The other night I found it hard to sleep. Not because the heating was turned off in our Kyiv apartment – we have plenty of warm blankets and the outside temperature had risen from -15°C to 0°C.
Of course, when you cover yourself with a layer cake of three to four blankets, their weight presses on you and it becomes difficult to turn from side to side – but you sleep warm! Yet that night, even the warmth from several blankets did not help me fall asleep. Earlier in the evening my wife and I went to the theatre to see a play based on Tennessee Williams’ novel The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. I did not like the performance. But I watched it to the end, especially since we had bought the last two tickets the day before. The theatre was sold out and at the end of the performance the entire audience gave a standing ovation. Eventually, I had to get up too. I looked at the happy faces of the actors and felt the enthusiasm of the audience around me. As they continued to applaud, I tried to understand: what was happening? It was a tritely staged play about the love adventures of a rich American woman in Rome after the Second World War, about Italian aristocrats impoverished by the war, forced to become gigolos or beggars. At the end of the play, one of the heroines, an old Italian countess, utters an essentially anti-American monologue, from which it is clear that she is a supporter of Mussolini and cannot forgive the Americans for the defeat of fascist Italy.
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