Almost forgot: regarding today's game, Mishah's being ambiguous. In his dream tonight, we lost, but there was no score. And yesterday, we won in his dream, 1:0. He wrote me that the only thing that's clear is that it's not gonna be a shameful game.

(Are there adult-looking devices for little kids: a laptop, a cell phone, all kinds of cords, remote control, etc. Black or silver, not all that flowery-pink kind of shit? Marta is not letting me write. She almost crawled for the first time yesterday to get to my cell... By the way, I don't worry about her not crawling: some kids do, others don't, I've been told.)

Have been trying to write about it for way over a month now:

My wonderful friend Tanya, the one I wrote about in that New York Times piece back in 2004, is in New York City now!!!

She's been awarded a scholarship to attend the summer Yiddish language program at NYU - this one, I guess.

I'm so proud of her, and very, very happy.

I've been told that she didn't like NYC at first (she arrived there Sunday), but is getting used to it gradually.

Again, I'm totally proud of her - and hope that she'll love this adventure and will do good in her classes! And will end up loving the city.

By the way, in addition to Yiddish, Tanya studies Arabic, Hebrew, and a few other, European, languages. Which ones, I have to ask - I can never remember them all )))

Someone somewhere wrote that last time he went to see a movie was The Titanic ten years ago.

My immediate inner reaction was, Oh my God, has it been ten years already? I haven't seen The Titanic but I babysitted my friends' 1 1/2-year old while they went to see it; it was also the day I defended my diploma - not that I regret spending the whole long evening with the wonderful little Jesse, but it was definitely the wrong way to celebrate the end of 17 years of all the schools and colleges. But at least I still remember the day now.

Anyway, it hasn't been ten years yet - just eight. Very soon, though, it'll be ten years since I left for the States the second time, to Iowa City. Sometime in mid-August, I guess. Ten years. So sad to think about it, for way too many reasons.

Time flies: it'll soon be three weeks since Marta and I are here. I may briefly go to the city this weekend - I'll probably experience culture shock there.

I'm so used to living here by now that I really envy the people on the upper floors: I wish I could hang my stuff out to dry like they do. I do have a rope outside - the landlady showed it to me - but I can't risk having someone spit on Marta's stuff or something, plus someone was using this rope for their socks and other shit the other day. Inside the apartment, there's so little sun and so much humidity, it takes days for everything to dry.

Yesterday was a day off - the Constitution Day - and it was impossibly crowded here, crowded both with people and cars. And very hot: +30 Celcius in the shade. Today, garbage is everywhere, the five or so containers they put up across the lake from the sanatorium are totally not enough. Ukrainians are not used to taking their garbage with them and disposing of it someplace where it won't harm the environment. However, it's still nowhere near as dirty here as it was outside St. Pete two years ago. The really bad thing about it all, though, is that some shit is burning outside and it affects the air - smells like Moscow's smog, makes me panic.

A dear friend of mine wrote she was so nervous yesterday, she almost ate her TV set.

This line in her email looked especially cute next to her signature line: head of the department at a bank.

***

Mishah's brother cried when he called Mishah yesterday.

***

Mishah has forwarded me a post from a fan forum, by someone from Crimea - here's my loose translation:

HAPPY VICTORY! I've no words... I was as happy (well, not as happy :)) in 1975 and 1986 (and it had nothing to do with our team):).

P.S. Even I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude toward our team in our small town (Yevpatoria), where almost everyone who moved toward or next to us were yelling "Ukraine the champion!" I was even more surprised by the cars and all driving by at ONE o'clock at night with UKRAINIAN flags and yelling "Ukraine the champion!"...

And this is Crimea :)))

***

"Our whole country wants to see Blokhin with his head shaved!" - that was one of the banners at the game yesterday, referring to the promise our couch, Oleg Blokhin, made - to shave all his hair off if Ukraine wins the World Cup.

Molodtsi, khloptsi!!!!!!!!!

I called mama, she opened the window and stopped hearing me - there's a huge celebration on Khreshchatyk! Sounded like Maidan!

Being on my own with Marta and having a slow dial-up connection isn't a good combination when it comes to writing. Here're two pictures - and maybe I'll add something later:





P.S. Mish jan, in your dream you saw 1:0 and 7:1, right? And 7:1 is the ratio of Ukrainian bets for our 1:0 victory in today's game, right? And this dream was a few days ago, not today, right? Or have I mixed it all up?

I should probably say something about the so-called Orange Coalition. Instead, I go on and on about some meaningless crap - cops in the middle of nowhere. Well, okay, here goes: I'm glad they've finally agreed on the coalition. Very good for them. It was both hard and easy to imagine a Yushchenko-Yanukovych coalition, and the public reaction to it. Now, back to the real world: all's quiet here - I'm off to bed.

I hate our police.

Half an hour ago, just after 11 pm, someone rang on the door. I had Marta on me, so I decided not to get up, but they persisted, so I went and asked who that was.

They said they were from police and asked for the landlady, calling her by her full name. I didn't open the door, told them she wasn't here. They asked who I was. When I told them I'd call her on her cell, they cursed and left, said they needed to speak to her personally.

I called her anyway, and she said she had no idea why they were looking for her.

I know for sure they were cops: the car they left in was marked as a police car. I couldn't see the license plate number, though.

It feels pretty lousy to be cursed by cops in the middle of the night in somebody else's apartment on the ground floor next to a forest and not far from a cemetery, with a 6-month-old asleep in the bedroom.

I won't be able to fall asleep now, I'm afraid.

Part of this ruin is visible from our kitchen window - but there's another, inhabited, building that separates us from it; otherwise, if we were closer to it, I wouldn't have agreed to spend my summer here.

There're many buildings like this everywhere in this part of the world, and each one has many human stories attached to it, and I've realized it only now, after our landlady had told me hers.

She was supposed to get a small apartment in that building. She has worked for the sanatorium for more than 20 years now, and the building was being built for the sanatorium employees. Several directors changed since the Soviet Union collapsed, she said, but none is really interested to find the money to finish the construction.

She's lucky her sanatorium is still functioning. Most seem to have been deserted.

It kind of makes me dizzy to think of it: one day, you're the lucky one, with the new apartment looming not on the horizon but almost next door - very lucky, unlike many others. Then you wake up in a different country, and for the next decade you keep waking up with the unfinished building slowly turning into a ruin right outside your window. And your apartment is in that building, never to be yours.

There're two rooms here, it's a very damp place, but in general it's okay, considering its gorgeous location. There used to be four of them living here, but their daughter has moved out. Now it's the landlady, her husband and their 12-year-old son.

And some 20 years ago, when the landlady just began working here, the apartment belonged to an old woman, and the landlady and her daughter (and, possibly, her husband) lived in the room Marta and I are in now, the smaller one (the other room is the TV room). The landlady was very nice to the old woman, and the old woman was very kind to her. She used to take the landlady's 4-year-old daughter for walks, despite being almost blind: "Put on that red dress, then I'll be able to see you," she used to tell the landlady's daughter. When the old woman died, she left the apartment to the landlady - not to her own son and his wife.

***

They have a dacha, by the way. They are at their dacha now, for the whole time we are renting their apartment and using it as our dacha.

***

There's some unfinished construction at the sanatorium, too: right next to the indoor swimming pool, an almost finished brick building that will never be finished. It was supposed to be a gym, I guess - a school-type gym with huge windows.

The ruin is very ugly, and it depresses me a lot - mainly because it reminds me of Beslan, of the school gym there and what they turned it into, and when I think of Beslan now, in my head there're the TV and photo pictures of the gym there, the ones that were broadcast and published, but also I see what I've read in C. J. Chivers' Esquire story, a reconstruction, very scary, an unforgettable read, dreadful scenes attached to the images, seeing for myself, from the inside, what I've been trying to imagine from way outside nearly two years ago.

A local boy killed a kitten and blinded two more a few days ago here. Poked their eyes out. Deliberately. For fun.

I didn't see it. Mishah heard the neighbors discuss it. "Never leave Marta alone outside when this boy's around," he told me, before describing what the boy had done.

The boy's 6 or 7, nothing memorable. When I first noticed him, he didn't want to share his roller skates with another kid - and that other kid called him zhlob, a slightly rude way of telling someone he's greedy (though not the only meaning of the word; it also means 'a redneck').

An older kid tried to kick the boy's ass for the kittens, but a neighbor from the second floor told him to stop, said he was no better himself if he could beat a small, helpless boy.

(Me, I don't think the boy's helpless. I think he should learn what pain feels like, someone's gotta show him, maybe next time he'll think twice.)

He's not from a poor family: his roller skates aren't something many people here would afford.

I looked at him again after Mishah had told me about the kittens and it made me shiver: what is it like for his parents, I thought, to look at their sadist of a son and know that one day he'll end up in jail - because one day kittens won't be enough for him anymore.

I told our landlady about it.

She said the boy's father was a former cop. She used the word ment - and she wasn't saying it tenderly.

She had no doubts that the boy would never end up in jail, even if he deserved it - thanks to his ex-cop dad.

Our ants - our domestic ants - are having a wedding/mating season: hundreds of bastards and their winged bitches are all over the bathtub and on the floor under the hallway lamp.

They forced me to commit a few anticides yesterday.

In the park, there are multitudes of those tiny greenish caterpillars hanging from every single oak tree on those tiny thin threads - they are the quickest creatures I've ever seen: as soon as they touch the surface - any surface - they create a tiny, thin, almost transparent pocket over themselves and go to sleep there, waiting to metamorphose into something. We found one such caterpillar on Mishah's camera last Saturday, and they are also very fond of my umbrella and Marta's stroller.

The stroller is also very popular with little wild spiders: there's a couple nearly invisible webs on it at the end of each walk.

Our domestic spiders seem to prefer my slippers.

***

I'm a city girl, but I'm really enjoying all these encounters with nature - no matter how much I complain.

)))

It's official: my husband's clairvoyant!!!!!!!!!

)))))))))

I'm trying to sms him, but the messages aren't going through - because, I guess, the whole country is sms-ing at this very moment.

We have won with the score from Mishah's tonight's dreams - 4:0. And there was a goal by Kalynychenko (I've just noticed that he's very cute), which they didn't count (there was that triple fall then, right? - one Ukrainian, one Saudi, and the Saudi goalie...) - so this is the explanation for the 1:0 thingy. Ha!

Rebrov's goal was such a beauty - I'm very happy for him, very happy that he's doing great again, after years of obscurity!

A very happy day.

Just for the record: Mishah didn't dream the score for today's game against the Saudis - maybe because he was on the overnight train, not a good setting for a clairvoyant person )))

P.S. There were some 4:0 and 1:0 in his dreams, but he says that's not it.

This place is so quiet during the week, especially when it's as rainy as today, but on weekends crowds arrive to make shashlyk and swim in the lake, and I really wish we knew how to make good shashlyk, too, because the smell of dozens of shashlyks that fills the air on weekends is just totally and unbearably wonderful. Maybe we'll figure it out before the summer's end.

***

All these people at the lake are from Kyiv, and I may even know some of them, but it doesn't feel so when we walk in the forest on weekends: it feels as if we're hundreds miles away from Kyiv.

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