Important note: the previous chapter ends differently now. I also went back and punched up / improved the whole story this week. I made Mordecai more Mordecai, made Innochka more Innochka, and I've rewritten / improved a lot of the material, as I figured some folks would be re-reading. The edits don't change the basic direction of the story but they change a lot of the subtler characterization, so it's worth the re-read if you've come back and are so inclined.

Thank you for coming back, by the way. I often take long pauses but this story in particular never leaves me. If you have returned to this story over the years thank you and welcome back.

-Grindylowe 4/5/2015

max и julita

It began to rain, and that paired with the slow rocking of the train made for a hypnotic afternoon. When the knock came on the cabin door they were both asleep on their respective beds, Mordecai with a heavy math textbook open on his chest, and Innochka face down on some sort of pulp romance novel she'd been reading. Every so often she would laugh aloud at it. Those sharp laughs, quickly muffled by her hand, were the most objectionable thing about sharing the cabin with her. Otherwise she kept pleasingly to herself, and to her great credit did not snore. She was far less obstructive than Viktor, who either stared out the window like he was making a list of scenery he'd like to kill or snoring loudly and intermittently onto his chest.

When the knock came they snapped awake. Mordecai sat straight up, his book hitting floor with a heavy clunk. Innochka, who'd begun moving before fully awake, fell into the sway of the train and smacked her head on the bulkhead. "Ой! Fyck!" she cried.

Mordecai stumbled to his feet and snapped the door open. Before him stood a stewardess bearing a tray with bubbling champagne flutes.

'What?" he snapped.

"Complementary mineral water to let you know dinner will be served in the dining car in half an hour," the stewardess said, handing him two flutes in quick succession, faster than he could refuse them. He said a muddled thanks and stepped backwards into the room, deftly closing the door and setting one flute on the small shelf which served as a table between the beds. He handed the other to Innochka, who hissed and rubbed her head where she'd struck the wall.

"Eh?" she said, taking the water.

Mordecai shrugged. "Complimentary. Apparently."

"Ah. Thank you." She took a sip and made a face. "Bleh," she said, and began digging around in her suitcase.

Mordecai retrieved a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and looked it over, drinking half his water and setting it aside. It was a note Sweet had given him detailing the identities of Max and Julita. "So, have you given any thought to – wait, what do you think you're doing?"

"Eh?" she said, pouring whiskey from a discrete flask into his mineral water, and then into hers. She smiled and handed him his glass. "Nostrovia!" she chirped.

I don't drink Mordecai began to say, but his sense of propriety stopped him. According to what little he knew of Russian culture it seemed a good bet that refusing a drink poured from one's personal flask would be considered inexcusably rude. She smiled, pushing the flute at him.

"I – thank you. Um." He raised the glass. "Nostrovia," he said. He waited a split second to see if she – yes, she did indeed down the entire thing, so it was a good bet he was expected to as well. He tipped it back, praying he could do so without coughing or choking. He'd never properly re-learned how to drink a shot after the first time he learned, which was after his second or third Bunnyhug. By morning his ability to down a shot and most of that night's memories were dust in the wind.

He managed to finish the drink with a minimum of choking to death, but he'd barely gotten it down before a grinning Innochka pushed another one at him. "Nostrovia!" she said, drinking.

"Nost-" he began, and drank new one as well, but the new one was whiskey without the benefit of water. Mordecai coughed, his eyes watering. "No, no," he said, pushing away the third one on offer. "Please no more," he said, coughing into his fist.

Innochka shrugged and hit him companionably on the back, chuckling.

"I don't drink," he said.

She nodded very gravely, and when he wasn't looking, drank the remainder of his shot. She tapped the piece of paper in his hand.

"Yes," he said, clearing his throat one last time. "On to business. I was wondering if you'd given any thought to - " he trailed off, realizing she could not understand him. He unfolded the paper and pointed to the names: Max Goldwine and Julita Banas.

"Julita?" she asked.

"Yes, and Max," Mordecai said. " 'Max is a banker from New York. He met Julita, a Polish university student, at the Statue of Liberty.' Pfff. I was born in Brooklyn, no native New Yorker goes to the Statue of - " he stopped short, realizing a second too late that he may have just given Innochka a bigger peek inside his life than he'd ever intended. He glanced up at her, but she was arranging clothes on a bed and didn't seem to realize he'd stopped speaking.

"You don't understand me anyway. If he asks, I'm saying we met at temple," Mordecai said. "That's where people like you and I meet. Statue of Liberty, who wrote that? What are you doing?"

She turned to face him. She'd tucked her hair into a bun and held a delicate, pale yellow dress to her chest. She picked up a pair of glasses from the bed and put them on. They were a high prescription - immediately her eyes became round and glassy and three times their natural size.

Mordecai laughed. It was a high and sudden laugh. "Is that your costume?"

"Julita," Innochka said.

"Not with those glasses."

"Eh?" Innochka said, tilting her head.

"Julita, dearest, you look like an ostrich, please don't do this to me," Mordecai said. "It's hard enough to play this role without your face looking like the headlamps of a Bugatti." When she looked at him in confusion he took her by the shoulders and turned her towards the mirror hanging between the beds.

"Julita, no," he said, and Innochka yelped when she saw herself.

"No! Oh!" she said, taking the glasses off, laughing. "Julita no! Ah, no - один момент - " she said, and dug around in her suitcase again. After a moment she produced a different pair of glasses of a simpler design, but held her fingers closed on the corner hinge.

"This," she said.

"You broke it?" Mordecai said. "Give them here. Is the screw still in it? Good! My sister could not keep the screw in to save her life, I fixed her glasses at least three times a week." He glanced up at her. "More than you need to know but you don't understand me anyway."

"Fix it?" Innochka said.

"Of course," he replied, setting the glasses down on the surface between the beds. He slid his fingers into a secret pocket on the inside of his vest to reveal a tiny eyeglass repair set.

"Oh," Innochka said approvingly. "You have this."

"Always." He gently coaxed the screw back into place, thinking of his younger sisters. He gave a small, private smile. "I spent a large portion of my formative years fixing broken glasses for little girls. Why do you have so many pairs of glasses, anyway?"

He glanced up at the objects strewn across her bed. His eyes fell on three archeology textbooks, two in Cyrillic and one in English.

"Aha, so you figured student equals smart equals glasses, did you? Brought a few options? Its just archeology, it's not exactly medicine, is it? The glasses aren't needed," he said handing them to her.

She slid them on, bit her lip, and batted her eyelashes at him.

He considered this. "Now you really do look like someone I'd meet at temple. My mother would be thrilled. Maybe the glasses do work. These glasses though, not the headlamps." He smirked. "We should change your name to Shira or Tamar, give old Tzipporah the full package. She'd be beside herself. We should put the rings on, have a picture taken and send it back to her, it would probably make her life. Look mother, I finally found a nice Jewish girl, and she's a shiksa!" Mordecai said. After a moment he caught himself, cleared his throat, straightened his collar. "Excuse me, all the whiskey you press ganged into me just kicked in. You know, in the United States it is not considered good manners to force people to drink."

"Okay," Innochka said. She pointed to his suitcase. "Max?"

He blinked. "What? Oh! Oh I – well I didn't bring much in the way of a costume, just a dinner jacket and - " he retrieved two items from the shelf above his bed, a bowler cap and a cane.

Innochka looked skeptical. "What?"

"Well – I – I mean - " Mordecai said. "Sweet told me to … be like..."

Innochka took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the mirror.

He looked like the star of a musical about car salesmen.

"Max, no," Innochka said.

"Oh! Max no indeed, " Mordecai said to himself. "Not so literally. Right. Sweet meant it- not- not that literally." He pointed to the bowler hat. "He didn't mean 'be like Atlas' in the sense I took it," he explained to Innochka. "In the sense of, um – personal attire. I thought he meant something else. I don't – sometimes I don't - "

"No hat, no cane," she said. "Okay?"

He nodded. "Agreed." He cleared his throat. "No hat. No cane."

"No caboose," Innochka said, pointing down.

"Or bam?"

She smiled. "Or bam."

"Well, there's the first entry in your instruction manual. Chapter one: 'No Caboose or Bam."

"Mmhm," she said. "More nice."

"And there's chapter two. Chapter three is how to cope with how disorganized, unpredictable, and messy you are," he said, gesturing to her pile of clothes. "You put on a polished veneer, miss, but you don't actually have it together at all, do you?"

He caught a glance of the two of them in the mirror – her with her freshly repaired glasses, hair falling out of a hastily made bun, a slinky yellow dress hung round her neck, and him with a disheveled dress shirt, red in the face, and wearing a funny hat.

Innochka held up her flask, toasting the odd couple in the mirror. "Nostrovia! Max и Julita!" she said, took a swig, and offered it to Mordecai.

"Nostrovia," Mordecai said, shaking his head. He raised the flask, but didn't drink.

ooo