"Tell your lover, 'I miss your Monsieur Mindless,'" my mother said to me one night. "It never fails to fl.u.s.ter them, but men like to know you are thinking about them. Miss your, monsieur-get it, Stalina?" She was simply being philosophical about men. Her experience was limited to my father and Maxim, but her delusions made her expansive with advice. She knew English and French and would mix the languages in our conversations often. I was very confused, and had been crying about Trofim.

"Yes, Mother, I miss his Monsieur Mindless," I said.

"Don't bother with him; he's a two-faced sn.o.b. You can always find someone else to f.u.c.k."

I was too shocked to react, beyond choking back my tears. When I told my friends the expression, they thought my mother was hysterically funny. I informed them that she was losing her mind. My friends still loved the expression, and when we would gossip about the men in or out of our lives, "Monsieur Mindless" was always there. Sometimes I still miss Trofim, but luckily, I live here at the motel and have this red heart-shaped tub to soak away any troubles in the water and bubbles.

That terrible night, a fellow who had been to the motel several times, always with a different woman, rented the "Roller Coaster Fun Park" for two hours. After half an hour he came to the front desk to get change for a fifty-dollar bill. I got a better look at him and saw how strangely he was dressed. His black raincoat had a fur collar, and his head was covered with a baseball cap that had "I Love Berlin" embroidered in red across the front. Previously, I remembered him being bald, but this time he had chin-length black hair sticking out from under the hat. I recognized him for the distinctive pockmarks on his face that had the shape of half moons on both his high cheekbones. He usually signed in as Santa Claus, but that day he signed the name Julius Caesar.

"h.e.l.lo, how are you today?" I gave him my usual greeting.

"You recognize me?" he shot back.

"It's your handwriting. Santa Caesar, Julius Claus, it makes no difference-you have a very distinctive half-moon shape to your...letter C, sir."

"Santa Caesar, I like that," he said.

I heard the door to the Roller Coaster Room open, and then a woman's voice. "Hey, what are you doing? I thought you'd be right back. I'm feeling lonely all by myself in here." She had left the door half open.

To my regular customer I said, "Julius Caesar was a very complicated man."

"Was he now? You are a smart little lady."

As he turned to go to the room, he looked back at me and said, "What is now amiss that Caesar and his senate should redress?"

It took me a moment, but I added, "Act Three, Scene Four."

"Act Three, Scene One," he said as he tipped his baseball hat with the wig attached.

He was in the room for less than an hour, and then he left without the woman. As he pa.s.sed the front desk, he said, "She's resting up for the time we have left. Here's an extra twenty in case she needs more time."

An hour pa.s.sed, and I heard nothing from the room, and there was no answer to my phone call. A hardening knot of unease began to grow sharp tentacles in my stomach. I chewed an antacid, which helped, but I still felt that something was terribly wrong.

The crow was making a huge racket outside the room. There is an ugly side to the short-stay world, and this was one I would like to say never happened. As I opened the door, the strong smell of the woman's perfume hit me, and then I saw her, a scarf pulled tight around her twisted neck. She was hanging dead from the roller-bed-coaster.

I called the police. Two came quickly. Many of them are my customers. They help to keep my business going smoothly and don't want any trouble for their comrades. The woman, a local prost.i.tute, was one they knew well.

As one of the officers picked his teeth with a matchbook, he said, "We'll call this a suicide. No worries-we'll take care of the body. You can go back to work."

The other officer said, "No need to mention this to anyone, Ms. Folskaya. We've got your back."

"My lips are sealed," I replied. The poor woman; what brought her to such a sad end I can never know.

Most of my work here at the motel is very routine, but as you can see, at times it can try my patience. And as with the events of that night, they can sometimes do much worse. Booking rooms, taking inquiries from hushed voices in random phone booths, or dealing with the demands of my regular customers who act like this is their own private club. This is my life, my work, my world now.

"What do you mean the Roller Coaster Room is booked?" one of them snapped just the other day.

"Sorry, it's first come first served; that's our policy," I responded.

"But I use the Roller Coaster Room every Thursday at three o'clock. I have now for a year."

"Why not try the Caribbean Room? It's very popular."

He is an older gentleman who always signs himself in as Mark Twain, a local hero here in the Hartford area.

"You've got me over a barrel. She's not going to like it; she likes to eat cotton candy while we..."

"Yes, I understand, but the Caribbean Room has its own romantic charms."

"Maybe I'll bring her a pina colada instead of the cotton candy."

"That's the spirit," I said.

Time somehow always moves on. Last week Carmela found half a green rubber s.e.xual pleasure device. I believe it is called a d.i.l.d.o. It was cut in half and left on the back seat in the Highway to Heaven Room. She never found the other half. People get crazy. I gave her a twenty-dollar bonus for dealing with that, and we had a good laugh. Another time a pair of fur-covered handcuffs was left in the Gazebo Room locked onto one of the bedposts. We had to dismantle the bed to remove them. Carmela wanted to give them to her boyfriend, but I warned her that without the key they could prove to be dangerous. She hung them on the wall of the linen room, where the cats love to swat at them. Yes, now we have more than one cat. Amalia recently went back to Russia to take care of her mother and left her cats, Shosta and Kovich, at the motel with me.

"They always liked you better," she said when she brought them by the motel before leaving.

I would miss my old friend. It was hard to hold a grudge after so long, and her referrals from the Majik Cleaning Agency were always very helpful at the motel. We talked about the bras and everything else.

"The past is the past," I told her. "Both the good and the bad."

"I am sorry, Stalina, it was a time when I had much confusion. And little money."

"You are a survivor, Amalia; we both are. I have many reasons to be grateful to you. Go to your mother; she needs you. I can promise you your cats will have a good life here at my motel."

Shosta and Kovich are that special breed of cat born and bred in Leningrad. Not many cats survived the siege, but the ones that did produced a very hardy strain of felines. These tough cats are a big part of the city's post-Soviet economy. The babushkas rescue the kittens from back alleys, sewers, and roofs and then sell them on bridges and corners near metro stations. Shosta and Kovich have become fat and lazy here in America, but occasionally they show their "Leningrad" side. They hunt with Svetlana, who learned everything from her surrogate mother, Zarzamora. The only photograph I took of Svetlana and the crow sits along here with the rest of my photo collection. I believe Shosta and Kovich were jealous of ZZ and her relationship with Svetlana. One day the cats chased the crow across the driveway, and she was struck and killed by a car leaving the motel. Svetlana was shaken, as was I. She did not eat for days and just sat under the pine trees where we buried the poor crow.

All in all, this place is not for the faint of heart. Overdoses and fires. Panty hose stretched, ripped, and tied around pillowcases, cigarettes burning on the edge of the toilet. Once a set of false teeth were found in the cup by the bathroom sink. How could someone forget those? It can all make for a very long day. As I recline in the heart-shaped tub, the photographs are my confidants, and with a gla.s.s or two of chilled vodka, my words flow freely. Nostrovya!

Thip!

Today, dear friends, marks my tenth anniversary here at the Liberty Motel in 2001. I am now Citizen Stalina, no longer Comrade Stalina. Giving up on my country was like severing ties with a lover. Like a haunting, sometimes I still catch a smell or see a shadow from a streetlamp that could only be Russia. Carmela and I call each other "comrade." It keeps our spirits up.

To my friends and family pictured before me, I say, "I offer you these blunt portraits to shed light on how the last ten years have been. Please pardon me this indulgence, as I drink in honor of this anniversary and my recent citizenship. Apeeteeta!"

Thiip!

Mmm, cold, thick vodka, like a fresh pillow against my face.

A toast to Nadia, my ex-boss and autocratic friend, who left five years ago to take her parents back to Petersburg to die. Without her I would not have the Liberty Motel. The other motels she put in the hands of her black suit boys. I am proud to say that our short-stay empire is thriving along Windsor Avenue here in Berlin, Connecticut. The city is still dying, and lucky for us, because as the city continues in a spiral down its sinkhole of recession, our short-stay motels continue to flourish.

To short stays and long sips! Spaseeba! Nadia!

Thiip!

I made Carmela my business partner. She knows beauty well and has used her love of the land when decorating our special rooms. She was inspired to complete the Caribbean Room, and she was thoughtful enough to incorporate my idea for the "cabana-bed" into the design, which pleased me very much. My most loyal customers, Joanie and Harry, waited with great antic.i.p.ation for the completion of that room. Ten years after the "roller coaster" incident, they are still conducting their affair "on the side," as they put it. Neither one wants to give up the other, so they accept their situation with dignity and are pleased to have a place like the Liberty to come to.

A toast to inspired romantic settings and Strauss and Sons Hardware, the local store where we buy everything to decorate the rooms! They always have everything I need, no matter how big or small.

Thiip!

The vodka when chilled correctly is so very smooth.

Carmela molded the blue carpet in the Caribbean Sunset Room into a theater of waves surrounding the cabana-bed, which stands on stilts and has a thatched roof. When the door opens, sounds of the ocean begin to play over and over. She is very, very clever. Harry likes the wraparound sunset mural painted on three walls.

"You see it from all sides when you are lying in the cabana-bed," Harry says. "It's all very intoxicating."

Joanie told me soon after the room was finished, "Harry got me some fancy-schmancy jasmine perfume for our 'Caribbean' time. Maybe someday we'll go to the real Caribbean. Until then, your rooms will have to do, Stalina."

That was six years ago. They have yet to visit the "real" Caribbean.

"Ginger and coconut are other scents you might want to try. I hear they can be very enticing," I told her one day when she was returning the key.

After she tried the new scents, she reported back to me. "The coconut made Harry sneeze, and the ginger made him itch where his thumb is missing."

That's when Joanie told me the story of how Harry lost his thumb.

"Harry used to run away when he was a boy from his home in Brooklyn. His father fought in World War II, was very strict, and wanted to punish him after he found him hitchhiking onto the BQE for the fifth time. Can you imagine? It's amazing Harry survived; he was only twelve years old. His father set the dog after him. The dog grabbed his hand, and as Harry tried to slip away, the dog's jaw locked down on his thumb. Harry's mother ran away with him from the hospital in the middle of the night. She left Brooklyn and moved here to Berlin and got a job in an umbrella factory. They heard later his father put his head in the oven in their apartment in Canarsie. The neighbors smelled gas and called the police. His father was still alive but unconscious. They revived him, but he was like a three-year-old. When his mother died, Harry went to the nursing home where his father lived. He took a gun and a bottle of a.r.s.enic, but he could not kill him. The drooling, rocking, and loud cartoons got to Harry. He told me the story when we were in high school. That's when I fell in love with him. He's a real mensch."

A toast to your love, Harry and Joanie, my most loyal customers.

Thiiip!

Mmm, peppery, this vodka is.

Nadia wrote after her parents pa.s.sed away within a month of each other.

Dear Stalina,

My parents are gone. Putin gave them special honors. They were mentors to young "Vladi" in his early KGB days. Did you know it is illegal to spread human ashes in Russia? I had no idea. I put their remains together in a Chinese urn my mother kept on her mantel in Brooklyn. You may have seen it when you visited them. She brought it with her when they left Brighton Beach. They sold many of their things at a flea market at the beach before they left. I wish they had kept some of their photographs from Russia. My father had a photo taken with Stalin. You can get good money for that sort of Soviet memorabilia. But the urn my mother refused to sell. It was a very valuable antique that my father purchased on one of his trips to China. I keep it by my bedside. I miss them very much. Petersburg is more beautiful than ever. Much is happening here for the three-hundred-year celebration, and of course the mafia still runs the city, so everything functions very well. Why don't you come visit for the festivities?

Your friend and comrade,

Nadia

Oh dear urn, you earned your keep. What liars Nadia's parents were! Maxim never mentioned anything about it being illegal when he spread my mother's ashes in the Baltic Sea.

Thiip!

Mmm, the vodka is just the right viscosity.

Among the photographs surrounding me is the one I took from Arkady and Radya's gla.s.s side table in Brighton Beach. It was from a photo booth arcade with a fake setup where you could have your picture taken with our leaders, Stalin and Ezhov standing next to a bridge in Leningrad. Trofim had the same photograph, but in his, which was taken later than Arkady's, Ezhov had been airbrushed away. It was for this version I scolded my lover.

He would argue, "It's for protection, Stalina, just like your name. I got a deal at the photo booth. They gave me extra copies. Would you like one?"

"You do look handsome on that bridge."

I did take one of the copies, but the photograph was not enough to protect my dear Trofim. His students thought he went mad when one of them saw him eating a slice of Lysenko's brain on a piece of sourdough bread and reported him to the authorities. The police did not mind his charade with the calf brain; they actually knew about it because the KGB had Lysenko's real brain. It was Trofim's experiments to improve Mendeleev's vodka recipe that ended up being the final straw. The KGB did not want anyone changing what they already considered flawless. Olga sent me the article from Pravda, which I have taped to the back of the photograph.

Thiip!

It reads, St. Petersburg April 15, 2002

Physicist Found Dead in Vat of Chilled Vodka

The body of physicist Trofim Nayakovsky, who had been missing for several years, was found dead in his former lab at St. Petersburg University. He was thought to have gone crazy after a student saw him consuming a slice of a human brain, and soon after he disappeared with no trace. His body, preserved in a vat of chilled vodka, was found when renovations for the tercentennial started and the lab's refrigerated vault was emptied. Death by drowning was determined, as it was hard to tell at so late a date if there were any signs of a struggle. One of his former students said that after he was seen eating what was thought to be a piece of our scientist Lysenko's brain, the authorities started making inquiries about the professor's activities. The student, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the authorities that in addition, the professor's teaching had become scattered and erratic, and he was obsessed with developing a new recipe for vodka. The brain was actually that of a calf. The vat filled with vodka, in which Prof. Nayakovsky was discovered, had been placed inside a large centrifuge that was being stored inside the cold vault. Relatives were contacted, and after the body thawed, they requested cremation. He is survived by his wife, Tatiana, and children Yosip and Nina. During the next year, many inst.i.tutions are having facelifts in preparation for the upcoming celebrations. We wonder what other surprising discoveries will be made.

Liars! Trofim would not have been so stupid as to fall into the vat and let the lid close. If he was that well preserved, instead of cremation, maybe they should have put him on display at the Academy of Science next to the jar with the African Pygmy.

Olga wrote a note below the article. "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks! Stalina, can you believe how they covered up this one? Poor Trofim, at least he was drunk when he went."

Nostrovya! To you Olga, my dear friend and legendary hairdresser!

Thiip!

At least I can look forward to the possibility of Trofim greeting me when it's my time to go. A toast to my dear love, Trofim! My heart still aches for you, Trofim.