Trekhprudny Lane

Moscow is of course a very modern and in some ways a very affluent city, but my life here so far, because of my handicaps, has been like an exercise in being primitive or very poor. It feels a bit like a visit to an earlier time. I think, Will that old lady by the station, who spreads her herbs on the ground on a little blanket, still have any sorrel leaves left? Hope so, because I don't know where else to find sorrel. I am illiterate here, and so my relationship to objects is somehow more direct. My needs feel more concrete and immediate. I have no twist-ties, no string, and no rubber bands, and I don't know the words for any of them. How can I secure this bag shut? Ah, some wire found on the ground will do it (since one doesn't so much walk past construction sites in Moscow as climb through them). I can't worry much about appearances or propriety. We're all still covered in mosquito bites, and rather than search for a more discreet product, I rub that white, cakey zinc suspension all over the girls and myself: cheeks, arms, legs. We look like ghosts, or a family of mimes. But it does the job, and there is so much more that waits to be grappled with each day. I feel like I've been camping, and for a long time. 

Modern and pre-modern... I awake in the morning to the growing roar of traffic around the ring, yet also, each day, to the rough scrape of brooms on the pavement, for each morning starts with the sweeping of entryways and passages. These are hefty, witch-flying brooms, mind you, big armfuls of young branches bound with rope to one end of a gnarled stick, not puny Target brooms with their trim triangles of plastic bristles. And after the sweeping, tin buckets of soapy water are slopped onto the sidewalk. It's a reassuring ritual.