sasha has a big heart...

…either that or he is threatening to slice open my sternum with his cigarette lighter. i am unsure, but he keeps imitating the action of slashing open his chest with the lighter and pulling back the flaps of skin. i opt for the former interpretation because open heart surgery with a blunt piece of plastic would be unpleasant and i think sasha is better than this. the truth is i don’t know. the only words of english sasha knows are ‘father’ and ‘russian’, and the only words of russian i know are ‘can i have some cake please’. normally, this would make for a short conversation but we manage to stretch it out for a good half an hour. sasha pours me a vodka shot equivalent to the daily fluid intake of an average saharan family – ‘mylinki’, he says, meaning ‘small’. russians live in a big country and i think it affects their sense of scale. by a complicated series of gestures involving raising his hand off the floor, sasha intimates that he has been drinking much bigger shots of vodka than this since he was a small child. i deduce he is being lenient on the foreigner. we throw it back in one, if by ‘one’ you understand 30 seconds of non-stop glugging. still, it is better than the stuff back home and i cannot linger long on the trail of lava in my throat because sasha has picked up a fish on his fork and is gesturing for me to eat it. the fish is big enough to have made a shark think twice and, sadly, it never made friends with a frying pan. i ask him what it is called and he says something that sounds like ‘mormon’. it is certainly big enough to have been a mormon and i know that non-orthodox religions are not popular here. i guess sasha killed the mormon by slicing open his sternum with a cigarette lighter. i decide to down it in one as tradition demands and knock the fish back whole. i imagine it splashing into life in the sea of vodka in my stomach. if the evening continues like this, no doubt it will soon have a mate and they can breed and do happy fish things together. sasha seems pleased at any rate and because he is, i am too. it is the russian way.