Russian Kitchen
‘Please, sah, can I ‘ave some borscht?’ ‘What voice is that you’re doing?’ ‘Oliver Twistovich.’ R takes the pot out of the refrigerator. I see some birds at the feeder through the unfrozen part of the window. Ice grows from its edge overnight across the wall towards the oven. I call it the kitchen glacier. Once or twice a week I knock it down with a rolling pin. Some of the birds have names. R named the Eurasian nuthatch ‘Popik,’ which means ‘Little Butt’ because he has a short tail and it also sounds like a diminutive of the Russian word for nuthatch, popolzin. He has hiding places for the seeds he takes. Pigeons arrive. They’re afraid of him. They eat when he is away hiding things. We laugh. A cat was in our building yesterday. Grey, bursting and opportune. I’m not as convincing as I would like to be telling her it couldn’t have been the same cat she’d found outside this morning, the one we’d kept in the apartment for a while. Grey slate against white, and still. I don’t want to fixate on this. I say, ‘Look at what the pigeons are doing,’ which is the same thing they are always doing. Their society has a certain order to it. I leave enough seeds for the invalids to have something. The sinitsi and the sparrows wait their turn in a tree. They eat before or after the pigeons eat. If the pigeons fight, they get the broom. I wave it at the sky, which is grey. Beyond that, blue. Beyond that, more broom. ‘Did you actually read Oliver Twist?’ I say, ‘No.’ I put my knife into the pot and spear a beet. I place the knife in my mouth. R says this is a faux pas. Like shaking hands through a doorway. Or being in love and wanting to die when you can do neither.
Bradley K Meyer writes from Tbilisi, Georgia. Recent work has appeared in Biscuit Hill, BRUISER, Muleskinner and Right Hand Pointing. He teaches English.
See more of his work in 13.4