99 Stories of God

32. Shaken

She was a student of literature. She loved the life of the mind and languages, though she was fluent in only five. The thought of the world’s peoples thinking and feeling, quarreling and praying, in so many different languages humbled and delighted her.

In 1968, she traveled to the Soviet Union to visit with the great Pavel Naumovich Berkov, the preeminent specialist of eighteenth-century Russian literature. This was shortly before his death,

She met with him several times at his dacha at Komarovo, but tea was never offered.

Once she desperately had to use the toilet but was too shy to enquire after the facilities. After she left Berkov but before she walked the short distance to the station and the train that would return her to Leningrad, she relieved herself in the birch woods.

She was so shocked at the long, glistening coil of blond excrement that was produced from her body and lay as though it could be quite alive on the leafy forest floor that she abandoned intellectual life and lived the remainder of her days more or less in seclusion in Ithaca, New York, not far from the bridge from which so many despairing students jump.