He wrote to me
       ©Irina Borisiva 

He started writing to me, having read on Internet my article about the crisis of 1998, when the ruble abruptly dropped, when people stormed groceries and when the next hungry winter was expected in Russia again. He also offered to arrange for humanitarian aid so that avoiding borders and customs Americans could fly to Russia in their small planes, could bring food and clothes and give it all, not to corrupted officials, but to ordinary Russian people who would meet them in the airport. But I could not help him in it with anything except mental support and he was grateful even for it, he continued writing to me and very soon he started to sign his letters "your friend Bob".

He asked me questions about Russia, he could not understand why a country so large and rich in its resources is in the state of constant collapse, he wondered why nobody in Russia cared to look for uncommon decisions for their country's welfare. He thought that as Texas started to develop with the development of air-conditioning, so Siberia could also flourish if fuel in which it was so rich would be obtained from its depths and used for heating that cold huge area, but, having concentrated on my business and personal affairs I somehow could not penetrate into all the grandeur of this project, I could not appropriately explain him why so evident things could not work out in Russia.

He wrote long letters to me, trying to express his world-outlook, he told me that American capitalism was doomed, that soon its end would come, that's why he decided to leave the corporation he worked for, to sell his house, to transfer money into gold and to leave for out-of-the-way places, where he was going to build a habitation made of used tyres and beer tins, to live there autonomously, producing energy with the help of a windmill and a solar battery, surviving the coming cataclysm. But I could not grasp why and due to what circumstances the American economy, our holy of the holies and the example to follow, would be liable to ruin; listening to him I showed scepticism because we here would give anything just to live a little in such a doomed economy.

He called me his friend and, being a responsible person, I replied to him though friendship in Russia is something different from friendship in America, friendship in Russia - it is years side-by-side with each other, it is common legends and traditions, friendship in Russia - it is that little that others often have not, but we still have.

And not wishing to give up what he wanted to do for Russia, at least what he had his own power to do, he wished to help at least one concrete person, and I found a worthy candidate - a modest girl selling candies from the stall making her living. And he sent her a parcel with winter boots she needed, but instead of elegant high heel boots which girls usually wear in St.Petersburg in winter he sent her warm boots for high mountains climbing considering that they would match the best rigorous Russian frosts. And having received the boots in which, according to her opinion, the girl could only dig her kitchen-garden at the dacha, she did not know what to reply to him and saddened by the girl's silence, Bob finally decided that some criminals attacked her to seize her wonderful boots.

And I felt guilty that he so much wished, but could not help our unhappy mother country with anything, and that I could not help him to do it either and that our worlds still have not crossed.

And soon we lost sight of each other; now he probably builds his new house of tins and tyres and thinks how he will survive the crisis that has not yet burst out in America, but blasts already crash in the streets of St.Petersburg where I live and lodgers of our block write lists of night duties trying to protect themselves from terrorists.

And like two atoms moving along different orbits we rush further and further away from each other, having approached only once for that short time that he wrote to me. . . .