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Open Road

In search of the voice of Father and Mother Russia.

ONE JANUARY EVENING LONG AGO in New Hampshire, a Russian emigre schoolteacher described a ritual from his youth. "There comes a night," he told me, "always in winter, when an old man knows it is time, not necessarily to die but to discharge an obligation. He'll pick a boy, usually a grandson, sometimes a godson, but often enough just a village child he happens to like. The two will lock themselves in a quiet room with a bottle of vodka. Then, over the next several hours, assuming the vodka lasts that long, the old man will tell the young one the story of his life. To be sure, it is a kind of ordeal, for the lad typically gets sick or passes out altogether. Nevertheless, the next morning he will consider himself grown up, a man. He will walk down the village streets with a different gait."

That anecdote came to mind as I stood in Moscow's Red Square with my 17-year-old son, Paul. It's not that I thought he would find some old man to share a ritual with here in the forbidden empire, it's that I hoped I would. My boy had already received his driver's license, after all, probably as close as American teen-agers get to a rite of passage, short of marriage or basic training. On the other hand, I was intent on finding traces of traditional Russian culture rather than just doting on contemporary Soviet society. Educated at a time in the U.S. when the great Russian writers were all the rage—Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevski, Turgenev—I dreamed of wearing a fur hat and racing in a troika through a birch forest, the snow keening into my cheeks, a pack of wolves or maybe agents of the Tsar catching up. Romantic stuff. But most of all, I wanted to hear earthy stories of Mother Russia, about the passage of generations or the grip of winter. What better vehicle than some grizzled old-timer willing to tell them?

On our second day in Moscow, the wom an appeared, striding across the hotel lobby like a procession of one: jewelry clinking, French perfume wafting before her. Very solidly built but attractive, she looked about 40. Heads turned, Russian and otherwise. She had noticed us admiring the native lacquered boxes in the gift shop, she explained. Would we be interested in seeing her own collection? Much better quality, much bet ter price. Upstairs, room 654.

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