Petersburg in the Back of a Notebook

I found the notebook while looking for something else. This is how most of my attempts at organising a cupboard begin: one practical search becomes an hour spent reading evidence that I used to have different concerns.

The notebook had travelled with me during my master's years in Moscow, from 2018 to 2021. Near the back were a few pages from a visit to Saint Petersburg in 2019. I had drawn a rough route, written down two words I didn't want to forget and recorded the cost of a meal with a seriousness I had not applied to several more important details.

Now I was reading it in Hanoi with my two-month-old daughter asleep nearby. My wife asked whether I had found the item I was looking for. I held up the notebook, which was not the item. She looked at the cupboard and then at me. I returned to the original search before reading the next page.

Later, when the room was quiet again, I sat down with the notebook properly. The route was incomplete. A canal appeared as a crooked line, and I had put a star beside a museum visit without explaining what the star meant. I could still remember the room more clearly than the route that had taken me there.

The day I tried to fit on paper

Before the visit, I had listed more places than a single day could comfortably hold. I was a student, and part of my planning consisted of persuading myself that walking faster could solve limits of time and money.

The map in the notebook had no allowance for eating slowly, standing in the wrong queue or following a street that looked interesting. It treated a museum as a point you could pass through. I can see the attraction of that version of travel. Every line appears controllable until you arrive.

I remember standing outside with a friend, comparing the paper route to the street. We had started with different assumptions about the direction. For a minute, each of us held the map at an angle that made our own answer seem plausible.

We found the correct way after checking an actual street sign. This became a useful pattern for the day: a brief period of confidence followed by contact with something written outside our heads.

Saint Petersburg felt different from Moscow to me, though I would have struggled to make a fair general comparison after such a short visit. The places we walked had long views, water appearing between buildings and a light that made me keep checking the time. I had arrived with an idea of the city and spent much of the day noticing where that idea was too simple.

I wrote a sentence about the light in the notebook, then crossed out an adjective because it sounded borrowed. The replacement was less impressive: still enough light to read outside. At least I knew what I meant by it.

We bought something to eat before entering the museum. I had learned that my interest in art could deteriorate surprisingly quickly when I tried to save time by postponing lunch.

A room I wanted to leave slowly

At the Hermitage, I first behaved as if the objective were to see as much as possible. I looked at a painting, read part of a label and moved on because there were other rooms waiting. After a while, I realised I was collecting evidence of movement rather than memories of looking.

The rooms themselves competed with the work on display. I would notice a ceiling, then a doorway, then remember that I had entered to look at something on a wall. My attention kept changing scale, and the notebook route offered no help with that.

I stopped in front of a small detail in a painting: the way light appeared on an ordinary object. I can't honestly reconstruct every label now, and I don't want to attach the wrong artist's name to a remembered surface. What I remember is standing still long enough for the object to stop being a small part of a crowded room.

My friend came back to find me. He asked whether I had seen the next room. I said not yet. He looked at the painting for a moment and pointed out something near the edge that I hadn't noticed. We stayed a little longer.

We can miss a room and still have been here.

I wrote that in the notebook after we left. It was partly a joke about the map and partly permission I seemed to need. There were far more objects than I could properly look at in the time available. Walking past all of them wouldn't change that.

I have since checked the museum's own general information when trying to remember which parts of the larger complex I was thinking of. The place is bigger than the compact word museum suggested in my plan. My visit covered only a small part of it.

By the time we went outside, I was glad to see a plain patch of pavement. Looking carefully can be tiring in a way I hadn't expected. We sat down and compared the few things each of us remembered best. They weren't the same things, which made the conversation much better than a shared list of rooms would have been.

A bridge over a smaller waterway

The canal is drawn badly in the notebook. I have spent several minutes trying to make the line correspond to the streets I remember, and I still wouldn't use it to give anyone directions.

What I can recall is stopping on a bridge and looking down. The water held fragments of reflected buildings. A small boat changed the reflections as it passed. Someone beside us was taking a photograph and trying to keep a bag from slipping off one shoulder.

The city had large views that invited a camera, but I liked this smaller one. From the bridge, I could follow a bit of movement without understanding the entire area. The railing was cool under my hand. A vehicle passed behind us, and I moved closer to make room for another pedestrian.

I took a photograph that looked less convincing than the view. The framing included an unhelpful corner of something nearby. I considered stepping back, then realised I would be standing in the way. I kept the imperfect picture.

In the notebook I wrote water not blue, which is an observation of limited literary value but more specific than the sentence I had first attempted. The colour came from weather and reflections, and it changed as I looked. I had been trying to name a stable shade where there wasn't one.

My friend asked what I was writing. I showed him the sentence. He said that seemed accurate and asked whether I was ready to eat. We had spent enough time contemplating water for one afternoon.

Sugar on a dark sleeve

We found a place serving pyshki and ordered a small amount first. I remember the paper and the powdered sugar more clearly than the arrangement of the room. One bite sent sugar onto my dark sleeve, where it became more conspicuous when I tried to brush it away.

The food was warm, simple and exactly what I wanted after walking. I had expected to spend this part of the visit discussing architecture. Instead we discussed whether we should order more and how much time we had before the next part of the day.

I wrote the unfamiliar word in the notebook. Learning Russian had given me an expanding set of useful words and an equally expanding awareness of what I could misunderstand. Food words were rewarding because I could connect the sound to something directly in front of me.

I don't want to turn that meal into the definitive version of anything. It was one place, on one student visit, at a moment when I was hungry. That is enough to explain why it remains clear in my memory.

My friend was carrying a small bag of things he had bought earlier. He rearranged it under the table so that a paper package wouldn't be crushed. We checked the route again and removed another destination from the list. Nobody seemed distressed by its disappearance.

The sugar mark remained on my sleeve for most of the afternoon. I noticed it in one photograph later and remembered the warmth of the food immediately. Several pictures of important buildings required more effort to place.

That is one reason I like old notebooks. They preserve the small thing I happened to notice before I knew what would become a useful memory. A stain and a misspelled word can do more than a carefully selected summary written years afterwards.

Walking past the plan

The afternoon became less structured after that. We walked towards something, stopped somewhere else and accepted that the map was now a suggestion. I was still interested in the places on it. I just no longer believed that crossing them off would prove I had used the day properly.

I remember a courtyard glimpsed through an opening and a window where someone had placed several plants. I didn't go in where I wasn't invited. Seeing a small part of an ordinary place was enough without treating every doorway as an opportunity for exploration.

There was a shop where we bought water. The exchange took longer because I misunderstood a question, then answered the question I thought I had heard. The person repeated it more slowly. I answered correctly on the second attempt and felt a disproportionate satisfaction.

During those years in Moscow, everyday language mistakes had become part of my routine. In another city they felt newly visible, as if the change of setting had reset a skill I thought I had acquired. I was relieved when the next conversation went more easily.

We found somewhere to sit and rested our feet. The notebook says legs tired, which is another sentence unlikely to win any prize. Beneath it I had written the name of a place I wanted to read about later. I never completed that particular plan, but I did keep the page.

I called my parents in Quảng Bình when the timing worked. My mother asked whether I had eaten. I told her about the sweet food and then clarified that it hadn't been my only meal. She asked about the weather. My father wanted to know how I was getting back.

Their questions returned the day to a manageable scale. I didn't need to explain the whole city. I could tell them where I was sitting and what I would do next.

The page in Hanoi

The notebook comes back into the cupboard now, but not before I have looked through the last few pages. There are technical notes from Moscow beside shopping reminders. The separation between a period of study and an ordinary life was never as neat as a later summary makes it sound.

I returned to Hanoi in 2021. Sometimes I talk about those three years as a single block because it is easier than explaining all the smaller days. The Petersburg pages reopen one of them without pretending that my memory is complete.

My daughter makes a small noise from the next room. I wait for a moment, then go to see whether she is waking. My wife is already there, adjusting the cloth near her shoulder. I bring the thing she asks for and leave the notebook open on the table.

When I return, I notice a flattened ticket-shaped scrap tucked near the back. The printing has faded enough that I can't confidently read it. I leave it where it is. I don't need to invent the missing text to keep the part of the day I remember.

Later I show my wife the map. She asks whether it was useful. I say that it helped at the start and became less important after lunch. She looks at the crooked canal and says she can understand why.

I close the notebook carefully because the cover is beginning to separate at one corner. Before putting it away, I brush a tiny piece of paper from the table. For a second it reminds me of powdered sugar on a sleeve, and I can almost feel the warmth of the room where we sat down to eat.

— John