It was a month after we'd met on the steps of the local World War II memorial that a peculiar scratching sound woke me one night. I rolled over. Katya wasn’t there. I stared at the cracked ceiling for a moment as my sleep-fogged mind processed the sound. I arose and padded across the icy floorboards of our one-room flat. The kitchen light, a single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, was on.  

That almost sounds, I thought as I turned the corner into the kitchen, like someone's cleaning the stove top with a Brillo pad. Indeed it was.  

Katya glanced at me and resumed scrubbing the stove top.  

"What’re you doing?" I asked.  

"Just doing some cleaning. Your stove is dirty." 

"Is this a Russian tradition, cleaning the kitchen in the middle of the night? I can take care of it myself tomorrow. Come to bed." Being a reasonably progressive 20th century American guy, I felt embarrassed that a woman I just met was sterilizing my cooking surfaces with Comet at 2 a.m.  

She looked surprised and smiled. "You’re sweet but I’ll do it. It’s kitchen work. Don’t worry, go back to bed."

I thought for a moment. Bizarre, most bizarre, but you know, living in a foreign land requires tolerance and deft adaptation to what we consider abnormal social behavior (Peace Corps Manual, Chapter 3, Section 2). I shrugged and wandered back to the bedroom. I heard another sound--thwack. I turned back. In addition to her cleaning frenzy, Katya was cutting the head off a fish and gutting it for breakfast.  

When I got up the next morning, the stove top sparkled. The fish, smartly fried and seasoned, was tasty. I volunteered to clean the dishes, even though the hot water was shut off that day. Katya was delighted.  

Having a relationship with a woman who once accepted wretched men, minus-50 below winters, and having her teeth drilled without painkiller as a part of life, is always full of pleasurable oddities like this. Okay, not always pleasurable--the spaghetti with cold pasta sauce was well short of pleasant. I never could stomach the dreaded 'fish under a fur coat' salad, a satanic concoction of beets and raw fish that you’re better off reading about, not eating. Learning to offer my hand to her as we exited the bus also required some paper training on my part. She insists to this day to lay all financial matters at my feet. She asks me if she can spend money, which I don’t expect, of course. She can’t even write a check, which can be a pain. But overall, the collision of our two cultures has produced plenty of warmth and little friction.  

I’ve come to realize that a lot of that warmth is generated from Katya’s low expectations of me--if her expectations of men were the Olympic high jump, the bar would be two feet off the ground.  In fact, I think that much of the success of our relationship, the bedrock of the whole damned thing, can be attributed to low expectations. In Russia, talking to her, peeling potatoes occasionally, taking out the garbage without being asked, keeping the fridge stocked with groceries, kneeling beside the bathtub washing laundry, not swilling 6 beers as a warm-up exercise to liters of bad vodka in the evening, Katya treated these as the marks of a highly advanced man. Many Russian men, and I count many of them among my dear friends, still trend towards the Neanderthal end of the scale in their treatment of women. Katya’s boyfriend before me, a Russian, would some days say four words to her: "Hi. What’s for dinner?" And once, when she sent him out one evening to buy bread, he came back the next morning with a hangover and no bread. Almost any American guy not raised by wolves could meet these standards.  

I sometimes wonder, is having little expected of me a truly pathetic basis for a relationship? Am I crassly taking advantage of Katya because her benchmark men were knuckle-dragging savages? Perhaps, but then Katya rewards me delightfully for taking her to the movies, and I tend to forget all that. The relationship works. We’re both happy.  

These days, a few years and a continent removed from the Urals of Russia, American life has changed things a bit, but not much. Those nocturnal cleaning frenzies are behind us; she works a lot and sleeps soundly, and many of the cooking cleaning duties fall to me now, which explains the unsightly state of the stove top. She gives me huge amounts of credit that I probably don’t deserve for the household chores that I take on and don’t complain about. Still, even in the progressive USA, low expectations grease the wheels of our relationship.  

I used to worry that living in America, Katya would notice the higher expectations that women here have of men. What if Katya raises the bar 6 feet and I get a concussion? What if she goes out for a fashionable salad in a tastefully decorated restaurant with American women for lunch, comes home and says, "You aren’t there for me"? God almighty, after years of low expectations, how could I possibly deal with that feminist psychobabble? I’d jump in front of a truck, or at least revert to the fetal position.  

Happily, after three and a half years in America, I can report that it hasn’t happened yet. The bar is still low. I take out the garbage and am treated as a hero. I go shopping for tampons and am handsomely rewarded. I ask her how her day was and listen, and she’s thrilled. Sure the kitchen is a little messy, but what can you expect from a man anyway?  

Still, I wonder about the future. What if she finds out who Oprah is and suddenly jacks the bar up? She often tells her friends at work how wonderful I am for cleaning the house. What if they get her in a corner and tell her this should be expected? Our relationship’s rickety foundation would collapse. We narrowly avoided disaster last year when her work friends heard her ask me on the phone if she could spend $20. These close calls happen more and more, but I keep my fingers crossed that the bar will stay low.  

But I’ll tell you this: The first time Katya says, "We need to talk about our relationship," or "Why didn’t you clean the stove top?" that’s it, boys and girls. We’re packing our bags and heading back to that wonderful land where I am the Man of the Century. 

Author's Biography

Joseph Pickett is a full-time writer and editor in Fairfax, Virginia. 

He lived in Russia for three years and brought home some nifty souvenirs, including a very nice wife.

E-mail Joseph at joe.pickett@longandfoster.com

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