1

My first day of class was already going badly, and technically it hadn’t even started yet.

I had, miraculously, gotten an 11^th-hour job offer at the very, very, very end of the previous semester, after my contract at my old college had already ended. A one-semester adjunct position with no possibility of renewal, but hey, a job was a job. I cringed a little inside whenever I thought about how I had gotten the job offer, but I had still taken it, along with the $5,000 “bonus” I’d been offered by the person who had arranged it all. Desperation makes scruples seem silly, and anyway, as he’d pointed out to me, I’d earned it. Besides, I wasn’t going to be able to make the move to start the new job he’d gotten for me without it.

So here I was, starting the second week of January by navigating a new town (Charlotte, North Carolina) and a new campus (UNC-Matthews, a satellite of UNC-Charlotte). Which was under construction. In its current form it was more the dream of a campus than an actual campus, but that hadn’t stopped the administration from offering classes on it, and, incidentally, taking people’s money for them.

My first class of the day, RUSS 1102, started at 10:00am. I had planned to arrive at 9:00. It was now 9:35, and I still was nowhere near Tryon 351, my classroom, and had only a vague idea how to get there.

First I had gotten caught in traffic at the main campus gate. The omnipresent construction was also going on there, narrowing the entrance to one lane. Since this was a commuter campus, the entire student body, as well as all the faculty and staff, had to squeeze through this single lane to get onto campus for morning classes.

Then it had turned out that the main faculty parking lot was blocked off for construction. Since I had paid $200 for a parking pass that gave me access specifically to that lot, I was displeased. But not as displeased as the construction worker who came out and shouted at me in broken Spanglish to get out of the way of the earth-moving equipment that was trying to get through.

I had joined the long line of other commuters cruising hungrily for spaces, and had circled the campus twice before pouncing on a staff parking spot near the sports stadium. I was fairly sure that faculty were not supposed to park in staff parking spots, but it was already 9:30 and I was desperate. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, and all that.

I slid in just ahead of someone in a Chevy Suburban that wouldn’t have been able to fit into the space anyway, gathered up my two bags of papers, water, pens, markers (permanent and dry erase), workbooks, textbooks, chalk, a laser pointer, and all the other detritus teachers tend to accumulate, and started hustling across campus to where I hoped Tryon Hall was.

My progress was impeded not only by my two-bag Teacher’s Survival Kit and the blister I was rapidly developing on my left heel from my new boots, but by the vast field of mud that lay between me and where I thought my goal was. Probably it was supposed to be a pleasant quad, surrounded by neoclassical buildings and tastefully decorated with flowers and ornamental shrubs, through which sidewalks crossed purposefully, or maybe crisscrossed whimsically, but right now it was just several acres of mud. Abandoned construction equipment stood forlornly off to one side, huddled against the rain.

Oh yes, and it was raining. A cold, soul-sucking rain. I wanted to check my phone to see exactly how many minutes I had left to cross this corner of North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, but I was afraid that if I pulled it out, it would get soaked, or maybe slither out of my fingers into the mud, never to return. Then I would be phoneless, and I would have to explain how I’d lost it to Alex, the friend (with benefits?) who had loaned it to me after I had smashed the last one, and he’d probably laugh pretty hard before offering any sympathy, and my first week at my new job would suck even worse than it was already threatening to.

The glorious people’s heroes of the Red Army didn’t wimp out over a little mud! I told myself sternly. And what are boots for, anyway? I started across.

Ten very slippery minutes later, I was on the other side of the mud pit, and only half covered with sticky red clay that was already trying to stain everything I owned. At least I hadn’t fallen on my ass. I scraped my boots off as best I could on the little patch of pavement outside the unmarked building I was at least 75% sure was Tryon Hall, and went inside.

Once inside, I saw that yes, I was in Tryon Hall, just on the other side from the entrance I had used when I had scouted it the week before. There was the front desk where all the admins for all of the programs in the entire building were currently housed. I gave a harried wave to a vaguely familiar-looking woman who may have been the one to process my intake paperwork last week. She had her back to me. To be fair, I had come in through the back entrance. Which meant…right is left and left is right…that looks like a stair…if I moved at a brisk jog down that corridor and up to the next floor and along the next corridor, I would be able to come bursting into my RUSS 1102 classroom at 9:59am.

“Hello, everyone!” I said manically as I raced into the classroom, dripping water and red clay everywhere. “Welcome to second-semester Russian!”

“What!” exclaimed someone in the back of the room. “I thought this was Farsi!”

“Isn’t this Tryon 351?” I asked.

The students exchanged uneasy glances. “We think so,” one of them volunteered. “But they haven’t put the room numbers up on all the doors yet.”

An exploratory expedition by one of the students sitting in the front led to the information that, as far as he could tell, we were indeed in Tryon 351, although it was a little hard to know because the room next door was a storage closet, so he wasn’t sure how it worked into the numbering system.

“I think Farsi is the next room over,” he said. “The professor’s wearing a hijab, anyway, so it’s gotta be Farsi or Arabic.”

The confused Farsi student left to investigate that lead, followed by a couple of students who had thought they were there for Spanish.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” one of them apologized on the way out. “We thought Spanish was on the second floor.”

“It is,” someone told them. “But the second floor from the ground is the third floor of the building. You gotta go down a level.”

“Okay,” I said, once the exodus appeared to be over. “Okay. Are we all reasonably sure we’re here for the right class? Second-semester Russian?”

The nods from the remaining eleven students were more tentative than I would have liked, like maybe some of them were actually there for Portuguese but hadn’t figured it out yet, but I decided we needed to move on. It was already 10:11am and we hadn’t even started the class yet.

“Why don’t we do a quick round of introductions,” I said, emphasizing the ‘quick’ part.

The student body was much more varied than it had been at my last school. The Liberal State College of New Jersey had been populated almost entirely by 18- to 22-year-olds, most of them white, or white-ish. Most my class at UNC-Matthews was over 25, with three black students, four Hispanic students, and four white students who exuded redneckness with their every movement. Most unusually, there was not a Russian Jew to be found. Most of the students were taking Russian on a whim, and finding it harder going than they had expected. Several expressed an intention of very likely dropping it if this semester turned out to be as hard as the previous one had been.

“I just don’t have the time,” confessed one woman, full of apology but not quite able to meet my eyes. Everything about her screamed “trailer trash,” from her hefty figure to the hunch of her shoulders. “With my daughter and all. I pick her up after work and then I just can’t do no more homework. I gotta put being a mom first, you know what I mean?”

The other students all nodded, and launched into explanations of why they had a hard time keeping up with their schoolwork, between their jobs, their families, and all the other things in their lives that took priority over school.

“I understand,” I said. “We’ll try to make this work for you, okay? If you’re having trouble keeping up with the assignments, let me know, and maybe we can figure something out. Now, let’s do a little review.”

The review revealed that whatever the students had been studying the previous semester, it had included precious little Russian. We worked until everyone more or less remembered how to introduce themselves, and then it was 10:50 and we all had to rush off to our next class, me included. I gathered up my stuff, and, brushing past a woman with a stern-looking hijab and sterner-looking frown, set off down the hall.

“Professor!” A student I was at least 60% sure was named Jason was following me down the hall. “Professor, you got a minute?”

“I have class at 11. Can you walk and talk?” RUS 2102 was in Tryon 447, which involved a brisk climb up to the next floor. My boots were still slick with wet red clay, making me skate as much as walk on the institutional linoleum tiles that covered the floor. At least it wasn’t carpet.

“Sure, professor. See, the thing is, I was gonna ask if you could help me.”

 “Of course I’ll be happy to help you if there’s something I can do for you.”

“See, the thing is, it’s my wife.”

“Um, okay.”

“She’s run off back to Belarus.”

“Oh.” I stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to face him. “Is she Belarusian?”

“Yeah. We met online. But now she’s run off. And she’s taken our son with her. I need you to help me get him back.”

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