Kakie shoesy

Our students are convinced that all Russian women wear 4-inch heels. It's an understandable conviction: the stores along our street are filled with displays of elegant and often quite expensive ankle-busters. Walks along the nicer thoroughfares are accompanied by a symphony of clicking heels. When we visited the Hermitage last weekend the guide pointed out that visitors are no longer required to put on felt slippers to protect the parquet. The administration decided it was simpler to refinish the floors than to get almost a million people to put felt slippers on over their street shoes. I sort of miss the awkward whoosh of visiting a museum in those slippers: you slide along teh highly-polished parquet, concentrating as much on keeping yourself upright and the slippers on your feet (they never fit very well) as on whatever objects might be in display cases or on the walls. The Pushkin Museum in Petersburg - my other museum foray last week - still requires that you put them on, despite the fact that most of their floors have carpets. But not the Hermitage. It's not clear just how they repair the floors, though: the hall that holds their collection of Leonardos has floors that look almost like bubble wrap, with thousands of little dents where women's stilettos have left their mark.

In reality, however, despite the striking number of shoe stores with astronomic heels (and similarly astronomic prices: you have to wonder who is spending close to 5,000 roubles - $172 by today's rate - on gorgeous patent blue shoes), and despite all those clickety-clacking women whose ability to maneuver on an additional 12 centimeters is remarkable, it turns out that not all Russia women wear spike heels. I can confidently announce this as empirical fact after my morning survey of the metro last Monday. I decided to defer my morning reading of Arumenty i fakty - the tabloikd newsweekly I often pick up in the metro newstand - and observe ground-level habits of the (female) natives instead. Easy to do, not obtrusive, and with startling results: it turns out that less than half of the female population wears spike heels. There are as many if not more women wearing those sensible flats that I myself tend to put on in the morning. And the women in sensible shoes aren't all above 40 (though the numbers of women over 40 wearing spike heels are predictably miniscule). There are lots of young women - college age, young professionals, sharply dressed 30-somethings - who have chosen not to torture their backs and ankles for the fashion statement. They're wearing flats and pumps and sneakers and neat spike-less boots, moving along with click-less sure-footedness and only slightly less elegance than their spiked sisters. I was impressed, and a bit surprised, by my findings.

One of the things about this shoe focus is that my own position vis-a-vis the shoe wearing masses of Russia has changed fundamentally since the Old Soviet Days. In those thankfully long-gone days I tended to be the one wearing nice shoes. When people on the street picked you out as a foreigner, for reasons that seemed inscrutable (how did she know I wasn't Russian?), it might have to do with what we used to call your carriage - the way you bear yourself, the ease and openness of the way you move and look around you, even the way you stroll along with your coat unbuttoned. Or it might have to do with your shoes. walking once down Nevsky Prospekt - I think it was in 1983 - in my obviously non-Soviet birkenstocks, I was approached by a Russian man who started walking alongside me, looking at my feet. he was clearly impressed by this previously unseen footwear: kakie shoesy!! What shoes!! the novelty of the sandals given birth to a novel word: Russian has lots of perfectly good terms for shoes and sandals (the generic obuv', women's tufli, summer sandaly, domestic and comfortable tapochki; the list goes on) - but he called my birkenstocks shoesy in honor of their novelty and non-compliance with other categories of things you put on your feet. Did I want by any chance to sell them? I didn't want to, of course, though I could probably have made out extremely well. It was one of the few times in my Soviet Russian experience that I was invited to participate in the ubiquitous black market. Not for high heels, clearly, but for these flatter-than-flat, unattractive but comfortable German sandals.

Nowadays I'm the one in dowdy shoes, shown up by Russian women's elegance and class, head to toe. It's not just that my hair is showing signs of aging (the language teachers in Siberia encouraged me to die it: your skin is so young! you just need to color your hair!) but that the flats I bought with me - in which I can comfortably walk ten miles a day, blister-free - are worn at the toe and across the bridge where my foot is widest. And they were never particularly attractive to begin with. I bought them for comfort, not for chic.

So Monday afternon, finally brought to heel by the heel-wearing masses of female St. Petersburg, I bought new shoes. Nothing too dramatic, nothing too elevated, just a bit of patent and a nice low heel. A kind of elegant loafer, one-inch elevation, fake snakeskin (at least I hope it's fake) across the top - the top which is called, according to my internet investigations - a vamp. Coming home from the Institute after classes I decided to try my luck at Gostinyi dvor, the big shopping arcade in the middle of the city. If it was too expensive I coul dhead across the street to Apraksin dvor - a more anarchic, usually cheaper version of modern Russan commercial life, a sprawling and now largely indoor warren of small shops run by non-Russians (the shopkeepers are mostly from the Caucasus). One of our students in 2000 dubbed it Scary dvor - but like all of Russia it's much less scary now, less muddy and more organized.

As it happened though I found my shoes in Gostiny, in almost the first shop I looked at. While the window displays may be filled with high heels and top-end prices, it turns out there are lots of more down-to-earth alternatives inside. I quickly identified three candidates for my sensible but slightly more chic demands; figure out that I probably wear a 39 or 40; and found a sales clerk who was pleasant and quick. I put them on; they fit! (my feet are almost always too wide for American shoes) and within 15 minutes I was out the door, having only spent 1500 roubles - a little more than $50. At Apraksin dvor I bought shoe polish and some new knee-high stockings. I felt like a new woman, ready to slip into this newly-purchased elegance and click right along with the rest of the city's women.

The funny thing about all this is that putting on new shoes really does make me feel transformed. I love the way the shoes click - when we went to a concert on Tuesday night, at the stunning new Mariinsky concert hall - I made this lovely sound on their beautiful blonde floors. I feel sharper and smarter, a tiny bit elegant and well-put together. I don't feel like I have to hide my feet. And it turns out they're not bad for walking; not quite as comfortable as the old worn brown pair, but not painful, either.

My theory about Russian women's elegance on the streets is that in a country where so much is out of your control, where the facades of buildings and apartment house courtyards are often in desperate need of plaster and paint, where home may be a tiny apartment in a Soviet cement block, the one thing you can control is how you look. Russian women just don't go out of the house without looking put together. Its less a matter of what they've got on than how they wear it. And they often look gorgeous - not just young women with their stiletto heels and slender frames - but older women, with their appropriately-colored hair and sensible but still elegant shoes. The world they can put together and control, the one where they can be beautiful, the one where they can feel absolutely fantastic about themselves, is this world of clicking heels and neatly-tied scarves, well put on makeup and well-coifed hair. Post-feminist American women might scoff. I'm less inclined to.

As in so many ways, I admire them, envy them, and want in my own small way to emulate them.

And so I've got a pair of sharp new shoes.
Listen to my heels click: aren't they beautiful!?