The first time I was in Moscow was in 1998. There were five of us living in an obshejitiye (dorm), and Jean got sick for a while.
There was also a cleaning lady for the building, because every square inch of Moscow had a cleaning lady.
One day while the rest of us were in class, Jean (whose Russian was the best out of all of us) got into a conversation with the cleaning lady. I don’t remember the details, so I may be making them up, but they went something like this: she lived with her daughter, her husband had died,* and, Jean told us, she often would do laundry for the students to make a little extra money.
Our showers worked like this: you’d turn on the tap that went directly into the bathtub. Then you’d turn the thing for the shower so you could take a shower. Only the shower head rested at waist level. So you’d take the shower head and wet yourself, soap up, freeze-dried, then rinse off. It was never a really good rinse, because you could only do it single-handedly. We were also in class every day and going to see shows every night. We learned that a shower every day was unnecessary**.
Laundry worked like this: when you needed to do laundry, you’d take a shower. You soaped up the clothes around the time you soaped up yourself, rinsed them off as best you could, and hung them on strings across the room. They usually turned out grayer than they had started, and very stiff. When we took them off the line, they had folded themselves.***
So when Jean told me our cleaning lady (I forget her name, which leads me to think that I never knew it correctly to begin with) wanted to do laundry on the side to make some extra money, I was sold. I had the money of a privileged American student! I hated and was terrible at laundry! It seemed perfect.
So the next time I saw her, I gave her my bag of mostly-base-layers laundry. I used my horribly broken Russian to indicate that she would wash them and I would pay her. She agreed. We had an arrangement! And she thanked me profusely. Profusely.****
For the next two weeks, whenever I saw her, I asked her about the return of my clothes. “Zaftra,” she would say every time: “Tomorrow.” A week in, I began to beg: “Ya nuzhno moe…this!” I would repeat, pointing and grabbing at my shirt, “Ya nuzhna!“***** “Da, da, da, zaftra!” she would smile, and I would sigh. Jean, of the high-school-level Russian asked her as well, and got the same answer.
And then, after not seeing her for about a week, I asked her one more time. She beamed, and launched into a long monologue that I couldn’t begin to understand. She pulled up her skirts****** and showed me what I thought might be my leggings.******
And at that point I came to terms with the fact that I had probably made, in Lorielle’s words, “a charitable donation.” And I thought, Well…if she needs my dirty underwear that badly, she’s welcome to it.
*all women outlive the men in Russia.
**We brought that lesson home with us for a while, before it wore off or we were shamed out of it, I don’t recall.
***In Russia, clothes fold you.
****Too profusely, actually.
*****”I need my [this]!”
******Plural. It was winter. You wore all the layers.