Free Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis

perversion of Justice by a Judge,” as in Arabic there is a word to express “a bribe offered to a Judge.”
    In the Russian language they have only one word to express the ideas of red and beautiful, as the Romans used the word “purple” without any reference to color, as for instance “purple snow.”
    He is bored by the society of the people of St. Petersburg, where he plays rubbers of whist without any amusing conversation. He considers card games even more dull and unentertaining than spitting over a bridge or tapping a tune with a walking stick on a pair of boots.
    The general appearance of the city is magnificent, and he sees this as proof of what may be done with brick and plaster—though the surrounding country is very flat, dull, and marshy. The weather begins to be cold, and a stove within and a pelisse without doors are necessary.
    He wishes to see the ice-hills and sledges, and the frozen markets.
    He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake, thinking it is a French opera. Yet he expects in course of time to be able to converse with his friends the Sclavonians. He sees the Tauride, now lapsed to the crown, behind which is a winter garden laid out in parterres and gravel walks, filled with orange trees and other exotics, and evenly heated by a great number of stoves. The Neva is now blocked by large pieces of ice floating down from the Ladoga. Though the temperature has been down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, that is not considered to be much at all here.
    The Empress gives birth to an Archduchess. When the Court assembles to pay their respects, the person who most attracts attention is Prince Hypsilantes, the Hospodar of Wallachia, and the Greeks of his train.
    There is not much variety in his mode of life. He studies Russian in the morning.
    He begins to be very tired of this place and its inhabitants: their hospitality; the voracious gluttony on every side of him; their barefaced cheating; their conversation, with its miserable lack of information and ideas; their constant fear of Siberia; their coldness, dullness, and lack of energy. The Poles are infinitely the most gentlemanlike, and seem a superior order of men to their Russian masters.
    He won’t remain here as long as he had intended, but will purchase two sledge kibitkas, and other supplies, and depart, not for Moscow, but for Archangel.
    He imagines there must be something curious in driving reindeer on the ice of the White Sea.
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    To Archangel: The Mayor Makes a Speech
    He buys two sledges covered with a tilt, furnishes them with a mattress, and lays in frozen beefsteaks, Madeira, brandy, and a large saucepan. For the trip he dresses in flannel, over that his ordinary clothes, over his boots fur shoes, over the fur shoes a pair of fur boots, covers his head with a cap of blue Astrachan wool, wraps himself in a sable pelisse, and over it all throws a bear skin.
    On the road there are no accommodations, so he sees inside the houses of the peasantry. The whole family lives in one room in suffocating heat and smell and with a number of cockroaches, which swarm in the wooden huts. The dirt is excessive. But the people are civil, hospitable, cheerful, and intelligent, though addicted to spirits, quarrelsome among themselves, and inclined to cheat. They are more like the common Irish than anyone else he has seen. Peter the Great has by no means succeeded in forcing them to abandon their beards.
    In the cottage, people come to see him dine. Twenty or thirty women crowd around him, examining him and asking him questions.
    He passes through Ladoga and Vitigra. Approaching Kargossol, he counts from a distance nineteen churches, most of which have five balloon-like domes, gilt, copper, or painted in the most gaudy colors, and thinks it must be a magnificent town, but the number of churches here almost equals the number of houses.
    In Archangel the Archbishop speaks Latin very fluently, but does not know