On my very first rush hour metro commute in Moscow, having waded through a sea of dreary brown and black leather jackets and been funneled onto the escalator that plunged me into the very bowels of the post-Soviet earth where without a doubt the old commie leaders planned to stash the populace in the event of a nuclear showdown with the Yanks, I reinforced a word practiced assiduously the day before. Spelled phonetically the word is best approximated as suka but honestly I'm too lazy to go look up the correct Russian spelling so this is gonna have to do.
So here's what happened. A small, dumpish man dressed in a light purple ski jacket was screaming the word, swinging a leather satchel at a thin balding guy with an impish look and a receding hairline. In between, acting apparently as a referee, was a squat little babushka. The fight had a pathetic feeling to it. Like the two guys were just going through the motions, drained of any real emotional feel. But then a week and a half in the land of kruschevy and stalinsky apartment buildings might have just zapped me of any remaining humanity. Other words were spoken of course, but suka, being one of about a dozen words I can comprehend and most of them being some form of profanity, was the only one I registered.
As I bordered the screaming train in that dimly lit station draped in brown marble, with the fight growing in intensity outside the car and security rushing in to dispense the melee, I had an urge to turn to the young women standing next to me, the one wearing the knee high leather boots softly whispering come hither my boy, wrapped around legs that ventured just short of her neck and tell her about my new discovery.
He's calling her a bitch, I would have told her.
