5/12/90 Although it was almost 11 pm, we could make out the features of a diminutive figure from the upstairs window of the Praga Restaurant. The May light in Moscow is memorable to a first-time visitor. Not only does the evening refuse to blacken, but it has a bleak translucence that plays a peculiar trick on the eyes: it appears actually to sharpen vision, to lengthen its focus. As she moved slowly, agonistically it seemed to me, from Kallinnprospekt toward the Arbat, the young woman in the street below shifted a baby, swathed in newspaper, from her left side to her right. She was obviously very young, her bowed body notwithstanding. Although I was in a party of a dozen or so people, only one other, a Russian apprentice-ethnographer, saw her as I did. Our eyes crossed. So did our voices: "She is terribly poor," I heard myself murmuring, in a fit of banality. "And the child... ?" The scene reminded me passingly of a hollow, Hollywood script, ca. 1910: the over-dressed, over-fed wealthy gaze down from their lush interior world onto the immiserated people of the snowbound streets as they make their way through their chill lives. But this was not a celluloid romance. It was all too real, it was 1990, and it was not snowing: "She's Uzbek," noted he, "they are very backward and poor." And then, over my silence: "They breed a lot. It's their nature."