Snow and Strangers
The cold hits Karim like a wall before he even steps outside.
He feels it first in the jet bridge, a thin seam of Moscow leaking through the gap between metal and rubber, needling through his jacket as if his jacket were made of paper instead of down. Three layers, and still the air finds him. He exhales, and his breath hangs in front of his face like a little ghost, and despite everything—the exhaustion, the eleven-hour flight, the ache behind his eyes—he grins at it. He can't help himself. He has never seen his own breath behave like that, visible and deliberate, a small white flag announcing: *I am alive, and I am freezing.*
"Okay," he says aloud, to no one, in English, because his Russian is still mostly sitting in a notebook somewhere in his suitcase, unused. "Okay, Moscow. Let's see what you've got."
Sheremetyevo Airport swallows him whole. The ceilings seem impossibly high, vaulted and gray, and everywhere there are voices—clipped, rhythmic, full of consonants that crash into each other like trains failing to yield the right of way. He understands perhaps one word in twenty. He catches *paszhalusta* from a woman ahead of him in line, recognizes it instantly from his…
