The Perfect Wife - Chapter 2
Natasha from St Petersburg
Dating in the 1990’s still depended on the old “ad in a magazine” model. However I had become familiar with the internet due to my employment as a chaplain at the one school that invested in the internet from day 1 - MLC Melbourne.
There were no online dating sites in the 1990’s. RSVP (a popular Australian site was yet to launch).
However, I came across a website run by a well-meaning American where he was trying to find husbands for a small number of Russian women. Natasha was on his website.
I contacted Natasha and almost immediately made plans to visit her in St Petersburg. It is true to say that I was more interested in my first international holiday in an exotic city than in my first international dating experience.
Natasha bravely offered to allow me to stay with her in her apartment in St Petersburg. She hardly knew anything about me but in her kindness made this offer.
Natasha had the protection of friends, one of whom was a police officer who drove her to the airport to meet me. On the way home we had a good laugh over my mispronunciation of the Russian word for potato. (I had the accent in the wrong place)
Natasha’s apartment was tiny. A tiny kitchen and a very small living room, doubling up as a bedroom. There was no luxury there nor anywhere else in St Petersburg in 1999. The ruble had collapsed the year before and there were old babushkas begging in Nevsky Prospect.
I inadvertently won Natasha’s heart when I sent her a bunch of flowers prior to my journey. I was not to know that my flowers arrived on the very day that Natasha’s mother passed away. Natasha seemed overwhelmed by my thoughtfulness.
Natasha made sure that over the next 10 days I would see the best that St Petersburg had to offer: The Hermitage Museum, the summer palace of the Tsars on the gulf of Finland, and most significantly the house where Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote his novels.
One day, as we got off the bus near her apartment, Natasha stopped dead and asked me “Do you love me?”. My failure to answer this question must have dismayed her because I replied “Natasha I am really tired right now and I need to rest first”.
The reality was that being not long out of a 20 year marriage I was not ready to fall in love with anyone. It takes time to get over the first one. My advice to divorced men is to give it at least 5 years before you contemplate a second marriage otherwise you might end up in a situation depicted in David Hockney’s painting “Second Marriage” which is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria.
In 2005 I decided to visit St Petersburg again, and while there I thought I would pay a surprise visit to Natasha. She opened the door of her tiny apartment and almost collapsed when she saw me standing there. The highlight of the couple of days I spent with her was our visit to the ballet (Swan Lake as I recall). There we sat, just meters from the Tsar’s box in the stalls.
Natasha and I agreed that our relationship should not continue because she would not leave Russia and I would not leave Australia. It was a pity because by then I knew that Natasha would make a wonderful wife; her sweet temperament and generosity were sufficient for me to say yes if the question had been asked.
Postscript: In 2019 I made one more trip to St Petersburg, mainly to follow up my passion for collecting Imperial Porcelain. On a whim I decided to visit Natasha once more. I managed to navigate the subway and bus systems by myself, and eventually located her apartment. To my dismay and disappointment Natasha no longer lived there. Gone from my life forever, but I will always remember her as the Perfect Wife who I failed to marry.