If attitude is contagious then a certain lady is guilty of unleashing an epidemic. To do her justice, one may have to liken her spirit to a love-poem that cascaded from the tip of Pushkin's feather-pen or a face stroked by Michelangelo's brush that paled everything else on the canvas...
It was the most ordinary, almost missable chance encounter when Mia and I were crossing the road to get home. It was a red light but the only two cars coming in our direction were far enough so we started to walk to the divider.
Suddenly, someone called out to us, "Girls, wait for me..." And there came this easily-over-80 lady, wearing a grey headscarf outlined by her silver curls, wearing a black knee-length overcoat and a long-skirt that exposed a bit of her fragile legs wrapped in skin-colour stockings and worn-out black men's shoes, dashing forward with her walking stick. "Please help me cross the road!"
Without question, Mia and I held her elbows on either side and did exactly that. When we got to the divider, the light turned green making the second half of the road even easier to cross. But now she didn't want to go!
"Come on. We'll take you to the other side," I said, unable to conceal my confusion at her sudden resistance.
"Don't worry. I have to wait for them," she chuckled toothlessly and turned back teasingly to the other side of the road, where her other friends had just started to cross seeing the green signal.
"Are you sure you don't want to come with us?" I think I was pleading at this point.
"Thank you very much for your help!" She said dismissing my question and then started to cross the road leaving her friends way behind.
Mia and I exchanged a look of complete amazement. Given her age, she had obviously survived the Seige of Leningrad and probably lost most of her dear ones then and in the years that followed when post-war famine plagued the Soviet Union. Her defiant eyes had obviously seen the Stalinist terror and probably knew some who had been sent to the Gulag and maybe she herself had been imprisoned! She had seen the Khrushchevs, the Brezhnevs, the Gorbachevs, the Yelstins and the Putins. She had probably lost everything she 'owned' in 1992 and 1997 under the capitalism shock and the currency crisis...
...And here she was jumping a red-light just so she could tease her friends for not being as fast as her!
"I want to be just like her when I'm that old," Mia said.
"I was just thinking of that!" I nodded as she walked past us!
And in that moment, she was my Russia! This is the unconquerable spirit I am so hopelessly in love with...
