I made coffee and toast and sat by the balcony. Down in the courtyard, street sweepers in orange uniforms were gathering piles of snow, then loading the snow onto their trucks. The sky was cloudless, cosmos blue. The roofs of the city were covered in white. I checked my phone and saw that Lena had not replied to my text message. I showered, put on winter clothes, went down to the street. In the metro, I prepared mentally for my monthly meeting with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. Typically, after talking about the weather, I would tell her what I was reading, which, to her disappointment, was rarely academic books or articles but mostly novels, the classics, which she thought I should have known by now. She would then give me some pointers for my research, recommend further reading and, when we ran out of things to say, we would discuss politics, history or whatever was in the news. I had to admit that I wasn’t dedicating much time to my research, at least not to the more conventional part – reading scholarly papers, meeting professors, visiting the library.
