To Sing Frogs Chapter 9b

Stass confirmed my suspicions when Amy asked him where these people worked. After all, there was no apparent industry, agriculture, tourism, retail… “I don’t know,” he said nonchalantly. “Maybe at some time they mined coal or something. Not anymore. Now they grow gardens for food and get a little bit of money from the government, sometimes. It’s not good to live in places like this. The people here are very poor.”

Yep. Hatfield-skayas and McCoy-ovitches. Probably not a full set of teeth if you combined those of an entire village.

Soon we were bumping through the potholed streets of Partizansk. At least a week had passed since the last snowfall. What remained off the roads was sooty and soiled. There were still a few areas where streets remained snow packed. In those places the now rock-hard covering was pitch-black. Like many areas of Russia, ash and cinders were spread out on icy roads at points where traction was most critical. It hardly created the setting for a Christmas card photo.

I saw plenty of unusual things in Russia and this was one of the strangest. Twin ten-inch-diameter pipes snaked their way above ground. The serpents wound through the village and humped over driveways to allow room for tall vehicles to pass underneath. If we were in an industrial area I might have thought they were gas or oil lines. Twin pipes though? I knew efficiency wasn’t of paramount concern, but still.

“What are those two pipes for?” I had to know.

Anya laughed. “Everyone always wants to know about the pipes. They might see all the sights of Russia and get to know thousands of people. Even if they forget all of that, even if they forget about us, they will always remember the pipes.”

Stass explained it was a hot-water project. One pipe moved water outward in the giant recirculation project; the other acted as a return to the plant at the far end of town.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Of course not. Hot water is provided to the homes in the main village for six months out of the year. The hot water comes out in the indoor plumbing and it is also re-circulated through iron radiators as a means of heating the cottages. This is quite common in Russia.”

Ho—lee crap. “Water is heated in a plant and circulated through the village…”

“Yes.”

“And it’s still hot when it gets to the end of the line?”

“Of course it’s hotter at the beginning.”

Go figure. “You guys ever hear of water heaters?”

He assured me that Russia used water heaters where it made sense and boiler buildings and recirculation systems where it made sense.

I don’t know the variables used to determine what makes sense in Russia, but it appears productivity isn’t one of them. The country was a superpower even without discovering efficiency. There is little doubt if they ever figure it out we’ll wish they hadn’t.

As we approached the office of the social worker who would accompany us on our visit, large overgrown cottonwood trees lined the perimeter of a confluence where several vehicle paths ran through rutted frozen mud. We proceeded for only a few hundred meters before Stass turned right and the vehicle slid down a twenty-foot decline in the unmaintained dirt road. Then he parked outside an old squatty brown-brick building. We sat under the scraggly shadows of several large winter-bare trees while we waited for Stass to retrieve Marina-Grigorievna.

In Russia there are only about nine female names and eight names for males. Worse yet some of them have male and female versions: Ivan for a boy, Ivana for a girl, Aleksander for a boy and Aleksandra for a girl. Nicknames solve the duplications through the childhood years. The Russian language has a gazillion-three-million-and-fifty of those.

Nicknames are not quite as common with adults though. Consequently, once children approach their teen years a middle name is always used along with the first to avoid confusion. Middle names are patronymic, meaning they include the name of the father (or in the case of so many of the social orphans, probable suspected possible father). Males add the suffix of “vitch” to their father’s name and females add “evna.”

 

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