November 5th, 2007 Moscow

November 5th (bonfire night) came and went like a damp firework. I threw the last cig of the night down the stairwell and as it flipped thorough the anti-suicide wire meshing placed across the well every three floors, orange sparks flew off in all directions. That was my fireworks for the night. The stubborn cold is dragging on, a cold sore has made a dramatic entrance stage left of my top lip and the voice only partially returns when black tea with honey is drunk. And yes this miracle cure does work.
This Kommunalka where I now live is better than the other one in Shabolovskaya, but I didn't foresee ending up back in one.
Two sixteen year old girls, Lena and Oxana, live in the flat opposite on the same floor. Their mother, who looks like a Soviet gym instructor, wears a red tracksuit and shouts even when you are stood close by. She wants her daughters to study English with me and I tell her I want to but that don't have much free time. She corners me in the lift with her giant intimidating breasts, with an implicit threat of suffocation, saying that their grammar is good but they need speaking practice. I agree to let them come to my flat for a quick test, but once released from the imposing breasts, resolve to find an excuse if they come. They do come, the next day, my resolution fails at the sight of their innocent breast-beaten faces. Empathising with these two spindly victims of the grotesque mastadon which had spawned them and heaved her heavy pendulums over since birth, I let them in and it transpired that 'good grammar' meant " Couldn't understand a thing". It was pre-beginner level, almost pre-language level, dating back to that time in adolescence when all meaning is expressed either by the absence of or presence of a blush. Their teacher had given them some cheap bad quality class books , intermediate level, and left them to get on with it. None of the exercises had been done. They said that he was often not in the class with them. He goes to walk and smoke around the school and leaves them alone. I gave them an exercise book, a CD and some homework exercises to do for next time, whenever that might be. Next time never came. During the next month, whenever I saw them in the lift I asked if they had done any homework for me, they just blushed and said nothing. Whenever I saw their mother, I was threatened with the heaving udders to explain why I had not invited her offspring for a second lesson. When I said that I had invited them but that they had never been, she began to snort like a bull. It seems they had been sent around to me for further lessons, but had never arrived at my room across the corridor. I feared for the girls safety that night and slept with one ear pricked for the muffled sounds of suffocation.