Visiting Professor (4 page)

Freshly shaven (though not well shaven), a patch of toilet paper clinging to a
coagulated cut on his chin, reeking from a few dabs of duty-free aftershave, Lemuel drifts at midmorning down South Main
Street, past emergency crews repairing overhead telephone wires, past teenagers chipping away at the ice on the sidewalk,
into the village of Backwater, population (not counting students) 1,290. With each breath the cold dry air stings his nostrils,
bringing tears to his eyes. He glances furtively at one sleeve, then the other, looking for evidence of a Russian heart, is
vaguely disheartened when all he sees is frayed sleeve.

Dozens of young people Lemuel takes for students scramble up narrow paths toward the campus, which clings to the side of the
long hill that dominates the village. Colorful scarves trailing behind them, they move with that distinctive rolling duck
walk he first saw when Word Perkins tried to high-five him the night before. Lemuel is struck by the fact that the students
appear to want to get where they are going. He decides that Americans may walk strangely but, unlike their Russian counterparts,
they are not put off by journeys that end in arrivals.

Continuing on, Lemuel passes a post office, a drugstore, a pool hall, a bookstore. The buildings strike him as being on the
puny side, groundscrapers where he expected sky. He scales a frozen snowdrift
and picks his way across the sanded street. On the far corner he stops to inspect a low-roofed hangar with a gaudy neon sign
that reads “E-Z Mart” suspended from a gallowslike structure planted in the frozen lawn. Lemuel remembers hearing rumors about
hangars with interminable aisles. His son-in-law claimed to have gotten lost for several hours in such a hangar in a suburb
of West Berlin, a story Lemuel took, at the time of its telling, as metaphor.

Clutching his briefcase under one arm, Lemuel shoulders through the swinging door and catches sight of endless aisles. The
heart he does not wear on his sleeve misses a beat, then accelerates. He is startled by a burst of hot air from a grill built
into the floor. Flinging himself through the wall of heat, pushing through a turnstile, he sets off down an avenue of an aisle.
Both sides, as far as the eye can see, are lined with shelves—and the shelves, without exception, are crammed with things
to eat!

If only the Great Headmaster could see this. Lenin always claimed that quantity could be transformed into quality, and here,
in the aisles of a food store, was the living proof.

Inspecting cans of corned beef and creamed corn and baked beans, Lemuel discovers that his fingertips have grown numb. Examining
jars of low-calorie peanut butter and plastic containers of Hershey’s chocolate syrup and vats of Vermont maple syrup, he
feels his knees begin to buckle. Suffering from what he suspects may be a terminal case of vertigo, he clings to a shelf,
inhales and exhales deeply several times, brings a hand to his face, is relieved to find that his nose is cold and wet. Or
(a sudden doubt) is that a sign of health only for dogs? Disoriented, he plunges on, fingering cellophane packages filled
with spaghetti of every imaginable size and shape and color. His lips sounding out the letters, he reads the labels on jars
of spaghetti sauce with or without meat, with or without mushrooms, with or without calories, with or without artificial coloring.
It hits him that there are people in this miracle of a country who spend time and money
coloring
spaghetti sauce red.

At the vegetable counter he fights back tears as he runs his fingers over a crisp iceberg lettuce. He starts to caress a cucumber,
but drops it back into the bin when a stout lady with a mustache, pushing a shopping cart heaped with detergents, clucks her
tongue at him. At the fruit counter Lemuel completely loses control of his emotions. Seizing a lemon—he has not laid his bloodshot
eyes on a lemon in
more than two years—he brings it to his nose and sucks in a long, drunken draught of its perfume.

Dazed, dazzled, blundering from side to side, Lemuel turns a corner so abruptly he almost collides with a dirty blond ponytail.
He notices the young woman attached to the ponytail slip a tin of fancy sardines over her shoulder into the hood of her duffle
coat.

“What are you doing?” he blurts out.

The girl, wearing tight faded blue jeans and ankle-length lace-up boots under the duffle coat, turns on him. “Yo! I’m scoring
sardines,” she announces innocently. She bats enormous seaweed-green eyes as if she is having difficulty bringing him into
focus. “What are you scoring?”

Lemuel has the eerie feeling he has looked into these eyes before. … Nonplussed, he thrusts out his empty hands, palms up.
“I am not scoring nothing. I am not even playing.”

The girl flashes a deliberate smile, half defiant, half defensive; freckles dance on her face. “Hey, don’t be a doorknob.
Score something. Everyone knows supermarkets pad their prices to make up for shoplifting. Which means someone’s got to shoplift
to keep the supermarkets honest, right? To make sure they don’t profit by people
not
shoplifting.”

“I can say you I have never looked at it that way.”

The girl hikes a shoulder. “Hey, now you know it like a poet.” Smiling dreamily, she wanders off down the aisle, inspecting
labels, casually stealing the cans that appeal to her.

Lemuel meanders on to the beer area, where he is overwhelmed by the choice. Confronted by cans and bottles and six-packs and
twelve-packs and cases of every imaginable size and shape and color, he rolls his head in bewilderment. A young man with a
three-day blond beard, long hair tied back with a colorful ribbon, granny glasses, and a small silver ring dangling from one
earlobe, struggles past pulling a dolly loaded with cases of alcohol-free beer. A tag pinned to his flannel shirt identifies
him as “The Manager” and “Dwayne.”

“If you don’t see what you’re looking for,” Dwayne says, “ask.”

Lemuel works up his courage. “Do you by any chance sell kvass?”

The manager scratches at his beard. “Is that a brand name or a generic?” When Lemuel looks back blankly, he asks, “What exactly
is kvass?”

“It is a kind of beer brewed from bread.”

“If someone out there’s smart enough to make beer out of bread,” Dwayne declares with an engaging laugh, “we sure as heck
want to market it. In case the word hasn’t reached you, at the E-Z Mart the customer is king.” He produces a pad and a stub
of a pencil. “How are you spelling kvass?” he wants to know, licking the point of the pencil, staring at Lemuel expectantly.

“I am spelling kvass K, V, A, double S.”

Dwayne looks up from his pad and peers at Lemuel through his granny glasses. “You speak with some kind of an accent.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, babe, I think so. An accent’s nothing to be embarrassed about. America is a melting pot of accents. Where is it you’re
from?”

“St. Petersburg, Russia.”

Dwayne brightens. “That’s cool. When I was working toward a master’s in business administration at Harvard, I did my thesis
on the disadvantages of central planning on a non-market-oriented economy. It had a catchy title—Trickle-Down Incompetence.’
“

“With a master’s in business administration from Harvard, what are you doing running a supermarket in Backwater?”

Dwayne pulls a pack of Life Savers from the pocket of his shirt, offers one to Lemuel, takes one himself when he shakes his
head. “I did the Wall Street bit for a while,” Dwayne says, “analyzing the infrastructure of companies for a
Fortune
500 brokerage house, making big bucks, washing my hands in corporate bathrooms where they got real towels, living in a condo
on Third Avenue, the whole Manhattan scene. Then Shirley, she’s the cashier with the naturally wavy hair, Shirley and me,
we decided we’d rather be ordinary fishes in a small unpolluted pond than minnows in a sewer. So here we are”—Dwayne makes
swimming motions with his arms—”swimming away.” He stuffs the pad back in his jeans, sticks out a paw. “I’m Dwayne to my friends.”

Lemuel shakes his hand. “I am Falk, Lemuel, to everyone.”

“So it’s been nice talking to you, Lem, babe. See you around the pond, huh?”

Back in the street, Lemuel experiences something akin to rapture of the deep—he feels like a skin diver who has surfaced from
giddy depths. A melody he does not recognize fills his head. It takes a minute or two before he discovers, to his relief,
that it comes from the steel carillon tower on the wood line of the hill. Further down Main
Street, he ducks into a Kampus Kave with something called “A Money No Object Pizza” advertised in the window, hikes himself
onto a stool, orders coffee from the woman reading a comic book behind the counter.

She looks up. “With or without?”

Afraid of appearing ignorant, Lemuel replies, “If you please, one of each.”

The woman snickers. “Now there’s one I ain’t heard before.”

Warmed by the coffees, one with, one without, Lemuel asks directions to the general store. He winds his khaki scarf around
his neck and sets out. Passing a modern, one-story glass-and-brick building, he spots an electric billboard flashing the hour
and the temperature and something called “Today’s Money Market Rates.” He notices a line snaking out from the building’s vestibule.
Without giving the matter a second thought, he joins it.

“If you please, what are they selling?” he asks the girl in front of him.

Her jaw stops working on a stick of gum as she uncorks an earphone from an ear. “Huh? Sorry?”

“Could you say me what is for sale.” Lemuel gestures toward the vestibule with his chin. “With such a line, it is undoubtedly
something imported.” He rummages in his pockets for the small notebook that he always carried in Russia, opens it to the page
containing his mistress’s measurements—brassiere size, glove size, shoe size, pantyhose size, hat size, shirt size, inseam,
height, weight, her favorite color (crossed out, with a note in Axinya’s handwriting next to it saying “Any color will do”).

The list arouses in Lemuel an aching nostalgia for the familiar chaos of Petersburg.

“The line’s for the ATM,” the girl explains in a whiny voice. Plugging the earphone back in her ear, she executes a little
shuffle with her feet, almost as if she is dancing to a snatch of music.

Lemuel turns to a young man who has joined the line behind him. “If you please, what is an ATM?”

“Automatic Teller Machine.” He notices the bewilderment in Lemuel’s eyes. “It distributes bread, as in money?”

Lemuel assembles the pieces of the puzzle. The phrase “Money Market” on the electric billboard, an ATM that distributes bread
as in money, the twenty or so people queuing patiently despite the minus
ten degrees Celsius. What could be more logical? In Russia you queue for bread, in America the Beautiful you queue for another
kind of bread. The streets may not be paved with Sony Walkmans in this Promised Land he has come to, but it is nevertheless
a country full of wonders.

Lemuel turns back to the young man to confirm his suspicions. “When my turn comes,
bread
“—he winks to show that he has caught on to the code—”will be distributed to me?”

“You have to have plastic.” The boy holds up a credit card for Lemuel to inspect.

“You need plastic to get bread?”

“Yeah. That’s the deal.”

“Where can I acquire plastic?”

“Inside. But the bank only gives plastic to people with bank accounts.”

Lemuel eyes the building. “This does not look like a bank.”

“It looks like what?”

“It reminds me of a dacha I once saw in the Crimea.”

“What’s a dacha?”

“A dacha is where the nomenklatura spend their weekends.”

“What’s a nomen-whatsis?”

“In Russia, they are the ones who decide which side is up. If I can offer you a word of advice, young man, in any given country,
the single most important thing you need to know is who decides which side is up.”

Lemuel startles the young man with an awkward high-five, then slips away from the line to continue exploring the Promised
Land.

Lemuel’s
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds; he knows expressions Raymond Chandler, may he rest in peace, would have to look
up if he were alive. High-five. Handle. Money market. Bread. Plastic. Ah, he must not forget the chest off of which you get
things. Not to mention doorknob, which is clearly something you do not want to be. Pushing through a door into the Village
Store, which takes up the ground floor of a worn, gray, peeling, century-old two-story clapboard building on the corner of
Main and Sycamore, Lemuel walks up to the counter. “I am looking for the barbershop,” he tells the teenage clerk, who is trying
to pry open the drawer of an old-fashioned cash register with a screwdriver.

The clerk jerks his head in the direction of the back of the store. Lemuel makes his way between racks of ski jackets and
cross-country skis and track suits to a rickety wooden staircase. A large hand with its middle finger rudely extended in the
direction of the second floor is painted on the barn-side planks of the wall next to the staircase.