The Train Sets Off; The Platform Remains Behind

May 1, 1977

Dear Nadya,

I went by your apartment again yesterday, and discovered that your mother was no longer living there, even on the weekends. The neighbor told me that she went to live with your brother’s family on the other side of the city. So she had no interest in following you to Moscow for your weekend jaunts? Or is it just that an apartment is small if there are two mothers in it? I can’t remember if your Zhenya has a mother— if he mentioned it to me I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten his patronymic and family name as well, so if he’s Zhenya to you he must be Zhenya to me. But I must imagine that if your apartment has a mother in it, his must as well, so that he felt quite at home with you, and you with him.

I’m setting this letter off into the wind. Do I know if you have gone to Constructors Street in Moscow? No. But it’s the address I have, and easy to remember. And if some stranger living there instead gets this letter, because your Zhenya and his mother (and yourself on your weekend trips) have all packed up and left, then I hope she forgives me for the presumption of sending her mail. Maybe she’ll write back, and tell me I have the wrong address.

Far better for me to send a letter than it would be for me to have some business in Moscow, and stumble up in the dead of night to the only address that I know. Far better to send a letter than get a train ticket on a whim.

There’s been something very funny that I’ve been thinking about recently. Is it funny? I don’t know.

I’ve been accused of being too solid and inflexible, unadventurous. But if I am not an adventurer, I think it is because all my life I have tried not to become a bandit. If I am cautious, it is because I know that when I am faced with frustration I will leap with my fists on what is frustrating me; if I am slow, it is because I know that when I am angry, I am the type of man to drive my car off the road and crash it, or lose it in a lake. People like me because I am sober; I am sober because I do not like myself drunk.

But what is truer about me? I suppose it doesn’t matter. For a year you saw me the way I wanted to be seen— a dependable, serious man— and on one night you discovered that I was a boor. Or perhaps it was that after a year of being a bore you decided that the amount of adventure I could offer was not enough. Well, what does it matter? I can’t change my nature— regardless of if that nature is the boring man unable to indulge himself, or if it’s the wild man kept fully in check by self-control. I don’t think there’s one of those that you prefer.

I hope that whatever adventure you’ve found in Moscow is suiting you well. Or maybe you’ve found it boring now that the holiday is over.

Four months have come and gone, and I’ve tried to visit you several times. Always on the weekends; I can’t leave my work to chase you down at yours, and I know you well enough to guess that you’ll finish the school year before abandoning your students. 

And please— don’t accuse me of not wanting to find you, and not going out of my way to hunt you down. If this letter finds you, then I know very well where you are on weekends and how to get there. But why should I intrude on your happiness? The incessant knocking at the door must be annoying for you, and coming with my hat in my hands would tire for me. It already has.

So why am I writing now, when I haven’t for months?

Because it’s spring. I think by the middle of winter, you and I and everyone else, we start to go half insane. We welcome in the New Year and try to forget that winter has already been dragging on for too long, and will continue to track its snowy boots inside our homes for months, until he shuffles out like a guest who’s overstayed his welcome; one who slept too long and missed his train out and has to stay another night. We get drunk on the holiday to pretend like the unwelcome guest is still a friend we can live with, and can bear to keep around until he packs his bags and goes at long last.

But it’s a holiday again today, red banners and workers’ parades. And I’m sure in the capital you’re having a grand display. And the mail isn’t running, so whatever letter I put in the box won’t reach you until you’re already back here from your holiday jaunt, and so it will sit on Zhenya’s table for another week until you return. The thought of this makes me not want to mail it, but the longer it stretches between the date I’ve written at the top and the day you read the letter, the less tempted you’ll be to write me back. Don’t— I don’t need a reply, certainly not one out of pity.

I think you do pity me, don’t you? You and I considered ourselves to be on our last chance, doing our best to get the unmarried situation over with. You had another chance blown in on the wind, and it snatched you away. Certainly, you think this leaves me without much, and makes me a man deserving of pity. 

For four months, when winter stretched on, yes. But who isn’t deserving of pity in the winter? We all are— and that makes it so much harder to extend it to anyone else. That’s something I’m guilty of, but not something I can correct.

So, something different would have happened if I had, when I walked in your door, treated a drunk stranger and housebreaker like an old friend. If I’d let him impose on our evening for just one evening and put him on a flight home in the morning, he wouldn’t have imposed on the rest of our lives. You like something about him— that means there is something about him to like. Perhaps we could have been friends. In a year, I would have invited him to a bathhouse the night before I married you, and he would have gotten so outrageously drunk that he missed the ceremony in the morning. But it was the middle of the night, in the winter, and I could not think about anything except wanting to be warm and having you in my arms— and if he were me, he would have been just as impatient as I was. If we have nothing else in common, we are both men— I’m sure he understood that about me.

But that was winter. In May, the thin soles of your shoes don’t bother you so much.

I think about you often— by the day if not by the hour— and I don’t suppose you think of me. If you do, I hope it’s fondly, and you remember more of the man that I wanted to be than whoever I was that night. Drunk, and so crusted with snow on my jacket that I was too cold for you to touch.

I met you in the spring— and all that winter I had been gloomy about my life. I think you were with yours, too. But there was spring— and it came, and you came with it. Here’s spring again, and it’ll come next year, and the year after that, always arriving to take pity on the lonely and the cold. I’ll try to remember that.

Maybe someday you’ll be back in Leningrad to visit your mother, and we’ll see each other on the street. I’ll still be living here. If nothing else, you know where to find me.

Yours,

Ippolit