Kovalevskij

...1963, as a swabby=swap=patla(N/root)=paddle/battle(E)=patlani(N)=fly i was taking Russian at the Navy Band School ground in Anacostia, later to be glorified as DLI-ECB. you'll have to figure out the alphabet soup yourself, as you don't have the need to know. as Zubov, all teachers were Imperial Russians, but Kove was special, everybody else kow-towed to him, even Arch-Duke "Stinky" Galitzin, the Lithuanian, who was embalming himself slowly with tobacco, chai=chalani(N/root)=not give the tone, tinkle of glass shattering, talk, not sing, and looked like an elegant Choctaw warrior preparing to black his front teeth by rotting them with a sugar cube and draining samovars entire through their posts, all the while chatting in English about his love for the sport cars of his youth, leaving us to wonder, even if he had one in his day where he would drive it. along the log roads of Russia during spring thaw, or would it have skiis and be drawn by troikas while he sat warming himself on the hood? in any case the cynicism and superiority oozed out of him like loose snuff from the many pockets of history his illustrious line had filled since Peter/Pëtr Velykij/the Great. ...Petrov was the tallest of the Instructors. his way out of Russia, he looked like Nobel Prize Winner, was through China, where he found work as bodyguard for a Chinese Billionare, but when the Chinese found out he wouldn't hurt a fly, they let him go find his way to Hong Kong where he opened a camera shop, but that didn't work either. somehow he found his way to California, managed to have time to write a book about Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush, then settled into DFL-ECB, as the only teacher there whose past glories mattered nothing. of course all were commuting from NYC where they could speak Russian on weekends. ...the only instructor who looked lupine enough to be working for the CIA we called by code-name, Wolf, graying military trimmed hair, with the rangy build of a concert pianist=pia(N)=guard and abstain, therefore, soft, in Italian, but there was nothing soft about Wolf as he scanned us with distant steppe eyes cold as coming winter. his father had been victim of his own country's power struggles. ...but Kovalevskij, a cherub, healthy flush to his round civilized face, small, delicate, immaculate, calm voice, dressed by his doting wife every morning, or so it seemed, a good boy who went on to be a marvelous husband, in the pink and peak of prime old age. yes, rumor had it he deposed Rasputin, being close to the Tzar=tzallantli(N)=sala(sp).