The Russian is not yours.
The Russian on the signs at Sheremetyevo is not yours, and the Russian on the overhead announcement is not yours, and the Russian the woman behind you is speaking into her phone is not yours, and you have been in a country for thirty-one minutes and you are already doing the thing your grandmother used to warn you about when she was alive. You are counting what you do not have in a language you do not own.
It is safer to go east.
The sentence arrives the way it has been arriving for a week. It is the sentence that got you on the plane. It is the sentence that walked you through the gate at Istanbul Airport, and the Aeroflot cabin, and the moment the plane tilted and the Black Sea went under the wing for the second time in ten days. You say it to yourself when the woman in the kiosk looks at your passport too long and then looks at you and then looks at your passport. You say it to yourself at the yellow line on the floor where the woman waves you forward.
Your Russian in the kiosk is not your Russian. It is your grandmother's Russian held at a distance, the words she gave you and the case endings she did not.
Komandirovka. You say. Work trip. It is a word your grandmother did not have reason to say, and you have a reason, and the word comes out of your mouth with the shape of someone else's mouth around it.
The stamp. The slide. The passport back across the plexiglass.
You walk into Russia.
Arrivals is a hall the size of a small stadium and three-quarters empty at fifteen-forty. The cold on the floor is different from the cold in Istanbul. Istanbul was the cold of stone. This is the cold of metal. You feel it through the soles of the boots you did not take off since Kameriye Sokak.
Your braid is still in from the plane. Your shirt is the shirt you wore in Istanbul yesterday. The cut on your cheek has become the thin line a cut becomes. The bruise is under the shirt where the shirt knows it. You have not eaten since the chicken-and-rice the flight attendant brought, which you did eat because Yelena would have told you to eat.
You are twenty-three. You are in Moscow. You are alive.
Before you leave arrivals you change two hundred US dollars at the kiosk at the rate of eighty-eight rubles to the dollar and come away with seventeen thousand six hundred rubles folded into your jeans. The rate is on a small electronic board that flickers every third second. The rate has not been this kind of rate for any of your parents' lives.
The woman is at the coffee-stand opposite baggage claim. You know her the way you know the people the network has sent to you — they make themselves easy, and then they make themselves easier, and by the time you walk to them you have already walked.
"Vera." She says your name with the stress on the first syllable, the Russian way, and then she corrects it to the English way. "Vera."
"Yes."
"You look like your week."
Her coat is the coat of a woman who buys her coats thinking about the wind. She is somewhere in her fifties. She has the hands of a woman who has done kitchen work for money — you can see it in the way the fingers sit near each other, the knuckles rounded by heat. She lifts her own coffee and takes a sip and puts it back down on the formica and the formica has a ring from where the cup was before.
"Come."
She walks you through the glass wall and out past the taxi rank and into a grey Toyota with a dent in the passenger door. The city outside the window is the color of a tired shirt. The highway is Russian the way highways are the same everywhere and also not — the signage-blue is a shade you have not met before. The heater is on and cooks the synthetic upholstery and the smell is the smell of cars that have worked for a long time.
She does not talk on the drive. The not-talking is what the network does. You do not ask where. She does not tell.
At a red light she says, "Your phone."
You hand her the phone from Kadıköy. The one that was not yours. The one you have been carrying because carrying was easier than deciding. She does not look at it. She turns it off. She breaks the SIM with two fingers and a small metal tool from the console cup-holder and she does it without looking at it, the way a woman dices an onion while talking.
"This one."
She hands you a new phone. It is a cheap Xiaomi, factory-new. The screen is on. There are no apps. There is one contact. There is no name on the contact. There is a number that is not a Russian number. Your hand receives the phone and the phone is warm from her coat.
"Ten minutes from the hotel. I stop at the corner. You walk."
"Thank you."
"Don't."
She says it the way a woman with twenty-five years of this behind her says it.
The hotel is not a hotel. It is the fourth floor of a building on a street called something you do not read, above a pharmacy that is open at seventeen-fifty on a Tuesday. Pharmacies in Moscow are open. Moscow is a city that does not sleep. Moscow has decided it will not sleep. The building went up in 1957 for railway-workers' families. The pharmacy below has been open every year since. Above, from an open window, a man is saying something in Russian slow and flat, the Russian of someone whose tongue lives in it. Not kiosk-Russian. Not yours. The key is in an envelope under a mat. The room is small. The bed is single. The window opens on a courtyard with a tree.
You close the door.
You sit on the bed.
You do not take off the boots. You do not take off the coat. You sit.
Your hands are shaking. They are shaking at a rate that does not match any rate of your body that you know. You watch them. The left is shaking faster than the right. You put them on your knees and they shake on your knees. You put them under your thighs and they shake under your thighs. You sit with the shaking. You do not name the shaking.
Ten minutes pass. Twelve.
The shaking does not stop; the shaking becomes slower; the shaking becomes the body's slow return to itself from wherever it has been. You do not cry. You would not know where the crying would start. Istanbul is on your left side and Moscow is under your boots and your grandmother is in a country you are inside of without being inside of her country.
I am in Moscow and my grandmother is not.
I have not slept in a room alone since the first night in Istanbul, and I am in Moscow, and the pharmacy downstairs is open, and the tree in the courtyard has a bird in it I can hear, and the hands are slower now.
It is safer to go east.
I am east.
The phone is in my hand. The phone does not know it is mine. The boot on the floor has a ring of mud from a country that is four hours to the west. I look at the boot and the mud has dried and it is a country I am no longer inside of and is inside of me.
I stand up.
The hands stand up with me.
I take off the coat. I do not take off the boots.