches. Apparently they don’t do those plastic head cones for pets over here. The funny thing is that Petrushka would fake a limp every time he had the vest on, holding up his right front paw and hobbling around the house. Anne and Simon were worried at first, but then they noticed that if you take the vest off, or if you act like you aren’t looking, he won’t limp. They thought he was perhaps a bit slow for a while, but this pathetic sympathy act proved otherwise.

After passing out in my new, comfy bedroom for about 6 hours thanks to jet lag, Anne and Simon came home again around 11:00 pm and asked if I wanted to go over to Jamie’s house for some drinks, since apparently Jamie lives in the apartment building behind ours. After picking up 12 beers from a street kiosk (seemingly excessive, but I think they were all finished by the end of the night), we headed to Jamie’s place and went into his small kitchen, where we were greeted by a choking wall of smoke. In Russia, you always entertain guests in the kitchen (mainly because most Russian apartments only have a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen). The first person I was introduced to was Jamie, who looks like a bit like Tom Hardy of Inception fame, only with black hair because he is a self-identified “Britishstani,” meaning his mother’s side of the family is from Pakistan. You honestly can’t tell he is half Pakistani, but he brings it up quite a bit, “Oh, is this because I’m Muslim?” “Was that a racist remark?” (all jokingly of course). Just as I was thinking that Jamie was quite cute, Anne brought up Felix’s new haircut to Jamie. Felix, as it turns out, is Jamie’s 7 year old son from his previous marriage with a Russian woman whom he is currently separated from, but they share custody. Yup, Jamie is someone’s dad. Whomp whomp whomp.

Next I met Marcello, Jamie’s apartment-mate, a skinny balding Italian man with awful teeth who looked like a character out of Trainspotting. I’d been warned by Anne and Simon that Marcello was “a bit of a douche” before entering the apartment, and one of the first things he said to me after I introduced myself was “Why you study human rights? For fucksake, that is so stupid. What if in your president election you pick president who not believe in human rights? Then you are screwed. For fucksake.” As Jamie shouted, “Stop being an asshole, Marcello” and quickly offered me a beer with a look that said alcohol makes Marcello more tolerable, the Russian man sitting quietly in a chair against the wall, Dima, began to defend me, saying “This is exactly why we need human rights. For when the government doesn’t believe in them” and shot me a small smile.

Anne had also warned me about Dima, but alternatively, told me that he was the most beautiful Russian man on the planet, “so chiseled, he’s just so…lovely.” She was not wrong. Although he was probably in his early 40s, Dima was literally the most attractive Russian man I have ever seen in my life, with the best compliment I can give him being that I didn’t think really looked that Russian. Salt and pepper hair, blue-green eyes, tan skin, perfectly straight, blindingly white teeth, and quite fit, it definitely showed that he had once been a gymnast and ballet dancer during the Soviet Union and now has become an actor, first getting parts in Germany and then moving to Moscow to break into the Russian market. He ironically has played a German or a Nazi in several Russian TV series and movies, as he was deemed to handsome to play a Russian. True Story. He recently got Jamie a reoccurring part on a TV series he was on, with Jamie playing a Canadian sheep farmer who swears all the time and in some episodes doesn’t understand Russian at all, and in others is completely fluent, thanks to the capricious nature (aka shitty quality) of Russian soap opera writing. Anne had also told me that Dima has a daughter in her early twenties, but that still did not stop me from staring at him like a 12 year old girl meeting Justin Bieber.

Out of nowhere, Marcello began going on a loud drunken tangent about reincarnation. “In my second life, I will be a large black woman in Liberia. I know this” he said, with a serious look on his face. God only knows how he came to this conclusion. Then, quickly changing subjects with no transition as only the very inebriated can, he start talking to Jamie about his Uncle Tony, and they both laugh. Anne explains to me that Marcello always talks about “Uncle Tony who lives in Texas,” but she’s never seen a picture of this person and is pretty sure he is a figment of Marcello’s imagination. “Uncle Tony is so good looking,” Marcello tells me, “Dima, in your second life, you will be gay homosexual for Uncle Tony. That is how beautiful he is.” Dima just replies with a calm, “ok” and takes a swig of beer, giving me a small smile.

Simon asked Jamie about his new driver, which they hired for getting to and from tutoring jobs, and Jamie told me he is working out well and pointed out to me that he is Tajiki, since he hears about my internship. He told a story of how he was getting picked up one day by his driver from a lesson, and said he needed to gas for the car. As they passed a gas station, Jamie alerted his driver to his mistake. “No, no, I don’t get gas there,” he replied and proceeded to drive around the back of this sketchy auto mechanic shop and pour an unlabeled container of gas into the tank. The driver explained that his uncle owns the auto mechanic shop and bribes young army officers to steal gas for him from their bases. The only downside for his uncle, he says, is that the officers on duty change every year, so his uncle has to start the bribes and winning them over again every January. And nothing about that story was surprising to me at all.