Snow in May. Kseniya Melnik
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At the airport, the loudspeaker announced that the eight-hour nonstop flight to Magadan was delayed because of adverse weather. The terminal swarmed with passengers, stir-crazy from the foul-smelling bathrooms and insufficiency of places to sit. Various personages of questionable intent, particularly gypsies and persons of Caucasian nationality, trolled the waiting halls, panhandling, selling trinkets, and soliciting fortune readings.
Tanya had too many things to carry all at once. She dragged her suitcases up to the end of the check-in line and asked the woman in front of her to keep an eye on them. When she returned for the boxes mere seconds later, the one for the color TV was gone.
She lost her breath, as if punched in the stomach. The bananas. She spun around and around: thousands of people, thousands of boxes of every stripe in continuous movement like atoms. How could she have not foreseen this?
Tanya shuffled back to her place in line. Now she knew with absolute certainty that she’d been happy just a moment ago, steadily on her way home, with presents for everyone. She began to cry. And she couldn’t stop, not when the woman in front of her asked her what was wrong, and not when, pushing her remaining luggage centimeter by centimeter, she reached the counter and handed her passport and ticket to the check-in clerk.
Everything felt wrong, like she was living in a parallel universe, separated by one crucial degree from the one containing the life she was meant to have. This other, true life was visible to her, even palpable at certain instances—like during the births of her sons—but impossible to occupy. She cried from pity for herself, and because of the stupidity of such pity. She cried for Luciano and for Anton. She cried because she’d only loved one boy with the follow-you-over-the-edge-of-the-earth kind of love—at fifteen. She cried for her mother, who had died two years ago, and whom she still missed every day.
For the rest of her wait Tanya haunted the airport, looking in every corner for the missing box, in the weak hope that, upon opening it, the thieves had discovered no color TV and abandoned it. It was eight in the evening when the plane finally took off.
She landed the following afternoon. Wet snow fell in clumps from the chalky sky. After an hour on the washboard Kolyma Route—the infamous road built on the bones of Gulag prisoners—Tanya began to recognize familiar streets, decorated with red flags along the May Day parade route. Banners with noble yet unrealistic proclamations hung from the most important buildings. The snow kept falling and falling, covering muddy slush from the recent thaw, last year’s yellow grass, and the garbage on the sidewalks—masking, for a short while, the old sins.
The taxi driver parked by Tanya’s building and helped her carry the luggage up to the fourth floor. Their apartment was small, but all their own. Anton was supposed to be at work and the boys in kindergarten, but as she opened the door and right away stumbled over a vacuum cleaner in the hallway, she knew that everyone was home, waiting for her. It smelled deliciously of fried potatoes.
A soccer match played on TV in the living room. Various articles of clothing hung over the backs of chairs, and socks were piled in little nests on the floor. Anton and Pavlik were napping on the couch, Anton’s face raw from a recent shave. She bent down to Pavlik’s bottom: his pants appeared to be clean. She looked at them again. They were a perfect subject for Mary Cassatt, had she painted in Russia. Tanya felt a twinge of pleasure and shame.
She went into the boys’ room. Borya sat on the floor, tinkering with his metal construction set. He wore his favorite orange flannel shirt and briefs. His feet were bare. He looked up at her, first startled, then astonished. His imagination winged back from the distant magical city he was building, and he smiled, baring a gap in his milk teeth. He jumped up and hung on Tanya’s waist. She could feel the angularity of his knees through her coarse traveling pants. As she kissed his head, she noticed a cluster of new freckles on his nose.
“Borechka, put on some socks. The floor is cold.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Papa hasn’t fed you?”
“Papa said to wait for you. We cooked together. I cut a potato myself.”
Tanya pressed Borya to herself so tight that he cried out, but he didn’t try to wiggle free.
“Wait here, kitten.”
Before waking up Anton and Pavlik, she tiptoed into the hallway. The bananas were gone, as she’d suspected, along with the tomatoes, oranges, cheese, Anton’s favorite smoked meat and sausages, and the wine. She rummaged in the suitcase and pulled out the green Yugoslavian dress. Made of high-quality silk, it had hardly gathered any wrinkles on its long journey east.
2012
This morning, a phone call from an unfamiliar foreign number interrupted my game of golf. I winced, recognizing Russia’s dialing code, and let it go to voice mail. I would have done the same with any unidentified caller. You never know what guise the past might put on to haunt you. I had my habitual postgame round of cocktails with my golf partners, all California retirees like me, and returned to the condo I shared with my sister, Angela. She wasn’t home. I took a long, cool shower, then went to the patio and looked out for a long while at the red terra-cotta roofs of our condo community, which, if not for the palm trees that stuck out here and there among the old Cadillacs and swimming pools, almost succeeded in looking Florentine. I listened to the voice mail twice. The message was from my former best friend. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-eight years and hadn’t spoken for twenty.
“Tolik, is it you or is it not you?” his message began. His voice was thin but cheerful; he must have been putting on airs. He’d gotten my number through an improbably coiled chain of acquaintances, he went on to explain. “How are things? Family? It’d be nice to talk of our old adventures. Do you still play tennis? I’m in Voronezh, still.” I waited to hear what he wanted, but perhaps this was something he was saving for the conversation proper. He gave his number with the country and city codes and hung up.
I went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, and took some deep breaths. Sputnik, my salt-and-pepper schnauzer, jumped up next to me, wagging his joystick tail. Then he hopped back down and planted his muzzle on my knee. Behind his bushy eyebrows his black eyes begged for a walk, and a snack, and love. For everything at once and right away.
Tolyan and I had been through the trenches of youth together, his loyal presence a watermark of authenticity on so many of my best memories. I should have been happy to hear from him. But what I felt was acute annoyance at this rather minimal invasion of my privacy. Maybe I’ve become too American. Or not yet American enough.
As I go about my long day, performing tasks I don’t mind, thinking either about what I now have the time and mind space to notice—a beautiful flower or an intricate cloud formation—or the people who matter to me—my daughter, Sonya, my sister, Angela, my wife, Marina—I am sometimes shocked into a fleeting physical weakness by the realization of how fast the time has galloped by, each winter marked by the increasingly passionate moaning of my once broken shin. And by the fact that I am here and Tolyan is still there, whereas we started out together and young.
We were both named Anatoly; I was Tolik for short, and he Tolyan. We were born a year before Stalin’s death in a small town on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, in the northeast. Despite its isolation, every Russian of a certain age still shudders at the mention of our hometown, Magadan, which was once the gate to the most brutal Stalinist labor camps—the most remote island in the notorious Gulag Archipelago. Besides mining gold, tin, and uranium in the permafrost basin of the Kolyma River, the prisoners were engaged in extensive civil works, building the first roads and houses, as well as the Park of Culture and Leisure, the cinema, and the stadium, with its