In Riga, I was greeted with alcoholic updates from my close friends.

Zhenia Konyaev, now a student at Riga Polytechnic, had become his year's orderly; his job was to monitor attendance and collect money for various initiatives. (He explained to me apologetically that he'd agreed only in order to be in the good books of the Dean, because his grades had been so poor that the man had threatened him with expulsion.) Having collected subscription money for some relevant local paper—something like Latvian Technology or Soviet Engineering News —he had found the temptation to spend it on booze—with our mutual friend Vladimir Kosov—simply irresistible. Then, faced with the obvious problem, he stole fifteen rubles from his parents. The theft was discovered, his folks wept bitterly over what they called “bearing and raising a thief “ and threatened to throw him onto the street.

The second piece of alcoholic news was more surprising, concerning as it did Yuri Afremovich, who hitherto had never touched a drop. He too had had to collect money, to buy a skull specimen for his year at the School of Medicine, where he'd enrolled the previous September—and he too had spent it on booze. (To me this was the first sign that something wasn't quite right with my friend, whose self–discipline and pedantry I'd always envied; indeed, the very next year he would fail a number of exams, be expelled, and drafted into the army. I suspect all this had happened as a result of the inescapable hormonal attack and Yuri's unwillingness to even acknowledge, let alone face it.)

The next item on my own agenda was getting permission from my father to apply for my exit visa. That was easier said than done. The state wanted to have it both ways: to show it respected its own laws regarding the “humanitarian reunification of families” but not to let its citizens out, even those it didn't particularly need, so as not to encourage others. The parental permission requirement had been designed as yet another barrier. Ostensibly, it was intended to avoid financial claims by parents against their children outside the country.