In the front garden, there is a tree preparing to blossom, summoning all its forces of pale pink and white. There is a risk that a frost will come again, but for the past few days, it has been sunny and warm and full of spring bird song. I should be summoning my own forces for the next phase of work.

A man at a cemetery near Anufrievo mourns
over the grave of his father.

Rogov rides by on his horse-drawn wagon, down to the now-broken ice to get water for the bath house, I suppose. Valentina Mikhailovna walks back and forth to the house of a little girl who died last night, bringing birch twigs and leaves "to make it soft for her in the coffin."

We all had trouble sleeping last night. Alexei came in from the garden and announced that the girl had died, the uroditsa (deformed one). Alexei thought she was about 4 years old, but Ludmila told me this morning that she was older than 7. She was born with signs of deformity and never grew to be much bigger than a baby; she couldn't sit up, eat by herself, talk. She couldn't even say "mama."

When Alexei announced her death last night he didn't show much emotion. He answered direct questions with neutrality: "This was not a person. She didn't die, she was born." I asked if people would cry for her and he said, "Why cry?" I asked him what he meant when he said that she had not died, she had been born, and he explained that you say that when someone who was living was causing pain and suffering to those around her.

Ludmila came into the kitchen and her face fell. "Praise God," she said. She told me that she couldn+t sleep last night. "Anyway, it was a person," she said.

May 3, 1995

Since few residents own cars, often the only way in or out of town is by hitching a ride on delivery or postal vehicles.

Tamara kindly let me stay in her Belozersk apartment alone for a couple of days until I can catch some transportation back to Anufrievo; the roads are impassable again. I will enjoy the use of her bathtub. Maybe I'll move into it permanently.

The other day, Kolya and Yura came by with vodka and I let them in but emphatically told them that they could just stay a short while and that I was tired of watching people drink.

I had come to Belozersk on a bus with a group of gravediggers who had gotten together to dig the grave of the latest man who had died in our village. The whole trip took five hours, and maybe the fact that they were gravediggers gave the whole thing a Shakespearean tragic-comic edge. I waited alone in the cold bus for them while they hacked away at the hard earth. Given the tradition that gravediggers are paid in vodka, by the time they finally lumbered onto the bus two hours later, they were all completely trashed. Black eyes, missing teeth, matted hair and all. The drinking only continued as the bus rolled along the frozen country roads... and I tried to make myself invisible. One man in particular wanted to share his ebullient state with me -- that same state that can so easily snap and darken into volatility. I managed to fend him off but found myself concocting bizarre escape plans just in case. It turned out that one of the men on the bus was a known rapist. He had paid off the family of his victim instead of going to jail (a practice considered more or less acceptable here). By the time I had arrived in Belozersk, my nerves were nearly shattered from the week behind me of death and drinking.

So when Kolya and Yura wanted to drink more, I wasn't pleased. Kolya is a brilliant rock musician, and maybe his exceptional talent makes the tragedy of his heavy drinking more poignant for me. I suppose it shouldn't.

There is something about this spring, even in its loveliest moments, that makes me feel the despair of the Russian young.

July 20, 1995

Belozersk's statue of Lenin that has stood guard in the town square since forever was mysteriously covered in white cloth at the time of the city festival yesterday. He looked oddly like a mummy, and Zina and I sat around the table at dinner last night propounding theories about what the deal was. Was it finally Time? Why now? Zina wryly offered the hypothesis that "it's so that he doesn't disturb us" (after all, as the saying goes, "Lenin is with us"). Another dinner guest from Vologda went off on a tirade about how they dare to insult "the great figures of socialism," which only got more energetic when the real reason for the mummification came out: Lenin's head seems to have been lopped off in a Belozersk version of an act of defiance. "Vandalism is getting out of hand," said Alexei, trying to close the subject.

July 30, 1995

Some of Anufrievo's children dancing at the town's clubhouse.

Last night I was given club duty -- Alexei was busy and needed me to open the clubhouse for the children and sit there for a couple of hours while they play. I brought David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb along with me to read, which I managed for a while until the kids came pouring in, clamoring for attention. I was happy to see them; we'd been teaching one another songs and they liked to hear themselves on my tape recorder. Sveta, 13, is the leader of a group of about 10 girls -- lovely without exception -- who live in the village during the summer. She ran over to me and eagerly asked to look at my book and tried to pronounce some of the words. I wished that I had brought another book -- this one had pictures that hinted of atrocities. I had no idea what these girls did or didn't know about the political history of their country but I was reluctant to disturb their youthful flight. Sveta wanted me to translate the captions under the photos.

I said, testing the waters, "Some very bad things happened in this country. There were these camps."

Sveta jumped in, as if to blurt out the right answer in class, "The Great Patriotic War!" By now, an entire circle of pretty, lively girls was staring at me, waiting for my reaction. I asked them if they remembered the putsch, and Sveta wanted to know which one.

"There have been so many," she said.

"You know, when the tanks were in Moscow," I said.

She interrupted again: "And Yeltsin stood up on the tanks!"

After a few more questions, Sveta announced that that was enough and they would be going into the other room to listen to music and would I mind translating some songs for them. I agreed and left my book behind in the front room. .