While she looks over forty, the Russians show their age in ways we do not. Do you know, I believe they take a certain grim satisfaction in wearing their souls on the wrinkled surface of their face. We Americans would, of course, go squeak before we’d ever let anyone have the satisfaction of thinking he was looking into our spiritual depths, but that may be exactly what the Russians have to offer. “I have passed through cataclysmic days, and permitted state horrors to be visited on friends, but I have never lied to my soul.” That is what her face says to me.
