1649 School

Soaking wet, I dragged myself into work on Friday morning. Tanya, the assistant administrator, looked up from the reception desk and muttered hello. I returned the compliment, then went on into classroom 4, where the first class of the day was about to start. T minus 8 minutes, but my students would probably be late, owing to the rain and the traffic. I wasn't bothered. It was bloody early, I'd overslept, and I needed coffee, strong coffee. Dry socks too, but you can't have everything.
For a moment I stood next to my desk, staring at the whiteboard. What did I need from the teacher's room...textbook. Yes. And board markers. Blue board markers…
Just then my boss, Andrei, looked around the door.
"Leely! Good morning! Have you read the sign in the teacher's room?"
"Dunno," I said. "There are a lot of signs in there."
"Well, read the green one," he said. "It's the most important."
"Will do," I said, and went back to staring at the board. But his voice had acted like a whip cracked over the haunches of my limping thoughts, and I was awake now.
Andrei was a thin and crazy Russian. I'd liked him ever since he picked me up from the airport in his Lada with half a door missing and a tin can for an ashtray – "Leely, are you sure it is OK I have a ciggy? Because I smoke like, like shithead. All the time." He taught me to cross streets 'the Russian way' (i.e. walking straight into traffic), and drove me and my suitcases to my new flat, where my arrival came as a total shock to my new flatmate, because he had forgotten to warn her that she was about to get company...
Under Andrei's mercurial rule, 1649 School always seemed be teetering on the brink of anarchy and chaos. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...To his credit, though, most things usually came back together. As long as you avoided him on Wednesdays. He didn't like Wednesdays.
My curiosity piqued now, I went into the teacher's room to have a look at the green sign.
Scrawled in board marker, taped to the wall, it read,

OI, YOU LOT!!!
Forget to change your watches and clocks on Saturday…
Or Andrei will kill you in your sleep!
Have a nice weekend.

The juxtaposition of death threat and pleasantry was particularly striking. But I was stymied by the paradox: how could I remember to forget something? Particularly the end of Russian Daylight Time? Anyway, what a great sign. I took a picture of it with my cell phone and went back to class.

The students were ten minutes late. When they finally came in, we sat down and had a meaningful conversation about verb tenses. Since there were only two of them, an adult brother and sister taking private lessons, the lessons mostly went at their pace, dictated by their interests. Or lack of interest, since the brother never did homework. He was a busy man. I agreed that studying was, indeed, his prerogative, and then went over all the information that his sister had already picked up. But he was not interested in action verbs. At the end of class he demanded to know when I was finally going to visit the Kremlin School of Riding, where, according to his business card, he was the commercial director. This was a long-standing invitation that I'd forgotten about.
"Maybe next weekend?" I said. "I do miss being around horses..."
"Many horses at the Kremlin School of Riding!" my student promised me, and with that, he and sister took their leave.

Hard on their heels came my twittering ladies, Lena, Vera, Victoria, and Yana, a quartet of middle-aged women. Our first classes together had been rough; they were intensely dubious about my age and my American accent, but now I was winning their trust. They were a good class, friendly and motivated, as long I recognized the smoke signals of incipient panic and confusion that they occasionally sent up. That was my cue to leave the board, sit down on a desktop and say, "OK. Let's...talk about this." Then we might well spend the rest of the lesson going over the sticky point, batting it back and forth until they were happy again, pacing schedules be damned.
Lena paused at the end of class to show me some photos of her son and his bride, and then they all left together.
By then it was 12:00 and no more students for the moment, but the day was hardly finished; I was going to take the bus across town to go boot-shopping with Lindsay, find some lunch, come back to 1649 and plan my lessons, then teach from 5 to 9:30.
Outside, the rain had mostly stopped and fog filled Zelenograd, softening the hard edges of the concrete high-rises. I turned up the collar of my raincoat against the damp, and then the bus came. We went through the streets, passing the forest, the technical college, the burnt-out shell of a sports dome rising from the shore of a dirty lake, the Japanese restaurant (beloved of expats), the movie theatre, the park with its pink fountains, and the rain came again, misting up the windows, so that everything seemed far away, boots, bosses, lesson plans, and I floated through the streets in the silence of my Russian morning.