Russia knew no single happy hour

Russia knew no established teatime, no single happy hour. Sometimes people dropped coins into fountains for good luck, and the coins did not sink. We knew then that the water was really vodka. We knew it twice, when we walked home from the theater by way of canal one moonlit night in Piter, and lived to admit as much the following day. That was the twenty-third of February. The entire country was on holiday for four days on account of the armed forces. I took the overnight train alone from Moskva to Piter to visit Ania Berman, who was in the city on a Fulbright. We paid a call to the house-museum of the painter Ilya Repin in the town of Repino on the Finnish Gulf. We could not discern, where the town ended and the gulf began. On the elektrichka to Repino, we slipped spare rubles to boys strumming folk tunes on banjos; we saw them again on the way back, flushed with drink. Somewhere in between these sights and sightings, I lost a glove; two days later I lost another.

It was still cold enough for gloves in April, when the four Americans and I went to a free concert at the Cervantes Institute in Moskva, where the management gave each girl a rose. Afterwards we went walking down a tree-lined boulevard that led to Pushkinskaja. We passed a huddle of youths playing guitar and singing around a bench; when they saw us looking at them with wist, they reached out a hat, but we were already in the distance. Suddenly Masha said that she would like to leave them her rose, and I said, Давай, Let’s, and we turned back, and gave our roses to the singing girls. Девочки, вы прелесть [1], they cooed, and the boys graze-kissed us each on the cheek, before we dashed back to rejoin our own crowd, who asked in retrospect, Why did you give them flowers, as if that were a question. We recalled that as we’d left the Cervantes Institute, there’d been very many leftover roses; we imagined the field day we would’ve had, if we’d taken them all in our arms and strewn them across the city.

[1] Girls, you are charming.