Southern Moscow is built for existence alone - it allows people there a life of sorts - nothing more. Mean, indoctrinated humans designed the buildings. Dire concrete cubes with regular, but scarcer windows than other places. A multitude of the same to make a point - pure communism - we are all equally as unimportant as each other these structures decree. The apartment blocks are bigger than the shops, the shops bigger than the kiosks, but the same pocked grey pervades - even the sky complies. The Nuclear Power Institute was the same, but the biggest. It didn't even need to be bigger - there were more empty corridors than utilised ones. So, it was bigger by design - an architectural assertion. From the fourth to the eighth floor you wouldn't even know which one you were on - identical in their lack of use - completely unutilised except for the cobwebs on them.
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When I first taught there I was shown each of these floors. One of the stewards, I think that's what they called them, showed me each and every floor. We got the lift from one floor to the next, marched down the arrow-straight corridor to the lifts at the other end, and repeated - for all its nine floors. Every floor with the same maladjusted paintwork and regimented set of bare wood doors. The ninth was where the English class was held. The steward made me late on my first day. I had tried to protest my lateness to him in my broken Russian, but it had held no sway. You could tell by the way he walked and breathed that somebody else was giving the orders. There are a lot of people like that in Russia still - a senior tells them to make their heart stop beating, and sure enough it'll stop beating and they'll die on the spot - they'd probably collapse to the floor in an obedient pile too. There is a growing plenty which are the opposite however and I'll get to that at some stage.
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Anyway, the class were in rows - twenty students for me and in an instant you could tell they'd worked here years. Years which had sculpted them. For half of them their skin had taken on a greyish pallor - about the same colour as half-dry cement. Most of the rest had that purple, busted spread across the nose and cheeks which alcohol abuse brings - well, alcohol abuse or a smack from a rusty girder. The purple faces looked less tortured - like they might have laughed sometime that year.
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I apologised for being late in a few different ways, searching for a hint of facial incomprehension which might give me a rough pitch for their language level. Nothing - dormant faces. I may as well have spoken Latin to a field of cows. So, I asked instead.
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'Does anyone here speak English?'
'Yes, of course.' Half the room chorused in a baritone - I couldn't be certain even now whether that pounded phrase was more from women or men. It made me pause a little, but not for long. Russian students are never the most welcoming and a bunch of middle-aged professors at the Nuclear Power Institute were hardly likely to rejoice about me teaching them.
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So, I dutifully plodded through a solid, tried and tested starter lesson. They spoke little, I showed them they had a few things wrong, raised perhaps one eyebrow in remote interest in the two hours. Overall, a success. It can't have been that bad because one of the vodka-flushed ones approached me at the end.
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'Do you want some lunch?'
'Erm, yes, okay.'
'Come. The cafeteria is in the basement.'
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He stood by the door as I got my bag together. It was very quiet as all the others had left. As I put each pen, paper and book in my bag I racked my brains for topics for discussion. I knew from some previous experiences that discussing the food would be impolite. I had the feeling this would be one of those conversationally stiff lunches.
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