Trekhprudny Lane

First, today, I give you the dancing series, alternatively "Trekhprudny Lane, the Remix." A week old but too good to withhold. 

It's thirty degrees F today, so warm that I've opened some windows to air out the apartment. Because the girls are finally better (I think we've weathered still another virus since I last posted, one with vomiting), we took our skates and sled to the pond this morning but found rain falling in the street and no Russians venturing onto the ice. We decided to trust local instinct or tradition and trudged home. 

One of the tragic Warsaw aunts just sent her son, who is nineteen, to study music for a semester in France. It is their first real separation. For many years they have had only each other, living in one small room in an apartment dominated by a father/husband who long ago disowned them. When we talked by phone, she was in a weepy panic, frustrated of course by internet trouble at the crucial time, their first few days apart. I have been thinking about her a lot -- what a no-win bind it is, to have your child be the most important man in your life, and renunciation the most honorable gift you can give. 

 

Slipped away yesterday with A to the Pushkin Museum. It was our first visit; we've been "saving" it for winter. The usual Russian protocol: magnificent and monumental classical exterior, which does not match up with the dim, close spaces one finds upon entering, where the oppressive presence of rules and procedures -- formica booths papered inside with tacky posters, musty curtains and xeroxed warnings blocking every other entrance, long lines of patient, dripping people leading to various dour babushki, and heavy security -- make the grandest vaulted halls feel dingy and claustrophobic. Still, once we reached the galleries, it was beautiful to drift among the cozy, fire-lit Dutch and Flemish interiors, the Nativities and shady hunts, and the still lifes (rough planks, a ceramic jug, a knife, a loaf, a gasping fish -- Andalusia, here I come!) while snow fell and trolley buses groaned through the slush outside. A remarked that the museum director is in her late eighties, a grande dame who survived Stalin's era and every upheaval since. We caught a glimpse of a tapestry in her office as her door opened to admit employee after employee, papers hugged to their chests, in and out -- were they really scuttling or am I imagining things?