ANOTHER ALARM IN THE NIGHT in St. Petersburg: This time I was staying at a friend's apartment in the middle of the city. The friend was away. Russian apartments are double-sealed against the world, with double windows and often double doors. The outer of the two doors to this apartment opened with a key—a long and heavy one, like a movie jailer's, which needed the touch of a safecracker to work. The second, inner door had a knob but no lock or key, just a heavy sliding bolt you shot once inside. With this door bolted, a person in the apartment could keep out anyone, even someone with a key. When the first symptoms jolted me from sleep, I wondered fearfully and obsessively about those doors, in between jolts. Should I throw the doors open in advance for the rescue squad? I never had enough of a pause between symptoms to decide.

The pains squarely occupied my middle, like a bull's-eye. This had to be a heart attack. Self-diagnosis is an objective, grown-up skill I lack, but in this case, further symptoms, lower down—rumblings, crampings, and other demonstrations—made the problem seem not cardiac but gastrointestinal. Maybe it was both.

I had come to the city a week earlier to report on its 300th-anniversary celebration. I had walked many miles, seen the elephant, stayed up all through some of the white nights. The day I got sick, I finished the last

All journeys bring to mind the truck drivers' adage "There ain't no easy run." When we travel, we think we don't want to get sick, but maybe, less consciously, we’re not so sure. If nothing of note happens on a journey, was it one?

of my reporting around noon, and then to celebrate bought a two-liter bottle of Baltika Beer—my first mistake, as the kielbasa the color of machine grease that I'd bought to go with it was my second. Later, I went to dinner at a friend's apartment in a high-rise on a far edge of the city. My friend's wife made a dinner of which I ate a lot, because she had gone to some trouble and seemed to have a hard life. I took several helpings of salad, possibly not thoroughly washed. Everything I ate that day was suspect, the kielbasa most of all.

Spasms and more spasms—these Russian germs were mean. They grabbed and shook me like a soda can. I'll skip the full details. After an hour or so, I ruled out a heart attack in favor of the common traveler's illness, with all the extras. Or possibly dysentery: I had a symptom of that, too. I tried to drink bottled water to stay hydrated but couldn't keep up. I was hot and shivering. During a short respite after vomiting, I dressed and made it out of the apartment—relocking the outer door took the last of my concentration—and then sort of sleepwalked through the city's strange boreal dawn, down empty sidewalks to a clinic I'd seen advertised in an English-language newspaper. The walk proved harder than I'd imagined, and by the time I reached the clinic, I was all in. I veered across the waiting room to the check-in desk and said to the nurses there, "Dumaiu, shto ia umriu!" which means "I think I'm dying!"—an overstatement, but on the other hand they didn't make me wait.

You hear bad reports about every institution in Russia, including Russian medicine. True, this was a clinic for foreigners; but to me, in off the street, it could have been anything. It turned out to be great. A young doctor named Viacheslav Zuev examined me and took my temperature and gave me an EKG. Zuev spoke pretty good English, and when he couldn't think of a word, he would snap his fingers on either side of his face and pull it from the air. He put me in a bed in a single room with the lights dimmed and started an IV. In Russia, sheets are still cotton, not percale or whatever miracle fiber has replaced it here. The sheets on this bed were white, fresh, like in a 1950s bedroom, and the pillowcases the same. Above the bed on the wall hung a clock the size of a steering wheel. I watched it fixedly and barely moved, waiting for this particular moment to be in the past.

The biggest surprise, and the point of this story, was the nurses. Russian women, I should mention in an aside, are beautiful; anyone who has been to Russia recently can verify this. No explanation exists for this phenomenon; it just is. I won't go on about it at too great a length, so as not to seem weird, but there are many, many lovely women in Russia. Anyway, these nurses were up to the standard of their countrywomen and then went beyond it. In America, nurses are brisk, goal-oriented, and upbeat. They don't get paid enough, and they have too much to do, and they want you to recover and move on, and that's fine. But Russian nurses (to judge by these) suffer with you. These wore starched old-fashioned nurses' caps, like the false fronts of buildings, and modest uniforms with pleats. They looked like the nurses little girls used to want to be when they grew up. I forget these nurses' names—Liuda, Sofia, and Elena . . . When they talked to me, their voices cooed sweetly and mournfully. "Oh, yes, life is very hard," their manner seemed to say.

I conversed with them slowly in my limited Russian, the sentences as if taken from the beginning workbook. Where are you from? I live in the state of New Jersey. Have you ever been to the United States? Where do your friends in the United States live? Do your friends like New Haven? Do they like to study at Yale? My wife's name is Jacqueline. She is not a Frenchwoman. She was born near Boston, in the state of Massachusetts. Yes, that is not far from New Haven.

These nurses were of the tradition that compares nurses to angels. They sympathized quietly, wholeheartedly, and from someplace unreachably high. They came and went, and I lay conversing in a disembodied voice. As it became clear that what I had contracted (salmonella poisoning, according to the lab report) was not going to finish me off, I felt embarrassed to have gotten so carried away. Americans are crybabies—that's me. No doubt my nurses had seen similar behavior before.

The window of the room was open, and I could hear the footsteps of passersby on the sidewalk just a few feet away. The steps increased in number as people awoke and the day began. I lay there listening to the steps. Like the nurses, they were different from the American version. They were Russian-sounding, cossack-dance footsteps, every one of them. I would not have confused them with American footsteps in a million years. For hours I looked at the motion of the clock and listened to the Russian footsteps. By evening I had recovered enough to be discharged. I consider this one of the most satisfactory days I've spent anywhere.

All journeys bring to mind the truck drivers' adage "There ain't no easy run." When we travel, we think we don't want to get sick, but maybe, less consciously, we're not so sure. If nothing of note happens on a journey, was it one? Travel pursues romance, and romance requires the unknown—an element in shorter supply now that technology is encompassing the world with ever-multiplying pings. The goal is not only to arrive at some numinous, far-off destination; it's to return to your usual place clothed in exciting unfamiliarity: You're the boy who lived with pirates, the girl brought back from the wilderness who has grown so accustomed to Indian life she had to be coaxed away. A key element here is the cool impression made on one's friends. Illness is a passage, and when it happens on a journey—a passage within a passage—it leaves you doubly transformed. When you get better, you feel doubly recovered and strong. Getting sick while traveling is one of those tricky accomplishments you simultaneously want to have done and don't ever want to do.