I was to leave the country with a number of send–offs, some amusing, some threatening, some almost unbearably painful.

On a bus a drunk said to Aaron: “You'll be a surgeon.” And to me: “And you, a general practitioner.”

“Why can't I be a surgeon?” I asked.

“You wouldn't be able to cut,” he said and showed the way I'd touch patients when examining them—ever so gently. Then he took my hand, turned it round and over and gestured despairingly.

Having fastidiously avoided expletives, I was regaled with quite a number of them in quick succession at my friend Yevgeniya's birthday. (Like Vera, she either had no parents, or they were away; perhaps one of them was an alcoholic; I seem to have paid little attention to such significant details in my close friends’ lives—a measure, I now see, of my essential egocentricity at the time.) Her aunt Klavdia—her only relative around—and a few other middle–aged women gathered in the room next to us, and the aunt announced: “Let's sing with our Soviet voices!” And presently they sang several bawdy songs in which parts of the male and female anatomy worked in harmony with verbs that described their interaction.

Then the other women left and the three of us chatted. “How come you know people so well?” Klavdia asked me. “You've seen neither hunger nor death on a mass scale but you understand everybody.”

It's easy now to laugh at how I must have felt flattered and probably showed it, but in my totally insecure state at the time, every good word, no matter how meager, was a blessing. Anyway, I think she mistook one thing for another. I didn't “know people” at all, let alone “so well,” but I liked them and I was open to them—and was also interested in the recent past of the country. Deserved or not, in a few weeks I'd gratefully take her compliment with me to a new land where new challenges were lying in ambush.