When I was 17, I played in a small amateur theater in Leningrad.

Not just anywhere.

We rehearsed inside Yusupov Palace - the place where Rasputin was killed.

To get to the stage, I had to walk through long, dark corridors lined with tall, ancient mirrors. I can still feel the hush of those halls, the shadows, the old glass catching fragments of light. I often walked there alone, imagining footsteps behind me. Imagining Rasputin stumbling through those halls, bleeding, refusing to die.

It was frightening.

And yet, I loved it.

There I was, seventeen years old, standing under those lights, playing roles I did not yet have the life to understand.

Our director, Kira Gurevskaya, had spent her life on stage. She carried the kind of authority that made you straighten before she spoke. She did not ask for effort. She asked for something truer than that.

She saw more than we could yet see.

One of the pieces we performed was Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants.

At seventeen, I thought I understood it.

A young couple is waiting at a train station in Spain.

He talks about an “operation.” He says it is simple.

He says they can be happy afterwards.

He says the world can still be theirs.

Nothing is named.
But everything is there.

The girl is pregnant.
He wants her not to be.

I remember saying the lines and feeling a sadness without knowing why.

There was one sentence Kira returned to again and again.

She would stop me. Ask me to do it once more.

“Far away, beyond the river, are mountains… they look like white elephants…”

I tried to say it "correctly." Again and again.

She was never satisfied.

Not because it sounded wrong.
Because it was empty.

At seventeen, I thought it was just a strange comparison.
I did not understand it was the girl’s way of saying something she couldn’t say directly.

Her way of asking: Do you see what I see?

And he didn’t. Or wouldn’t.

Many years later, I found myself in Spain.

We bought a small house, and from the terrace there are mountains.

I look at them often.

And every time, I think of that girl at the station.

But something has changed.

Back then, the mountains were “white elephants” - distant, metaphorical, a line to be memorized.

Now, they feel different.

They don’t look like white elephants to me anymore. They look like small, green mammoths - shaggy, patient, and real.

And I love them.

And still, I think of her.

Of the way she tried to say something without saying it.
Of the way she tried to show him something he could not, or would not, see.

Of the way she said it was okay when it was not.

I did not understand that then.

Now I do.

And perhaps that is why the mountains changed.

Not because I moved to Spain. Not because time passed.

But because I have lived long enough to recognise how much can be hidden inside a woman’s silence.

Including my own.