The kitten is unlikely to live, says the vet, and I am just waiting now, and force-feeding, and giving fluids. Not even a month on this earth, and all of it spent hungry, in Moscow, in winter. Makes no sense.
We bought Lena a train ticket home to Moldova for the holidays, and said goodbye today for at least a month and possibly -- if EB does start school next month -- for longer. There were no tickets left for the 48-hour train journey, but the conductors apparently reserve at least one compartment of seats at holiday time, to sell, themselves, upon the train's departure, and Lena plans to get a place that way. I remember so many arduous Eastern European train trips with A, back when we were nimbler: bribing conductors with cigarettes to make the train wait a few minutes more; hauling an heiress's amount of luggage, none of it wheeled, through sooty underpasses in freezing rain (I was never a backpacker, always a pack rat); compartments that were icy, and those that were sweltering, with windows that never worked; opting to disembark before the border (inevitably in the wee hours, in a field, and in the cold), then walk across and catch the next train through, rather than pay for an international ticket; submitting to obnoxious searches by very young border guards, who might still, back then, have been unable to hide being just a bit taken aback when handed an American passport; the bizarre landscapes and grotesque characters of provincial railroad stations in the middle of the night.
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