The Russian

Diary Entry: May 30, 2025

My body had declared its surrender. I could not drag myself one more step through the city. My legs were screaming, my spine felt like a splintered plank, and I was trapped in a state of perpetual, jaw-cracking yawning. The honey-beers, a thoughtful gift from my friends in Chicago, now felt like a cruel joke. Each bottle was a dead kilogram, a leaden weight that transformed the trudge over sloppy roads into some pathetic, miniature ascent of Mount Everest.

As I finally neared the hostel, a doorman greeted me. I immediately, almost desperately, offered him the entire cache of drinks, spinning some half-conscious tale of their “tremendous vitaminal and healing ingredients.” He looked at me, probably seeing just another exhausted traveler spouting nonsense, but he took them.

I made the final pilgrimage up to my room, slipped between the sheets with the quiet stealth of a fugitive, and oblivion claimed me the instant my head hit the pillow. I was calm, finally prepared. The alarm was already set.

I surfaced around 11 a.m. and, with a mechanical efficiency, prepared for the next leg of the journey. I gathered my luggage and went down to check out, holding the naive assumption that the $50 I’d deposited for security would be refunded to me in cash.

It was not.

Upon inquiring, the desk officer informed me — with a practiced, neutral expression — that I had, in fact, never paid that money from my personal account. No, what actually happened, he explained, was that they had blocked the funds, a temporary hold, which was now, conveniently, “released” upon my check-out. Whether he was speaking the truth or reciting some well-rehearsed corporate lie, God only knows. It felt like a magic trick where the money vanishes, but you’re assured it’s still safely in your hat.

And, here I am. Stepping into the sterile, recirculated air of the Chicago airport, bound for Boston.

* * *

They kicked me out of the Boston airport, for absolutely no reason at all. I guess foreigners aren’t welcome in the city that vandalized the home of Bill Russell!

With the taste of acidic coffee and bureaucratic indifference in my mouth, I drifted into the city. Boston felt abrasive, its historical brickwork possessing a rudeness I hadn’t anticipated. I found sustenance — some bland, functional meal that was more ballast than pleasure. I secured a hotel room, a beige box that served as an adequate holding cell. My first act within its walls was to purchase a bus ticket to New York for the following morning. I was done with this city before I had even arrived.

But the day was not yet over. The prospect of sitting in that beige room, marinating in my own irritation, was unbearable. Night fell, and I went out again, moved by a contrary impulse, a vague desire to force the city to give me something other than a cold shoulder.

I found myself in a nightclub, one of those caverns of predictable rhythm and dim, forgiving light. The bass was a physical presence, a blunt instrument against the chest. I was an observer, mostly, committing a few detached motions to the beat, a man dancing with his own shadow.

And that is where I saw her.

She was Russian. I knew it before she spoke, though the accent certainly confirmed it. We fell into conversation with the absurd ease that only such places allow. The noise provided a convenient excuse for proximity, for leaning in. I tried to get her name, but she demurred. She told me, with a small, enigmatic smile, that I could call her “Musik.” It was a strange, surprising answer, but in the end, neither her real name nor her story truly mattered. What mattered was the sudden, sharp spark of connection. We laughed. It was genuine laughter, a sound I hadn’t realized I was starved of. She was witty, her eyes holding a cynicism that matched my own.

After an hour, or perhaps it was two, she turned to me with a directness that cut through the club’s artifice. “Come with me to my house.”

It was not a question. It was a declaration.

Her apartment was a small, two-story affair, a cozy, almost curated sanctuary against the city’s indifferent chill. A narrow, almost spiral staircase ascended to the second floor, where her bed, a nest of disheveled blankets, was tucked under the eaves. The walls were a gallery of stylish, enigmatic pictures — photographs perhaps, or abstract prints — each one a window into a taste both refined and slightly melancholic. We drank a little wine — something red and inexpensive that tasted, in the moment, like a grand cru. We made love with an urgency that spoke less of raw passion and more of a shared, temporary reprieve from the world. Afterward, we lay tangled in her sheets, the ladder a silent sentinel beside us, listening to music — some melancholic rock I didn’t recognize but understood perfectly. We talked.

The hours bled into that strange, translucent time before dawn, around four or five in the morning. The conversation, having exhausted the trivial, turned serious.

“I love literature,” she announced, as if it were a confession.

The classic, tired test formed on my lips. “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”

“Tolstoy,” she said, without hesitation.

I smiled, settling into the familiar lines of the debate. “Ah, of course. Because Tolstoy is light, and Dostoevsky is darkness?”

She turned to look at me, her expression unreadable in the dim light. “No,” she said, her voice flat. “I am also a dark person inside.”

It was a door left ajar, and like a fool, I pushed it open. I was intrigued, treating her “darkness” as a literary device, a puzzle to be solved. “Why?” I pressed. “Why are you dark?”

“Because I don’t believe in anything,” she said, her voice dropping, as if stating a simple fact, like her eye color. “The world is a cold place. Everything is bad.” She shifted in the sheets. “That is why Dostoevsky is right. For him, everything is dark and hopeless.”

I couldn’t let that stand; it felt intellectually lazy. “But that’s precisely where you’re wrong,” I argued, energized by the debate. “Dostoevsky believed. He was a Christian author. He’s the one who famously said he’d stick with Jesus even if the truth itself contradicted him. How can you read him as hopeless?”

She was silent, just looking at me. The wine and the hour made me reckless, provocative. “So what does that make you?” I pushed. “Are you Jesus or are you the devil?” A smirk played on my lips. “I have to say, I’ve never made love with Jesus. And I’ve never made love with the dark lord, either.”

The shift was immediate. The playful intimacy vanished, sucked from the room. She recoiled slightly, pulling the sheet with her. “That is a disgusting thing to say,” she said, her voice tightening. “Jesus represents... humanity. I don’t like that kind of conversation.”

The contradiction was fascinating. “But why not?” I pressed, sensing the nerve I had struck. “If you don’t believe in him, why does it bother you? Why do you care?”

She spoke less and less, her answers clipped, evasive. The conversation, which had been a volley, was now me, throwing a ball against a wall. I let the silence hang for a moment before trying one last time, returning to the original point. “So, why are you dark? What does it actually mean?”

She said something then, a mumbled sentence I barely caught... something about serial killers. It was so bizarre, so utterly disconnected from our entire conversation, that I was sure I had misheard.

“Serial killers?” I said, half-laughing in disbelief. “What are you talking about? You Russians are truly crazy. Why did you even mention serial killers?”

She gave no answer, just burrowed deeper into the pillows. The air was thick with a new, strange tension; the easy intimacy was fractured. Trying to reclaim it, to soothe the mood I had so clearly broken, I reached out and idly, affectionately, began to twist a lock of her hair.

Suddenly, she flinched, pulling her head away.

“My hair hurts,” she said, her tone sharp, acidic. “Stop twisting it.”

I was still in the warm haze of the night, still playful. I laughed. “I know. My mother also gets irritated by that.” I tried to maintain the joke, to reclaim the mood. “The way you’re looking at me right now... it really makes me nervous.”

I was still smiling. I did not, until that very instant, detect the ice forming.

“The most I can do,” she said, and her voice was no longer her voice, but a cold, formal instrument, “is to ask you to leave.”

The words hung in the air. The shift was so total, so fast, it gave me vertigo. “Do you... do you want me to leave?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated, a desperate, foolish attempt to salvage a shred of dignity, to reframe this expulsion as a mutual decision. “What time is it?” I asked, affecting a casual tone, as if I were just noticing the hour, as if it were probably time for me to be on my way regardless.

She didn’t even look at me. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice devoid of any warmth. “I don’t have a watch.”

The finality of it, the absolute dismissal, hit me. I got up, stunned, and began the humiliating scramble for my clothes. As I pulled on my shirt, she delivered the monologue. It was not a conversation; it was a verdict.

“Recently,” she said, staring at the ceiling, “I lost my country. Then I lost my mother. A couple of times, I have contemplated committing suicide.”

I froze, halfway into my trousers. “I... I am sorry.”

She rose from the bed, swung her legs onto the ladder, and began to descend from the loft. As she moved down the rungs, her voice drifted up, cold and detached. “You wanted to know about my darkness? There it is.”

I followed, my feet finding the rungs just after hers.

“I am not that nice and light-hearted person,” she said, each word precise. “I am not even that smart. So leave.”

I stood there, fully dressed but feeling utterly exposed. I felt, in that moment, like some Kafkasque insect. A disgusting, burrowing thing that had been discovered and was now, quite rightly, being expelled. I was kicked out, not with a shout, but with a sterile, surgical precision that was far more brutal.

I moved to the door, my mind a toxic swirl of irritation, fear, and profound confusion. She was the one who opened it, a final, formal gesture of expulsion. In that last, absurd moment, I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

It was like pressing my lips to cold marble. There was no response, no flinch, nothing.

I looked back one last time. She was watching me, her face a perfect, porcelain mask, her eyes dead and cold.

I left. Walking through the empty, pre-dawn streets, the chill air doing nothing to clear my head, I told myself the same, tired thing I always do.

These Russians are truly crazy.

They are all warmth, all polite intensity, all desperate passion... and then, without warning, for no reason a sane man can grasp, they snap. They go completely, irrevocably mad.

I went back to the hotel. I sat on the edge of the bed as the grey light began to filter through the beige curtains. Then, methodically, I began to prepare for tomorrow’s trip to New York.