As they're driving away, in the direction she'd gone the evening before, she remembers she's forgotten to ask for her passport.
- /
They turn onto a wide street, one that Cayce, from her morning's Moscow Yellow Pages map foray, tentatively identifies as Tverskaya. Her driver, with a phone plugged into his ear now, is wearing cologne.
They stick to Tverskaya, if it is Tverskaya, and stay with the traffic flow. He doesn't use the blue light.
They pass beneath a banner in English: WAXEN FIGURES EXHIBITION.
Street-level signage offers snippets of the non-Cyrillic: BUTIQUE, KODAK, a drugstore called PHARMACOM.
As they turn left, she asks "What street is this?"
"Georgievsky" the driver says, though it might as easily be his name. He turns again, into an alley, and stops.
She starts to tell him that she hadn't meant for him to stop, but he gets out, walks around, opens the door for her. "Come."
Gray, distempered concrete. Cyrillic skater's tags, their letters bulging in clumsy homage to New York and Los Angeles.
"Please." He hauls open a large, anciently battered steel door, which reaches the limits of a restraining chain with a dull boom. Within is darkness. "Here."
"Stella is here?"
"Kino," he says. Film. Cinema.
Stepping past him, she finds herself in a dim, indeterminate space. When the door crashes shut behind them, the only light is from above. A bare bulb, visible up
"Please." He gestures toward the stairs.
She sees now that there is a railing, the spidery ghost of one: a single length of half-inch steel. Supported by only two uprights, it droops between them, seemingly lank as rope, and sways when she grips it.
"He took a duck in the face…"
"Up, please."
"Sorry." She starts to climb, aware of him behind her.
There is another steel door, narrower, beneath the forty-watt bulb. She opens it.
A kitchen, bathed in red light.
Like the kitchens in the oldest, still-unrenovated tenements of New York, but larger, the stove a squatting pre-Stalinist presence wider than the car that brought her here. Coal-burning, or wood.
Where the tenement kitchen would have offered a central bathtub, there is a shower: a square of raised tile surrounding a slightly lower concrete space for drainage. The ancient galvanized showerhead, looking either agricultural or veterinary in intent, is suspended from a sixteen-foot ceiling gone sepia with decades of smoke and soot. The source of the red glow is a stolen Metro sign, propped against one wall, with a bulb inside.
"You are here," says Stella, opening a door, light behind her. She says something in Russian to the driver. He nods, stepping back through the door to the stairs and closing it behind him.
"Where's here?"
"Come." Stella leads her into another room, this one with tall, unwashed windows, looking as though they might originally have been internally shuttered. "The Kremlin," Stella says, pointing out a view between the nearer buildings, "and the Duma."
Cayce looks around. The walls, unpainted since Soviet days at least, remind her of the nomiya in Roppongi, decades of nicotine deposited over what may once have been cream. Cracked, uneven. The individual planks of the wooden floor are lost under layers of paint, most recently maroon. There are two very new, very white Ikea desks, with articulated swivel chairs, a pair of PCs, and baskets of papers. On the wall above, a long, complex chart is being maintained across three adjoining whiteboards.
"Sergei says it is a production that never ends," Stella says, seeing Cayce looking not at the view but the chart. "Only the start of the work can be done here, of course."
"But does it end?" Cayce feels herself blushing, appalled that she's been unable to resist immediately asking so pointed a question.
"You mean, is linear narrative?"
"I had to ask." She feels as though Parkaboy, Ivy, Filmy, and Maurice, the whole F:F:F crew are in the wings, counting on her.
"I do not know. One day, perhaps, she will start to edit as she edited her student film: to a single frame. Or perhaps one day they speak, the characters. Who knows? Nora? She does not say."
A young man with bushy ginger hair enters, nods to them, and seats himself before one of the computers.
"Come," says Stella, moving in the direction he'd come from. "You know this idea, 'squat,' like Amsterdam, Berlin?"
"Yes."
"You have not, in America?"
"Not exactly."
