3
Max and I headed toward the city. It was already light out. A whitish kind of day. A cloudy winter day, matted and low-contrast. The first phone call of the day did not come from Her. It was Pascal, my amusing French friend. An architect from Paris. A very energetic and enterprising forty-year-old fellow. His father had at one time been a consul to Russia. Pascal’s Russian was excellent. His accent wasn’t as much an accent as it was his own charmingly erroneous, but expressive version of the Russian language. A sort of dialect that only he was versed in. Talking to him was very funny. He very much wanted to accomplish something in Moscow, arrived a couple of months before with that very goal, and got busy… So busy, in fact, that it became impossible to stop him. He really liked Moscow.
