Outside a block of flats, a group of children. A boy circles on a bike. His companions chase and laugh. On the second floor, a man stands on a balcony and smokes. A woman leans out of the fourth floor, shakes a rug, recedes. The wall is huge, with orderly windows and stacks of balconies. The wall swallows the woman and her rug.

No, not even that.

The brunette woman and her red rug.

They were never there.

Olga and I walk in the fog to the canteen. I remind myself to go faster; she is always waiting for me. We take off our coats and scarves and hand them to a woman in a blue apron. She gives us dirty plastic tags. The old guard kicks his feet up on the desk. I am learning to fix my hair in the mirror like Olga does, though mine doesn't have the flip she blow-dries in each morning. Thick, warm juice. Boiled cabbage. Fish. Cream globs on the surface of my soup. It is here I look at her face. The walls are pink. Outside, litter. The curtains are frilled. Outside, birches just now bare and stained with rain. I watch her everywhere we go. At twenty-seven, she has no particular wish to be somebody's wife. I look at her shapely buttocks in tight pants as she buys tickets for the Board of Trustees' trip to Finland. She earns a good salary. Her voice is soft.

Even in Objachevo, a village of 8,000, there is a Lenin. He is silver, and pointing. I can see why men prayed to him. I want to discuss the irony of this with someone, but I have already plied my English-speaking friends with too many questions, and so far I only know enough Russian to say Thank you, I'm full.

What would Lenin point at? The future, maybe, though on such a brilliant morning, silver finger afire, the future is too abstract of an answer. A particularly graceful birch tree leaking yellow onto the pavement? Stark land, northwest Russia, forest as far-reaching as grief. Thank you, I'm full.

Around us business people in dyed red hair or ill-fitting suits are taking their lunches, looking seasick under the fluorescent light. Olga nudges me, says the man in back and to my left is Katya's boyfriend. Which one? The married one. I have no idea what constitutes an appropriate glance. The instant I look, he is biting down on a roll. The reel of film plays over and over, the mechanical lift of the arm, eyebrows working down with the chomp, over and over, grinding into Katya's thin, bronze body, over and over. Grimacing the way someone taking a bite does. Over and over. A business suit sleeve and a roll glazed with sugar. No face. Just a bite.

The stairwell smells like sulfur. Empty cigarette packs and fish heads on the steps. I hurry up eight flights, hoping to somehow stave off the meatball weight gain, shedding layers of clothing as I go, remembering half the time to be conscious of dark corners. The words "hip-hop" are written in English on the walls. Windows are broken. A window of the staff van was broken during just one night in Objachevo. When a window is broken the conclusion is always that someone was drunk.

I try to write hip-hop lyrics, alone in my room before Nadezhda and Anatoly come home. I sit cross legged, facing the window, a cup of instant coffee in my hands, struggling to make my voice loud when it has always been quiet, to take the recent pain of my first broken heart and spit it out with conviction.

Anthropology 140: Cultural Anthropology. The lecture is about the political lives of dead bodies. Lenin's body in particular. It was moved a few times. I listen. Quickly cease to remember. We discuss statues. Immortalizing people. The philosophical meaning of Lenin's statues. He is everywhere. His face is godly. He is dead. He is worshipped. His body a political symbol, its movement a political statement.

Russia in my mind is a dreary place, cold, wide, unintelligible. Solemn. Frightening. I leaf through the class text, imagining other humans endowing a corpse with meaning as a sort of collective ball of light, a 5-o-clock p.m. honey light, behind the head of the corpse. The audience wowing at a product of their own wishing. Like the quark machine at Princeton someone told me about once. Not very many quarks recorded while no one was there. If someone came, sat, looked at the screen. Wanted quarks. There they were. There is Lenin, handsome, a man of the people. Peasants crowded round his deathbed.

The head cashier notices me the first time we come to this particular canteen. She has a large mole and sharp eyes. I only need to know once how she reacts to my not eating everything on my plate to subtract the heavy potato from my selections and dutifully gobble the rest. She comes to fill the salt shakers and checks my progress, nods, says something to Olga. At my request, Olga translates. She says you're a good girl.

Time behaves strangely, swallowing events. The puddles have frozen but cars still rush between potholes and swerve dangerously. It is an odd feeling, these Russian mornings, these dirty buses. I am everywhere. I am nowhere. I am stretched between people. Women trudge, shawls around their heads, crossing themselves fervently at the gate of a brand-new Byzantine church. I walk past a park filled with birch trees to a warm office where there is tea in the kitchen and aerosol room freshener in the bathroom. My daydreams are vivid enough to be happening somewhere. On the day of my father's death the man I love lies in bed with me, looking at my face. The Russian word for car sounds to my untrained ear like the Russian word for men.

We all know it is one of the last clear days of autumn. I am about to experience my first Russian winter, but there is no trace of it in the broad sky and river. Stout golden light. Birches half-naked and still. We roast sausages over the fire, celebrating the weather with a picnic of equal parts meat, potatoes, and alcohol. The factory across the river leaks smoke like ink in cursive across the sky's pale edge. Vladimir's favorite soccer team, St. Petersburg's club team, won yesterday. He belts out its anthem on the steep riverbank, spilling his oddly colored drink. Lena adjusts her quiet toddler's hat. Katya redoes her lipstick. Sasha and Olga joke in a language I still don't understand. It sounds like they are rolling marbles in their mouths. As long as I am a stranger in a strange land, I decide, drunk, I have no choice but to hibernate in the den of my internal world.

Sasha bundles little Lucia in his jacket with his big hands. She fell into the water. She sniffles. Vladimir undresses a birch limb with his knife. The shavings fall like snow.

I read Einstein's Dreams, in bed with my first Russian cold. We cannot know the nature of time; we live according to its nature. Time could go in a circle. We might know. Time could be a sense. We wouldn't know. The cigarette I have longed for all afternoon is in my hand, the railing of the front steps dirty and bent and too cold to touch. A huge machine pounds cement stakes into the ground in the next plot, which shakes our building to a slow rhythm—a giant approaching, screaming maiden in his fist.

I walk beside Alexei, thinking of a quote: "The soul of another is a dark forest." (Who wrote that? A Russian did.) His dark forest like a sphere around his head and body, pathways of solids and fluids, thought and matter. The lines of our lives touch like moths, stretch parallel on a damp street. Which dimension is it that has us seeing everywhere we've been? The first snow falls and barely sticks, dusts the tops of logs. Women in fur hats glance curiously. His face is fraught with acne. He tested well enough to go to Moscow to study physics, but he must stay here. He does not live in a flat. He lives in a wooden house with electricity but no hot water, taking care of his mother, who works at a telegraph center. He never knew his father. He has drawn up a list of questions in English to ask me.

"The soul of another is a dark forest." Quotes validate writing, supplement, elucidate. Supposedly. Quotes depend on the past. They emerge out of it as out of a deep pond. Goldfish, at least, do not pretend to have enough of a grasp on the past to thrust greedily into a context. A life. Emerge triumphantly with something to gut. The body of Lenin is empty of vital organs. It is currently being dressed in a new uniform by people in a laboratory. A good quote illuminates an essay, gives it a back. Good lighting illuminates Lenin's husk to make him look godlike. According to Olga, Lenin has no back. Alexei would like to read my poetry. When it is time to leave I say Thank you and he does not respond. I say Thank you again and he says I do not know what to say. I say Maybe you're welcome. He looks at me, thinking. Those are common things. I like to say original things but I do not know enough English. He shuts the door. Lenin's body imitates that of a saint, liberated (or restrained) from natural decomposition. Look closely at Lenin's mouth. How easy it would be to open it, fingers working the cold skin (stubble?) and place the apple there (teeth?). I wonder what it is like to own a brain that devotes itself to the consideration of atoms, neutrons, magnetism. Alexei certainly does not know enough English to tell me that. Which dimension is it that has us seeing everywhere we've been?

When I am six I teach myself to tie my shoes, waiting on a railroad tie for my mother and brother to come out to the car. In Russia they keep the original soundtrack under the voice-overs, so British movies aired on Russian channels sound like crowded airport bars. I am two, telling my sister I don't want her to cut my food, I want Daddy to, and Daddy complies. At the bottom of a Russian glass of juice there is solid fruit, which one spears with a fork. I am fifteen and I tell my father I don't think he should shout at his doctor just because the doctor might not give him his Vicodin; my father pulls over and leaves me by the side of the road. Russian schoolgirls walk arm in arm in pink jackets, long braids down their backs.

The organization I type English documents for is dedicated to implementing sustainable forestry. The biggest obstacle is turning out to be changing the mind of the local population, teaching them the process of democratic determination when they are used to a Soviet state issuing orders that are not questioned. Convincing them that they have a voice. Teaching them how to use it. Old-growth forests are protected now, according to agreements between scientific institutions, logging companies, and the people. The soul of another is a dark forest. The soul, a forest. Does this mean we are reforming how a soul works? Protecting its untouched parts. Reforming.

Are we saving souls?

Olga takes me to visit her parents. I can't tell if the shouting and breaking is normal until Olga sits on the edge of the bed I have been napping in, tears in her eyes. I am sorry, she says. I didn't know things had gotten this bad. It is our first time alone together outside of the office. I want her to like me. I am lonely. I touch her shoulder. Her mother comes in, speaking unevenly in Russian. A cigarette dangles from her hand. She lifts the other hand, strokes my forehead in jerks. My feeling has no name. This touch belongs to Olga. I ache to lean into it; I have not been touched this way in years. We leave early, I look out the window, the sky opens with rain. There is this longing. Our weeping is out of sync.

I am nineteen, a number, and numbers give names to time, which either doesn't exist or exists in fragments. I am nineteen and learning to wear the painted lips and forward glare of Russian women. I am twenty-six, fiddling with the engagement ring on my finger, feeding rice to my sister's baby. I am fifty-five and a spinster, driving a purple car I have named Pollywog.

I am nineteen, shaping my facial expression like clay. I am twenty-two, at my first job, nervous.

Lenin died in nineteen twenty-two.

This from Sasha, and not a fact I bother to check. I give my Russia to the people I meet to shape like clay.

I lied I do check and the year the book says is not the year Nadia sitting up straight in her chair eyebrows knit remembers it being.

According to records, someone broke my heart. Ah. Records. My own words become a quote, then. The onion of remembering. I walk across Katoovskaya Treenadtset, parting the air of an outer layer. A layer where someone broke it but it is not broken. No, not even that. If there is no break. How can one claim it was broken?

Lenin to my right, eyes forward as soldiers.

The past replaced.

The past effaced.

The past retraced.

The past erased.

And it is never someone, really. Not, at least, when we are nineteen. We are all too alone together for that. You broke your own heart. The sky is cranky with fog, government buildings stuck with antennas like acupuncture needles.

Neighboring town. Paper mill puking smoke and providing jobs. Nadezhda takes my picture. I just want to take a picture of the mill. I do not smile.

You see. I am learning.

Logging equipment, factories, bare trees, flat blocks. We sit in the flat of one of the workers. Nadezhda supplies cookies for tea, buys me a cream basket simply because I point them out as my favorite. Onions dry under the handsome son's bed. The wife has a yellow dress on. They speak quickly. We look at photos, and I sit between Nadezhda, who turns the pages too slowly for my liking, and the father, the hunter. A hunting album, for the most part. Antlers on the walls. Tattoos on his hands. I want to sleep. I want her to turn the pages faster. I look over at the soft-spoken man. Sitting beside us, not to show Nadezhda, but to show me. What he loves. I am guilty; I search for common ground, flip back to the cute hunting dogs. He shows me the tags. I ask about the dog competition. He produces a real rabbit foot, six inches, roughly stitched. He caught the rabbit in September. I tell them it means good luck to rub it. He says to keep it. I say thank you, thank you, thank you. I rub it against my cheek. To remember. They ate the rabbits and birds he caught. Two of my favorite Russian songs came on the radio during the car ride home, the snow falling, the sky dark, the flats lighted, the air sharp with cold.

Memory is not fact, a friend says in an email from Brooklyn. It is perception. What we call the past does not guard fact, it guards reconstruction. Images. Missing. Wishing. Compromises between the involuntary shedding of experience our brains do in spite of us and the light we prefer to cast a history in. Nostalgia: the selection of pleasant memories. Grudges: the selection of unpleasant ones. We are all alone together.

Remember. All the advice that sticks. Remember this, then: love is work. Who we are is different from what we do. Add time and stir if there is no apparent solution. If you are unsure of a moment's meaning, celebrate the poetry in it. Every act is an act of love. Earth is a hard place to be. Feel thankful for the confusion, because it is yours. We are all alone together.

I work at an old computer in the big meeting room, where I can easily hear the glasses clinking and voices laughing. Teatime. I like knowing the drill. I pour apple yogurt into a black bowl. Vova gives me bread and potatoes for lunch. I am famous for wanting milk in my coffee, which around here is endlessly strange. Sasha looks dashing in his business suit. He is off to give a lecture on forest biodiversity. According to office gossip, his wife rules him. Sugar cubes. Earl Grey. Madonna's latest video. I bite into a pastry, groan. I should know by now. Russian food is full of surprises. Ham and cheese inside the chicken. Jam inside the cookie. Fish inside the pastry.

When Anatoly asks to look at my passport, he gives me his, and I study every stamp. I point to one. He says My woman. Points to Nadezhda, slim and petite in her green housedress. His marriage registration. I laugh, say Your wife, Anatoly. Wife. Nadezhda looks up, smiles, says Woman, maybe other. I am wife. I am almost certain she jokes. Russians often joke about adultery.

Magpies wake me up every morning of third grade because the dog food is kept in a barrel outside my window. Screeches. Yellow beaks. Black and white. I smoke a menthol cigarette outside the tax bureau where Olga waits to have a salary report stamped. It flies between two dingy apartment blocs out of a sunlit morning on my front deck. I bury my head under the rough, pink comforter. I tuck my fingers into my jacket, mint smoke in my mouth, painfully cold air. Can't we just put the dog food somewhere else? Do menthol cigarettes have worse chemicals in them than regular ones?

In the car on the way to the forest, Premslav tries to explain to me the virtue of infidelity. Maybe you are not used to the idea, but when you are young and want to have a family you look for a good father. Later maybe your priority is to have a good lover. I tell him if I cannot find a man who is both I will not marry. Alongside the highway, tan grass and red berry trees. I fix my expression, try to work out the kinks. Learn the Russian glare. Nothing is wrong. My protest, too quick. He studies me, knowing.

In Syktyvkar, everyone meets at Lenin. In Moscow, Nadezhda informs me, the popular meeting place is Pushkin. There is a statue of him here, too, one arm across his chest, under a stone branch with a nest. He is nicknamed Man Taking A Shower. The three women waiting solemnly for their heroes to come home from the war, a pine branch across their outstretched hands, are Women With Alligator. There is a nickname for every statue.

Lenin, the territory of the Komi Republic carved out of the stone behind him, is Man With Backpack.

Against all good judgment my brother watches a video about snakes with Mom. I know better. Still, I am awake in the night. My blankets rustle. I know better than to look. Maybe a man in a trench coat? A mummy. A ghost. Morning, Marc has bags under his eyes, says It was me, I was scared, I tried to get in bed with you. I turn, lift up the blanket for him, hug him. We sleep. Over and over I turn and lift. He isn't there. Not only that--learn from the statue, the hard gaze of stone. He never was.

Olga takes me on the majority of her errands. Fresh air. Walk. Tax agency. Her duties as administrator are apparently to answer the phone, type financial reports, and wait in line with them. Wait in line. We wait. In line. She sends me to find cream baskets. I take a ticket, wait in line to buy them, sound out the labels of chocolates and meats. I walk around the block to kill time, still catch myself smiling at old women. Used to Soviet suspicion; they are caught off-guard by my unlocked expression. I set my face. I am examined quickly. Their features do not change. I begin to teach myself not to look back. One foot. The other foot. A tricky thing to learn. Like tying shoes. Sparse snow. A rifle shop Open 24 Hours. A room filled with tired, long-coated women. Olga is text-messaging Nadia on her cell phone. The line has barely moved.

Flat blocks: inevitably gray and trimmed with purple. Flats: identical layouts. Neighborhood: 40,000 people living in cement blocs. Inside a flat: warm. Cooking: something. A family: each member folds up sofa bed in the morning. Stairwell: foul and shadowed. Expression: inevitably solemn and trimmed with suspicion.

On the 9^th floor of one of the blocks there is a woman with a baby. The woman has a shock of red hair and a deep laugh. The baby is the fifth of her husband's children. His eldest is her age (twenty-nine). She has a little boy with tremendous ears. Like angel wings, she tells me. Which trees are the first to reproduce themselves after a controlled burn? Birch, spruce, then cedar. She makes a mean batch of mayonnaise. When I was fifteen, she says, I led the preteen communist party youth group. I listened to live punk music. I drank beer. I smoked pot. She high-fives her teenage stepson. She explains to me the three generations precipitated by the end of the Soviet era: older than fifty, most cant grasp it. Angry. Thirty-five to fifty, some get it, work new market jobs, some don't and are angry. Under thirty-five, they get it. Oceans away from their grandparents. They have choice. They have selves. They must decide. They must ponder. Better this way, she says. Enough of angry people waiting in lines. She looks sex at her husband. In ten years they move to the forest, maintain ecological trails, fuck in between the trees. In five years he takes another woman and leaves her. In fifteen years he gets too old to fuck and she takes two lovers who tell her that her hair is like fire. He leaves her. She leaves him. Three children in the house, none with the same parents. They dance, grab hold, make a family, let go, grab hold of another. Perhaps it is more honest this way. She leaves. He leaves. They dance.

Where are you hiking with that big backpack, Lenin?

Summer evening. A girl of five lies with her father in a rough hammock. Oak branches above like dark arms. The air is warm and smells like aging grass. The father pulls the rope, the hammock swings. The girl says Let me do it. She pulls hard. The hammock barely moves. The girl says Let's play Airplane Girl. Excuse me, miss? Yes, sir? How much time until we reach New York? No, not New York. Where? UmÉSeattle. Okay, how much time until we reach Seattle. One hour--what would you like for breakfast, sir? I would likeÉpancakes. Pancakes? Okay sir, I'll have that coming right up. Would you like juice? No, I would like coffee, and please remember the cream. I always remember the cream! A flight attendant wouldn't say that, sweetie. She would say yes sir, I will remember the cream.

The girl leans into her father, smelling baby powder and musk deodorant. They have a secret language, the girl and her father. A cat language. They meow to each other. The daughter says Well then I don't want to be an Airplane Girl.

I read 1984. Winston Smith's job has something to do with erasing people from history records. He burns proof, doctors archives. He aids and abets reconstruction. The enemies of the state were never there.

In the Russia I am living in—and I know by now that it is likely not the one anyone else is living in--a church is replaced by a swimming pool. Later, a church again. I ask Anatoly what the Soviet era was like. His answer, in full: it is over.

The town that bore Lenin's name is now St. Petersburg, as it was before. Russia is not only home to the unscripted touch. Churches and pools do the same dance. Continual editing of the script. Perhaps it is more honest this way. Replacing. Reforming. It is names, too. They dance.

I glance at Anatoly's purple food. Nadezhda watches, clucking, while I eat soup and meat and cabbage and cake. I want desperately to smoke a cigarette and shower. I do not know the words for Honestly I just wanted to know what it was. I say Thank you, I'm full. I say Shower. They say Yes. I run into the bathroom, smile. Victory. Nadezhda's voice. My name. Eat. A little bowl, beet shavings in sauce like hay in purple goat diarrhea. For you. Eat. I sit heavily. They laugh. They are my last parents. I swallow tears and beet salad. They have no idea.

Sit across from Anatoly. Stare straight at the place above his head. He is bent over his studies, a mathematician preparing for a law exam. The world begins. A yellow kitchen, his form, thinking, angular face and large glasses, the red triangle of broad shoulders under his shirt. Breeze lifting curtains. Each morning he sees you at the kitchen door, butters bread, lines salami on top, hands it over without a word. Their wedding album, imposing meaning onto a day no more meaningful than this one. A photo album: a gallop on a circular track. On their wedding day handsome Anatoly cannot suppress a smile as they exchange rings. Black and white photos of the traditional walk to a war monument to leave the bouquet. Married during Soviet times. Spectrum of gray. There was still love. A striking picture of Nadezhda, loose dress, flyaway hair, big smile on their Black Sea honeymoon. An instant encapsulates either all meaning or none of it. At what rate? Anatoly's form across the table, the bread and cheese between you. His own saga. Squint. Try to detect his genius in the air, reforming.

You are missing the point.

Every love story is not one book, it is two.

Outside the window, the day brightens and darkens with bundled people waiting at a bus stop under tree skeletons. The end is not the plane ride home.

Now rain.

The purpose is not a deathbed surrounded by grandchildren.

Clouds part.

The apogee is not the wedding day.

Sun, only for nine minutes on the west side of the flat.

I ask my Russian friends about Lenin. Their translations are different: Lenin, the Father of Russian Socialism. Lenin, the Soviet Father. Lenin, the Father of Communism. They speak casually, they care little, they are annoyed by my questions as if they are being asked to dredge up facts from a high school history class.

Lenin, Russian Father. What do you keep in your backpack? A map of your Republic.

Seeds.

It is not just the walls that talk. The sidewalks, cracked and wet, tell you. These things you say you remember. Your world never split open every time your father shouted and your mother never devoted herself to painting over the crack. They were never there. We are all alone together. The world splits open against a somber Russian public lot where a couple kisses with passion so palpable it makes your thighs ache.

The window of the plane from Los Angeles, your first polar ice caps, silent, the moon over them.

That moon never happened, either.

There is no broken.

There is only break.

A scar on the heart proves no former wound, it proves only a scar on the heart.

Rows of car garages say things in the language of four sides and rust.

They say.

If the past is the purpose then there is no purpose.

Someone is breaking into one of the garages.

Past.

Purpose.

Your past purposes.

The purpose of your past.

Birches finger the sky. Over and over again, stand on the asphalt while he drives away, lift the blanket, watch the dark. Lenin's stare is clear--his eyes are eyeball-less, stone. The world begins; it opens out. Calling each other's names back and forth, the sounds arcing through bruised skies like faith long in the gloaming.

Are we alone, all together?

Alone, all: we are together.

A forest of birches, fingering.

A dark forest.

So dark you can barely see him receding; he is taking decisive steps away from you between crackedwhite trunks, and finally even his backpack is hidden by branches and leaves.