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.