Fontanka. All morning the sky had been cloudless, but suddenly around 6 PM the clouds rolled in and the streets emptied. I dashed into a musty passageway to wait for the rain to subside, along with three girls in sky-high heels who had also decided not to carry their umbrellas. It was still sprinkling when I continued on to the show; there were people in every doorway and at every gate who had similarly been caught unawares.
Yesterday I took the day off. I made one phone call in the morning and then packed my backpack, caught an elektrichka up to Sestroretsk, on the Bay of Finland, about an hour up the coast from St. Petersburg. Men were selling cookbooks, strips of bandaids, maps, ice cream out of ice chests--up and down the center aisle of the wagon. When we reached the platform I didn't know where I was going; I let the crowd from the train carry me along, across the tracks, into a fruits & vegetables market (the kind that springs up next to all these dusty little train stations), through a few huge apartment buildings, onto the main road into town. Standing on a bridge over a small river, I could feel salt in the wind, and found a packed-dirt path along the bank, so I followed it into the woods in the hope that it would lead me to the shore. I ran into an old man who was collecting Podorozhnik, a medicinal plant, in a plastic bag, and he guided me onto all the right paths and pointed the direction to the seaside. "You ought to be careful, a girl like you, in these woods--the kinds of people we've got around here!" He prefers Belorussia, he says; none of this muck, litter, garbage everywhere, it's so clean and peaceful, and the people are friendly. "Here, just look at this mess, and everybody's drunk." He also confirmed my suspicion about a spiky-leaved plant I'd had an encounter with earlier: крапива, stinging nettle!
The mosquitoes were vicious, even worse than the ones that keep me vigilantly awake in my apartment, but when the mud gave way to sand and the trees opened up onto a coarse-pebbled beach, they subsided as well. It was a beautiful expanse--the beach was narrow, covered in dry reeds and grass that rustled, driftwood, tiny blue and purple flowers. The remains of a campfire were still smoking where I laid out my towel on the edge of the woods, but the beach was empty and silent so I took off all my clothes and stretched out to read the last 100 pages of Force of Circumstance. I was nervous and kept glancing around, remembering Beauvoir's recollection of falling asleep on sand dunes in Tunisia, then waking up to a man with a knife sitting on her belly. Still, the sun was bright and there was nobody to be seen. I put down the book every now and then, looked around me and was overwhelmed with a sense of--I want to call it vertigo, but I know that's not right. An awe at being where I am, utterly alone, so far from what I consider my life, lying in the sun on one far corner of the vast Euro-Asian landmass. Instead of the isolating, maddening solitude of living alone in a big city, I felt a solitude that was serene, voluntary, replenishing. It was just what I needed.
I laid there until my stomach grumbled, then got dressed and dove back through the woods. Had some embarrassingly bad soup in a cafe by the railroad tracks, then some incredibly good dark raisin bread baked in the Sestroretsk bread factory, and the most perfect tomato I've ever tasted, which I ate whole, from a fruit and vegetable stand in the market. I caught the 6:30 train back to Petersburg. There were more men selling ice cream on the return train.
And today woke up at noon, feeling terribly groggy--I couldn't sleep last night from the nettle burns on my ankles, the mosquito bites, the heat, and I took some benedryl to soothe myself a bit--it put me to sleep, alright, but waking up is so unpleasant with benedryl. I went out for a run, then spent the entire day walking around the city. There was a street celebration in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky outside the apartment he once lived in; performance art, puppet theatre, fake 19th century signs up on all of the buildings. I got sprayed with chunks of watermelon by actors deep in Dostoevskian despair and madness, who tore them apart while another actor, Dostoevsky I presume, wrote words in blue paint on a grey backdrop. I went into Land, a posh supermarket where they sell tofu, squid ink pasta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (15,000 roubles a bottle; the price is staggering even in dollars), individually packaged mangoes, camembert and hummus--I bought orange preserves and dry soymilk. Bought a stale croissant from a stuck-up bakery near Chernishevskaya metro, sunned myself in the Tauride Gardens while I finished Simone de Beauvoir.
I've been practicing my accordion without big results; I'm far too impatient for musical instruments and this is an exercise for me as much as sit-ups or the gym. But I take a few deep breaths, set my eyes on my goal, and take baby steps toward it: first scales, chords, simple tunes. THEN, La Valse d'Amélie!
Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and across the ocean I feel like celebrating for the first time in my life--because I'm so out of place here, because I'm independent, because it might make me feel a little closer to home. Yeah, huh.
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