The war ended. Summer of 1945, Lyuba visited her father who was stationed in Silesia, and he was demobilized and they all moved to St. Petersburg.   Papa Bensil immediately set about arranging that Lyuba go to medical school there. 

At this point in time, there’s a whole stack of letters and poems from Vitaly. In one he writes, “I was walking on the street. Some day people will have radio-telephones, and you will be able to talk to anybody from wherever you want.”  They were apart for a year or more. 

I envision Vitaly sitting on a park bench, with a new fangled telephone at his ear, talking to Lyuba with the boats of St. Petersburg in the harbor behind her. His concept phone still contains one of the most endearing artifacts of telephones at that time: namely the little “pigstail” cord on the receiver. Only for the purpose of this digital photomontage, the cord is fashioned out of a tightly coiled young green fern ….