Although he pretends he can't read it, her body language couldn't be clearer: an exhausted stillness suggests that a long, dull wait for a bus is just about all this woman expects from life, today or tomorrow or the day after.
Decades after Lenin's arrival, when Wilson was doing his book research, he found peasant women sitting there, with "bundles and baskets and big handkerchiefs around their heads," seated on "benches rubbed dull with waiting".
When they climbed slowly down from the backs of the trucks, they had lost their appearance of healthy villagers and taken on the passive, dull-eyed, waiting expression of the uprooted.
She sings, making up the words as we go along: Somebody stole the kitchen and Boully's oh-so-mad; she's about to lose it, the past and what she had; the bathroom is moldy, the knives are dull; she waits for the milk to curdle; the firecracker wind blows the kitchen to its knees..
Wollman Rink, when no one is there everything seems dull unnoticeable skates waiting on shelves to be sailed around the ice waiting for another winter.
Fogliano's poem and Stead's illustrations capture, with beauty and wit, the dull frustration of waiting for spring in a fallow natural world, and the joy of its transformation into life.
In a race to share it all, there's no time to waste on the dull bits, the waiting for the train, the interaction of lovers on a bridge, the conversation with the taxi driver or the greeting of the overnight hotel clerk as you arrive late for another night in a strange bed.
You'll have to sit through a few lectures and while away a few dull hours of waiting.
"I can't describe to you how dull it is while waiting to race," she said.
They might sound dull, but just wait until they're set against the clock.
