One day the past returns. Curly or straight hair. Green eyes or brown. Jeans or a skirt. An ordinary history, just a little aged. And only the person living it will truly understand the feeling of loving him. This is simply the past.
There was care, there was respect, there was a wish that all former lovers would pale in comparison to this one.
Dovlatov, born September 3, 1941, would be turning eighty-one today, a reminder that some aged memories feel impossible to imagine. He is among those whose old age defies expectation. In this tale, the immigrant narrator encounters his former love at a dissident gathering in Los Angeles. Dovlatov, always drawing from life, recounts a real meeting with a real ex, without doubt about it.
To the text he adds a tiny flourish — an extra letter appears in a name as if to conceal something. No concealment here, only a comic gesture that reminds the reader of imperfect memory.
An extra letter makes a flicker but cannot erase what is felt. The author writes that his hands trembled, then steadied, then trembled again, until a teaspoon clinked in a glass — jing-ding.
The tremor and the meeting feel like a quake. A handshake that follows the first long separation, as if the room itself shakes without a door opening or a curtain moving yet.
Another figure, hidden behind the disguise, senses that something major is about to unfold. And indeed it does. The first love walks into a hotel room, a moment the narrator once described as a sense of death from youth returning in a new form.
That is only part of the story. In a parallel reflection, Nina Berberova wrote in My Italics that she learned too late that life cannot be lived entirely with one person, that clinging to a single center often harms the self. She asked whether a person can be a river or must be a rock, and whether the river is truly a constant or merely a flowing illusion.
We move through the river of memory and doubt. Tasya, the river of youth, sits in her bed and wonders if she can be content in a dam, a lake, or a rock. The sea of life shifts with every current, and memory tells us we have choices even when the heart insists on a single path.
Even the Pavlovsk meeting leaves a mark. He boards a bus with Tasya and spots a sleeping woman by the window. A pink and yellow ticket reel rests against his chest. Readers do not immediately know the woman is a conductor, a detail long familiar in daily life, yet the larger truth remains: the world is full of ordinary objects that reveal deeper patterns when seen with new light. The technique is described as elimination, where familiar items melt into a dream like haze.
Dalmatov, like Adam in the old text, sees wonders for the first time. He notices animals and birds and, crucially, figs rather than the expected fruit. The classical translation of the forbidden fruit is challenged by a simple, almost humbling sight. The moment becomes a counterpoint to alienation, a reminder that meaning often hides in plain sight.
But the story does not hinge on fruit alone. Dalmatov and Tasya shift from script to living moment, not defined by what was expected but by what unfolds. They arrive in the city at dawn and recall the best day of their lives, or perhaps the best night, a memory that lingers in the morning light.
Both Vasily Aksenov and Joseph Brodsky are noted as admirers of Asya Pekurovskaya, the literary muse who inspired the heroine in the tale. In 1968 she separated from Sergei Dovlatov, who had lived with her for eight years, and relocated to America in 1973, taking their daughters along. Dovlatov would move to America much later, at the age of seventy-eight. Then they meet again in a distant land.
Literary critic and writer Andrey Ariev recalled meeting her and noting that for Serezha the essential thing was always people, then perhaps literature, and at times family. Yet the river and the rock question remains unresolved, a metaphor that keeps surfacing through the pages.
There is a sense that Asya, Tasya, and the writer’s own life cannot be neatly separated. She could not live with him forever, yet she could not simply disappear. The river continues to flow, and the rock may crack under the pressure of memory and longing.
The narrative moves toward a difficult truth: lives are not always destroyed by love, though they can be deeply wounded. Pain remains, but it can pass, leaving a stubborn ache that lingers and then loosens its grip. The people who mattered stay vivid, even when the situation changes entirely. The story brushes against the idea that the past is not a neat, closed chapter but a living, restless presence that can redefine a person long after the fact. A bookstore encounter becomes a scene of revelation. A single line about a paralyzed gorilla hints at humor, vulnerability, and the unspoken oddities that bind two lives together. The memory of it all becomes a telling not of perfection but of unguarded humanity, a reminder that the past is never truly past. It remains, stubborn and candid, a companion that refuses to be ignored, even when the present demands attention. The last note is simple and unsentimental: everyone we love has grown older, sometimes difficult, sometimes grateful, always human. In the end, memory is not just a record of what happened but a living mirror of who we become when we love and lose. The past, in all its tenderness and imperfection, remains a stubborn companion in the journey of life. [citation: Berberova, My Italics; Ariev, recollections; Dovlatov biography and interviews]