Approaching Rostov na Donu (Rostov on the Don) on the night train from Sochi, one is struck by the gold dome of the city's large Russian Orthodox church, which dominates the horizon. From the window of the train, it doesn't look like a city of a million people.
My preconceptions were of a drab place, brimming with muddy streets and industrial stagnation. After all, Danny had told us that the Russians refer to Rostov as "the armpit of Russia."My impressions on reflection, however, are much different.
I will always remember, for example, our view from the window of the Intourist Hotel on Bolshay Sadovaya (Garden Street), looking out toward the frozen river, across the tops of a broad section of downtown.
Out the window, the roofs of the buildings across the way were covered with snow, creating sharp contrasts of form with the dark sides of the buildings. I especially enjoyed it in the early mornings as the lights were coming on, creating glowing spots of life in the otherwise cold cityscape as people were beginning to fill the sidewalks and side streets at the beginning of the workday.
There seemed to be a lot of pre-Soviet architecture in Rostov. The buildings and avenues reminded me of Copenhagen and northern Germany, a lot of five- to six-story buildings, with intricate brickwork and broad sidewalks with lots of trees. Tall trees. Old trees. Trees with lots of wear and pruning and interesting shapes. In the dusk, they bound the streets to the sky with writhing black lines.
I could talk about the people we met - the people Danny had known in the 14 months he had worked in Rostov before being transferred to Sochi - about Victor, the new branch president with the two gold teeth and the gentle smile, or 16-year-old Gena and her vibrant 13-year-old sister Lena, who led the music in church, which was held in the sixth-floor auditorium of a large gear factory. I could write about Sergei and Luba, and of their young children Olga and Costa, and of how hard it was for Danny to say goodbye.
But it's almost as if the trees say it all. They stay in my memory as dark, rich frames to the whole human landscape of our three brief days in Rostov.
They say Rostov is a city where the Russian Mafia has more control than almost anywhere else in the country, that it is comparable to Chicago in the 1920s and '30s, during the heyday of mob bosses like Al Capone.
That might well be. But the people we met in Rostov were such a jarring contrast to those images that they fuse into my memory now like winter snow falling from a quiet sky and resting in the high branches of the trees of Rostov's avenues and parks.
Traveling to places foreign to our own experience is always a challenge. The realization that there are places and people who have never known us, and who will never see us again, give us a more genuine sense of our mortality than we tend to experience in the everyday. If sensitive as we travel to "other" places, we are seized from time to time by the fragileness of our tenure.
Rather than trying to tug away or stuff such impressions to try to make them fit our own expectations, it is probably more to our advantage to settle in as if we were blessed to be here for this brief moment - and I mean profoundly blessed, for we are stepping into the fabric of other lives, other cultures, other scenes.
Being so settled in my own culture, this is difficult for me to do, and I always have to go to an extra effort to let myself savor the exotic nature of that which is not my own experience.
Maybe that is why I enjoyed Rostov so much. It was much nicer than my expectations, that, with my guard down, I settled into it easily and savored it much more than I had thought I would.
There was one late afternoon - we were walking toward the center of the city on a busy street with the setting sun to our backs. There were thousands of people around us, selling wares and waiting for buses and heading home from work.
And ahead of us, glistening in the sun, was the golden dome of the Russian church at the city's center, its whitewashed walls glowing pink against the sky.
Suddenly, a massive flock of crows appeared from above the buildings on the right. They arched across the gold dome of the church in droves, wave after wave of them, disappearing behind the buildings on our left.
I was left with one of those brief, blessed moments of epiphany that sometimes occur in our lives, creating an indelible imprint on our personal experience.
In a small way, Rostov now belonged to me too, the way it already belonged to Danny and to the million others to whom Rostov is home.