On his 35th  birthday, Misha Bobitch, lover of chess and unavailable women, left Russia for a new life in the New World.

    After a flight punctuated by generous helpings of (reheated) pelmeni, more or less doable shots of Vodka and three stopovers in equally overcrowded and under-heated airports, he spotted a cab parked right outside the front door of the arrivals terminal of JFK airport; its driver with facial expression and demeanor slightly less wintry and Soviet (maybe Czech or Polish) than his own. During the first leg of the ride into Manhattan, through the unremarkable landscape of quasi-suburban Queens, Misha paid little attention to that non-splendor of slush, sameness and sunless-ness which marks the outer boroughs of midwinter New York. His view was, instead, inward, his mind filled with snippets of Moscow on the Hudson and a blur of scenes from Cagney-Bogart shoot-em-ups that he’d watched in the well-stocked (with Western films) library of a friend whose dad worked in the KGB’s vaunted media department.

    Seeing that his passenger was near numb from having just completed the multi-stop odyssey that is so often the fate of his fellow cast-offs of the Great Social Experiment who flew “coach” from points East, the driver chose to spend the time with a soft stream of jazz piano from a local FM station rather than try to engage his (more or less) compatriot in conversation. When they approached the East River, the cabbie was startled by the sound of his passenger’s voice. Misha jumped right into it.“Can you recommend a good place to stay? I don’t have much money and I don’t need anything luxurious!” Having made his often unhappy wife of 12 years a bit less unhappy with a state-of-the-art television paid for with tips from umpteen-plus fellow Eastern Europeans who were grateful for his recommendation of a relatively cheap hotels in the epicenter of greed and Darwinian capitalism, the driver nodded his head and made the last leg of the journey into Manhattan to the tune of a tried and true list of its best deals in the hostelry department.

     After a quick check-in at the midtown Manhattan YMCA, receipt in hand for two prepaid weeks, Misha was able to pry from the young desk clerk the name and address of the nearest all-night café. This wasn’t an especially challenging task for him once the young and by the look of his ketchup-stained clip-on tie not-overly-hip law student-cum- night clerk realized that he had just been given a reprieve from dissecting an endless  queue  of torts and Supreme Court verdicts. Now all-night cafe equals chess in certain parts of Manhattan, and hunting up a chess game on a bitterly cold January evening was certainly not calculated to make a reasonably cultured Muscovite feel any less at home on his first night out on foreign shores. The ritual of checking into a humbly priced Manhattan hostelry out of the way, Misha’s mind, as he entered his room, was occupied by the promise of hot tea and chess held out by the post-it note just given to him by the desk clerk with the name and address of a nearby coffee house scribbled on it. He quickly shoved his suitcase under the bed and was out the ”Y’s” front door in no time at all, thus allowing the newly goatee-ed desk clerk/ law student to resume his assault on his cardboard tub of Egg Foo Yong and study guide to the New York State bar exam.  

  All in all, Misha was neither happy nor sad, since his leaving Moscow was a decision based on neither the whim of the born adventurer nor a deeply felt dissatisfaction with life in the Motherland. Misha, in fact, was not a deep man. He had no real idea what his life was about, and certainly no idea of what it was about to become.

(To be continued)