little wood. It was a traditional timber izba, or cottage, two-story, with walls of silvery
weathered boards, the golden light of late afternoon picking out the delicate tracery of
carvings around the windows. “Here is house of Professor Bayeva.”
“Oh, it’s lovely,” exclaimed Mrs. Clement.
Sergey went to open the car door, ushering them out. As the girl stepped out, he said, a
little anxiously, “Please excuse if I frighten you, Miss.”
The girl looked at him. Beautiful eyes, but too serious for one so young, he thought. At
her age, she should be full of joyful sparkle, like his niece Masha. She said, softly, “It’s okay,
Mr. Filippov. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.”
“It’s Helen’s first time in Russia,” explained her mother protectively.
Sergey nodded. “Ah. And you have come from Moscow, of course. Much too big, noisy,
tiring city. I myself go there only once. And this enough. I want to run away. But here is
different. You find peace, Miss, I think.”
**
The taxi driver turned his back to them as he opened the front door of the house, and
didn’t see the look that passed over Helen’s face. He was quite right, she had been freaked out
by Moscow. But unlike Sergey, she came from a big city, so it wasn’t that. And it wasn’t that
the Russian capital was ugly or frightening, either, quite the opposite. Partly, it was because
the physical contrast to home was so great, and so sudden. They’d left a mild gray London
spring morning and emerged into a Moscow afternoon so bright blue that it seemed painted on
with a lavish brush. Everything had culture-shocked her, from the sublime to the ordinary: the
candy-striped domes of St Basil’s cathedral flaunted against the intense sky, Red Square vast
as a rolling stone plain, wide streets strung with garlands of lights, weird little railway kiosks
like tiny general stores, impassive people whose faces she didn’t know how to read. And most
of all, the barbed-wire look of Cyrillic script, fencing her off from any real understanding of
what was going on.
But it wasn’t just culture shock; she knew that.
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