More Neighbors.

Returning from work, I ran into a drunk acquaintence outside the front of my apartment building. I had headphones on, and so he staggered up to me and, without any greeting, said, "Let me listen." Without a word, I handed him the headphones (keeping a hold on my Ipod), and having put them on, he closed his eyes and swayed back and forth with an ecstatic expression on his face. "Is it American?" he asked. "It is," I answered. (It was Ben Folds Five.) "Give me money," he said, handing back the headphones. "Sorry, man, I don't have any for you," I responded, and he walked away.

One night, there was a party in the stairwell. Since I and another volunteer had a friend visiting from abroad, and he wanted to meet my neighbors (about whom he had read on this blog), we stepped out to make their acquaintance. They were friendly and forthcoming with declarations of brotherhood, which we translated for our visitor. I decided to go into my apartment to get some cognac so that we could take a shot together. For convenience, I poured all the cognac I had into one drinking glass, intending us to share it, according to the custom in my stairwell. The glass was about half-full of hard liquor. I brought it out, and one of my neighbors, (Little Bird's older brother), took it happily. "Is this for me?" he asked. "No, I thought we'd share it," I said. "Share it?" "Yes," I said. "All of us?" "That's what I thought." "Share?" "Yes." "Well, let me say a toast," he said. And he launched into a two-minute, fairly repetitive ode to brotherhood. At the end he raised the glass and one hand with a showman's gesture, and announced, "In honor of this, I will...drink the whole glass!" And he downed the entire half-glass of cognac in one gulp. We applauded. A babuskha shuffled out into the stairwell and told us all to shut up.

I ran across Dyadya Kolya and Little Bird in the stairwell a couple days later. "We're leaving," they said. "Where to?" I asked. "We're going to Russia forever," they said. "Really?" I asked, a little sad. "When?" "Tomorrow," they answered, "we're going to buy a car." A shot of vodka was passed around, and the talk turned to hunting. "Have you ever been hunting?" they asked me. I answered that I hadn't, and this changed the plan from using the car to leave for Russia forever to using the car to go hunting with me. "We'll have to get lots of girls," said Little Bird, kissing his fingers and saying, "vot takie!" They made a list of ten more people to invited, and then it occured to Dyadya Kolya that we would have to make kebabs, which meant we had to make a kebab stand. The discussion then turned to how they were going to fit all the girls and the drinks and the guns and the vodka bottles and the kebab stand into the car, and I excused myself. They probably won't be leaving for Russia anytime soon.