Odessa

Odessa becomes more than a stop on Bella Baxter’s journey: it is a place where public space feels unexpectedly open to her and a stranger’s account of Russian literature gives her a language for thinking about memory and belonging. The harbour steps and a conversation in a betting shop make the city a setting for comparing the welcome she receives with the social judgments she expects elsewhere.

Harbour Steps and Public Life

On a warm day in Odessa, Bella sits with her writing case on her knees at the top of a huge flight of steps descending to the harbour. Their scale reminds her of the steps near West End Park in Glasgow, but the social atmosphere seems different. She imagines that in Glasgow people might stare at a woman writing in public, or that the police might move her along if she were poorly dressed. In Odessa, passers-by either ignore her or smile in a friendly way. The contrast makes the steps more than a landmark: they show Bella measuring how public space can admit or exclude a person according to appearance and status.

Her response is not simply that Odessa is welcoming. She places Russia alongside the United States as a country where people seem more willing to talk to strangers without formality or disapproval. She wonders whether this openness has something to do with having little past, an idea that turns her impression of the city back toward her own unsettled sense of history. The harbour setting thus accompanies a private question about what it means to belong when memory and background feel incomplete.

The Betting-Shop Stranger

Odessa also brings Bella into conversation with a Russian man she has met in a betting shop, while a crowd fusses around Duncan Wedderburn. She describes the stranger as small and neat, poor by his clothes, clever by his face, and at once humble and proud. She finds him lovable and is delighted that he speaks to her: apart from Duncan Wedderburn, nobody has spoken to her since the policeman in Regent’s Park. When she invites him to say what he has to offer, he is surprised and assumes she is the daughter of an English lord or baron. Bella rejects the assumption, exposing the mismatch between the status he reads into her and the identity she claims for herself.

The stranger’s account of Russia gives their conversation a wider reach. He argues that a nation’s literature helps make it real: before Pushkin, he says, Russia was administered rather than a true nation. Its aristocracy spoke French, its bureaucracy was Prussian, and the peasants, whom he regards as the only true Russians, were despised by their rulers and officials. He credits Pushkin with learning folk tales from his nursemaid and making Russians proud of their language and conscious of their past, present, and future. He then places Gogol beside Dickens, Turgénieff above George Eliot, and Tolstoï beside Shakespeare, while noting that Shakespeare came centuries before Walter Scott.

For the stranger, people who care nothing for their country’s stories and songs are like people without memory, only half complete. Bella is struck by the idea and considers whether, like Russia, she may be making up for lost time. The exchange links Odessa’s friendliness to a more difficult question: whether a person or nation can build a sense of self through stories after a past has been diminished, disregarded, or lost.

A Stop in the Travel Narrative

The diary places Odessa within a longer itinerary. Bella recalls that she and Duncan Wedderburn had previously reached Athens by way of Zagreb and Sarajevo, and writes that the ship is due to stop there the next day. In a later entry, she records that their Russian ship has left Constantinople and is steaming onward. These references set Odessa within an ongoing journey rather than presenting it as an isolated destination; the city is encountered through successive diary entries, as Bella writes on the move and interprets each place through what it allows her to see and say.

The entries also register a change in Bella’s writing. She first attempts to write like Shakespeare, then abandons the effort because it slows her down, explaining that she is trying to spell words out fully. In Odessa she writes outdoors among people who do not rebuke or remove her, and her encounter with the stranger turns that freedom into a conversation about the stories through which a past is made. The city’s significance lies in this conjunction of ordinary access to public space and an unexpected lesson in memory: Odessa gives Bella a place from which to consider both the history she lacks and the one she might yet make.