Visiting Professor Read Free

your heart you think it may be true. In any case, the trip is bound to end badly—you have
     always been more fascinated by the going than the getting there.”
    When this argument failed to impress him, she trotted out the big guns. “People kill for tenure at Steklov. How can you abandon
     it like that?”
    “Everyone in Russia has tenure,” Lemuel observed crabbily. “The problem is they have tenure in Russia.”
    Ladies first, the
visiting professor (still clutching his duty-free shopping bag) and the reception committee crowd into the Institute’s minibusfor the twelve-mile drive back to the village that is home to both the university and the Institute. Word Perkins, the Institute’s
     factotum (he doubles as a chauffeur, night watchman, switchboard operator, plumber, electrician, carpenter, ice-salter and
     snow-shoveler), brings up the rear. “So what’cha got in here, huh, Professor?” he wants to know, struggling with Lemuel’s
     enormous valise. “Bricks maybe?”
    “Books maybe,” Lemuel replies in a voice that conveys remorse.
    Matilda Birtwhistle flashes a supportive smile. Lemuel grins back uncertainly.
    Perkins, huffing, slides in behind the wheel, raises the earflaps on his mackinaw cap as if it is a preflight requirement,
     adjusts the hearing aid hooked over an ear, works the choke and guns the motor. Snow chains on all four tires set up a rattle
     that renders conversation difficult. “So where is the visitin’ professor visitin’ from, huh?” he calls over his shoulder.
     “And when he gets his act together, what is his act?”
    The Director twists in his seat and blinks his eyes rapidly—his way of apologizing for the egalitarian nature of American
     society that permits chauffeurs a degree of impertinence. “He has come from St. Petersburg,” he shouts to Perkins. “As for
     his act, he happens to be one of the world’s preeminent randomnists.”
    “I can’t promise I know what a predominant randomnist does for a livin’, but if it’s got anythin’ at all to do whit snow,
     he’s come to the right place, huh?” remarks Perkins. “What whit all this snow we got, we got us a randomnist’s paradise. Hey,
     professor from Petersboig, in case yaw the athletic type, the village staw under Tender To rents out lightweight cross-country
     skis.”
    D.J. rolls her eyes to the tops of their sockets. Matilda Birtwhistle suffocates a smile in her Tibetan glove. Lemuel, mystified
     by the conversation—why would a randomnist need skis? And what or who is tender to?—stares morosely out a window. Now that
     he has finally gotten where he is going, he finds himself struggling against a persuasive postpartum depression. His first
     glimpse of America the Beautiful does not help. The minibus rattles down a wide, bleak main street paved with cracking volcanic
     tarmac, not Sony Walkmans, past mountains of plastic garbage sacks that look as if they have washed ashore on a tide. Long
     stalactites of ice trickle from lampposts and store signs and the giant clock over the revolving door of a bank at an intersection.
     The minibus, making its way between drifts of dirty snow, crossesa bridge with rusting girders, passes darkened, dead gas stations and supermarkets and cut-rate furniture stores and an all-brick
     drive-in savings-and-loan next door to a gray-washed wooden church with a movie marquee advertising CHRIST SAVES , without specifying what. Lemuel spots an illuminated billboard at the side of the road that makes him wonder whether he
     can get by with his Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual English.
    He leans forward and taps D.J. on the shoulder. “What does it mean, ‘Nonstops to the most Florida cities? How can one city
     be more Florida than another?”
    “Hey, professor from Petersboig, take a gander at them trees,” Perkins calls before D.J. can dredge up a Serbo-Croatian translation
     for the billboard’s message. ‘They all been turned into weepers, huh? We just had