Change in Leningrad

Being released from one 's fixed identity is the high point of travel.

That there are no Roddan's in the Saint Petersburg phone book, for instance, and if there were the name wouldn't be spelled Roddan, it would be spelled some other way and I wouldn't be able to read it.

Dostoyevsky died here, as did Anna Akhmatova.

In the old days, when I traveled under the name Brooks Roddan, I would have made a pilgrimage to their graves, interested as I was in great literary achievement and the suffering necessary to create it.

But now that I've become a different person I walk the streets of Leningrad like the tourist I am, looking for the sites everybody else looks for, the Cathedral of Spilled Blood, The Hermitage, and The House of Books.