Snow in May. Kseniya Melnik
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of. Sonya is wiser than Marina and I were at her age. And if she makes a mistake, I hope that luck will come to her rescue, just as it has always come to mine.
Marina moved to Anchorage a year after Sonya. By then her relationship with the TV journalist had disintegrated. She let her hair grow out to her natural color and cut her bangs, which made her look so much younger. I hadn’t divorced her because, having no official relations in America, she wouldn’t have been able to immigrate, and Sonya needed her mother. We are still not divorced; there was never a hard-pressed need for it. Marina still lives in Alaska and is friends with many other Magadan expatriates. We often speak on the phone. She has almost forgiven me for the ways in which I had disappointed her, and I have almost forgiven her betrayal. After all, she’d been nothing but a positive influence in my life.
In 2011, our little airline company ceased flights between Anchorage and Magadan—there was no longer a market. Perhaps Americans had become disenchanted with the way Russians did business. I wouldn’t blame them. The portal of friendly associations and opportunistic marriages had shut. Instead of taking a four-hour nonstop flight across the Bering Strait, those who wanted to visit relatives now had to connect through Seattle, Seoul, Vladivostok, or through Los Angeles and Moscow—all the way around the globe. In the summers, it would probably be easier to paddle over in a canoe, fingers crossed and betting on the old Russian avos—“what if.”
What if, what if.
My partners and I disbanded the company, paid our debts, and called it a good run. Then, after more than fifty years of snow, vicious winds, and icy nights, I moved to California, where Angela had been living for years and working as a manicurist. Hers is a whole other story. I live quietly now, minimally, in the golden land of dreams, which to Tolyan and me had once seemed farther than the moon. I manage a few properties. I try not to tax my luck.
I’d been walking on the beach for almost an hour—my exuberant Sputnik so wet and happy—thinking about how readily I always dismissed Tolyan’s disabled child. I’d tucked that tragedy between a hapless first marriage and a failed career. But, surely, this misfortune had influenced his life in ways I couldn’t imagine. How was the boy now? I almost didn’t want to know.
On the other hand, knowing Tolyan, I could as easily see him as an emotionally and physically absent parent to a healthy child. Children were not one of his great interests, nor was his career. Though, how many blows on the head could one take until one finally decided it was safer to stay on the ground?
Perhaps I had misinterpreted Tolyan’s comment back in ’92, and he didn’t blame me for what had gone wrong in his life. He simply wanted to reconnect, and that was what today’s phone call was about as well.
How much of my life did he know? What news, what rumors had reached him?
Or maybe he wanted to ask for a favor. If he had sought me out, the favor was probably big. Russian people had a notion that all Americans were rich and powerful, and definitely all Russians who had made it in America. First, it wasn’t true. And second, he didn’t know what it had really taken, all the dirty details. My family didn’t know. He couldn’t just show up and pick the fruits.
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