Russian Tattoo by Elena Gorokhova

find a teaching job, helping him with his Russian grammar and pronunciation, listening to him practice the violin, cooking minute steak. Maybe she would even continue to live with him, providing Karen the Russian professor didn’t mind this arrangement, providing the new foreign wife didn’t become a stone around his neck, dragging him down the slope of routine existence from the heights of classical music and cosmic research.
    She seemed mature and independent, cynical of the Soviet circus around her, eager and ready to make a new life. She seemed learned and well read. He thought she would look around, get used to the eight-hour time difference, and plunge into the culture, just like he did on his six-week stay in Leningrad.
    All by himself, last summer he ventured into a gastronom near the university dorm in search of yogurt, puzzling the potbellied woman behind the counter, who didn’t seem to know the word. He was pronouncing it correctly, he was sure of that, rolling the tongue against his front upper teeth, just as his Swarthmore professor had taught him. Nevertheless, the woman stared at him with annoyance, her arms folded across her stained, white-coated stomach. Yogurt, he repeated again, only to watch her shrug and turn away. He found another store and asked again because he was persistent and unafraid. He even befriended a black marketeer who had approached him at a metro station entrance, asking to exchange dollars into rubles at a rate of one to three. The black marketeer, Valery, invited him to his apartment at the end of the metro line, where his wife was doing the laundry in a Finnish washing machine—Valery’s pride—parked in the living room, which, as it turned out, wasn’t really a living room but a bedroom with a folding table and a sleeper couch against the wall. There are no living rooms in Russia, said Valery, a little culture lesson Robert immediately tucked away.
    A year later, back in Austin, Robert couldn’t understand why this Russian he brought here wasn’t asking questions, making friends, trying to blend in. He felt disappointed in her. He felt trapped. How could a smart, English-speaking woman with a green card and a roof over her head not be able to figure out how to find a job or what to buy in a supermarket to make dinner? A supermarket so much better stocked than any yogurt-deficient gastronom in Leningrad.

    In a room with fat folders stacked on shelves along the walls, I sit on the other side of one of the four desks. Across from me is a woman with hurried movements and nervous eyes, a cup of coffee next to the form she’s filling out, a pencil she is holding like a cigarette in her left hand.
    â€œFirst you have to sign this,” she says and points to the bottom of a page filled with tiny single-spaced print.
    I try to read a few lines, but the words refuse to make sense. “What is it?” I ask.
    â€œJust a standard agreement,” says the woman. “You agree to pay the agency your first paycheck and ten percent of your salary thereafter for a year.”
    I have no idea if this is a regular practice in employment agencies or a ploy to enslave a newcomer ignorant of the rules. I don’t know what constitutes a paycheck here or how much people make. I run my eyes over the document again, the words staring back at me in their indiscernible force, like linked rows of black fences. With her fixed gaze, the woman lets me know that at this moment my possible future employment hinges on my signature, so I pick up a pen and sign my name at the bottom of the page.
    â€œGood girl,” she says, plucking the paper away. As she files it into a folder, I see a small name plaque on the desk, stella conroy . With her nervous eyes and nails bitten down to the flesh of her fingertips, she doesn’t look like a Stella.
    â€œWhat are your skills?” she asks me.
    From her dismissive voice it is immediately obvious she knows that I