Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene Page B

produced jet engines. The buildings lining the city’s boulevards are beige or gray, the snow is abundant but not fresh, so it’s turned gray, and all this paints a depressing backdrop interrupted every so often by flower kiosks bursting with color. Bland, dark, and cold as Russia can feel, no society has a deeper love of flowers, or tsvety . At the end of a workday, on the streets or on the subway, in any Russian city, you will find men and women carrying bouquets. For any occasion—birthdays, retirements, office parties—flowers are nothing short of a requirement. And so without even mentioning it to each other, Sergei and I know that visiting Nikita’s parents means bringing flowers. We ask our driver to stop by a kiosk near our destination.
    “Maybe a half-dozen roses for Nikita’s mom?” I say to Sergei.
    “No,” he says, almost sternly. “Even numbers of flowers are only for funerals, for mourning a death.”
    After several years in Russia, this is the first I’ve heard of this particular tradition. (And it is no small realization, having brought Rose even numbers of roses on many occasions. Oops?)
    “Sergei, they lost their son a little more than a year ago. Are they still in mourning?”
    The two of us are perplexed. When does a parent close the door on such a tragedy? Never, of course. But when it is time to move on? More to the point, when does a person not want to be reminded of a tragedy anymore? I lost my own mother in 2006. Her sudden and unexpected death, from a blood clot, was easily the hardest day of my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. But within months I began the hard process of moving forward, unshackling myself from that awful day in the past. I want to believe Nikita’s parents are well on their way down that road.
    “Odd. Let’s go odd. Five roses.” Sergei thinks about this for a moment, then nods his head approvingly. “I think this is the right decision.”
    Our decision reached, the woman at the flower kiosk delicately pulls five roses—three red and two yellow—from her gorgeous stash, dresses them with white baby’s breath, trims the stems with scissors, wraps it all in plastic, and ties the bouquet neatly with yellow ribbon. I hand her seven hundred rubles (twenty-three dollars), and we are on our way up the street.
    Nikita’s parents live upstairs in a tan-brick apartment complex that’s as drab and uninteresting as so many buildings in Russia. But I learned a rule very quickly in this country: Don’t judge a building by its structure. Many a time I have trudged through a trash-strewn courtyard, opened a rusting metal door, climbed a dark, cracked-concrete staircase only to find a person’s apartment beautifully decorated and welcoming. Many landlords could care less about the outside. Tenants care deeply about what’s inside.
    Nikita’s mom, Liubov, opens the door of her kvartira , or “apartment,” and waves her right arm in a sweeping motion for us to come in. I hand her the flowers. She nods and quietly says “ Spasibo ,” thank you. She looks down at them for a moment, perhaps counting, and smiles, the only hint that we made the right call. Following another tradition, I remove my snow-covered boots, since we are in someone’s home. Liubov points to a pile of slippers, which families always have on hand for guests, but Sergei and I both just stay in our socks—one of two acceptable options. Nikita’s mom is a short, tough-looking woman with cropped dark hair, a square-ish face, and a gap between her two front teeth. At first the tension is difficult to endure. She isn’t sure whether to detour into small talk or go right into talking about her son. Sergei and I aren’t sure where to go either.
    She quietly walks us into a room that I immediately identify as Nikita’s old bedroom.
    “This is my museum,” she says.
    It’s full of medals, photos, hockey sticks, and other memorabilia. The centerpiece on the wall is a photo of