Trekhprudny Lane

This morning we visited a Waldorf/Steiner detsky sad, or kindergarten, where EB might be permitted to go once she turns three. Taciturn Russians seem to do Waldorf more convincingly than Americans, who tend to confuse Steiner's prescription for companionable silence in the classroom with perpetual (and thus false) cheeriness. The little stuccoed school was a warm, homey place, with wood-paneled walls and overgrown potted plants, even mushroom caps and apple slices hanging on strings in the windows to dry, and on the first floor, an old tiled kitchen where lunch is prepared, and in the anteroom, slippers for all of the little children to wear indoors. The trademark apricot walls and fuzzy pastoral murals of gnome life looked a bit bizarre, esoteric, back in the US. Here, after one emerges from the gritty metro and the chilly gray wind, the same decor felt warm and welcoming and dreamily childlike. 

I've realized that I've become worried about keeping up intellectually with A, who blazes ahead, reading the latest novel, watching the news, increasingly connected to the city around us. For this reason meeting some of the older American wives has been a little terrifying: they are spouses of important decision makers here, men who work for massively powerful companies or for the US government, men who are “out there” every day, finding ways to do a profitable business in this strange and inscrutable place. The husbands must be exceptionally intelligent, agile, talented. It seems to me (at least, at this early point) that expat wives face a great risk of being left behind. For a while, if A spends his days devising contracts and clauses for big, fast-moving Russian clients, and I spend mine at the grocery store and at home, or even if I spend mine looking at paintings in the Pushkin Museum, we might still be able to find each other in the evening. But that cannot last very long – no more than a few months. After that I fear I will become in his eyes a child, a dunce, a holdover from a previous life. This was already happening back home to some degree. The more comfortable my life, the faster my brain goes flabby. It's not good for me, and it's not good for the marriage.