Vag stirred uneasily in his hard Sever chair and looked about him. All the students were busy writing. Vag thought perhaps it was time he started writing also. They had told him Russian would be a very useful language. if you only knew how to say "Kak pozshevayetye, tovarish Stalin?" a commission and the glamourous life of an intelligence man was yours. The instructor gargled throatily and everyone else laughed. They were, Vag mused, an interesting lot. For instance, there was the red-headed man with the weak pink beard who mouthed his vowels as though he were chewing each one carefully. And the two graduate students who were native Russians and who were always going off on a side excursion with the teacher, both parties erupting in explosive and incomprehensible phrases.

The teacher got up and scrawled something on the board. Vag saw everyone else writing busily in their notebooks, and began laboriously himself to copy the scrawl--it came out looking suspiciously like "Kbacc" which, he was told was a Russian home brew. Vag wondered vaguely whether Russians liked Scotch and sodas, or had a phrase for "bottoms up." "EE vwi!" the instructor screamed as he bounded from his chair and bore down threateningly on Vag. Vag froze in his seat and searched frankly for the word. "Da," he managed to utter tentatively, and then, when no lightning struck, "Da, da, da, da" he repeated enthusiastically, looking awfully intelligent about the whole matter, while the instructor waved his arms madly, burbled, and made other strenuous noises.

Close call, Vag thought, aware that the immediate danger had passed. Mustn't let that sort of thing happen again--bad for morale. The friend that had suggested this to him had always been trustworthy on the subject of courses before. No human being could possibly pronounce the required sounds without a bad case of cleft palate, much less make sense of the designs Russians scribbled on paper and tried to pass off as an alphabet. Now a slim fellow over in another corner, with a thin, nervous voice, was speaking very fast--punctuating his talk with short, indrawn laughs. Then everyone laughed again. This time Pag smiled weakly, closed his notebook, and shuffled his feet impatiently as he heard the muffled tones of the hour bell.

Something, he remarked sternly as he walked out, would have to be done. The correct approach to this was obvious--live in a Russian environment. Russians led a simple life. They had samovars, rode in troikas, and were chased by wolves. A man with a very long name wrote a book about how crime does not pay. They there was Russian music, the Nutcracker Suite, 1812 Overture, and some man who wrote just recently about Leningrad burning down--he was a fireman or something. Vag realized his acquaintance with Russian life was limited, but he might as well get off to a good start. He turned down Dunster Street. The best introduction to Russian would undoubtedly be a bottle of vodka.