So- I am now in Marseille, meeting old friends and picking up some boots for my walk. Presumably Charlemagne has moved into my flat by now. He will relieve me only for two months, after which time he will, I hope, leave without a fuss, having paid most of my rent in my absence, thereby saving my flat for me, which besides possessing the rare quality of being owned by honest people, is in a choice location, ten minutes from two different metro lines.
The move, or in fact flight, to my flat is a good one for Charlemagne, too. His landlord has been ripping him off for months, claiming he scratched the floor, and forcing him to pay 9000r- around 400us- and then adding that the people in the flat below had water damage, and that it was Charlemagnes fault for not turning off the leaky faucet. Price: 800us. During such situations, the corrupt landlady hangs up her phone every time Charlemagne calls. Meanwhile, late payment notices of an increasingly threatening tone which are addressed to the landlady are arriving by post at the flat; she is in debt, although by an amount she could pay in several months if she just took the 800 bux she gets every month for rent. In other words, she has a cash cow in the form of the apartment, and instead of using it to pay her debts, she uses it to subsidise them.
A few weeks ago, I asked Charle,agne if he wanted to meet at the subway and walk to my place and check it out. From the tone of his voice on the phone alone, I knew that he was going to take it, nonetheless we had to go through the formality of looking through the place and making sure it was up to standards.
We met near the subway station SOKOL, about 8 minutes from my house, at around two pm on a rainy Wednesday. The rain, which apart from being unpleasant cleanses the air of pollutants from traffic and construction, had been pouring for a few days. Charlemagne was standing outside near Leningradskii Shosse, a multi-lane monstrosity which leads all the way from downtown Moscow to St Petersburg. As is the case around the clock and in all weather, the street, which is being widened, was lined with hitch-hiking beauties. Charlemagne was oblivious to them when I first caught a glimpse of him. Although he had only been standing, he was already out of breath and asked for a brief pause. After we had walked another 50 meters, he had to stop again, this time for several minutes. He was panting unevenly, there were unhealthy spots and large, cool beads of sweat on his balding scalp, and he was complaining about his schedule, which entails waking up at 4am every day and getting home late after having worked all day.
Charlemagne is one of the few teachers to sign a full-time contract two years in a row. Basically, most teachers arrive in Moscowl working on a full-time contract, and then discover what a raw deal it is, and that it is possible to work fewer hours as a freelancer, build your own schedule and thereby eliminate all classes located too far from the metro, and best of all, get double the pay. I have told Charlemagne many times in the past of dead-easy opportunities to get new private students from an agency offering well over double the pay of a full-time employer, but he not only is a person who does not listen, he is someone who rarely ever even perceives the other person in the conversation, seeing him more than anything as a swill-funnel for his white gay supremacist, hetereophobic bleatings. Charlemagne could have solved his schedule problem months ago with my suggestions, but because he does not listen, he has continued to be used as a tool of self-enrichment for his employer. His employer sends him to opposite ends of the city at all hours, and Charlemagne, exceptionally, never whimpers the least complaint.
It took us a full forty minutes to walk to my house. Part of that was due to a heavy duffel bag full of books he was carrying, which he refused to give to me until I feigned curiosity about its weight and then didnt give it back. But it was mainly from over exertion paired with over eating and undersleeping. He was so tired when we arrived that he I had to help him up the steps, something of a magnanimous act in light of a previous spat dating back to when I lived in his spare room in November. We also had to call the landlord and landlady, who were waiting inside, several times to let them know we were still coming.
When we finally arrived, he had to drink his sweet tea, after which he immediately began victimising the landlord and landlady with his Georgia country boy-inflected, fluent 500 word Russian. When Charlemagne begins speaking he almost immediately makes himself into a burden- he says what he needs to say very quickly and then proceeds to repeat it in various ways multiple times, speaking at top speed and bearing no interruptions.
Finally I was able to take the landlord aside and explain to him that as long as he listened, Charlemagne would continue speaking, and suggested he invent an urgent meeting, which he did almost immediately.
After they left, Charlemagne said it was time for his vitamins, and instead got out and downed a heavy sack of cookies dusted with confectioners sugar; he followed up with some prescription medicine from an orange bottle.
I let him go back to the subway alone.

Is Charlemagne dying?

I have a wad of cash now from living badly and working a lot, and have been debating how to reward myself after a long, hard winter, and finally decided, after much waffling, to head to the Pyrenees, walk across them for two months, and then come back to Frowntown until at least Christmas.
That decision puts me in an awkward position vis-a-vis my apartment. Should I leave it, or should I continue paying rent so that I have a place to live when I come back? The question, in th context of the Moscow real estate market, is far more complicated than it sounds. Both choices entail serious risks.
Let me explain how one finds a flat upon arriving in Moscow for the first time. You call a real estate agency which has lists of all the flats up for rent inside the city, and in outlying suburbs. They send out an agent to help you find a place that fits your requirements. You pay the agent for one month's rent as commission, and you pay the first month of rent immediately; then you also of course pay one month, or sometimes two months of deposit to your new landlord. There is a very high probability -exceeding 60 percent in my circle of ex-pat acquaintances- that you are going to get ripped off. In rare cases, the agency, knowing that you speak little or no Russian (which is not true of me), have work permits of dubious value, and that the courts will do nothing to help you, will simply take the commission from and give the flat to another person, and get another month's commission from them. More commonly, you live in the flat and the landlord throws you out on a few days' notice, and steals the one month of deposit. He is also very likely to extort cash large sums from you, threatening to change the locks if you do not pay. Or he may purport damage to the premises: a broken doorknob, a burst pipe, a shelf that is crooked. In a city where most flats are many decades old, things are likely to break, and landlords use this as a way to extract money from the renters.
But the most common tactic is to simply throw the tenant out on two days' notice and steal the deposit, then try to get another foreigner to live in the flat for several months until he is confident in the honesty of the owner. That's exactly when you get thrown out again. The average living arrangement in my experience is around 4 months.
For these reasons, I have been trying to get someone I know to live in my flat during my absence, and pay part of the rent.
Enter Charlemagne. Charlemagne is a colleague of mine that housed me (at market prices) for two weeks after being thrown out of my flat and getting the deposit stolen from the landlord last November. He is a middle-aged homosexual, lonely, long-winded and overweight in equal measures. Although he daily faces a 75-minute commute in crowded buses and subway wagons, wakes up at 4am, and does not return home until 10pm, he is a highly energetic character, walking and riding all over town all day. He purports that the subway cars are jam-packed every day with fags and player-hating Soviet babushkas who envy them; according to Charlemagne, everyone wants to sleep with him, and he is a social and sexual omnivore and dynamo who takes only the choicest mates.
The truth is much more mundane.
Russia is a very homophobic country. I think there are a lot of very repressed, ashamed homosxuals who have never touched a person of their own sex, apart from themselves. Charlemagne, on the other hand, is completely uninhibited, and speaks of his multi-hour kissing parties. I suppose he is able to grab one of these repressed middle-aged men, begin making out with him and make him his own very soon afterwards. I must suppose that his companion, having for the very first time been touched by a man, becomes quite aroused; however, he soon afterwards understands that he can do what he wants with who he wants to do it with, and does not need a multi-hundred pound windbag for companionship.
As a result, Charlemagne's only reliable companion is, or was, his elderly cat, for whom he set out 21 bowls of different types of cat food. However, the cat, which apparently had been suffering from age-induced diarrhea and low blood pressure for many months, soon died, and Charlemagne, dissatisfied with Moscow's pet cemeteries, put the cat in the freezer.
In addition to these eccentricities, he also possesses an unlikely high energy level for a person of his breadth, a fact reflected in his routine of a 10 hour work day often including long walks in freezing rain.
I am unable to continue now on this note because of time constraints, but I will complete this thread in the next 36 hours.