the general's daughter

I work with some pretty odd people here. So I thought I would add a few descriptions of them to preserve them in memory.
One of these people is X, the daughter of a retired soviet general. She spent a chunk of her childhood in cuba, her real childhood she tells me. Life was much better in cuba than here in Moscow. Her family lived in an enclave for Russians right on the edge of Havana. In the enclave they had their own shops (providing them with kolbasa and sirki even in cuba) and their own school. Her family was allotted a house (for the first time in their lives) and they even had a garden with a patio. And a dog. The dog dominates her memory of the place, she bursts in to tears even now describing how they had been forced to leave the dog there when they returned to Russia. She has funny stories about going back and forth between Havana and Moscow, about the people who would jump out of the plane and go bolting across the tarmac during refuelling at Gander airport in Canada, and about the time she smuggled a smelly lobster to her sister in Moscow (where such things were unknown). I gave her an article from the economist on the state of things in cuba in light of fidels surgery. Her father was friends with Raul castro, and X agrees that raul is lacking in charisma. He is a doer not a dreamer, which is why he can never replace his brother in the peoples hearts. Like me she is very worried about what will happen to the place after fidel is gone.
X’s other favourite topic of conversation is sex. She appears to be in full rebellion (age 31) against her military family’s soviet sexual prudery. For some reason sex was a completely taboo topic in the soviet union, especially among people of her class. Her mother never talked to her about it at all, and when she first got her period, in Havana, she actually thought she was dying. The mother of a Cuban friend managed to set her straight. However it appears that X is doing everything now to reverse her parents prudishness. She talks about sex non stop. And about her lovers (of which there are so many I often get confused and cannot keep track….so I just nod my head and pretend I know who she is talking about). This is a common theme with Russian women of her generation, those who were born early enough to grow up in the Soviet period, but who finished school/university in an independent Russia. When I was teaching here before (2000-2003) I had many similar students, all about the same age. I even had a student whom I called tarzanka (do to her limited English skills which seemed destined never to improve) who was also a general’s daughter. At one point during the year I had her as my student, she got pregnant, but decided to have an abortion as she could not figure out who the father might be, her husband or his friend. You would think as a medical doctor she would have been able to prevent such a situation in the first place, but no. they never do. X’s stories are similar, and the innocuous “how was your weekend” seems to invite trouble.
But at least she is not boring.