City of Yellow and Gold

This is a city of yellow and gold.

Not just because fall is finally beginning to touch the leaves, brushing the tops of oak and birch. When we left Siberia three weeks ago, the birches had already turned to brilliant gold, so that the steep hillsides above Baikal were mosaics of green and amber. But here the fall is slower, almost indifferent: the days keep relatively warm - some mornings it's 10 celsius by our kitchen thermometer - either an anomaly of living close to the Finnish Gulf or a consequence of climate change. In either case it's hard to complain about dry weather and warm temperatures at this latitude.

But the city is yellow and gold in any weather and at any time of year, most beautifully when the skies are grey, or when there's snow on the ground and precious little light in the sky. Then the yellow walls of buildings - all shades and admixtures of brown, mustard, curry-colored and marigold - and the golden domes and spires of the city (St. Isaac's, the Admiralty, the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress) stand out like beacons of warmth and brilliance. The city generates its own light and warmth, even when its bizarre northern location denies it both.

Maybe travel always involves a measure of the chameleon, or camouflage: most places I've traveled I want not to stand out, not to be immediately recognized as an American, not to cause heads to turn. Some of the students I've traveled with over the years have made that hard - either because of their oblivious loudness, the way they travel in packs, their shorts (despite all my advice to the contrary) and backpacks and collegiate insignia. There's no way NOT to be perceived as an American - and not just AN American but a whole pack of them, like wild dogs that might be rabid.

But when I'm walking alone I'm always hoping people don't see me as foreign. I've spent decades, after all, working on my Russian accent - the aural part of "not standing out." Trying to get that soft l, or the appropriate syllabic stress, or the elegantly rising and falling intonation of a question. So that even if people don't think I'm quite Russian, they won't think immediately that I'm American either. Once in 1985 I struck up a conversation with a Russian in a train station, and he kept refusing to believe I was American - which I think had more to do with the unlikeliness of encountering a U.S. citizen in a provincial train station at the height of the Reagan era than with the infallability of my Russian l. He was sure I was Estonian, with the chut'- chut' difference in my accent and my non-Russian features.

On the street, though, the camouflage is visual rather than linguistic. People do come up to me and ask for directions, but they come up to Aslaug as well, perhaps even more frequently: the consensus is that she looks very Russian, with her well-coiffed hair and strong cheekbones. Not the case with me. I treasure all evidence to the contrary, though: in March of 1985 I was waiting at a bus stop on Srednyi Prospekt not far from our dorm. As I stood there in a state of mild distraction an elderly woman came up to me and whispered Devushka, vy ne znaete, kogo oni vybrali? Girl, do you know who they've chosen? The they was the people who made decisions in Moscow. The who turned out to be a relative unknown named Mikhail Gorbachev. Standing at the bus stop for a bus that refused to come, I got taken for a Russian who might know something about the future. But of course none of us then - neither Russians nor Americans - had any real inkling of what the next few years would hold. Or how much that unknown Party activist from Krasnodarksky krai would wind up changing Russia for ever.

At the time I was just pleased that she'd thought I was Russian. The old woman, an unwitting messenger of that unexpected, so long desired (to quote Akhmatova in very rough translation), and what I remember is the old brown wool coat with the hood, a coat old enough and drab enough, clearly, that she thought I was a local.

All of this is simply prelude to the news that I've bought a coat. And not any coat but a yellow coat, mustard colored or closer to camel, depending on the light. An extravagant and wonderful purchase, from a small boutique I ducked into to avoid the rain, where the shop girls brought me green tea and obligingly brought out one coat after another, convinced that they'd find me something I'd want to walk out in. Raglan sleeves and offset buttons, big and brown, as though it's a pea coat with buttons on only one side. No collar, just a stand-up neck, nice stitching around the sleeves. Knee-length, of wool and cashmere. I feel elegant and warm and camouflaged: or perhaps it's not camouflage but a kind of chameleon shift, a shade of self that is every bit as "real" as that other Maine self that goes around in the tired old green and purple coat that I bought at Beans' at least ten years ago. So it's not camouflage - which implies a kind of deception - but a shining forth of the yellow-ish, gold-ish me that slips into this cloak of warmth and radiance.

A city of yellow and gold: the domes and the walls, in a stunningly diverse palette of hues, varying degrees of brightness and dust. A city where there are yellow buses and bananas hanging on fruit kiosks and (what I realized only AFTER I bought the coat) a surprising number of women wearing yellow coats, which is perhaps THE color of the season. Mine, however, is decisively the most beautiful. Blowing down Nevsky like an autumn leaf, snagged from the top of a birch in the Alexander Garden, a spark of light on a grey day.

Would you be able to pick me out of a crowd?