Annotated pages from the author’s copy of The Dog of the South

About a month ago, this man dropped an orange peel on me, deliberately, from the third-floor window of a pink apartment building on Bohdana Khmelnytsky Street in Kyiv, Ukraine. If you would like to picture the scene, you should imagine a man with the same shape of head and beard as Karl Marx, dressed in a high-necked white garment that sits at the intersection of “mystic” and “physician,” eating an orange and staring directly into the tired eyes of a woman who is wearing an ankle-length black coat that makes her feel like a corrupt but dignified old banker and big shiny black shoes that make her feel like a powerful car. I was on my way to the A. V. Fomin Botanical Garden a few streets away, and it was early enough in the morning that I had nothing in my head except the thought of how much I loved my shoes. I’d been gazing down at them as I walked, gloating over them in a way that was Rumpelstiltskinesque, when I realized someone was staring at me, hard, so I looked up and there was this man, in the pink building across the street, eating his orange with glazed conviction and giving off an aura of Rasputin. Read More