Thursday Afternoon with Lee in St Petersburg

Lee was assigned to a bunk in the room that I was sharing with the teenagers from Holland who were traveling during their “gap” year between high school and university, a couple of puppies who lay around in the sitting room and squirmed around one another’s bodies while watching American movies in Russian and subtitled in English, and who waited until they thought I was asleep before groping at one another under their sleeping bag. Renate, the young girl, pouted and demanded that Miran, her boyfriend, cook sausages for her while she read David Copperfield, and they stayed up late wearing their boots around the hostel and ignoring Ina’s requests to remove them. Not that it was difficult to ignore Ina, whose blatant dismissal of the no smoking rule offended all the hostel inmates, none of whom smoked.

So Lee was given his choice of upper or lower Ikea bunk in the room I shared with Renate and Miran, but because I was sleeping in my bunk at the time, he was reluctant to come in the room. I got out of bed to make it easier for him to unpack and set up his things, but I was still jet lagging and would have preferred to sleep through the dark morning.

Once up out of bed, I decided to head off to the Kazanskaya area and visit the Zoom restaurant, where I had spent many a blissful hour last summer eating the cheap and large omelet while writing. It was a common hangout for SLS participants, so I could also count on running into people I knew, or at least recognize from one of my courses. Of course I knew I wouldn’t recognize anyone there that day, but I was hungry and feeling like one of those omelets, so I plotted my route on the map and got bundled up to set off.

As I was leaving, Lee, my new roommate, asks me where I am going and before I can answer, he asks if he can come with me. Um, yes, I say. You can come. I am going to the Zoom restaurant for an omelet. Do you go to Nevsky, he asks me. I hadn’t been planning to, but getting to Zoom via Nevsky is not much of a detour, and I know that what he really wants is help finding the minivan that will take him up Sadovaya to Nevsky. Yes, I am going to Nevsky, I reply, thinking that showing him how to get there will embolden my own resolve to use this transportation. I had been planning to walk.

We walk out to Sadovoya, which seems closer to the hostel than it had seemed the previous day, and stand at the corner to wait for the #212 minivan, which will take us up to Nevsky Prospekt. For 17 rubles it’s a bargain, and on the way up Lee tells me that he is from Korea, but that he is now living in New York City, attending New York University and studying mathematics. He is a PhD student, and is three years into his five years of doctoral study. He then plans to do post doctoral work and then become a professor at some US university.

I take a bit of a risk and ask him what his area of study is in mathematics. I say this is a risk because I'm pretty sure that whatever he says I won't understand. He pauses, and I figure he is trying to dumb down his explanation so that neither one of us will be embarrassed. Then he smiles and says that his focus is the area behind aircraft wings where the impact of the wings against the air leads to many things of interest in the space along the back edge of the wing. Okay. He has told me something that I can actually picture, but what I can’t picture is how those strings of letters and numbers and symbols that he works with can tell anyone anything about the physical reality along the back edge of an aircraft wing while it is in the air. That’s for another lifetime.

So here I was, in the company of a great mathematician, and I am curious now to know what it is that great mathematicians think about and do besides work with these numbers. Here is my chance.

Lee tells me that he is 31 years old. That it has been decided from the time he was very young that he would be a scientist because smart children in Korea are told by their parents that they must be scientists, and that it has been decided from the time that he was very young that he would go to the USA to study mathematics, and then become a professor, because in Korea, he tells me, there is no good mathematics study. Good mathematicians leave. Or are not in Korea in the first place. But I’m not sure. I don’t ask, though, as I prefer to let him talk about what he wants to tell me, rather than have him tell me about what I think I want to hear.

When we get to Nevsky Prospekt, he pulls out his map and asks me which direction he must walk to find the Kazan Cathedral, and when I show him on the map, he disagrees, and tells me it should be in the other direction from what I am telling him. Um, no, I say, and I have to admit that I get a bit of a thrill from being able to read a map better than a doctoral mathematics student. I take it where I can, I guess, and after he exclaims dismay at my confusion, he suddenly turns his map upside down and orients it so that it fits his comprehension of where he is standing in relation to the streets and the Cathedral as they are represented on the map. Of course this action just confuses me, so I ignore the map and start walking, telling him that if he wants me to take him to the cathedral, he should just follow me. He puts his map away, and with a look of distrust, apprehensively follows me into the underground crosswalk at the corner of Nevsky and Sadovoya.

I point out the Singer building to him, and give him a two-bit history lesson on art nouveau architecture, and we soon get to the Kazan Cathedral, which causes him to pull out his map and shake his head in amazement. So, there you go, I say. There is the cathedral. Yes, he says, nodding his head. And where are you going now?

I tell him I am going to Zoom, just down the street, for a large and cheap omelet which will mean, once I have eaten it, that I won’t have to eat again for the rest of the day. And then, I say, I am going to do some work in this café. I have my laptop with me, and I must work.
What is your work, he asks.

I pause. This is difficult, and I feel a bit of an imposter when saying it, but I reply that I am a writer. A writer? Yes, a writer. What books have you published? None. Oh. But you are a writer? Yes. What do you write? Poetry. Fiction. Travel writing. May I come with you at lunch, he asks, and have, how you say it, an omelet? Yes, I answer, and although my preference would be to be alone, I push myself to say yes so that I will learn more about Lee. I had also to remind myself that the purpose of this trip is to write, but what would I write about if I didn’t talk to Lee or others like him? So, I say yes, and we go to Zoom and I order an Americano with hot milk on the side and an omelet with potatoes and cheese, and Lee orders an omelet and hot chocolate milk.

I wrote poetry once, he tells me, even before the omelets arrive. When I was a young man, I fell in love with a girl, and so I wrote her some poetry. I was mathematics student, and she studied literature, and so I changed to study literature so I could be near her and learn to write poetry for her, but she told me after a while that she did not like me because I was not such a rich man, and so she went away with another man who will be a rich man, a doctor or lawyer or something. So, I returned to mathematics, because, you know, to understand the poetry, you have to be very smart person, and I have a hard time to understand it, what it means.

Really. Okay, now I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be?

That happens in Korea. Woman wants to marry rich man and stay home and be looked after, and all families want girls to marry rich man, and I am not a rich man and I won’t be a rich man, and so it is very hard for me to find girlfriend. Even in US it is the same, the Korean women want a rich man.

I want to say well, you got to go out and win the Nobel prize honey, and then maybe at least you will find a woman who will marry a smart man, but in my thoughts that sounds glib and crass, and I’ve determined to keep the glib and crass part of me under wraps for a few months. So I keep quiet, and don’t even have to ask him questions, he just talks non-stop for a couple of hours, and I think, well, yes, I was right that I was coming to Zoom to work, I just didn’t know what the work was to be, exactly.

As he eats his omelet, he tells me his “story”, which has to do with a 1970s Japanese animation series called Galaxy Express 999. Do you know that series, he asks me, and I have to admit that I do not, and urge him to tell me about it. It is an animation about a little Japanese boy who rides a train through the galaxy from star to star, and on every star he has a different adventure and learns something new about people. He is traveling with his guide, a woman with long blond hair and fur hat and coat, a Russian woman. He pauses. His name, the boy, is Tetra, and the woman, she is Masy; my friends, they say I am a Tetra without a Masy.

I am telling you this, he says, his fork in mid air between his plate and his mouth, because you are travel writer, and I have this story about travel, and maybe it help you in your writings.

Maybe, I think, but I am dubious.

So I saw this animations when I was a little boy, maybe 7 or 8, and I really liked them, but I did not understand them all what they meant. Later, when I was older, I found them on DVD and now I watch them all the time, and there are a few that are my favorite episodes. Let me explain. But first, I tell you the background. This boy, Tetra, he lives in a country where rich people are able to buy a machine body that allows them to live forever. But Tetra and his parents, they are very poor, so they cannot buy machine body. They are so poor that they cannot have any foods, and always the parents they lie to their son when they feed him, and they say that they have already eaten, and they give them all the food that they have. The father dies soon, and so the mother and Tetra have to leave where they are living. So they set off wearing their rags, through the cold and snow, and while they are walking, some men with machine bodies see them and shoot at them, and Tetra’s mother dies. Tetra is left alone and is very sad, so he decides that he must find money to buy machine body and live forever. He meets Masy and she tells him she can help him find machine body, and they get on this very long train, just the two of them, and one conductor. The rest of this long train is empty, and the train goes from one star to the next, and this little boy, he learns something at every star.

I saw this when I was a little boy, and it made big impression on me. Especially there is one episode when the train is on its way to the Memory Star, and there is one other person on the train. This is the only episode where there is another person on the train, and in this episode this person is a woman. The conductor falls in love with the woman, but the woman, she is cruel to him, telling him to do this, do that for her. When the train crashes, she blames the conductor for the crash and tells him he is stupid. But the conductor is still in love with her, and even when she leaves the train and removes her mask to reveal that she is the woman who he fell in love with many years ago as a young man and whom he has loved ever since, he still loves her, despite the fact that she mocks him for not being a successful rich man, but only a failure, a train conductor. The little boy, Tetra, watches and listens to everything that is going on, and he does not understand why the conductor loves this woman who is cruel to him, and when he asks Masy, his guide, she tells him that there are some things that children do not understand when they are children, but that they will understand when they are older.

Lee stops and looks at me. And so my friends, they call me a Tetra without a Masy, and I remember this episode when I first saw it, and how when Masy tells Tetra that there are some things that children can’t understand, that was very powerful for me, and it was right for how confused I was as child. And then, well then my love for the woman who studied literature is like the conductor’s love for the cruel woman. I am not rich man.

He is quiet for a while and for once my inner Dorothy Parker isn’t choking back a glib response.
And my life, he continues, my life is very boring. I do mathematics all the time, all the time reading and writing mathematics papers and studying, and I do this for many years now, and nothing changes in my life, it is always same. So I think a few years ago about Tetra traveling on Galaxy Express train, and I decide that I will travel when I can. I am poor man who travels. He pauses, then laughs, at himself, but his mouth is grim. He looks up at me. Every chance, I travel, and I visit Russia because of many things, but partly because Masy is Russian guide for Tetra, and I read that to really know Russia, you must visit in winter. But it is very cold.

Tonight, I will show you episode of Galaxy Express 999 on computer if you are interested.

I assure him that I am and he gets up to leave. As he bundles himself into gloves and hat and scarf and coat he says, and now you must work.