Bird of Passage

‘Who was that man who was just sitting here?’ A young woman asked in accented but more than competent English. She had taken her seat at the small table across from me in a chair that had just been vacated. ‘He looks familiar.’

We were in the Pribaltaskaya, a hotel for foreigners on the outskirts of Leningrad in 1986, where I was staying with other poets and writers as part of a Citizens Exchange Council peace-and-friendship delegation to meet with Soviet writers. These were the last days of the Soviet regime, the summer after Chernobyl, when all the apparatus was still in place but the spirit was crumbling around the edges. Our group was leaving for Finland and home the next day, but I had elected to stay on and travel by myself in the Soviet Union for a couple of weeks, and a day or two longer at the same hotel, too.

This last night, we had been drinking together in the hotel bar, scribbling limericks on cocktail napkins, saying our goodbyes. Then, one by one, the others left, while I lingered alone in the bar, nursing my drink, a little fearful of striking out on my own the next day in a foreign country where I knew little of the language and had only the most superficial of contacts.

She had a broad face and high cheekbones, conventionally beautiful in a Eurasian way, dressed slightly more stylishly than most Russian women in those days. I knew she wasn’t most Russian women. Most Russian women were not allowed in the Intourist hotels reserved for foreigners. ...