My landlord Igor

Elena is the liaison for expat teachers here at the school. She finds apartments for new teachers, relocates teachers who hate their apartments, and gets paid very little money for a lot of hassle. A couple of months ago, Elena stopped by to tell me "Mary, you are very lucky, you have best landlord of the school! He calls me to ask how is Mary, does she have problem? but you have no problem! He says you are good tenant, beautiful! intelligent!" (which is now a running joke with me and Patty "beautiful! intelligent!" what was lost in translation?)

I was tickled to hear that I had the best landlord, but just learned that Elena has been going around saying that to several teachers, probably to quell dissent.

However, Igor IS a great landlord. He runs over whenever I do something stupid like locking myself out (only once). When internet/phone service is down, he immediately takes steps to correct it--it may take a few weeks, but that's how things go here, and Igor takes care of it.

The first time he came, in August, he arranged water delivery (can't drink the water here, it's full of radiation from Chernobyl), helped me buy a cell phone, and sat around telling me stories about his life in Kyiv.

He comes over at least twice a month to take care of bills. He's usually in a hurry but I'm always trying to pick his brains. Early in January a Ukrainian politician was shot and killed in a hunting accident. Yevhen Kushnarev was supposed to be well-supported and well-liked, but this is a country where the president was poisoned by dioxin in his soup (his kids go to my school!)

"Hey, Igor," I said,"what's the deal with this hunting accident? was it an accident or an assassination?"

Igor paused as he was pulling on his boots. "Oh, it was accident, they were drunk, I don't know how it is in civilized countries, but here, hunting, bottle of vodka, two bottles of vodka..."

Of course, all of the Americans here were making jokes about Dick Cheney.