“What do you mean?”
Aleksandr pauses. “I sometimes feel like home, or whatever I experienced that could constitute it, that could have that sense of history and meaning—it isn’t really there, anymore. A different city, with a different name.”
“Do you mean Saint Petersburg? Or rather, Leningrad?”
“Yes, but for any of us, really. Home’s a bit of an illusion, no? Something we say to make ourselves feel better. The idea of something we’re moving towards, something we can return to, when we’ve actually left years ago.”
A different coast, the sound of parrots and cable cars in the morning. Ocean for miles, rushing air, the crash of clean waves, familiar laughter. A place that recedes further away with every day she steps forward.
“What about you?” Aleksandr asks, looking at her. “Does this feel like home?”
“Best city in the world,” she quips.
He raises an eyebrow.
Lili lets out a sigh. “I feel like there’s so much here, that I don’t have to worry about whether I think of it as home,” she admits. “It’s the center of something, it means a lot to so many people—it’s nice to get caught up in that. To feel like you’re somewhere that matters, somewhere with meaning. Like, years spent here couldn’t have been wasted? Millions of people, crawling over this island—I guess I thought if I was going to be alone anywhere, I’d feel the least alone here.”
Concentrating on the insulating buzz of noise, dozens of other dinners around them, she’s able to share words that feel like giving voice to nameless, buried things; what she used to scrawl in her journal when she’d first arrived in the city, and felt that panic settling in again: that she hadn’t outrun it, hadn’t caught up to it—or rather, her.
Hadn’t outrun or caught up to herself.
At the thought, familiar pain rises. Lili feels the instinct to shy away, but instead, she breathes; able—somehow—to hold it at arm’s length, look at it.
The chance to sit with that agony, and not become it.
She continues. “At first, I did think I would feel at home here.” Her voice is quiet under the restaurant chatter. “That if I would feel at home anywhere in the world, it would be here, with so many different people... Ithink I invested it with too much meaning. It disappointed me. And then I started thinking about other cities, where I might maybe feel not so alone. The next place, other lives. But that—that doesn’t actually ever happen. You never actually catch up to or escape loneliness, I think. Just like that sense of home,” she adds, rueful, glancing at Aleksandr.
And he’s watching her. Gaze steady, calm.
The way he looks at her: It feels like a memory. Cold salt air, the scent of an orange.
Before she can give any credence to that stirred feeling, sense of a misplaced memory—she moves on. “What do you think, when you look at Russia now?”
A pause—a beat passes—before he says: “I see a country throwing the last handful of dirt onto its own grave.”
She raises her eyebrows, taken aback. “Do you mean in terms of the regime, Putin? What he’s done to the country?”
“Yes, but the country was rotting long before him.”
“So, what do you think can change it?”
He gives a hard laugh. “I wouldn’t say change is on the table in Russia.”
“What? Why not? Don’t you think democracy—a free society, a better future, progress—is worth fighting for, there?”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“I’d say it is. You need to fight for the future you want.”
Aleksandr sighs. Lili bristles at first, but it’s not a patronizing sound. “You can’t understand Russia through a Western lens,” he says.
“Isn’t that just an excuse to stand by while horrors persist? War crimes, human rights violations?”
“I’m not defending, Lili. I’m explaining.”
Habitual resistance rises again, but she lets it pass; seeking understanding, rather than compromise. “Okay.” She nods. “Tell me. I want to listen.”
“Russia has never—not once—had a conception of its own national identity that didn’t center on greatness. It’s always had a predilection for strongman rulers, Putin is nothing new. This rallying for Western ideals, activism in the streets, America’s support for dissidents—it doesn’t actually have much to do with empowering the Russian people. America will never want a strong Russia. But it also fundamentally misunderstands the people’spsychology. After almost a hundred years of living in a near-constant state of terror, that totalizing fear? That irrevocably changes how you think about the world, your conceptions of self, the possibilities of political imagination, of what the future might bring. You can’t import Western ideals wholesale into that.”
