ABSTRACT
THEY WERE WAITING for us, three large men wearing white face masks, when we stepped down from the train. This was Leningrad in February, and if you opened your mouth to speak, your breath steamed in the air and hung before your face like those little balloons that tell you what people in the comic strips are saying. “Toot OH-chen HOH-lahd-nah!” it said in my balloon, but nobody needed a weather report. The Finland Station was an old cathedral of the Iron Age, steam from the locomotives censing the nave and rising to the tangle of girders in the dark above our heads, and only in some old churches have I ever been as cold.
