School Number Five stood in the very centre of Stavropol, a couple of minutes’ walk from the central department store and from that square with Lenin which Soviet towns were issued as standard and which in most of them still stands.
I slept alternately at my mother’s and at my grandmother’s, and the route depended entirely on that. Grandmother also lived in the centre, so from hers I walked, some fifteen minutes through the park with the regional drama theatre and the freshly cast monument to Lermontov, on which the bronze was still dark and shiny. (At the time I knew nothing about the particulars of Mikhail Yuryevich’s biography and had not yet met my Bella.) If I could not be bothered to walk, I rode a couple of stops on a passing trolleybus.