“That’s how it always was, since we were children. Always a few steps further ahead, walking a bit too fast, but at the last moment, when I thought he’d forgotten about me, about to leave me behind—he’d look back to see that I was still there, scrambling after him.”
Lili barely breathes, listening. After a few beats of silence—consideration, carding through thoughts—Michael continues. “We’re a strange generation, children of the collapse. The nineties...” He shakes his head. “Fatal nineties, some called them. Shock therapy applied to awhole country. The Gorbachev years, then Yeltsin, Gaidar’s reforms. At the end of the day, it was just a painful mess. It’s difficult, living in the twilight of something, the gray dawn of something else. I think everyone was exhausted, but braced for... well, we didn’t know what, but it came. It came.
“I met Aleksandr for the first time in the kitchen, when we were children. He likely didn’t mention this, he doesn’t tell many people, but we grew up in communal apartments, they’re called—”
“Kommunalka,” Lili murmurs. “He told me.”
Michael looks at her, reevaluation. She glances away.
“Exactly,kommunalka. About ten families in this dilapidated aristocratic apartment, 3 Ligovsky Prospekt, ornate ceilings high above our communal near poverty. Shared kitchen and bathroom, a private room for each family, old oak floorboards that creaked. After his father died, when he was seven or so, his mother moved them into ourkommunalka.”
Michael exhales a hard laugh. “It was perhaps one of her only defensible, if unintentional, parenting decisions. Anyway, I met him in the kitchen right after they moved in. For Russians, the kitchen isn’t only the place we cook, it’s where we lived, hosted guests, late-night conversations; where children did homework. The radio played Vysotsky, and illegal international broadcasts. Hard-boiled eggs, stacks of the week’s old newspapers.
“He was seven. His mother had just left for the evening, while everyone else was coming home from work and school. I remember him sitting at the table. Hard stare, serious boy. It felt like there was the air of an argument, just passed. My grandmother was cooking, and I was half hiding behind my older sister, who was helping as she gossiped with one of her friends. As I watched, he started studying—I think he was doing maths? My grandmother loved him—all the grandparents and parents loved him. They’d let him linger in the kitchen most nights after they’d put the rest of us to bed, as they started talking late and drinking.
“I still remember the tick of the heavy clock in their room, Aleksandr and his mother. That faded, golden wallpaper; the Cyrillic alphabet poster. Books everywhere—Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. Elena taught at the university, always brought books home.”
“Elena?” Lili asks, frowning.
“Ah—Elena is his mother.” He nods. “But she was almost always gone.In the classroom, in the streets, who knows where else. When Sasha studied, I’d wander into their room and read—it was quieter, there. He was alone, most of the time. I had siblings, my parents, my grandparents, I could never think straight in the noise.”
Michael laughs, quiet with genuine recalled affection. “I learned to read earlier than most, because I was irritating Aleksandr. Constantly asking him to read headlines aloud, trying to look over his shoulder at his books, getting bored when he wouldn’t come play in the courtyard. Some of the first things I read were about the millions dead, suddenly ‘discovered.’ Like the gulag had blinked into existence. People read reports, finally uncensored, in paralyzed astonishment.
“Yes, people could speak a little more openly now, but all our money vanished with Gaidar’s reforms. A drunk was running the country, everything was for sale, black marketeers in charge, street fighting. I remember Tchaikovsky on every channel,Swan Lakelooped on state television, as tanks filled the capital.
“Nothing was certain, nothing was safe. For almost eighty years, we’d lived in one kind of world, and now, what? Free markets, free people?”
“You sound like a socialist,” Lili murmurs.
Michael shrugs, as if indifferent. “You don’t feel like much of anything, in that type of aftermath. You’re just... hands, really. Reduced to what you can grab. Most people can’t survive a switch like that, from gray to teeth-rotting Technicolor. People’s minds broke a little, realizing this new world necessitated another species of person, a different type of man.
“The more freedom we got, the faster food evaporated from the shelves. We had ration cards for everything. Empty shops, long lines, people waiting for hours. I was twelve. My mother would send me to wait in line. I had younger siblings, so she couldn’t spend hours away from home, and it was too cold in the winter for my grandmother. But it got dangerous after dark, and it got dark fast and early. The streets weren’t safe, walking back, and when Aleksandr found out I was the one waiting in line, he started coming with me—he was fifteen, people usually wouldn’t bother us if he was with me. He lost hours studying like that. I can’t smell menthol now without wanting to cry. Zolotaya Zvezda—Golden Star, but I think you call it Tiger Balm here? He’d put that under his eyes to keep himselfawake, to keep studying when we got back. Past midnight, his mother still not home.”
Michael pauses. She holds her breath, not wanting him to stop. The confusing noises of the playground, Brooklyn, rush into the momentary silence. “I’m not sure how much you know about his mother,” he finally says. Lili relaxes with the promise of a few moments more. “His father died when he was young, but his mother was a professor. Fairly outspoken, too. She distributed samizdatas a teenager, criticized the regime. Protests, pamphlets, agitation, that sort of thing—and she could get away with it, too. She knew how to ensure consequences never fell too heavy on her.”
Lili tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
He smiles, a little rueful. “She was beautiful. Stunning, really. She still is, she had him very young, barely twenty. She was stunning, sharp, and she used that. Taught him how to use that, too, I suppose.
“I remember, when he knew she’d be home for dinner, these rare evenings, he’d read more, trying to find some opinion or idea to interest her, to try and... I don’t know, make her stay longer? He stopped eventually, when he was eleven or so. By then, he understood that she had priorities, and he wasn’t one of them.
“She’d take him to the Hermitage, though, maybe once a month—this, I remember. That was important to her. It’s a city of museums, Saint Petersburg. She’d tell him history, show him art, walk the streets. I was jealous of it, but then he’d come home and just collapse on the bed, exhausted. I’d try to get him to come play with us, come down to the courtyard. He’d tell me to go away. I think she weighed him down with it all.
“It’s a glorious city, Saint Petersburg—Leningrad, then. It is a gray place, though. Maybe sixty days a year have sun, and in the winter, we’d go weeks without it. That’s partly why he loves New York so much—even in winter, it’s a brilliant blue sky. You can see the sun. You can breathe.
“Not there, not then. I think he was suffocating, hungry—no, not hungry. Starving, ruthlessly hungry. Growing up without a father, in those years—in any years, but especially those? It was brutal. You had to fight with teeth.
“I think Elena laughed at him, when he finally admitted that he was trying to get out, that he’d applied to schools abroad. As if she hadn’t madehim the boy—the man, at that point—that would want to leave, that was capable of leaving, who had the languages, the intelligence, the drive and dissatisfaction, to get out.
“And I don’t think they often see how similar they are. Sharp in the same way, easily cruel in the same way—caring too viciously about certain things, scorning others in their entirety. It was claustrophobic in that apartment—you always knew if Elena and Aleksandr were home at the same time, that was the joke in the building when he was a teenager, because one of them would inevitably storm out, seething, after the shouting. She thought Russia was stepping out of the grave, he thought the country was decaying in the streets; she was in the classrooms and squares, and he was already thousands of miles away.
“So, yes, he got out, and there wasn’t any luck in that. He did it all himself, then helped me. The applications, the tests, the studying, the fees—helped me through all of it, paid for it, too, with what money, I don’t know.”
Michael falls silent. In his steady breathing, she can hear calm resignation, slowly settling back into the present; reorienting to the colors of now, the noises here, the insulation of memory fading. A history he’s come to terms with, these dead things that still live for him—and the thought, a sickness in her stomach, of why he’s shared this with her.
Lili stays silent, too.
“I know he’s not... an easy man.” His words are more careful now. “Sometimes, it may seem like he cares about nothing, and thinks the world is a game, some dark joke, like not much is sacred to him. There’s irony there, that I think he’s somewhat aware of. How unbelievably Russian that is, even with decades between him and that country—and he doesn’t care, not really, not truly, about most things.
