From the Crooked Timber

B efore the conductors checked our tickets and passports, I knew our train had crossed the border into the Kaliningrad oblast. It might have been all the minor shifts in landscape seeping into my unconscious—the ratty lean-tos I could barely see in the distance, the potholed service road running parallel to the train tracks, the leanness of livestock in the fields—but that’s not how it felt; I just knew we were in a sadder place than we had been moments ago. I turned to Natalie and saw that she felt it too; the knowledge of it hung on her normally bright face. The Kaliningrad oblast is a place forever separated from itself—a part of Russia (oblast is Russian for enclave or province), though separated from the motherland by Lithuania and Latvia, or Lithuania and Belarus, depending on which route you take. And years of neglect after the collapse of the Soviet Union have only served to deepen its native sadness. Natalie and I were headed toward the heart of the Kaliningrad oblast, to the city of Kaliningrad, drawn by the thrill of such an unlikely destination. She squeezed my hand, and I smiled, glad to be having this adventure with her. We’d dated the previous year when she had studied in America. Due to my having earlier studied in Germany, we communicated in an amalgam of English and German, making us at once foreign and familiar to each other, both exciting and comforting. Now that I was at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland, and she was back in Germany, she had come to visit. I was supposed to be her tour guide for Eastern Europe. Coming from Western Europe, she saw the East Bloc as exotic, romantic in its downtroddenness. And I’d chosen the Kaliningrad oblast as the subject for my semester project—a paper on the effects of poverty in postSoviet society ranging from poor medical facilities to increases in drug addiction and STD rates.