The Moskva Pool

I’D BEEN SWIMMING in Russia since I arrived, in the fall of 1992, to study poetry and historical change, and to live “like a Russian.” In the face of food and goods shortages, brutal pushing crowds, crazy weather, unidentifiable fevers, and nasty cashiers, I kept treading water. For weeks, whenever my host family’s apartment in Kaliningrad lacked hot water, I’d head to the local pool, respite from the Scylla of my own increasingly smelly body and the Charybdis of a cold shower.

When spring descended in rain, with its millions of puddles, I plodded along water-shod like a post-evolutionary fish. Once, as I scuffled down a boulevard sidewalk, feeling depressed and victimized by my fate, a tinted Benz appeared and plowed through a gigantic puddle. The gorgeous car grew two tremendous wings of muddy water, the closer of which crested white and then fell, soaking me entirely. I could almost feel the machine smile as it disappeared down the road.

And now, finally, summer and the sudden strange feeling of sun on bare skin, the light sheen of sweat radiating from pores, lilac bursting from morning dew, the loveliness of girls’ arms stretching in short sleeves. It was time to find some real swimming again. Where better than the Moskva Pool?

Before the Moskva Pool claimed the prize as the biggest open-air pool on the planet, its ground was the site