The Place Exchange

My-tì-schì Maya Guileva Gò-rod nash My-tì-schì, Rò-di-nòi zo-vè-tsià.

Our town My-tì-schì, That which we call our mòther-lànd.

Whilst nobody, including me, remembers a single, other line from this malignant song, its motif still mockingly follows me to all family gatherings like a particularly bad, incurable case of an aural disease.

In my own, over-inflected six-year-old voice, this line comes ringing, verging on internal tremor, dragging with it a hazy memory of a Russian sub-urban town from which I had spawned, or simply — of home.

Whenever I recall it, Mytischi is always overcast, its streets of concrete apartment blocks stamped with an austere, shadowless light. It’s one of many towns that has not yet woken up in a haste to remove the statue of Lenin from its main square, so the git just stands there dumbly, hand still raised to the sky, lonely and poor, stripped of the republic, of honours and of followers. Behind him stands a battered Theatre “Fest”, a hub of battered stage productions and worn out troops, hanging by a loose, boozy thread, whose only salvation from total zapoi is the call-back for the annual New Years rush, which they accept submissively, understaffed and underpaid, rotating a malted beard, a vulgar pair of blue velvet mittens, one shabby sceptre and a pawned smile between redemptive acts as the granddaddy figure of Ded Moroz and his manic granddaughter Snegurochka.

On no particular winter, I remember being inside its derelict walls, 14