by Zhanna Slor
“That sounds shady,” I respond. “Were you in the KGB?”
Marik lets out a surprised chuckle. “No, no, not the KGB.”
“Were you in the mob?” I ask, knowing of course that if he was, he would never tell me. Not that I could picture him in the mob. He’s too nice. His kids are such squares they don’t drink the wine set out on our table at family functions.
Marik turns to look at me, suddenly serious. “What is this about?”
I shrug. I should probably just shut my mouth, but I’m a little drunk. It’s hard not to get drunk around my family; at nineteen, it’s hard not to get drunk, period. It just seems to be the thing everyone is always doing. “Just wondering,” I explain.
“It isn’t interesting. I didn’t have a real job, Annushka, not like I do here.” He exhales a long line of smoke, looking like an angry bull. “I had a lot of friends, though. I helped when I could.”
“Oh,” I say. I know without asking that this is as much information as I’ll get out of him on the topic, though now I am even more curious than I was when I originally asked. Like an itch that only gets itchier when you scratch it: this is the summary of my familial relationships. In general, it’s better not to scratch at all. “Did you ever work with my dad?”
Marik nods indifferently. “Sure.”
We’re both quiet again, as another boat swims by, slicing a line through the pitch-black water. Marik is almost done with his cigarette. It is possible he is rushing it so as to get away from me quicker, but maybe that’s my imagination. It has often felt to me like no one in my family really wants to talk to me. That they don’t really know how. And it’s not only the language barrier, there’s something else too. I inch closer to Marik, inhaling his smoke, which is as close as I am going to get right now to a cigarette. He mistakes my interest as disgust, and switches the hand he’s holding it with so that it is farther away from my nose.
I decide to ask him one more question. “Did he ever work with anyone named Zoya Oleskin?”
His head snaps to attention. “What?” he asks me. I repeat my question.
For a moment my uncle’s face goes blank. He’s probably thinking about all the bread lines and bribed police officers he’s left behind. The divided apartments that smelled like cats, working on the collective farms in summer, friends mysteriously disappearing. I’ve heard about these things, but it’s like listening to a tape that’s a copy of a copy of a copy; you can barely make out the words, so your imagination fills in the rest. God knows I’ve tried, anyway.
Marik clears his throat, without giving anything away. “Annushka, that was so long ago. What are you getting at?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say, searching my brain for what I can use to cover up this blunder. The only way out of this trainwreck is to turn and crash it in another direction. Good thing I have several tricks in my arsenal to vex family members. “You know what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately?”
Marik sighs. “What’s that, Pochemushka?” my uncle responds in Russian. Pochemushka is a slang, cutesy term that comes from the word pochemu: why. I probably deserve to be called one today, but it still irks me, as it is generally used in a sort of a derogatory way.
“Going back to Ukraine,” I say. It’s an easy target because it’s also true.
Marik turns to look at me, and his entire body is trembling with laughter. “Why?” he asks in Russian. “What did you forget there?”
ANNA
________________
CHAPTER TEN
Back inside my uncle’s condo, I’m gratefully packing three Tupperware containers full of leftovers (a very exciting development when you’re living mostly on instant oatmeal packets), when Marik sees me and relays to everyone what I told him on the porch. He starts laughing again. He thinks it’s the funniest thing.
My dad is quiet, and my mother is furious. “Are you crazy?” she asks me when we’re back in the car. The mix of her perfume and my grandmother’s immediately makes my stomach uneasy, on top of the fact that sitting in a car always feels to me like being trapped in a moving death cage. And did I mention the wine? There was a fifth cup consumed inside, while I was waiting for my mom to finish showing off her purple studded purse from Japan to my aunts. “Everyone is killing themselves to leave that country, and you want to go back?”
“Just to visit! I want to see what it’s like,” I say. I don’t blame Marik for saying anything, but I do regret opening my mouth. I know my parents might see my desire to return to Ukraine as a personal insult to their decision to move. But it’s really not. I get why they came; but I also don’t understand this means I can never go back. Or why I have to forever be in their debt, when it was their decision, not mine. Sometimes I wonder if all kids feel so indebted to their ancestors, or it’s only immigrants. Or if the debt is merely on a different level; for most people, it is only the act of being born and raised that they owe. With immigrants, one adds moving to a new country and having to start a person’s life all over again. And, on top of that, if you are Eastern European and Jewish, like we are, the weight of everything your grandparents survived is compounded on it too; if they hadn’t escaped the Nazis, there would be no parents, no me. Every step I take I am dragging a thousand ghosts behind me. My great-grandpa, Baba Mila’s father, was an artist too; a musician who played four or five instruments, when he wasn’t running the Jewish orphanage in town. Then the Nazis came, and there was no more music.
“Do you know what they would do to you if they found out you were American? Or if they found out you were born there and left?” Mom asks.
“They kidnap tourists all the time,” my dad adds. “For ransom money.”
“Right. I’m sure they still do that now, and it’s not all over the Internet somehow.” I lean back into the seat and close my eyes, trying to keep a wine headache at bay.
“What’s happening?” my grandpa asks, sliding into the car next to me, still smelling precisely like he did all those years he lived with us in our first tiny American apartments, like bad breath and Soviet-era industrial soap. I don’t know where he finds the stuff; I hope he never stops. Like many things from Ukraine: it’s terrible, but it’s home. “Why are you fighting?”
“It’s nothing,” my dad tells him.
“Shto?” my grandma asks.
“It’s nothing, he said,” my grandpa relays. I open my eyes again and, in the dark, see him taking her hand in his. “Vco horosho.”
“Why can’t you people speak Russian?” Babushka complains in Russian for the millionth time, even though, as previously mentioned, she does understand English. “Would that really be so hard?”
“Da,” I say.
“How can it be hard to speak your native language?” Baba Mila continues. “I still remember Romanian, and I’m an old lady.”
I’ve never heard my grandmother speak a word of her native Romanian, but it doesn’t matter; her comment only serves my point on a golden platter. “See, this is what I’m talking about,” I tell my parents. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to bring it up, but now that I have, I might as well see it through. I have been fantasizing about going there ever since I saw the study abroad list at our Honors Department orientation back in September. “It’s ridiculous that I barely remember how to speak Russian. I saw Russia and Ukraine on the list of places to study abroad. It can’t be that unsafe if they let college students go there.”
“We’ll talk about you studying abroad, but you’re not going to Ukraine by yourself. Or Russia,” my dad says. Then he looks at my mom with an expression I am all too familiar with, because of my curfew-breaking, punk-loving sister: one of total vexation, like what did they do to deserve such an incendiary child. My mother has the exact same look on her face. As if I’m telling them I want to go on an unsupervised African safari, or drop out of school and join the circus, not simply travel abroad like a million other college students have done.
“Your sister speaks perfec
t Russian,” my grandma complains.
“My sister lives in Israel, where half the population is Russian,” I explain, a little bit stung. My entire life she has always compared me to older cousins who have had more successes, because duh, they are older; this is the first time she’s pitted me against Masha, though. I have always gotten better grades than her, plus I stayed in the country, so there was never any need to. “We live here. If you guys wanted us to speak Russian so much maybe someone should have taught me better.”
Of course, I can’t blame her for being annoyed. I’m annoyed at myself. This is part of why I have spent years fantasizing about a return home. So many Russian immigrants got the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan skyline lit up by an endless stream of lights, they’d gotten the Russian dolls and pilmeni of Brighton Beach, they got Holocaust survivors playing chess in the parks of Queens, but not us. The only Soviet immigrants I’d met in Milwaukee were directly related to me, and most of them lived in the same government-subsidized apartment building as my grandparents and their siblings. New York transplants got to keep their culture and inherit the new world at the same time. We, on the other hand, had to choose.
And what had my family chosen? Wisconsin.
The car comes to an abrupt stop. I turn to see we’re back at my grandparents’ apartment building.
“Oh, we’re home already,” my grandma Mila says, looking at me with a surprised laugh. She laughs at everything lately, I don’t know why. It’s like a nervous tic or something; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sincerely amused by something in my entire life. She says something to me in Yiddish, then laughs again. My heart surges with love and sadness in equal parts.
“What’s that Babushka?” I ask her, helping her out of the car. Her white, fluffy hair is somewhat matted on one side of her head, and her eyes appear tiny without her glasses on, possibly a side effect of her glaucoma. This is probably not nice to say, but I always thought she looked a little bit like a hobbit. A cute Hobbit, but still a Hobbit. She even has enough whiskers on her chin to qualify as a small beard.
“She doesn’t speak Yiddish!” my grandpa yells in Russian from the other side. “Bozhe moy!”
“It’s okay, Dedushka, you don’t need to yell,” I tell him as I help them to the door. I find the two of them so adorable when I see how much they still adore each other, especially when I am tipsy. They hold hands all the way through the vestibule and across the doorway and into the elevator, where they disappear from view. Part of me wishes to follow them, to bask once more in their uncomplicated affection instead of returning to the car. But it’s late, and they need to go to bed—so do I.
“Anyway, Anastasia. I’m not trying to be mean. I’ve looked into going back to visit Chernovtsy a few times,” my dad says, immediately jumping back into our conversation after I’ve finished helping my grandparents inside. He starts driving towards my house, which makes me relax a little. “They don’t let you rent cars without drivers, and they charge a crazy amount of money. You can fly into Poland and rent a car there to drive to Ukraine, but that’s also expensive. The visas are complicated to get. It’s a mess,” he says. “You’re better off going to Paris or Berlin. Even Poland or Moldova are easier. Anywhere but Ukraine.”
“But I don’t want to go to Poland or Moldova or Paris,” I explain.
“Or Israel,” my mom interjects. “Birthright is free, and it’s two weeks long! And you can see your sister.”
“Isn’t it basically a dating service?” I ask my mom. “I heard it’s really for Jewish parents to have their kids meet other Jewish kids without actually setting them up. No thanks.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she tells me. “You’re too young for that anyway.”
“And I also heard they brainwash everyone into becoming Zionists.”
My mother gasps at this. “Where are you hearing things like that? In school?”
I shrug. “No, just…friends.”
“It sounds like you’re friends with anti-Semites! That’s what anti-Semites would say,” my mother exclaims, so aghast she’s reverted to her native tongue without realizing. Which I find a bit dramatic, if you ask me. I don’t really spend much time considering Israel or anti-Semitism, though, at least not in the present tense. It’s not like anyone has ever criticized my cultural origins to my face or anything. “Pavel, did you hear this?” she asks him, but my dad stays weirdly silent. So she turns back to me, her naturally pale face even paler. “They made this trip so kids like you can understand.”
“Understand what?” I say. “Religion? Religion is silly. No guy is sitting up in the clouds watching all of us and judging us. The Bible is a bunch of stories with a lot of plot holes.”
“Huh. So you know better than thousands of people who came before you, that’s what you’re saying?” my dad asks, chiming in.
“No...” Boy do I wish I had a rewind button. I would go back to that balcony and never open my mouth. Maybe I would go back to my apartment and never leave in the first place. I can’t help but wonder why they are speaking Russian again if they hate it there so much. How can you hate a thing and be mad at someone for wanting it, but also use it constantly? It’s so…hypocritical.
“Jewish people here for thousands of years,” my dad says, returning to his choppy English. “Other cultures—the Romans, the Babylonians—they larger and more successful, they vanished,” he says. “Why you think Jews still around? It’s not easy...2,000 years of exile. The Spanish Inquisition, pogroms, Holocaust. Being kicked of every place in the world.”
“In the years after the Berlin Wall fell, eighty percent of the Jewish community left Ukraine,” my mom chimes in, also in English; hers is ten times better than my dad’s because she worked so long in customer service. “They lost a million in the Holocaust, then another half million because of Gorbachev. At last count, it was something like 80,000 Jews left. In less than a hundred years, Jews were forced out of Ukraine almost entirely, either by gas chamber or anti-Semitic policies.”
“And we still here,” my dad continues. “Just think about. Without stories, we have nothing. We a chapter in history book. You don’t think you have something to learn from that?”
“Sure. People can believe in very crazy ideas no matter what the century.”
“Judaism not just an idea. It self-corrects. Rabbis adapt rules,” my dad continues. “That’s what makes it great.”
“If it’s so great why have I never seen you go to a synagogue?” I ask, rolling my eyes. I stretch my legs out over the now-vacant backseat, where it still somehow smells like my grandpa.
“We almost moved to Israel, you know,” my mom says. She turns around to face me again, but I keep my glance on the road, which is getting closer and closer to my house. We pass a brick apartment building, followed by an endless array of vast duplexes with matching balconies.
“We were a week away from moving when we got our visas from America. Everything was packed and ready to go,” my mom is saying now.
“I know.”
“If you really knew—if you understood why—you wouldn’t want to go back to Ukraine. Ever.”
Before you go thinking I’m a total ignoramus, let’s get one thing clear: I understand that the USSR was no picnic. But it was not all prison either. There were upsides, too: camaraderie among the oppressed, tight-knit family units, off-the-grid survival skills. The fact that you knew where you were, where you belonged. I’ve never had that. In emigrating from the Soviet Union, whatever we all gained in safety, we lost in an assortment of smaller, equally important things. Cultural heritage, community, a high-stakes life.
And then there’s this: struggle isn’t all bad. Struggle makes your lungs remember air, makes your eyes remember there are stars.
What makes us remember anything now?
“It’s been sixteen years. It’s not the same anymore. We went to St. Petersburg on that cruise. And Estonia,” I try. “And it was fine!”
&nb
sp; “That’s different,” my mom says. “It was only for a day, and we were there.”
“I don’t understand why you would even want to go to Russia again. You were miserable on that cruise,” my dad says.
“I was miserable because I was fourteen, not because we were in Russia.”
“It’s not how you imagine it,” my dad adds. “I promise. Everyone who could leave it left. You think that many people leave a place because it’s so wonderful?”
“I know it’s not wonderful,” I say. “Cuba isn’t exactly heaven, and people still go there.”
“Bozhe moy,” my mom says, placing two fingers on her temple. And if I’m not mistaken, she looks a little teary-eyed. This makes me feel bad—my mom is not a crier—but it doesn’t make me stop. It’s too late now to stop.
“Cuba?” my dad asks, his voice now an octave higher. “What are they teaching you at that school…”
With a dramatic sigh, my dad turns the car left with one hand, and allows the other to clasp my mom’s, as if to remind me they’re a team, and I’m the interloper. For a moment, I feel some empathy for Masha, who had to bear the brunt of their disagreements growing up. The three of them were always fighting. They fought so much that by the time I became a teenager, I decided that I would keep my opinions to myself, even if it meant making a few sacrifices. I didn’t think I could take it. If this car ride is any indication, I was absolutely right.
“Anastasia,” my mom says. “They didn’t want us there, don’t you understand?”
“I don’t really need your permission. I’m nineteen. If I want to go, I can go.”
“Maybe. But you do need our money,” she says. “Or have you found a way to fly to Eastern Europe on your own?”
She has me there. It’s the only reason I even bother arguing with them about going or not. I spent all my savings from summer jobs on coffee and cigarettes, and I’m still not done with a four-foot painting commission of Le Père Jacques’s “The Woodgatherer” I was slowly working on for my former high school guidance counselor last year and no longer even bother trying to finish. There is also, of course, the daily distraction of drugs and parties and schoolwork. How I get anything done at all is nothing short of remarkable.