The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson

to time, fearful of seeing a fellow student who might ask her, Who were you with on Pushkin Square? The young Englishman seemed oblivious to her apprehension, and she had to keep asking him to lower his voice.
    They inspected each other with a polite yet avid curiosity. You are the enemy, Brezhnev always said so . You poor girl, they’ve brainwashed you, haven’t they. The Cold War had made them mutually exotic, in a way that Katya suspected no longer existed in the world. The fact that she, as a Soviet citizen, was not supposed to be meeting people from the West gave an adulterous spice to their encounter. The political and social transgressiveness of it.
    At the time she couldn’t imagine that these were the last weeks and months of the nagging, persistent, inbred fear. That only five years later, her country would dissolve into a chaotic openness, for a time, anyway. Nor could she imagine on that warm summer day that she would spend the rest of her life with this pink-cheeked Englishman with his posh accent and slight stutter, who was asking her about her studies and whether it was at all possible for her to travel to England.
    She looked at him and laughed. What do they teach you in Russian class in London? Don’t you know we’re not allowed to travel?
    He stuttered an apology, then said, On some of our excursions here, we’ve been with students who told us they’ve been to Scotland to study English.
    She laughed. Because those are the children of good party members. They’ve been selected to meet you. I’m just an ordinarystudent, not a good one. We could get in trouble, you see. The others have permission to meet you. It’s called privilege.
    They had finished their ice creams, and he asked her name.
    For a second she hesitated, then felt the first stirrings of a defiance that would get her all the way to Britain. I’m Katya.
    And I’m Peter.
    That’s a good Russian name, she said. I’m very happy to meet you.
    He told her he would skip class if she would meet him the next day. She thought for a moment and said, All right, let’s go to the Tretyakov Gallery. Have you been there?
    Later, in the early years, he would tell her that he had fallen in love with her over a painting. On a previous visit to the gallery with his group, the Intourist guide had hurried them through the icons and the avant-garde Soviet artists. Now Katya led him to the paintings of Isaak Levitan, whom he did not know. Bucolic, typically Russian landscapes with birch trees and wide expanses, full of stillness and a faint melancholy. Not bold, but unique in their way. There was one in particular where they stood for a long time, oblivious, as crowds of children in their Young Pioneer uniforms and Western tourists with their stern guides swirled around them. It was a river scene, with two churches on the far side, a cluster of towers and onion domes. A road led down to the river and then away from the other side, almost as if a horse and carriage could drive across the river unimpeded. There was a small jetty with some fishing boats, and a larger boat conveying people to the other shore. There was an evening light with clouds, a gentle summer serenity.
    Katya turned to Peter and said in Russian, We’re in the picture. We are on this side of the river, obviously, and we have to find a way to get to the other side.
    He took a moment, probably searching for his words in Russian,then said ungrammatically but eloquently, You don’t mind if our English churches don’t have onion domes?
    She laughed, not sure whether he was joking or whether he had truly read her thoughts. I don’t mind, she said.
    He took her hand very discreetly, gave it a squeeze, and said, I’ll find a way to get us to the other side.
    Somewhere she had a reproduction of the painting. It was called Evening Bells. Vecherni zvon. Actually, Bells was not a correct translation, the Russian word zvon stood for the