Back in late April when I first fractured my right foot and left ankle I thought for sure that two months of forced home internment in a Soviet-made wheelchair would lead to all manner of quasi-dangerous entertainment in the spirit of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window being viewable from the cozy confines of my fifth-floor balcony. But alas, this was not to be.

For one thing, the May and early June weather was mostly too dismal even to keep the balcony doors open much of the time. The one time I heard anything remotely interesting was from the constantly rotating group of locals who congregate down in my courtyard on a more-or-less nightly basis (a woman’s seemingly desperate screams for help), visual surveillance of the situation revealed that it was nothing of the kind. The woman was simply piss drunk and, if anything, she was definitely getting the better (with flying feet and the occasional well-placed fist—she couldn’t have been that drunk) of the male attacker who was ostensibly the cause of her screams. Hardly worth the effort of struggling to my fiberglass-encased feet and hobbling out to the balcony for a look, I think you’ll agree. A classic case of the hysterical freak who cried wolf.

But not long after the removal of my second cast and the arrival of balmy summer-type weather last week, my modest little courtyard finally blessed me with the scene of suitably dramatic and incomprehensible street theater which I had been craving for so long.

The night began blandly enough—Rudnitsky, myself, and two other unfortunate souls busied ourselves investigating what turned out to be two pretty non-prepossessing nightlife establishments. By about 5:30 a.m. we were quite drunk (but not pleasantly so) and one of our number had already turned in for some rest. Wandering along Tverskaya with the vague idea of stopping in at Garazh for a quick “hallo” to those Night Flight whores who were still going strong, I spotted an impressive length of heavy-duty metal chain lying orphaned in front of the Benetton shop. I considered bringing it to the club to threaten the doormen with before leaving it heaped behind a row of kiosks in the metro perekhod.

Of course, they wouldn’t let us into Garazh, blaming my “sports shoes” (the dicks themselves were wearing black Teva sandal knockoffs and ugly gray socks), but I’m sure it was just because Jake’s a Jew and they’re all a bunch of raving anti-Semites. Or maybe it was the grime and rust all over my clothes and my bleeding hands from the chain that set off their “Do Not Allow to Enter under Any Circumstances” alarms. Whatever the reason, following a brief shoving match on the Garazh stairs that, frankly, neither of us was particularly interested in, the only available option was to retrieve the metal chain and find a suitable home for it.

I left it to Jake to flag down a cab, while I did my best to hide the chain (it was about 6 feet long and weighed around 30 pounds) under my coat. Obviously, the driver could not have cared less about whatever potentially deadly implements I was carrying, and we made it back to my place without further incident. The elevator was out-of-service again, but this merely provided a good excuse to drag the chain noisily up the five flights of stairs to my door, with Jake’s cohort snapping high-quality action photos of the scene from behind. I set the chain down out on the balcony in a neatly coiled pile and adjourned to the bathroom to deal with the grime and blood.

With little in the way of expectations and strong white Russians in hand, the three of us gathered back out on the balcony to smoke up what remained of the carton of Kools I had recently brought back from the states. And this was when the fun, as it were, started.

Our attention was immediately drawn to the teams of pigeons and sparrows diligently poking at the courtyard’s various puddles for who-knows-what sources of nourishment. Recalling the moldy half-loaf of bread I had discarded the day before, I went to the kitchen, obtaining some hazelnuts and pine nuts while I was there. All of these I then tossed down into the center of the parking lot, first breaking the bread into two relatively less-moldy and more-moldy chunks.

Predictably enough, the nuts were a huge hit. The pigeons made quick work of them, while the smaller sparrows pecked at the less-moldy chunk of bread. Upon finishing with the nuts, the pigeons bullied their way into this as well. But none of them would dare approach the moldier half. We were of course hoping that the moldy bread would yield some horrific hallucinations in the birds, so this bashfulness on their part was certainly disappointing. But we had nothing if not time to kill and so we would wait until their hunger got the better of their common sense.

Fortunately, we did not have to wait very long. Before the first round of cigarettes had burned down there appeared a slightly larger pigeon with various mottled white feathers, obviously a leader of sorts. As the other birds (sparrows included) retreated to the edges of the courtyard, this honcho approached the gray-green bread mass and furiously attacked it. Taking a step back from the bread, the bird then went into the oddest succession of choreographed maneuvering I’ve ever seen from a non-human beast. He (an assumption on my part) started walking sideways across the parking lot while doing a series of 540-degree spins, first counterclockwise, then clockwise, then counterclockwise again. The display was disconcerting, not least because I alone had seen it occur (the other two having gone inside for a minute to refresh their drinks). Whether the “dance” (there being no other word to describe it) was a mold-induced hallucination or simply a sign to the lesser birds that they could now have a go I have no idea, so I’ll just leave it at that. In any case, the other birds did now gradually begin to approach the moldier of the two bread pieces.

As that spectacle was winding down and most of the birds had returned to their puddles, our attention was drawn to the old man who had been sleeping on a cardboard box spread out on a length of above-ground heating pipe and was now astir. What drew our attention in particular (aside from the pair of crutches leaning against the pipes) was not the man himself, but a mysterious bit of whiteness that appeared to be sticking out from under his head. It looked kind of like a pillow, but it was impossible to be certain from the distance of 75 feet or so. Jake half-joked that there was a second man sleeping under the cardboard. And sure enough, there was! A few moments after the old man had risen to a seated position on the pipes, a second, younger man climbed out from underneath the cardboard and wandered off behind a tree for a piss. None of us knew quite what to make of that, so we did our best to refrain from commenting. No doubt you can arrive at your own varied conclusion as to the nature of this mysterious symbiotic relationship.

Enter the trash truck, come to go about its daily task of emptying the building’s two designated dumpsters. I had listened to this process on many previous mornings while vainly attempting to sleep, but never before had I actually seen what was involved. Turns out I had been missing a true wonder of Soviet engineering in action.

As it happens, the truck lifts the dumpsters with a surprisingly maneuverable joystick-operated grasping arm. The first dumpster was no big deal—the driver simply moved the arm straight out, grabbed the receptacle and flipped it up and over, emptying the contents. If anything, it was rather impressive how little of the trash spilled considering how primitive and rickety the device looked. But the second dumpster was the kicker. Without having to move the truck to a more convenient position, the driver was able to move the arm diagonally and repeat the dumping motion—again, with surprisingly minimal spillage. These words hardly do the scene justice, but suffice it to say that I cheered out loud and applauded for several seconds. The driver didn’t even look up—no doubt he had long ago become jaded about the miraculous piece of machinery with which he had been charged. And who knows how many more dumpsters still awaited emptying on that morning alone.

Thus ended Act III. There was a hint of an encore as a shirtless old man up on the eighth floor began climbing precariously out of his kitchen window to hammer on the outer frame. But rather than attempting some unnecessarily convoluted form of suicide, he was merely forcing open the windows for the warm months. This I took as a cue to blast the first few sections of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Jake and his friend were soon off to visit Lenin’s tomb, but I had seen more than enough post-Soviet theater for one morning.