Sergei Kourdakov, a former KGB agent and Soviet naval intelligence officer, defected from the USSR at the age of twenty. A year later we met at my Federal Government office in Washington DC. We were watched and followed. “Even you could be spy,” Sergei whispered. My book, A Rose for Sergei, is the true story of our time together.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Anything But Mundane


Definition of mundane (adjective):  ordinary, dull, routine, boring, unexciting

Below is an excerpt from my draft of A Rose for Sergei.  It was a Sunday afternoon and Sergei Kourdakov stopped by my apartment in Arlington, VA.  We only had a few hours to visit before he had to leave for the airport for his return flight to Los Angeles.

”We didn’t have a lot of time left together that afternoon but Sergei remembered that I said I needed to go to the grocery store that weekend because I was practically out of everything.  And, for some strange reason, he said he really wanted to help me grocery shop.  It seemed like such a mundane thing to do, but he was adamant about going with me.

I should have known that a trip to the grocery store with Sergei would be anything but mundane.  Everything in this country was new to him, and he wanted to experience as much as he could.  He had to push the grocery cart, he had to look at everything in the store and ask about all the items.  We laughed the entire time and acted like two little kids in a candy store for the first time.  I could tell that just hanging out together, doing something so ordinary, made him feel like he was normal.  He could forget about his past life, forget about the danger he felt, at least for just a little while.

When we were done shopping he took a wild ride on the back of the grocery cart in the parking lot as he raced ahead of me to my car.  It was quite a spectacle, and I just shook my head in disbelief and smiled.  I didn’t know a lot about the . . . but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the image they usually projected.  As I watched him sailing through the parking lot on the grocery cart, I couldn’t help but think how free he must have felt.  For the first time in his life he was completely free to be himself.  And he loved every moment.”

Sergei and I always tried to fit in as much time together as possible.  It seemed like there was never enough time.  Spending time with Sergei was always an adventure—it was never ordinary.  It was anything but mundane.
 
 
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