The story jumps forward in time to a much older Christa, aboard a plane coming in to land at St. Petersburg, reflecting on how, as child, she had thought of Russia as dark and unknowable. She disembarks and moves out into the airport, looking for someone, and sees a thin, old man holding a piece of torn cardboard with her name on it. His hand shakes, and he eagerly greets her in English and in Russian.
"I'm sorry," she says, and asks if he could speak English, at least at first, for it has been thirty years since she last spoke Russian.
He courteously replies, Yes, of course, and apologetically lists the languages he is fluent in, which do not included English, although in fact his English, if stiff, is good. Indeed, it is as posh a reception as the group she is visiting can arrange, complete with the car and driver of a government official engaged in a bit of private enterprise. She is taken to a good, but not lavish, hotel close to the apartment of her guide.
When they find her room is not yet ready, she and Gavriil Viktorovich settle to tea, and Christa—Kit, now—tells him how she met the poet for the first time. "I met him at university I went to," she says. She was nineteen, entering a year late, although she does not say that, only, "He taught there."
"And you were a poet then?"
Kit says that she'd won a prize and was supposed to have a bent.
Gavriil Viktorovich listens, attentive, hearing, perhaps, how many things she has come to say but has not yet said.
"I'll tell you it all," she says.
(to be continued)