You think about your childhood. You remember your time in Moscow. Not in the center of the city, and without the glamour of big, central downtown metropolis that people liked to visit. You lived in a strictly residential area. You assumed the buildings had not been touched since the onset of communism. Instead of names, the buildings had numbers. You lived in building number seven with your grandmother and your uncle.
From the outside, each floor of your building seemed to come from a different building entirely. Most floors were painted different colors; some were not painted at all. Each was built in a slightly different way. Ten of these stacked up to form an eclectic birthday cake sort of building. The first floor was painted army green. It matched the front entrance door. The second was white, with clotheslines loaded full of linen dresses and undergarments swinging from the open balconies. You could smell the soap on the fabric as you waited for your uncle to open the front door. Everyone did laundry by hand. You had watched your grandmother do it every Friday. You could recognize the smell from the second floor as the bargain soap from the grocery store down the street. It came in a box of ten bars. Each bar was sterile white and soft to touch. You would open the box and squish the soap with eager fingers until white clumps ran down your arm. You told your grandmother you were helping her with laundry, but she said you were ruining the soap.
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The third floor was painted black. You were glad you didn’t live on the third floor because black was an unlucky color. You were glad you lived on the fourth floor. The fourth floor was made of light forest wood and smelled like polished leather. You wished that the fourth floor had open balconies to hang up laundry, but you liked having windows instead when it snowed.
When it snowed, you watched the older children carry bright, plastic sleds to school. They tied the rope on the front of the sled to their winter coats and held the straps of their backpacks with two, gloved hands. You wanted to start school too, but you had to move in with your parents first. You had to wait until they finished graduate school. Your parents lived in the United States. You weren’t sure if it snowed in the United States, but you wanted to have a sled in case it did. You learned how to say “sled” in English from a book of Curious George stories your mother gave you when she last visited. You thought you liked George by the pictures, but you couldn’t know for sure until you read the words. The words looked vaguely like Russian. They were even printed in the same black ink as the words in your other books. The pages also smelled the same when you turned them, a faint, yellow, wooden smell that made you think of starting school. You hoped that school would be full of books, but you were afraid you wouldn’t be able to read them. You tried to read the English letters like Russian until you realized that the letters made different sounds. The English words were sloppily put together in strings of gibberish. You wondered if English was a real language. You tried to pronounce the misshapen letters in the American way, but they hurt your tongue and stuck to the inside of your gums. You felt like you were chewing on pieces of metal that were too big for you to spit out. The pieces were jagged, heavy, and made of frozen steel beams that you fashioned into odd shapes with your teeth until you were ready to force them through your lips. You hated the sound they made. They would crash into Curious George with a metallic clamor, cutting the edges of your lips as they fell. You waited for the ringing tone of metal hitting metal to fade from the pages. You wanted to like the George in the pictures, but your lips still tingled with the English words that were printed in obtrusive black beside him. You heard the ringing tone. It sat in your ears awkwardly as you squinted back at George. His cheerful, friendly expression hadn’t changed. You thought that someone so friendly would prefer to speak Russian. Russian was colorful cartoons and board games, chocolate cake and bicycle rides. It was dozens of pigeon’s wings fluttering in close circles around you as you fed them sunflower seeds. It was your hands quietly collecting bread from the kitchen when you spilled an entire bag of sunflower seeds on the concrete.
You never felt as though you wanted to leave, but you knew that your mother never planned to have you stay. Your uncle hadn’t moved a single time in his entire life. He slept in the same room since he was old enough to tuck himself into bed. He took you to every playground in the neighborhood before you could walk by yourself. When you began to walk, he bought you a bike. You rode the bike to the playground about two blocks from your building. Moscow had about three playgrounds on every block, but this one was your favorite. It had been there for years. It was made entirely of wood and metal that someone had to repaint every April. You could see the rust pushing through the coats of pastel paints. The rust creaked each night when gusts of winds pushed the metal pieces of the swing against each other. The seat of the swing was made from one, solid plank of wood. It was painted red when you moved, red like your bike. You came back to visit next summer. The playground was repainted and your uncle had sold your bike.
