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In Memorium

In Memorium
When I wake up, my contacts were drying out slightly, casting a blurry edge around everything I looked at out the window. Slava's grey Volvo is bouncing around the street, trying to avoid the potholes that loomed up from the asphalt. Potholes in Belarus take on a life of their own, and appear out of nowhere, sometimes forcing people to abandon their cars because they cannot
get out of them.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Pinsk. We're all going to look for the house that we lived in when we were kids."
"We all" constitutes my husband and his two brothers. And of course me, but I don't really count because I never lived in Pinsk, Minsk or anywhere else in Belarus. The dichotomy between the guys and myself is vast, based primarily on the fact that I understand more Russian than I can speak, which isn't much. This, combined with the fact that I will consume anything put in front of me except shuba, is the only mark against me with my new family. We pull into a parking lot and pile out of the car. Pearl gray clouds are rolling across the sky and the wind is picking up, a sure sign that rain was on the way. The breeze feels good, a vast change from the sticky humidity that had enveloped us for the last 4 hours in the car.
We start walking down the street. We pass a brownish red brick house, whose windows were trimmed with some white brick. The house was beautiful, with only the most minor damage that occurs with the passing of time. There were chipped bricks on the corners, and holes in the bricks, which Alex later told me were bullet holes from WWII. The window sills sagged slightly in the center. But most odd about the house was that it is surrounded by the typical Soviet and post Soviet 9 story apartment buildings on three sides. On the 4th side is a parking lot. It's an altogether strange place for a house.
"So where's your house? I'm really excited to see it."
" We can't remember." This statement is accompanied by the typical...