Consider this a love letter to a lady I saw only for a moment. More than 20
years ago. She was passing on a trolley car, and I was on a bus headed in
the opposite direction in what was then Leningrad. I wonder if she's still
living. Has she changed as much as Russia has since then? Or perhaps she's
not changed much at all, as Russia hasn't.
She lingers in the mind. An older but no wiser newspaperman in Little Rock,
Ark., sits down to write 800 words about Valentine's Day and there she is
again. The gray day lights up, just as it did then. Every detail of the
scene is still there, imprinted. From the slope of the street to the
decaying old buildings in the background. I can still hear the rolling clank
of the streetcar as it passes.
It's like opening an old photograph album, and finding the one picture you
were looking for.
It was our last day in Leningrad on an editorial writers' tour of the Soviet
Union. There was a touch of late-afternoon yellow in the clear sky. It was
still early in the trip, which would go on for weeks more, but I was already
growing accustomed to the uniform grayness, the long lines, the lies nobody
believed, the unsmiling faces, the whole Kafkaesque experience in which
nothing was as it seemed Š and then I saw her.
She was jammed on the back of a crowded tram during rush hour, looking
absently at the traffic, as if returning from a long day at work doing
nothing and her feet hurt. Her clothes had the too-stylish look Russian
women affected then, her make-up too obvious. It was as if a carefully
coiffed shop girl from the '40s in rouge and bright red lipstick had
wandered into the Sovdrudgery of the '80s, the last unrecognized days of a
crumbling empire. And workers' state or not, she was going to be feminine.
I see her gaze absently at the passing Intourist bus. It's a moment before
she realizes that someone on it is trying to take her picture. He puts his
fingers to his mouth, spreading it into a grin, trying to get her to smile
for the camera. After a moment's wary hesitation, she does.
It is a breathtaking smile. Full, warm, generous, giving, maybe a little
mischievous, proper but knowing, and given freely to someone who has to be a
stranger forever.