“Sis, do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?” Ilya asked. In Russian, the word cousin is translated as “secondary sister,” which is usually shortened to “sister,” or “sis.” It instantly made me feel close to him.
We stepped outside and I was hit with a wave of swampy humidity that made my chest heavier than it already was. My thick flannel desperately clung to my body, making me regret the six sweaters and jackets I’d packed.
Ilya popped a cigarette into his mouth and tipped the pack toward me. “Do you want a cigarette?” he asked. He must’ve read the same phrase book as me. His pack had a close-up of a man’s neck, with tubes protruding from a large hole. You could see a few rotting tooth stumps jutting out from the man’s otherwise naked gums. The word EMPHYSEMA was stamped across the photo in big, Cyrillic letters. Ilya caught me staring. “We like to collect these,” he said, tapping the warning label. “I have cancer in my car.”
Ilya started up his second cigarette as we neared his brand-new BMW. Beads of sweat congregated underneath my boobs as the midday sun bore down on us. Over the next two weeks, I’d spend a lot of time standing next to cousins as they finished up cigarettes. Underneath trees, in alleyways, on balconies, in light rain, and unforgiving sun. Cigarettes were my closest companion and by the end of the trip I couldn’t taste things in quite the same way.
I unbuttoned my flannel, exposing a sheer tank top underneath; no time for modesty in this weather. Every time I had imagined Russia it was in the context of cold and snow; heat was nowhere in my purview, and neither were German luxury vehicles. All of my parents’ stories revolved around a shortage of food and products, and an abundance of sadness. It was clear my perception of Russia was about to get turned on its head.
Even though Ilya carried the small stature that comes with Shifrin genetics, he refused to let me help him load my enormous suitcase into his car. I watched as he struggled, using a sort of humping motion to tip my baggage full of winter wear into the trunk.
“You ready?” he wheezed into the car. I was.
As we drove through the green outskirts toward Moscow, gargantuan apartment buildings began to crowd the road, not a single-family home in sight. It was clear that keeping up appearances was important to Russia, and the appearance it wanted to keep was “We can crush you.”
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Ilya asked while peeking up at the buildings.
No, I thought. “Big,” I responded in my limited Russian. I could get my point across, but mostly sounded like an intelligent toddler. “Mmm … I love mushrooms. Mushrooms in soup. Mushrooms with potatoes. Mushroom pierogis. All mushrooms…” I prattled off at my first family dinner because the word was easy for me to pronounce. Every subsequent dish I ate during my trip had mushrooms in it.
Later in that same meal, my dad’s cousin, a college professor, asked about my hobbies in America. “I like to pee,” I enthusiastically told him. The whole table was quiet for a moment before bursting into laughter. (In Russian, to pee and to write are the same word with different emphases: писать vs. писать.) As the last traces of embarrassment left my face I thought about all the times I had laughed at my parents’ own awkward pronunciations of American words: Shit for sheet. Van for when. Bitch for beach. Zief for thief. Fresh hues of shame colored my face.
Ilya’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a pre–1917 Revolution building with walls as thick as my couch. It had the same sweetly stale rye smell as my grandfather’s immigrant-run building in Chicago. Do all large groups of Russians smell like rye bread? I thought as we approached Ilya’s comically small elevator. In order to fit inside, Ilya and I had to straddle my luggage and squeeze our bodies together. Normally, I’d be empathetically uncomfortable with this level of proximity, but I knew that Russians were used to living in small quarters, and didn’t have issues with physical contact in the way that I, or my rigid American counterparts, did.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, Sophia, Ilya’s mom, who couldn’t have been over five feet tall, pushed him out of the way and leaped into my arms. She was the female version of my father, with the same delicate wrists and bullfrog shape. Her worn skin, large chest, and skinny legs looked like my future.
“Did you see any grizzly bears out there?” Sophia grinned, knowing that my dad had prepared me for the worst. Years of smoking turned her voice into a raspy whisper.
I introduced myself with a formal greeting and quickly learned that Aunt Sophia, who insisted I call her Sopha or the diminutive Sophka, didn’t do anything according to formalities. I should’ve guessed when she greeted me in a neon-yellow nightie and nothing else. “Do you like it?” she asked, pointing her tiny brown leg out like an elderly ballerina. “I bought it just for your visit!” she cackled. Her laugh sounded like a deflating mattress, making it my main objective to make her laugh as much as possible.
As I dutifully slipped off my shoes at the entrance, Ilya’s wife, Olga,2 came out of the bedroom. I was taken with how beautiful she was. Her circular Uzbek face and fox-like features were complemented by her bottle-blond hair. She had a tiny waist, a defined collarbone, and weightless breasts that sat atop her chest. Normally women with such beauty, especially Russian ones, would’ve intimidated me, but I was thrilled that the Shifrin gene pool was adding a model-esque blonde to the rotation. Still, I envied her elasticity.
Despite the fact that she didn’t speak any English, Olga and I got very close during my trip, not only because she was tasked with entertaining me for much of it, but also because she was practicing for her beauty school finals. She’d spend an hour each day lightly correcting my pronunciation while staring into my dumb face, brushing different colors onto it, stepping back to observe her work before leaning back in—her nose nearly touching mine. It was quite intimate.
“I have a mustache!” I yelled the first time she got near my face.
She looked closer and furrowed her brow. “You do! Oh my god,” she exclaimed. After her laughter subsided, Olga began to delicately pluck the hairs on my upper lip because “women cannot have mustaches.”
The first time Olga did my makeup was for Ilya’s work retreat in the Moscow countryside. The retreat was also my first time interacting with non-family Russians. They were mainly interested in homelessness and whether or not Americans actually thought Russian spies had tampered with the election.
Early in the evening, a man with sleeve tattoos, blue eyes, and a shirt that read “Carry On and Slap the Bitch” grilled me about homelessness in America.
“Is it true that your homeless are overweight?” he asked while swaying from side to side.
We had shown up to the retreat halfway through; many of the attendees were lobster-faced and wasted. He took two steps downwind of me and lit a cigarette.
Another of Ilya’s coworkers, a nicer man with a gentler energy, added to Slap the Bitch’s inquiry. “My cousin was in San Francisco and he said that they all had cell phones.” Slap the Bitch’s mouth dropped open and he began to make a sound I could only describe as “drunken stoner chortle.”
I looked out beyond the crew of tanked consultants (or maybe they were data engineers? I still couldn’t quite figure out what it was that Ilya did) toward the beautiful lake. It was like the setting of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The muggy heat gave the edges of my vision a dreamy blur and the scene was lush with greenery. In the middle of the lake was an inflatable jungle gym infested with Russian men in speedos. They were climbing ropes, hanging on walls, jumping off platforms. It was a jubilant scene filled with the elated squeals of summer—a new contrast to what I had in my head for Russia. Everyone was sopping, sunburnt, yet completely ignorant about socio-economic dynamics.
The whole country felt liked a warped version of America in the seventies; there was no compassion for the complexities of homelessness, no one wore seatbelts, people were suspicious of the gays, men worked, women cooked, and everyone smoked two packs a day despite the warnings printed on the cartons. Sure, there weren’t ho
ur-long lines for bread rations anymore, but people were wearing shirts that said SLAP THE BITCH with no social ramifications.
I spent most of the trip teetering between relief that my family had left and sadness over my disconnect with the culture. The disconnect was painfully obvious when it came to my complete ignorance of the famous monuments that littered the city. On my first day, Ilya brought me to a pond near his home. “Do you know where we are?” he asked, barely able to contain his giddiness.
“Outside?” I wagered.
Ilya spread his arms. “We’re at Patriarch’s Ponds!” he gushed. His entire face dropped at my lack of reaction. “Patriarch’s Ponds?” he repeated. “Master and Margarita? It starts right here, right in this spot.”
“Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to read it…” I lied. Russian literature is notorious for its distinctively flowery ability to dissect the human condition, but unfortunately, translated novels “are not like the real thing” as my dad always tells me, and “the nuances are lost on foreign-speakers.” Ilya bought me a copy of Master and Margarita the next day, demanding that I read it. It’s sitting under my coffee cup as I type. I’ll get to it next, Ilya, I promise.
A disappointing result of having left Russia at such a young age was my stunted grasp of the language. Speaking Russian for two weeks was difficult—the words felt clunky in my mouth. I became a half-speed version of myself. Well-meaning people, too impatient to wait for me to find the right words—were constantly finishing my sentences. I longed for the sophisticated ease with which my cousins spoke.
Truthfully, I was jealous of Ilya. He grew up with a rich, historical, complicated culture at his fingertips, while I grew up with Maggiano’s and making out in minivans. My parents left one of the most populous cities in Europe in exchange for a two-car garage and the boring stability of the suburbs—I couldn’t help feeling like I’d missed out.
Sensing that I was in the middle of compiling an unintelligible retort to Slap the Bitch, Olga pulled me away for a walk. Although she was younger than me, she knew better than to get into a fight with a drunk man. She was cooler than that. “Let him think what he wants, you focus on yourself,” she told me as we walked down a tree-lined path. I swallowed my annoyance.
Everything in my staunchly progressive bones tells me not to say this, but it was nice to take a break from being a disappointed feminist all the time. I got used to spending my days getting my makeup done, and my evenings being wined and dined by my cousin and his male friends. Toward the end of the trip, I stopped reaching for my wallet, knowing that it was a useless gesture. I didn’t touch any doorknobs or pay for a single thing. Even souvenirs—after a lot of back and forth—were paid for by cousins. Male cousins who worked hard, drank harder, and were perpetually exhausted—I much preferred the laidback lives of their wives. At least during my two weeks there.
I forgot how fun it can be to be a girl. My struggle to succeed in a male-dominated industry had muted my desire to be seen as a woman—I tried, so hard, to be one of the boys. Entering the comedy world felt like I had to choose between being powerful or being feminine, but Russia presented me with a third option: both. The women taught me that I could have a face full of makeup and ambition beyond my femininity. It was okay to be strong, yet delicate. Russian women are the toughest broads out there, and I’m honored to be a part of the sisterhood.
I spent my last night in Russia at the Kremlin, where my parents spent their last night too. The pride of Moscow’s past shines brightest at night and the Kremlin is the best place to take it all in. All the buildings are lit up like architectural Christmas trees—it’s truly breathtaking.
We walked over to the exact spot where my parents took their final photo in Russia, only to find it was gated off. “Oh no,” Olga gasped, knowing that I’d been wanting to replicate their photo since arriving.
Normally, I would’ve marinated in the disappointment of a symbolic opportunity ruined by bad timing. But I didn’t much care. Either Olga’s calm and collected nature had rubbed off on me, or I’m just getting older. Big problems of the past have shrunken to minor annoyances of today. I don’t get as worked up when things don’t go as planned. Mainly because I’m done overexerting myself on the small stuff.
The last photo my parents took in Russia. They are wasted.
“Do you want a drink?” I asked Olga, no longer needing my phrase book to guide me.
We briefly debated whether or not to Uber,3 but decided to take the train so that I could say goodbye to my beloved Metro. I could’ve spent the entire trip in the Moscow Metro. Each stop looked like its own magnificent museum; some with painted ceilings, others with bronze statues in every corner, all radiating the regal beauty of a different era. The Metro was where I finally understood the showy elegance of Moscow. Deep beneath the monstrous buildings, and even bigger egos, lay the desire to be beautiful, to be accepted and imitated by all. The Metro is where I began to relate to my birth country.
The Mayakovskaya Metro stop, where Sophka lived, had art deco columns, marbled walls, and large metallic arches at every entrance.
“I used to stand at one end of the arch and slide a ruble to my friend at the other end,” my dad told me over FaceTime. “If I did it right, the ruble would slide across the entire arch and land in my friend’s palm.”
As we waited for the train, I took a ruble and slid it up the side of one of those metal arches. A flicker of familial connection tickled my soul. The steel blur flew up the wall, over my head, to the other side of the arch where it hit the marbled floor only to roll back to my feet. Olga and I cheered so loud that our yells reverberated off the ceiling mosaics.
This was the country I was taught to fear. Fear that was fueled by my parents and anchored by movies, media, and neighborhood bullies yelling “Communist!” But when you greet fear with open arms and laughter, the fear diminishes, first within yourself, and then within those around you. A week into my trip, my parents began to tell me lighter stories of their childhood, stories that had happiness hidden within their words. During one of our daily check-ins, my mom told me of the time her parents took her to Дéтский мир, the Russian equivalent of Toys ‘R’ Us. “It was the best day of my life,” she said, the phone screen reflecting her glassy eyes. My heart folded in half at the thought of my mom as a rosy-cheeked eight-year-old standing in line at the toy store. Years before she got her tonsils ripped from her throat and her mother died, Olga had a day at Дéтский мир. I went there a few days later with my cousin’s daughter, Anya, and bought everything she could carry. As I stood there between a stuffed gorilla and a Frozen display, my pilgrimage felt complete.
Russia gave me something I didn’t know I needed: closure on my past. Answering where I came from helped me figure out where I’m going. Sharing a dinner table with people who had loved and held me as a baby was an incredible experience. It encouraged me to move forward with confidence, power, and security in the fact that I’d earned my tiny spot in the world.
I landed in Los Angeles on a Saturday afternoon in August. After a long and uneventful wait in the immigration line, a sterile machine checked my passport and scanned my face. “Can I offer you a cigarette?” I asked the machine. It did not answer.
30
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APPENDIX
Modern Love
A LIFE PLAN FOR TWO, FOLLOWED BY ONE
BY MARINA SHIFRIN
APRIL 4, 2013
Kevin was everything an overweight ten-year-old girl could ever hope for in a man. His hair was the color of Cheetos and he was an incredible speller. It was decided; I was in love.
“You live six houses down from me,” he said, making my heart turn inside out. My family had just moved to Highland Park, Ill., from Skokie, Ill., and I didn’t know anyone. Here was this magnificent boy who actually had taken the time to calculate how many houses stood between us. I started to wonder if the glow from my wedding dress would make
him look washed-out.
Soon after, I began devising a plan in which Kevin and I would end up “2gether 4ever,” as all my notebooks stated.
Months of morning strolls to the bus yielded a confession from Kevin: he had a crush on Caitlin, who was thin, blonde and cheery: my opposite. I didn’t mind. I figured it would be healthy for us to see other people before we spent the rest of our lives together.
When he asked me whom I liked, I panicked. I wasn’t ready to reveal my plan, so I made a promise: I’d tell him everyone I’d ever liked on my sixteenth birthday. It worked. He went back to lusting after Caitlin, and I went back to picking out names for our children.
On my sixteenth birthday, Kevin (who by then had moved on, crush-wise, to Haley) was waiting in my driveway. Admitting to your best friend that you have liked him for the entirety of your friendship is about as awkward as getting a bikini wax from your dentist.
I could have lied, but Kevin had developed this annoying habit of reading my thoughts. Finally, I worked up the courage to tell him the truth: I’d had a crush on him for a few years, but was totally over it. Totally.
He took the news as any scrawny, pale high-school boy would: by triumphantly leaning back in his chair like a champion. I began to worry about the plan and our future together, not knowing that a few months later we would encounter our largest obstacle yet.
Surprisingly, our relationship hadn’t changed much after my confession. About four years earlier we had started a tradition where we would shoot hoops at one of our houses until it was time for dinner; very 1970s of us, even though it was really the late ’90s. And one night, a few months after I had partly professed my love, we decided to just sit and talk, lamenting how high school was half over and neither of us had received our first kiss.
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