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 Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:09 pm
Destiny City’s Russian community wasn’t massive, but it was big enough to support a little… well… it wasn’t quite a neighborhood. It was more like a street and a half of shopfronts. There was a grocery that sold domestic and imported Russian foods, and a bookstore that sold Russian-language texts, and a little Russian Orthodox Church where the services were held, predictably, in Russian, and three little restaurants where you could order Russian food with varying degrees of authenticity, and a bathhouse where you could pay five dollars to go sit in the steam baths with fat old men with names like Nikolai Andreyevitch and Aleksandr Petrovitch.
But the real crowning glory, whether you were the young child of ex-patriots or an old woman born in Yekaterinburg or anyone in between, was the candy store. Nestled between the church and the Russian baths, its cramped shelves offered an array of, well, everything.
Iouri was a regular.
He’d heard stories from Muscovites fondly remembering their childhoods perfumed by the production line of the Red October candy company. Being from St. Petersburg himself, Iouri had no such stories, but the chocolate bars clad in papers featuring a babushka-wearing, rosy-cheeked young girl brought back sweet memories nonetheless. He remembered buying these with his pocket money after school when he was barely in primary school.
And someone had just grabbed the very last box. The entire case! Right in front of his eyes! “Excuse me,” Iouri said, following the younger man down the aisle. “Clearly you have plans for that chocolate, but would you mind if I took just… one or two bars to purchase for myself?”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:18 pm
He’d been pointed to the street of Russian shops by his hosts, who were apparently trying to be very accommodating. It was only to be expected, since they’d spent a lot of money to bring him here for a year, and would be continuing to spend a lot of money to keep him here. For that reason, he was fairly determined to stock up on his favorite things to minimize the long-a** trek from the Rackham Estate to this… street. Maybe he could get them to subsidize his public transit card, too?
Hence the case of Red October chocolate bars. They were good for long days in the studio, quick energy that didn’t stick to him and make him feel disgusting later like energy drinks or large meals of carbohydrates did. He had a bag of vdohnovenie, too, and some nut pralines he remembered liking--it was only appropriate to keep treats out in case of visitors, which he didn’t expect would be too regular. He hoped they wouldn’t be too regular. He hated visitors.
He became aware someone was talking to him, and stopped his slow stroll down the aisle to listen. The man was older than he, he thought by perhaps a decade. And short. Irinei pulled a slight face, and said in Russian, “How long has it been since you left the homeland, then? You barely have an accent.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
Iouri broke into a grin, recognizing the accent characteristic of his hometown. “Oh,” he said, slipping easily back into his mother tongue. “I was eight when we moved here. A few years before the Soviets lost power.” A few years more, he thought, and he’d have been living in the United States a full three decades, and wasn’t that depressing? “I was back briefly in Graduate School. Is my accent really so bad?”
He hadn’t noticed it fading. That was troubling. But anyway, here was someone who’d arrived from his hometown far more recently than he, if Iouri was any judge of accents (any it was possible he was a terrible one). “I hope I’m not too bold in asking,” he said, “But are you from St. Petersburg or the surrounding townships? Your accent is familiar to me. You see, I grew up there. Most of the people around here, they’re Muscovites.”
Not that that was a bad thing! It was just… lonely. They had all their in jokes and not that Iouri would have all that much in common with someone newly arrived from St. Petersburg but it was the principle of it all.
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
“Barely detectable,” Irinei confirmed. His was plainly apparent when he spoke, something that gave him a great deal of pride; Russia might be behind in basic human rights, but they also rather lacked the… dearth of history and accountability that seemed to plague the United States. “Yes,” he said. “I arrived last week for a residency at the Rackham Estate.” Now that the man was speaking Russian, it did become apparent that they had similar accents. Apparently there hadn’t been too much drift since… oh, twenty years ago? Irinei had barely been four when the Soviets fell.
He could understand why someone might be excited to see a peer. “Have you been to the State Hermitage,” he asked, because of course one had to ask about the hermitage museum. It had been established in the mid-eighteenth century and open to the public since the mid-nineteenth, so it would be ridiculous for someone to claim to have grown up in St. Petersburg and have never seen it. “I volunteered there, for a time. It was enlightening.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
Iouri’s grin could scant grow wider, but it remained plastered to his face. “Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “My mother used to take me there when I was little. When I went back for a semester in graduate school, I was studying museum sciences, so I was there often. Have you ever seen… I forget the name of it, but it’s a film shot at the Hermitage, entirely in one take?” Something involving a costume ball. Watching it had been rather akin to how Iouri imagined an acid trip.
Not that he’d ever had one of those.
“Iouri Abramovitch,” he said, offering a handshake to the younger man. “I’m operations director of the Destiny City Earth and Space Museum. How long are you in town for? I hope you’ll give us a visit. And before I forget, the chocolate bars?”
He already had nearly forgotten, after all.
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
He supposed, for a fellow, he could give up a few chocolate bars. Irinei fished three of them out of the case and set them into Iouri Ambramovitch’s hand in lieu of the offered handshake. “I remember when it was filmed,” he said. “Or. They were doing setup when I left for a gallery opening. I didn’t actually see it filmed.” Irinei leaned on the bar of his shopping cart, and said, “Irinei Valentinevich,” with an aristocratic nod of acknowledgement. “It’s likely I’ll be by, at some point. I’m here for a year.”
Irinei tapped the toe of one shoe on the dingy tile floor of the little candy shop. Operations director, was it? That was fairly important, as far as the scale of things went. He found himself… a little curious. “What does an operations director do at a science museum,” he asked. “I think sometimes that if I hadn’t been so obviously suited to painting, I would’ve liked to be a writer. But you sound more like the kind of person who would be arranging visiting scientists and such?”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
Iouri took the chocolate bars gladly, slipping them into his shopping basket beside a bag of hard caramels and a tin of cocoa mix. “Thank you, friend,” he said, and worried for a moment that the wording was awkward. The most practice his Russian usually got was speaking to his parents and with shopkeepers around this little slice of Destiny City.
“I arrange for visiting scientists, yes,” he nodded. “We have specimen collections that are of research value. We host visiting lecture series. I arrange the planetarium schedule and do my best to keep the material fresh. I plan special events and classes. I manage the budget. I oversee the hiring of staff and interns… it’s a very busy position. I have to be a jack of all trades.” He shrugged consideringly. “And also a master of all trades.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:19 pm
“Perhaps I’ll come by sometime,” he said. He could think of a lot of uses for a planetarium in doing study work. He’d have to consider the theme of his overall work. Maybe something to do with stars? Lining up face models, though, that would be a challenge. Perhaps he could do a series on senshi, since they were such a big deal here. Or on his fellow officers; that would probably be more welcomed by his peers, he thought.
Well, anyway. “Do you have an established policy for allowing visitors to use your specimens as reference,” he asked. “I make attempts to reach out to museums that might have artifacts I am interested in, for my work. It seems expedient to ask someone like you, who ought to know, now, rather than waiting until later to obtain permission.” If Iouri’s speech was stilted, it was not in a way that Irinei noticed; his own speech patterns were excessively formal, especially around people he didn’t know well. Always better to be cautious, as the saying went. They also said, the fish trap exists because of the fish, so, there was that.
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:20 pm
“I would like that very much,” agreed Iouri, debating whether it would be too forward to offer a free visitor pass. But then, he didn’t doubt that Irinei’s residency would reimburse him the price of admission if he said it was vital to his artistic experience. So perhaps… Perhaps he should just let this matter be.
“We have an application process for using the private collection,” he explained, “But the applications only have to go through me. If you give me your email address I can send you the form, and then once you’ve had a chance to look around and decide what you’d like to do in-depth studies of, you can send it back. And, of course, the public collection is always open to the public for whatever respectful purposes they need it for.”
The number of people he’d caught heavy petting in the exhibition halls was frankly atrocious. Teenaged hormones needed to be stopped… at least in his halls of science. “Anyway,” said Iouri, fumbling for a business card that he then offered to Irinei. “It was a pleasure to meet you, but I left my dog tied up outside, so I’d best finish my shopping and be on my way.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:20 pm
He reached for his billfold and pulled out a business card of his own--not the English-language one, because that one was still something of a joke to him, and he’d made them with that in mind--to trade with Iouri. “Thank you very much,” he said, with a sincere--for once-- smile. “Please, do take care of your pet. I’ll email you once I’m settled in.”
As Iouri headed for the next aisle, Irinei leaned on the bar of his cart again. Perhaps his stay in Destiny City wouldn’t be so bad, after all.
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