It takes three hours for the police to remove the door. Near midnight, we finally get a call at the apartment that I can go back. No one broke in. The door’s lock was too strong for the crow bar and the would-be intruder had mangled it in a failed attempt to break in. Probably to get me, right? Why else would someone break in there? They have nothing. Everything in the apartment is at least forty years old. There are no beds. Natalia Alexeyevna and Kirill and I all sleep on couches in different rooms. I sleep in the study, Kirill has the bedroom and Natalia Alexeyvna converts the living room hard foam couch into a bed by placing a single comforter on top of it.
Kirill is a biologist and works at the university. He studies butterflies. There are hundreds of cases of dead butterflies pinned in rows and rows in cabinets in the apartment’s only hallway. He has all of his butterfly pinning equipment in his room, including a huge jar of the most awful smelling clear liquid I’ve ever encountered, which I assume to be some sort of formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde? Really? People can have that contained in glass jars in their apartments?
There are several aquariums of exotic reptiles divided between the bedroom and the living room. Kirill studies butterflies but looks after reptiles because the lab at the university has no room for them. Iguanas, geckos, chameleons—probably some reptiles I’ve never even heard of before—
One time I’m sitting in the living room watching the Russian version of MTV (which is hilarious, even more so when you can’t understand most of it) and I notice some movement on the outside of one of the stacked banks of aquariums lining the walls of the room. It’s a gecko, best I can tell, and it is crawling out the front of the aquarium. It is crawling out of this hole in the front left corner and all of a sudden this gecko is standing there, looking at me—or maybe it wanted a better view of Russian MTV, I don’t know—and I was, completely, all-encompassingly, stumped.
What to do in this situation?
The first thing that crosses my mind is to act like I had never seen it happen in the first place. I’d just let Kirill handle it when he gets back. But what if this gecko goes on the loose and no one notices? What if it crawls into the study and I find it under my pillow in the middle of the night? Or worse—what if it is a liberation gecko, bent on releasing the masses of his imprisoned brethren and organizing a Russian reptilian rebellion against its former captors? Would I be caught in the middle? Just an innocent, unfortunate American bystander stuck in the crossfire of a cold-blooded uprising against the tyranny and oppression of Kirill’s enslaving rule?
I sit on the couch for several minutes, considering this unlikely scenario before determining that Russia might be, in all likelihood, slowly causing me to lose my mind.
“Do you know anything about lizards?” I ask my friend Kelly, who I have just dialed up on my piece-of-crap cell phone.
“I think their tails fall off if you pick them up.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I heard that. On the Discovery Channel.”
“So what should I do?”
“Well, you can’t just leave it there.”
“Yeah, I got that far. You’re not helping.”
“Get a big bowl and try to get it into the bowl with a towel. That way if the tail falls off you will still have the tail in the bowl and won’t have to touch it.”
“They aren’t poisonous though, right?”
“Oh. Well I don’t know. You’ll have the towel…”
“Ok. Thanks, Kelly.”
There is this unique look—one that I have never seen duplicated before or since—that is the look of a Russian host brother who walks into the apartment he’s living in with his mom and the first thing he sees is an American exchange student with a big stewing pot in one hand and a pink flowered bath towel wrapped around the other, crouched down in the defensive stance of a point guard, facing a stack of reptile aquariums and looking over his shoulder with a stupid, how-do-I-explain-this-one look on his face.
“I, um… your, your… animal… exited.” ‘Gecko’? ‘Lizard’? Not even ‘reptile’? Why didn’t I pay more attention on the vocab section where the family goes to the zoo?
Kirill smiles, still confused but too polite to ask me what it was I had been trying to do. He says something and walks up to the aquarium, opens the front upward swinging hinged face of the tank, brushes the lizard into it, then closes the door and quietly relieves me of the pot and bath towel.
“Um. Thanks,” I say.
“What? Were you going to cook him?” Kirill can’t resist himself.
The reptiles aren’t so bad, actually. After Speedy, my next pet was a snake—the next in a long procession of compromised pet allowances by my parents leading up to the dog I had asked for since I was six. It’s spiders that freak me out. Throw a crazy Russian with a Kalishnikov underneath a trenchcoat at me and I’m fine—but watch me scream like my nuts are in a sumo death grip at the sight of a daddy-longlegs crawling across the floor.
Except Kirill feeds the reptiles crickets and the crickets seem to have an even better knack at escaping enclosures than the geckos. Don’t ask me anything more about the crickets, though.
Maybe the university thing is a cover-up. Maybe Kirill is really a black market exotic pet dealer who is engaged in a ring of deception against the Russian mobs who are trying to control exotic exports to the Mediterranean shipping port in Croatia through connections in the Eastern European former Soviet bloc. Maybe that’s why someone tried to break into the apartment!
Hey, I’m not with him, really. I don’t know anything about his dealings. I’m just an innocent American, trying to finish up my study abroad program. What? No. Language study. No I’m not a spy. I’m not a spy! I swear… please no, don’t dunk my head in that vat of grease, no, I swear, I don’t know anything! I don’t—
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