One day, I left my mother sitting on a bench…When I came back, she was no longer alone, there was a man with her. A pleasant man. “Meet Vitya,” Mama said. “He likes Brodsky, too.” The writing was on the wall. We know full well that if someone likes Brodsky, for Mama, it’s like a code word, it means he’s one of us. “He’s never read Children of the Arbat? What a savage! Straight out of the forest! That’s a stranger, not our kind.” That’s how she’d always categorized people, and that hadn’t changed, even then.
