You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  Now, I knew that Papa was very fond of Lyonya, who had supported him through many difficult times back in Kharkov and dutifully passed on the American dollars he sent every month to cover my grandfather’s living expenses. The rather fanciful image of his cousin Papa conjured for me can probably be chalked up to the fact that I was a child at the time. Perhaps he also wanted to somehow lighten my impression of life in Kharkov, which only seemed to run the short gamut from crappy to unbearable. In any case, despite my warped image of the Cousin Who Drinks Water, after my grandfather died, Lyonya was the only person left who could show me the things I wanted to see in Kharkov. And it suddenly occurred to me that he wasn’t getting any younger either.

  When I announced that I was planning to visit Kharkov, my normally absentminded father snapped to attention. The first thing he said was “That’s a bad idea,” followed quickly by “Do me a favor and don’t tell Mama.”

  But Mama did not react as badly as we thought she would.

  “Great!” she yelled, launching into full-throated someone-is-shoving-an-ice-cube-down-my-pants mode. “Now maybe you will finally know what a godforsaken hole we rescued you from!” Mama assured me that I would return from Ukraine and spend the rest of my days showering her with things she liked: marzipan molded into animal shapes, gift certificates to Loehmann’s, et cetera.

  For weeks Papa kept trying to dissuade me from going, but when I held firm and even managed to convince Josh, my long-suffering husband, to come along, he grudgingly arranged for a meeting with the Cousin Who Drinks Water. Then, shortly before we left, Papa also coughed up the following unenthusiastic summary of Places of Family Importance in Kharkov:

  The most important place is the house where we lived. The address is Krasnoshkol’naya Naberezhnaya 26, apt. 96. It stands near a rather stinky river called Lopan. You are welcome to take a walk along the bank.

  The next destination is Kharkov State University. This is in a very big square. In the middle of the square is a park named after Dzerzhinsky—the founder of the KGB. I skipped many classes reading physics books in this park.

  Right next to the university is a park called Sad Shevchenko. The marble statue of Shevchenko (a famous Ukrainian poet) is kind of OK. I studied in this park as well.

  From Sad Shevchenko you can get to the zoo and see the sad animals. I had a brief career as a night watchman in the zoo, and a more lasting one guarding a small kiosk in the zoo, called Café Petushok.

  And just to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed his point, Papa added a final note: “Even if this sounds like fun, I suspect it won’t be.”

  Josh and I arrived by train from Kiev on the Stolichniy Express, seated on a bench of genuine Soviet pleather, nervously squeezing hands when we felt the final jolt signaling our arrival. Then an attendant lowered a metal ladder to the platform, and we stepped down, feet finally firm on warm Kharkov concrete. Blinking back nonexistent tears, I stood there uncertainly, waited for the rush of feeling. But there was nothing. Nothing but this sense of whistling disorientation. Making our way to the station, I stopped to examine the Kharkov city emblem prominently mounted to the wall. It featured wreaths of wheat, bushels of fruit, and, hovering above them both, the symbol for nuclear energy. Radiation and produce, I thought to myself, a combination that screamed an urgent need for rebranding. Once inside, we found the station itself unexpectedly sumptuous. From the soaring ceilings and massive chandeliers, one would think we’d just pulled in to one of the loftier cities of Europe. There was no trace of the cold boot of Soviet oppression. If only my family had lived in the train station, we could have been happy here.

  The first practical order of business was to inform my parents we hadn’t been vaporized at the border. Conveniently, we found an internet kiosk right inside the station. The cramped room had three computers lined up against one wall and was presided over by a bulbous woman stuffed behind a desk.

  “Can I buy fifteen minutes of internet time?” I asked in Russian.

  The woman gave me a sour look. I found myself unable to tear my eyes away from her halo of pinkish-burgundy hair. It looked like one of those fiber-optic lamps you see in the windows of head shops, and I half expected it to start rotating.

  “Internet? What internet?” she barked.

  I apologized for mistaking her for someone who might help us and we went next door to see if the lady at the dry-cleaning kiosk knew where to find whoever was in charge.

  “Wait a minute,” said the dry-cleaning lady, and tore open the side door separating the two rooms.

  “Sveta!” she yelled. “For God’s sake, you can’t just pretend you don’t work here whenever the tourists come around.”

  Confused by the torrent of Russian, Josh turned to me.

  “What was that?”

  “She was pretending she didn’t work here.”

  “Oh,” Josh said. “I’m going to go find a bathroom.”

  I was still working on the email when Josh wandered back into the room.

  “No one will tell me where the bathroom is.”

  “Maybe they can’t understand English?”

  “It’s weird,” he said, “I think they understand me fine. They just didn’t want to tell me where it is.”

  So we went off in search of the men’s room, and it turned out to be a good thing because I’d forgotten that the ladies’ room would only be marked by an inscrutable Cyrillic letter that looks like nothing so much as a caterpillar trying its best to run away from you.

  We had booked a room at the Hotel Kharkov because, in my parents’ day, it had been the grandest hotel in the city. And clearly it had once been grand. The richly columned interior looked as though the Sistine Chapel had thrown up on it. Unlike the train station, though, the Hotel Kharkov was also alarmingly run-down. As I struggled to find a camera angle that didn’t include child-sized holes in the wall, gaping wires, or what I could have sworn were traces of bullet-strafing, I detected an unmistakable whiff of downtown Beirut to the place. On the way to our room, we found that an army unit had been stationed down the hall from us. The wiry young men, all naked from the waist up, regarded us suspiciously as we made our way past them, their eyes glinting like hard candy.

  As soon as we closed the door behind us, Josh went over to one of the cot-sized beds and lay down, face-first.

  “Do me a favor?” he said, voice muffled. “Don’t go out there.”

  I took a photo of him lying there, then walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain. There, in vivid green and gray, were the Soviet postcards of my youth. The hotel overlooked Freedom Square, which was supposedly the largest square in Europe, second in size worldwide only to China’s Tiananmen Square. As Papa mentioned, it used to be called Dzerzhinsky Square, and perhaps for that reason, its new name still managed to sound ominous. The western end was completely dominated by a statue of Lenin that looked to be about three stories high. And although most of the vast cobble-stoned expanse was empty, the grassy stretch surrounding Lenin was teeming with students. They sat in colorful clumps on each of the four tiers that made up the base of his pedestal. Lenin himself was dressed in a business suit, tie tucked into vest, with a rather stylish coat rakishly thrown across his shoulders. In his left hand he held what appeared to be a rolled-up newspaper or an umbrella, but was probably something far more symbolic, like a small, frightened farmer. His right hand was raised, outstretched toward the square in a gesture meant to say, “Come, Comrades, join me in building a glorious future!” but which today looked a little more Vanna White–ish. “Welcome, Comrades, to Europe’s biggest parking lot!”

  We had agreed to meet the Cousin Who Drinks Water for our tour of Important Family Places in front of the hotel at three, and so we went outside to wait. Ten minutes later, a lonely figure emerged, trekking toward us across the endless slab of freedom. At first sight, I had to admit I was a little disappointed. Cousin Lyonya was a balding, slightly paunchy guy with soft features. He wore beachy knee-length shorts and
a black t-shirt that said “Yacht Club,” and could easily have been mistaken for a customer-service representative from Hertz Rent-a-Car. He didn’t look much like Papa at all. Nor did he resemble Popeye the Sailor or some other quirky superhero who might thrive on salt water alone. It had been my secret hope that at some point during the afternoon, we might slip away to some shady spot where Cousin Lyonya would stand on his head for us. This hope was quietly dashed. Trying not to sound despondent, I asked Lyonya if he was still drinking water. But at this he only shook his head and laughed.

  The suggestion to visit Dedushka’s grave was waved away as too complicated, so instead we struck off on the scenic route toward our first destination, Krasnoshkol’naya Naberezhnaya 26, the apartment building where my family once lived. It was a beautiful July day and downtown Kharkov’s dignified prerevolutionary buildings were lit up like pastel flares in the sun. We had just settled into a pleasant amble, crossing the square and turning down a wide, leafy boulevard, when Lyonya turned to me and asked, “So why don’t you have any children?”

  Even though we had known each other for all of eight minutes, I wasn’t surprised by the question, having grown up fending off the invasive inquiries of ruthlessly blunt Russians. I still remembered being greeted at the door by my parents’ friends one Thanksgiving with the exclamation “But you are so much greasier than last year!”

  “How old are you anyway?” Lyonya continued. “You must be at least thirty by now.”

  “We’re planning on having kids,” I said, feeling like Jennifer Aniston. “We just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” I looked nervously at Josh, who was enjoying the view of the park.

  “Because a woman should have children while she is still young and healthy. Like here in Kharkov. Our women give birth when they are twenty or twenty-two years old. This is considered normal.” He shot me a look from the corner of his eye as if to underscore what was not considered normal.

  “But maybe that is because our women are so irresistible,” Lyonya went on. “Like that one there, eh, Joshua?” He raised his eyebrows at a passing blonde. “Wouldn’t you say she is very luscious?”

  “What’s he saying?” Josh asked, suddenly with us again.

  “Oh, you know.” I shrugged, taking his hand. “Just Welcome-to-Kharkov stuff.”

  For the rest of our walk, our attention was focused on the various landmarks. “Here, on the left, you will notice the Monument to a Soldier-Defender of the City of Kharkov, built to commemorate Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War,” Cousin Lyonya would say. And I would lamely circle the statue with a camera while Lyonya called after me, “Try it from the other side. Get the sun behind you. Don’t forget the inscription!” Nothing, I soon discovered, sucked the fun out of history like a ginormous statue of a guy pointing a gun at the sky. It was a relief when we finally crossed the Lopan River and stopped before a nondescript brick building partly obscured by a billboard for Zlatagor Vodka.

  “Here it is,” Lyonya announced. “Your old home.”

  Most people, when taken to the doorway of a typical Soviet-era apartment building, think they’ve mistakenly arrived at the service entrance. They find a series of crumbling steps, a pair of doors that form a kind of sheet-metal sandwich, and a grim facade of concrete or dirty brick punctuated by the occasional disintegrating balcony. Our apartment building was no different from the rest. The only strange thing was that throughout my life, everyone in my family had always insisted that the flat in Kharkov had been a primo piece of real estate. “Your grandparents had a splendid apartment, right in the heart of the city,” Babushka always told me. Even Mama herself, who could scarcely bear to hold the word Kharkov in her mouth, admitted as much. Of course I couldn’t see inside the place, but architecture doesn’t lie: the windows were small, the ceilings low, and the balcony held in place with what appeared to be a giant dollop of sticky-tack. It was a squat and ordinary Brezhnev-era flat.

  We stood awkwardly in the dirt—the grass having long ago been trampled away—and Cousin Lyonya began counting the windows up from the bottom. He pointed vaguely in the direction of the building’s upper right-hand corner.

  “See that window? That is where you lived.” And then, to fill in the silence a bit, he coughed and added, “I used to visit your father here.” Pause. “On many different occasions.”

  I looked up at a sea of darkened windows and pretended I could see wherever he was pointing.

  “Oh right, up there. So that was the apartment, huh?” It was easy now to imagine Mama stuck in this place, hating her in laws and being hated back, waiting for Papa to come home from guarding the zoo, staring out the window at the stinky Lopan winding its way to someplace even stinkier, and plotting our escape. I made a show of looking around, taking pictures of the only things in sight—a dumpster; a sad, pokey jungle gym; and Cousin Lyonya standing on his patch of dirt, looking for all the world like he wished he were someplace else.

  On our way back to the hotel, we decided to cut through Sad Shevchenko, passing the statue of the Ukrainian poet that Papa had so movingly described as “kind of OK” along the way. It was a Sunday afternoon and the park was full of families pushing strollers; packs of young guys sporting crew cuts, acid-washed jeans, and collared t-shirts; and dazzling young women. The women mostly walked in pairs, linked at the elbows or holding hands, their dresses glittering fiercely in the sun. I looked down at myself, feeling like I’d somehow surreptitiously slipped past the park’s face-control unit. Cousin Lyonya noticed me staring and snorted.

  “Eckh, these people. They come to the park looking for attention. They have absolutely nowhere else to go and nothing to do with themselves.”

  And I thought: Had my family never left, this would have been my Sunday afternoon. I would have woken up, slipped on something scratchy and sequin-covered, then styled my hair for two leisurely hours before hitting the park. There, my friends and I would patrol the trees like a squadron of mismatched bridesmaids, eyeing the bullet-headed men in ball-hugging jeans, hoping that one of them might impregnate us by age twenty-two …

  We stopped at a bench not far from Freedom Square where we were supposed to meet Volodya, Papa’s best friend from college, and his wife, Inna. Lyonya pulled a packet of photographs and some papers wrapped in a plastic bag from his man purse.

  “These are for your father. Some old family artifacts I think he’ll find interesting.”

  I thanked Lyonya and handed him an envelope with the money Papa had asked me to pass along. In the midst of this exchange, Volodya and Inna appeared. A round of handshakes, and a struggle to arrive at a common topic of conversation, ensued. Time, we decided, for some awkward photos together. Then Lyonya told us to come back to Kharkhov again soon, promising to cook us dinner next time. A quick hug and a kiss and he was gone—the Cousin Who No Longer Drinks Water.

  Volodya had apparently also gotten a copy of Papa’s dismal list of things to do, because as soon as the niceties were over, he turned to me and said, “Okay then, off to the zoo?”

  We set off across the square, passing beneath the lengthening shadow of Lenin before cutting through the grounds of the university where Volodya and Inna had studied together with Papa.

  “I remember once,” Volodya began, “your father and I lucked into finding some money just lying on the sidewalk. A small fortune, something like twenty dollars. So we decided to realize a long-held dream of ours …”

  Volodya laughed, a bit overcome by the memory, and I imagined a debauched binge of black-market purchases, Papa sitting, pasha-like, atop an illicit blue-jean-and-caviar mountain.

  “We set for ourselves,” Volodya continued, “the goal of visiting every shashlik stand in Kharkov!”

  To me this sounded suspiciously like a quest to visit every Dunkin’ Donuts in Worcester, but I did my best to radiate enthusiasm.

  “Ambitious!” I chirped.

  Volodya was still deep into enumerating the shashlik stands of Kharkov when we reached the iron gates
of the Kharkov State Zoo. The zoo’s paths were lined with colorful, campy signs that could have been lifted straight from the set of a John Waters movie, but did nothing to hide the state of the animals themselves, who had gone from sad to miserable in Papa’s absence. I took off down the darkening, overgrown lane alone, past some dull-eyed bears and a collapsed ostrich, stopping to take a picture of a baboon who looked up at me like he hoped I had some Lexapro.

  “I used to talk to them,” Papa had told me. “Not the lions, though. They never seemed interested. Also, all of the expensive animals were locked up in a different part of the zoo, so I didn’t talk to them either.”

  I was sorry Papa had to talk to cheap animals.

  “That’s what you did? All night?”

  “No. Just until the other guards came around to see if I had a ruble.”

  “Did you give it to them?”

  “I’d better. One of them was just a drunk, but the other was a man with a past—a former chauffeur in the KGB. He used to drive agents to make their arrests. Sometimes big shots. These kinds of visits … well, a lot of people were never heard from again. Anyway, they’d come by on their rounds and we’d pool our money, go drinking.”

  “What would you say to them?” I’d asked. “I mean the animals.”

  “I don’t know. I just … commiserated.”

  By the time Papa began working at the zoo, he’d been on the blacklist for years. The Ministry of Higher Education had long ago eliminated the graduate position he’d received in physics, a signal that he’d never be allowed to pursue his PhD. He had also quit the Komsomol, a dangerous move for anyone save those who had already given up all hope of a career in the Soviet Union. As the last light faded, I imagined my father there, a young man in a uniform with a gun, staring through the bars, seeking out dark, wet eyes for a few quiet moments of communion. Before the KGB chauffeur came to take him away.