“I've got a travel pass!” Announce that anywhere on Moscow's public transport, and no one will bat an eyelid. Announce it in Riga's—and you'll get weird looks and even a few laughs. Moscow and Riga. Two capitals and two different universes.

On the train back to Moscow, on the last day of August, I was summing up the impressions and results of my summer visit home. I was still fond of my Riga friends, but I had found them wanting in comparison with the breadth of erudition and interests of my Moscow fellow students, not to mention the depth of character and incisiveness of my closest friend Vitaly. Mother's nagging about my “leaving her, already abandoned by husband,” went on. She wanted me to transfer to the University of Riga, even though it had no psychology department. She accused Father of supporting my desire to qualify as a “psycho” (according to her thorough research and the information therefrom, the most popular nickname for psychologists) and even having interceded for me with the Deputy Minister with one aim only—to tear me away from her and her positive influence.

“I know why you went to Moscow,” she said. “To be debauched, depraved, and perverted. You father, himself totally carnalized—isn't that why he's left his children to live it up with a whore—is only too happy to see you torn away from the decency and care your mother provides!”

She went on to quote various family friends supposedly critical of me for leaving her alone after the trauma of her husband's departure, until I began to suspect, uneasily, that what had bugged her most was not my absence but her wounded pride, her prestige in the eyes of all those friends, some of them leftovers from before Father left, some her own woman companions, some—increasingly and significantly—members of the city's clandestine Jewish religious community.

I saw my father only a couple of times—not nearly enough, considering he was supporting me financially and wanted to see me more—but such were the consequences of my mother's influence.