By Hannah Feustle Abroad writer
When the explosion in the metro happened last week, I was in Kirov—a city 22 hours from St. Petersburg by train. It was strange to read about the attack from a distance, to hear an area I know so well described in the news.
The car where the bomb went off was on the blue line, on a train going from Technologichesky Institut, a transfer point with the red line, to Sennaya Ploschad, a transfer with purple and yellow. I go to Technologichesky Institut every school day—I transfer to the red line there to get to the university. It is one of the most beautiful stations, although all the metro stations are beautiful here. The metro is the palace of the people. The walls in Technologichesky Institut are whitish dark-veined marble, and there are chandeliers hanging down the length of the hall that I see most often. At Sennaya Ploschad—the next stop, which that train was heading toward—the arched ceiling over the escalator is covered in mosaics. They are in sharp contrast to the outside, where the square and buildings around it have a decidedly “Crime and Punishment” feel, even all these years after Dostoyevsky set his novel there.
I spent about an hour every day in the metro system—for every week that I’ve written for “The Quill,” I’ve written unfinished stories about the metro. It’s a place in the city where I’m competent—I pay attention there, know the details. The escalators here are long—I timed the one at Chernyshevskaya, the end of my morning commute, where it takes three minutes from top to bottom. In Petersburg, people only follow the stand-to-the-right, run-to-the-left rule on down escalators.
On up escalators, everyone stands, two to a step at rush hour, and I’ve only ever seen one person try to violate that. Those kinds of unspoken codes carry over into the cars, where the speakers say to give seats to the elderly and to women and people also give their seats to parents with children. Before your stop, you move toward the door so you are ready to get out as soon as the doors bang open; one of my professors told me that in the Soviet Union, that rule was announced, too. You do not make eye contact on the metro—everyone is buried in a book, in their phone, with the distant, unapproachable metro face—but foreigners and people with luggage will be stared at. You do not speak there. The cars are silent.
The metro is the way of life here. On my first day, my host mom made me practice how to hold my purse to prevent pickpocketing. Every day that I’ve made my way through the crush of people to the three-minute up escalator at Chernyshevskaya, I’ve seen the same man waiting for whomever he waits for at the bottom and the same women waiting at the top. You describe where you live by metro stop: mine is Frunzenskaya, blue line, one stop south of Technologichesky Institut. I cannot imagine what people did for even that short period when the metro didn’t run. It must have felt like the end of the world.
This morning I got off at Technologichesky Institut and started to weave through people toward the red line train that I could see on the other side of the marble columns. I smelled the memorial before I saw it. The flowers—the smell filled the whole high-ceilinged place. I stopped and looked. The doors banged shut on the red line car. Around one of the standing maps in the center of the aisle were flowers, piled up a foot high all the way around it.
And then people kept pushing past me so I had to move. I walked far down to the left toward the end of the train, where there is always room to stand without a stranger pressed up against you. I swung my backpack off and held it from one hand, like everyone does, and waited just behind the yellow line for the rush of wind and glare of headlights. The smell, even from there, was strong. And even so, when the train pulled up, everyone parted on either side of the doors to let people out, and then packed inside—me included—just like any other day.
The editorials of The Quill reflect the views of individual members of the editorial board. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire editorial board or of the university. The content of the Forum page is the responsibility of the editor in chief and the Forum editor.
