Like a spy, I follow an elderly woman and her companion through the exhibit of Russian impressionist paintings. The woman has an accent that makes her sound like Natasha in the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. They stop before a landscape painting, golden fields reminiscent of van Gogh, as I pretend to be lost in the light streaming down the wall of a monastery.

“Stalin sent my grandfather to prison for painting crows.” Her companion is silent. “It was a field of wheat stubble with a flock of crows settling in it.”

They move on and I remain at eavesdropping distance to catch snatches of her tale. Apparently Stalin, for whatever political or pathological reasons, forbade crows in works of art.

I slip into the gift shop behind them and pour myself a complimentary cup of tea, stirred, not shaken, with two sugars. Fiddling with some Russian dolls, her companion, with an attempt at levity, asks, “So, did your grandfather ever come home to roost after Stalin’s death?”

“No,” she says. “He was a simple man and could not imagine a field without crows. It proved to be a fatal lack of imagination.”