The room has three objects in it that are not the bed and the small table and the hot-plate: a kettle, a cup, a Bible in Russian that someone left in the drawer of the small table and that you open once and close without reading.
The courtyard outside the window is a rectangle of grey that is not yet night. A woman two floors down is smoking at her kitchen window. A boy on a balcony is throwing a ball against a wall and catching it. The ball makes the only sound. The wall sounds like a wall that has heard the ball before.
You fill the kettle at the bathroom tap. The tap runs loud then soft. The water tastes of something metal.
You drink tea you do not make properly — the bag in too long, the water not quite boiled. You eat two of the biscuits that were in the cupboard in a sealed plastic sleeve. The biscuits taste of nothing in particular and you finish the sleeve.
You sit on the bed.
Your boots are still on.
I take them off.
I take off the shirt. I take off the jeans. The jeans have the rubles in the back pocket still, seventeen thousand six hundred of them. I move the rubles to the inside of the boot on the floor — the boot is the thing a thief looks in last, after everything else, and by that time you are already gone. You have been taught this kind of thing by men who did not teach you, and by a woman who did, in one sentence, on an airport bench.
I put on the long shirt that is too large for me. I do not know whose it is. It was in the drawer above the Bible.
The pillow smells of something Russian I do not recognize.
I lie on my back.
The boy on the balcony has stopped. The woman at the kitchen window has gone. There is a car somewhere turning a corner and there is a voice calling someone named Sasha and the voice is the voice of a woman who has called for Sasha many times and does not expect Sasha to answer. A sentence in Russian goes past the window, the words I do not catch, the tone I do. Impatient. Then gone.
I have been in a country for four hours and eleven minutes.
I am not my grandmother.
I am not my mother either. My mother has not been in this country ever. My mother is in a town I will not name, in a library that closes at nine, and she is awake right now because I am.
Keep your face still.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep.
I hear the pharmacy below — the small chime of its door opening, a late customer, the night-register of a city that has decided something about sleep. The courtyard tree has a bird in it that does not know it is a bird at 22:40.
I open my eyes.
The ceiling is still the ceiling.
The rubles are in the boot on the floor. The phone with no name on its single contact is on the small table. The photograph and the envelopes and the thing you are carrying east are in the bag under the bed where you put them before you took off the coat.
I have six days until the harbor.
I close my eyes again.
The tree. The bird. Sasha.
I am alone in a room in Moscow.
I am alone.