Is there a more beautiful word in the English language than "vacation"? For me it usually means shedding my Russian persona and heading West, where all the stores take valyuta and lettuce costs $0.59 a head. I forget every word I ever knew of the magical language of Pushkin, and even, at times, adopt the broad vowels and silent "r" of my native Boston.


Not this year. My excellent friend Fedya has decided to abandon both his wife and his mistress and accompany me to the United States. I can hardly refuse: Fedya is now a successful new-Russian businessman, while I am a poverty-stricken foreigner, and this trip will be on his expense account, not mine.


When we met, of course, things were different -- he could not afford to go to McDonald's without me, and our first joint trip to America strained my credit cards to the limit. Well, times change. Fedya showed up at my door last week with a plastic bag full of rubles -- 60 million or so -- that he had made by selling (just in time) his shares in MMM.


So of course I will be glad to have Fedya along. But what it means is that I will be bringing my own little piece of Russia with me, something that is not likely to enhance my capacity to relax.


Not that it will matter all that much, I guess.


The last time I was in New York, with my friend Yura, I felt that I had stepped through the looking glass. It smelled like New York, looked like New York, but something was not quite right.


It began in an art museum, when I sidled up to Yura and whispered, pointing to a particulary virulent avant-garde painting, "Do you like that?" I was speaking Russian, of course, so imagine my surprise when the guard on the other side answered with a curt "nyet."


We continued our tour of the city with a walk down Broadway. I stopped in front of a pet store, and was enthusing in sickenly sweet terms about a family of puppies cavorting around in the window. A whole group drew up on the other side and chimed in -- also in Russian, of course.


Yura took me to a restaurant -- a Russian place called, for some strange reason, Ararat. We arrived to see a nearly empty room, waiters standing idle, and the doors locked tight against a possible onslaught of clients. Those who were in Russia in the '70s and early '80s will know the scene.


Yura, who has been in the States for several years and has forgotten a lot, rapped impatiently on the glass. The maitre d' opened it, shook his head, and uttered the immortal slogan of the Soviet era: "Mest nyet" -- there is no room.


I couldn't help but laugh, although the whole scene was beginning to give me the creeps.


We got into a taxi, and got into a fight. I, who have never been known to mince words, was telling poor Yura exactly what I though of him. I was paying no attention to the taxi driver, of course, since I felt secure in our Russian-language bubble. Yura ultimately got out and I went on alone. There was silence for a few minutes, then the driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said, in Russian, "He was right, you know. I don't know why you were so hard on him."


That did it. I left New York and headed for Baltimore. At the airport, I went to the taxi stand to ask for a ride. The head man looked me over and called over his shoulder in, you guessed it, Russian, "Volodya! Hurry up! This one's yours!"