The Prodigal Sons of Russia

Right in front of the staircase leading to the college library doors, a huge vertical bronze wrist leaned slightly backward, its fingers half-opening, half-closed, its palm pierced through with a massive bronze nail.

“Here’s the Hand of Christ,” I told Victor. I searched his face, wondering what he was thinking about our Catholic college replete with pierced hands on library steps, Jesuit priests in robes, and wooden crosses hanging in every classroom, since he’d been raised in the atheistic Soviet Union. When he arrived in the US in the early 1990s, a lanky red-haired freshman at my college, I was already a senior, but Russians in America were as rare as Amur leopards, with a similar air of danger.

“Ouch,” he said. He’d already begun to pick up on the lingo. I was taken with his military bearing—as if he’d come from Russia right out of junior boot camp—and his slow monotone baritone, tinged equally with seriousness and wry humor.

“Maybe they placed it there,” I said, “so you have to think about suffering before you enter the library. As if suffering and wisdom were part of the same deal.”

“I know suffering,” he said, then went silent as we climbed the steps. I wanted to know more but didn’t press him further. He’d just arrived and hadn’t entirely figured out our American ways yet: the difference between deodorant and antiperspirant, what fabric softener was for, or how to order takeout.

In the library we passed a reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. Within the darkness of a Rembrandt, the titular son—his head shaved like a convict, his clothes in rags—kneels to embrace his father, his head turned and resting on his father’s stomach. The father, in his royal red cape, leans over his broken son, his hands on his son’s upper back, his mouth pursed as if he is cooing.

“Do you know the parable of the Prodigal Son?” I said.

He shook his head.

“Well, the short version is that a son decides to ask for his inheritance, leaves home, and blows it on parties, until not a penny is left. He gets so down on his luck that he ends up sleeping with pigs. Finally, ashamed, with nowhere else to go, he decides to return home. But much to his surprise, his father runs out to greet him, and they have a feast in his honor.”

“Strange,” he said, his stoic face unchanging.

“Seems like a metaphor for college, doesn’t it?” I said, trying to make a joke.

He shook his head, not understanding. He’d come to college for entirely different reasons.

That spring, when I learned I’d be going to Russia on a fellowship to study Russian poetry, I rushed to tell Victor the news.

“You can stay with my family,” Victor said, shaking my hand hard, as usual. “After all, my room is empty.”

I couldn’t believe I was going. Russia! A place so unimaginably distant, I thought of it as a country behind a mirror where everything was reversed, where poems were powerful and poets feared by murderers. Not like my country, where poets were as anachronistic as silent-movie stars, locked in exaggerated, wide-eyed overemoting. I didn’t know a single person in that country behind the mirror, and the thought of having a place to stay was such a relief that I didn’t let go of Victor’s hand right away. Neither did he. We just kept shaking on it, this deal we’d made.

For three months during the fall of 1992, I lived in Victor’s room—one of two tiny bedrooms in the Maslov family’s modest four-room apartment in the outskirts of Moscow. Though I could never replace him, I must have made his family feel he was close by. As if I were a door that, opened at just the right angle, would lead magically back to him. Perhaps that’s why Valera and Svetlana, his parents, greeted me at the airport outside customs not as a stranger, but as a son, raising their arms to me.

Victor had been gone for just over a year, so it still seemed possible that he might come back, might just suddenly appear at the front door, in capitalist rags, finally ready to return to his mother and motherland. He’d grown up during the dreg-end of the Soviet Union and came to consciousness during glasnost, when the oppression of Lenin and Stalin could be read in all its excruciating detail. One night, over tea and store-bought cake, I asked Svetlana, who’d almost instantly turned from host to mother, what she’d read when glasnost first took hold.

“Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. My hair stood up,” Svetlana said, shaking her head. I’d heard that Solzhenitsyn’s writings had torn the blinders from people’s eyes as they learned the extent of the horrors of the prison-camp system. Ten to thirty million died in the gulag just during Stalin’s rule. Stalin had been denounced officially in 1956, but The Gulag Archipelago implicated everyone. There is the story of a political rally at which the audience stood and clapped in tribute to Stalin, but everyone was afraid to be the first to stop clapping, because it might be seen as disloyal. They clapped for five minutes. People looked around, but no one stopped. Then ten minutes. The applause continued. In Solzhenitsyn’s words, “Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!” That man, Solzhenitsyn reports, was arrested that night and charged with a fabricated crime. He would spend ten years in the gulag.

“When Russians read it,” Svetlana said, “their ideals crashed to the ground. The older generation didn’t even want to see it. They just didn’t want to know. It was too much.”

She sighed, her face suddenly flooded with emotion, as she rubbed her palms together.

“When Victor read it . . . that was the end. Solzhenitsyn became his favorite writer, and he began to write USSR in small letters. That’s when he decided to leave Russia.”

I didn’t know what to say. I took a bite of the cake. It looked beautiful—white frosting—but tasted like sugary cardboard.

The absence of Victor may have pronounced itself every day in my presence, but that only fueled Svetlana’s desire to show me what her oldest son was missing about this great and troubled country.

“Come,” she said, gesturing with her hand, after she’d gotten the tickets, and bustled, head down, into the doors of the Russian Federal Space Agency building. Kaliningrad, their suburb, was the site of the once-famed Soviet space program and had been a closed city until the year before I’d arrived. Now they were letting an American waltz in.

“This is the soup,” the guide said. Down below our balcony was Mission Control: just like in old space movies, it was a series of individual control screens, like a computer lab, and a huge map on the wall that everyone faced.

“The soup?” I whispered to Svetlana. It seemed a funny way to describe the place.

“TsUP. It means Center for the Direction of Flights,” she said, huffing a little. It wasn’t a funny acronym. Nothing was funny about this to Svetlana. The Russian space program was a point of great national pride, cosmonauts had lost their lives trying to explore the universe, and I was acting like a child.

I was a child here, not only because I didn’t know the language well enough to negotiate the complex cultural interactions required in a just-reopened Russia, a Russia utterly unused to foreigners, but also because that’s the way that Svetlana preferred me. Svetlana was losing everything—an empire, a country, a way of life, her son—and so quickly. Perhaps having me need her would slow that down.

I too felt as if everything suddenly was lost. For one, my ability to understand and read words. Despite four years of Russian language classes, I could stumble through the title of my project—“Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change”—but still felt tongue-tied in day-to-day speech. I was in awe of the perfect conjugations and declensions of Alyosha, Victor’s ten-year-old brother, whose English was already better than my Russian. I was in awe of the sturdy stoicism of Valera, Victor’s father, a small man with big strong hands and childlike impish eyes, who didn’t shy away from being my surrogate Russian father, reading me Tolstoy’s children’s stories. It was equally endearing and aggravating to be locked out of a language and country, to be reduced to clumsy monosyllables as I tried to describe how this wondrous country made me feel.

Like someone who’s swigged hard liquor for the first time, I staggered about, unable to find my footing. And when the wonder of Russia wore off, as it did after the nimbus of those first weeks evaporated, it was replaced by a weariness, a sense that I would not be able to keep my head above the waves of each day. Going about my daily business in Russia, I was always careening, twisting my ankles in rutted roads, slipping on ubiquitous invisible ice, tripping over drunks in dark doorways. Even sitting in the bedroom, not moving, I was falling. A phone call home would often take an hour simply to go through, if it did at all. Behind the fallen Iron Curtain, Soviet-era technology was suddenly overwhelmed. When the connection did work, a time delay and echo made conversations bounce awkwardly, like playing tennis on gravel. First I was homesick, and then the magic of living in Russia—in Russia!— changed into a dark spell I couldn’t shake.

One night, lying in Victor’s bed, I could not find my way into sleep. Earlier that evening, the Maslovs and I had hiked to the house of a friend who had a VCR, so we could watch the video Victor had sent from college. It had been like seeing the first broadcast from the moon. Seen through that Soviet screen, the lush green grass and the tidy orderliness of the campus almost hurt my eyes. There he was, the actual son, prodigal but not asking for forgiveness, showing us (his family) his messy dorm room, his unmade bed, and the pinup above his pillow—each thing more scandalous than the last.

In the onyx dark, I sat up suddenly, as if shaken awake. Through the silvery branches of nearby trees, I could see a handful of lights tracing windows on the apartments across the yard, just past the rusted playground between buildings. And beyond that, a black sky aching toward blue.

I thought of Victor halfway around the world, on our sun-drenched picture-postcard college on the hill. Perhaps right then he was at track- and-field practice, raising the great pole in his hand and readying his approach to the bar, a dead ringer for the great Soviet/Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergey Bubka. He was counting his every step, speeding up as he approached, and at the last moment, when it seemed too late, stabbing the huge pole down, and reaching as the bent pole returned to straight, throwing himself feet first over the delicately balanced bar.

I thought of my family, my parents and sister and brother going about their day. My psychologist father sitting in his office listening to patient after patient talking around and through their pain, my mother sitting at hospital bedsides offering counsel or prayers, my sister studying politics and Arabic in college, my brother goofing with friends in middle school. I thought of my college friends now spread across America, beginning their adult lives, working in unfamiliar places. I thought of Amy, the woman I’d come to love beyond all reason, walking in the endless hills at Pine Ridge Reservation after a long day teaching, trying to find some peace, hoping it would find her by twilight. Did everyone feel this way, reaching inside to reach outward, to find something to hold onto, needing this bracing aloneness?

I lay down again, unable to sleep, waiting for the stubborn light to come.

At home, I had gotten along with my parents, almost too well. I was the dutiful eldest son who followed my parents’ rules to the letter, coming home before midnight even on weekends. When my father’s temper would flare at the dinner table, for a hundred sundry reasons, I’d try to mollify him with humor or good deeds, executing my role as peace- maker to perfection. My mother leaned on me as well, since I provided a steadiness that my father sometimes lacked. Even in college, I found myself summoned into the role of emotional anchor, a momma’s boy and daddy’s oldest son all wrapped into one.

Now, we tried to call every week. I’d steel myself for the close listening that my parents would do, as they strained to hear any emotional turbulence beneath the surface of my voice.

“You sound TIRED!” my mom said. “Is everything okay?”

I wasn’t sleeping very well. I was worried about next year, what I’d be doing after college. We shared our struggles—mine with uncertainty, hers with her mother, who was a sweet but anxious woman whose self-preoccupation occasionally resembled the inverse of the Buddha’s, increasing the suffering of everyone around her, particularly her daughter. Once, when my mother was a teenager awaiting her date, my grandmother answered the doorbell in her negligee, exposing her generous breasts and flirting with the boy at the door. My mother was horrified and ashamed.

“I love talking to you, Phil,” my mom said after I encouraged her to not let her mother overcome her good intentions. “You make me feel so calm.”

Then my father got on the phone.

“Why haven’t you called? I’ve been MISSING you!”

It was only after years of being flooded with guilt that I’d come up with a response.

“Dad, the phone connection goes both ways,” I said.

After an extended conversation, in which I risked having my soul pried open as my father psychologized me, he said, “You make me feel so calm. I LOVE talking with you. Why don’t you call more often?”

I missed my parents in an entirely new way, missed my safe and known role as the golden child, even though I craved the real independence that living in Russia required. I felt as if I were suffocating inside myself, like a doll inside a doll, and I needed to be broken open.

I needed to breathe. I wanted to be closer to Moscow, closer to the poets, closer to the Central Telegraph, where for the first months I picked up faxes from family that were like oxygen tanks to a scuba diver, since letters took weeks to arrive, and email and Skype were still science fiction. Closer to Dima Psurtsev, my poetry teacher, in whose apartment we’d work on translations of contemporary poets. Closer to the expat community, who could understand what was happening to me. Closer to daily fresh fruit. Closer to the just-opened Pizza Hut. I had come to Russia, it occurs to me now, to end my childhood, to escape from being a child.

And here I was, someone’s replacement child.

I was stifled not only by their treating me like a child, but also by salted fish and beets and kasha for breakfast, by ice-cold showers, folk remedies, and endless directives about how to live. Maslov came from the Russian word that means butter; somewhere in the deep past, an ancestor may have been a dairyman. True to their roots, they plied me endlessly with kefir, cottage cheese, sour cream, and all manner of acrid cow products. In short, Valera and Svetlana—whose names mean valiant and shining light—were good post-Soviet hosts who fed me and protected me like their own. Victor’s little brother, Alyosha, who had ably chaperoned me around his town for months, suddenly announced that we were “practically family.” My heart seized to hear it. It was lovely and terrible all at once. I was about to betray them.

But I hadn’t traveled to Russia to go on theater dates with my friend’s mother, though I appreciated her whirlwinding me through the sites and shows of the capital. What began as endearing had become tiresome. I’d come here to learn poetry, to witness what was happening in this strange land, to shed the falseness of American life, and probably secretly to have my heart broken. So when I slowly got my footing, I took to heading into Moscow alone, exploring not only the museums but the metros and the streets, the shops and the parks, the eyes and speech of the natives of this place—getting myself lost or bruised along the way.

Once, after returning to Kaliningrad and the apartment alone after dark, taking my shoes off in the hall, I could hear Svetlana’s sharp questioning tone—Feel?—and her nervous steps toward the door. She was about to deliver a scowl and a scolding since “the hooligans” might have been out.

Even before the words left her lips, I lost it, blurting out in anger, in botched Russian: “It’s my life!”

Like I was an American teenager having a complete meltdown. If I could have slammed the door and flopped on the bed, blasting some hard rock on my boom box, the clichéd American scene would have been complete. But in that tiny hallway, she was blocking the way.

Her moon face softened—she knew she’d pushed too hard—as she tried to explain again that they worried about me, that I was their responsibility, if anything happened, etc.

I understood. It was too much to explain that I wasn’t here to become someone’s child again. I didn’t need to tell her what she already could sense. What she’d lived through once before.

The next day, my teacher Dima—who’d taken to wryly referring to Svetlana as “my protector”—informed me that the formulation of my blurted-out words wasn’t terribly Russian. That I could have said “mne zhit”—which means something like It’s up to me to live. Perhaps none of us owns our lives outright, but they are for us to live nonetheless. I’d spent most of my life thinking that everything was under my control, for good or ill, and everything good or bad that came to me was due to my own efforts or lack thereof. It was only in Russia that I understood, finally, how little is under our control, and how much we are borne by the workings of internal and external operations, machinations that the Russians prefer to call fate.

Finally, some weeks later, when I had furtively lined up another apartment in Moscow, I faced Svetlana in the kitchen, as she was doting on me with tea and chocolates.

“Svetlana,” I said, “I need to move.”

Svetlana’s wide face froze, as if she were looking at a dead person. I’d been paying them well for their apartment and knew that the extra income meant a great deal to them, but it wasn’t really just about the money, as dear as American dollars were to them in a time of hyperinflation. It was like I was taking away her son again.

“Where will you go?” she asked.

I explained the arrangement I’d made with Olga Leontevna, to live in her apartment in the city.

“What will you eat?” she said.

“I’ll find something,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

She thought about it for a minute, turning away. “I don’t think you’re ready,” she said. “But if you must move, be careful, especially at night.”

“Hooligans?” I said.

“Hooligans,” she said.

The day after I moved into Moscow, the Maslovs called on the phone three times. Once, Alyosha, depressed, calling for no reason but that he missed me. Once, Svetlana, talking quickly about some problem faxing Victor or some problem Victor was having that she learned by fax; either way, she was begging me to do something about it. Once, Svetlana asking if someone was feeding me. I may have been dead, but she needed to be certain that I would not go hungry.

I see them all now as I write in the predawn dark, thousands and thousands and thousands of hours ahead. She is tall and strong in a demure floral-print dress, weighed down with two massive bags, having walked home from the local grocery store, her shoulders and long arms—even her forearms—thick with the muscles of survival. The way she dips her elbow in and touches her short brown hair like a little girl, smiling shyly at some compliment, her cheeks reddening. I see Valera, in the fun house of memory seeming just half Svetlana’s size, his impish grin and wide-cheeked Ukrainian face, expounding on the virtues of an ice-cold shower, trying to toughen me up to Russian life and weather. And now Alyosha swims into view, not even a teen, his strawberry-blond hair and freckles and surprisingly capable English, his glee at mischief and allergy to homework.

Every time I go back to a memory, it changes a little. It will not stay still. The other day, when I moved the multiple mirrors in my bathroom to just the right angles, I could see perfectly, for the first time, the back of my head. It once featured a whirlpool of black, but now a round patch of skin is visible. I’m hemorrhaging hair. Nothing in us, and nothing of us, stands still. Twenty-five years later, I’m afraid of losing that whole year, and with it, Russia itself, so I keep combing through what it was that drew me there, what I gleaned then, and what is left to salvage.

Even Kaliningrad—named after the Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet functionary Mikhail Kalinin—disappeared. Three years after I left, in 1996, after sixty years as Kaliningrad, the city was renamed Korolyov, in honor of the father of the Russian space program.

At the time, I prayed to make the right decision in moving. I prayed that I would not hurt these dear and aggravating people who’d opened their home and hearts to me in ways I only dimly understood, too naïve to know the grief of losing a son to college, to another country from which he would never return. What I couldn’t see then is that they were just like my parents. My letter to my parents explaining the need to leave the Maslovs could have been a way of explaining why I needed to leave my own home as well. That I loved them and would never forget how they loved and created a space for me, but that I would never really be coming back.

Not only did Victor never return to Russia, but Alyosha soon followed, disappearing behind the mirror. Neither could convince his parents to join them. On the other side of this small globe, in some mirror-world where day is night and night is day, the Maslovs lie sleeping in their pullout bed, in the place they’ve never left, dreaming of their prodigal sons.

Read more from Issue 18.2.