It was a dreary Saturday morning which led to an equally dreary Saturday afternoon...the day was chocked full of ennui, and so was I...it was overcast and chilly and there was absolutely nothing going on to disrupt the inescapable skull-crushing boredom of it all...after looking out the window at the dead tree in the front yard for the better part of an hour, and thinking of when I should hold services for it, I puttered around in the garage for a bit thinking I was doing something useful, but I wasn’t...I could have cleaned the garage but my heart wasn’t in it...so I listened to the occasional raindrops scattering on the roof and a few blowing onto the garage window...then the phone rang and it was my friend Georgy and he said a few friends were getting together that night to go out and have dinner and a few drinks...that sounded good to me and all of a sudden the nothingness of the day had taken a turn for the better...so on a chilly Saturday night that December, windy with a mournful cold blowing about, he picked me up and we drove over and huddled inside a wannabe Greek restaurant for a good, inexpensive steak and some watered down drinks...we’d been going there for years, but tonight was different...our waitress, who none of us had seen before, had a short skirt and some incredibly long legs wrapped in some black silky stockings...her blonde hair falling halfway down her back...she spoke with some kind of accent and we all tried to guess what it was...one guy said Swedish, another guy said Polish, someone else said she was from Greece, and I think he was only half-joking or more probably half-drunk...being half-Russian myself, I guessed Russian but I wasn’t sure...it might have been the vodka doing the thinking and talking...and it wouldn’t be the first time or the last...when she returned with our orders, we asked her where she was from...she said with a blank expression that she was from Russia...“Really” I said, “I thought so”...she probably thought I was lying or she really didn’t care if I was or not...she stared ahead with eyes as cold as a Siberian winter and a look on her face as distant as Vladivostok... unmoved by our curiosity, real or otherwise, and obviously unhappy in her work.. she looked out of place to be working at that job...it’s more the kind of job that middle-aged women who are a little too friendly and wearing too much makeup and perfume perform...it probably wasn’t the first time a bunch of guys who had drank too many drinks had tried to get warm with this female comrade...so we ate and drank and the conversation turned as we waited for four Miss Universe’s to come in, but surprisingly they didn’t...I was going to ask our friend, the Russian waitress if she wanted to go out some time, but I decided she was a nyet waiting to happen...after hanging out in the restaurant’s bar for a while watching some football game on the little tv, we went over to another bar that wasn’t far away and not much was going on there either...I don’t know where the four Miss Universes were, but it didn’t look like they were in town tonight...so we drank too much and talked too much and called it a night, and I was back at my gulag before long...we’ve went back to that restaurant many times since, but we never saw that stone cold Russian beauty again.
