In Russia there is a babushka for everything. You will find the old ladies struggling impossibly outside with groceries in the cold, wool socks hitched up high, in the corners of the metro begging quietly, in the little glass compartments keeping a watch on 4 screens of people getting onto the subway escalators. There is even a babushka in the print museum in Sankt-Peterburg who will open the back door where Lenin edited the Pravda, and another who will appear just to wave you through the next. They were selling verba branches before Russian Easter outside the stations, and walking grandchildren in the parks as the snows of March melted. They crowded the churches for five o’clock mass and shouted at men smoking on the train to Podolsk. A babushka with gold teeth told me she’d seen the Taj Mahal. I wonder how many babushkas died when they bombed the metro as I slept after too much wine too close to the Kremlin.
And then there’s the babushka who I shared an apartment with in St Petersburg, along with two cats, a giant poodle and half a bottle of vodka. We’re working on the second half, sitting at the table where they operated on Yasha after he got bitten by the stray, while the old classic by Nikolai Noskov played on the radio: ‘I’m a guest in this world, one that no one invited, and it’s cold here. But there is one thing that makes it better: I love you, and this is cool…’
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