Walking composition
“Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured, Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell— We, who have sung the praises of the lord With every fiber in us, every cell.”
—from “Bound for Hell,” Marina Tsvetaeva
I have a kid turning 15 this week, and after momentary flashback to the day he was born, the still-surreal experience of being so far gone in liver failure I didn’t even know I was dying—my doctor impressed that upon me later, perhaps recognizing that attempting to push through increasingly debilitating pain for nearly a week didn’t bode well for my future—my mind shifted to when I myself turned 15, a birthday I literally cannot remember even a moment of, though I know we were in another land, the Soviet Union, the place my father had lived in exile from for 17 years.
People often ask me if my father has dual citizenship. It’s a question that always startles me; it seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the kind of absolute rift the Cold War was, even for those of us who lived through it. He and my American mother lived in Leningrad until my older sister was two years old, when the reality of raising a child in the Soviet Union came home and they decided to leave. It took them months of advocacy and applications, and lobbying of my mother’s home senator back in the U.S., for my father to be granted an exit visa.
Their efforts eventually succeeded. My father was told he could go, and was given three days to leave his country. Three days to say goodbye to his family, his friends, his language, and all the life he had ever known. He was told that if he returned, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave again. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and went into exile, learning later that his own father had been stripped of his security clearance and nearly been kicked out of the Communist Party in retaliation for his son’s defection. My father didn’t return until 1990, after his own father had passed away.
Bonus photo: My father and his friends on the banks of the Neva. Leningrad, Soviet Union, early 1950s. My father is the one on the right, “the good-looking one dressed in the hand-me-down old coat.”
I’ve been thinking of all of this a lot recently. Of what exile means, and loss and love. Of things left unsaid that we will always regret, and those things we regret speaking aloud. Of actions we take, and freedoms we lose, and how difficult it can be for people to truly understand what it means to live in a state of unfreedom. To not have choices, when you’re not allowed to walk out of a speech in an exercise of protest, or not allowed to pursue certain professions because of your religion or ethnicity or gender, to not be allowed to practice your religion or be free from another’s religion, or literally are not allowed to simply stand in a public place and hold up a blank piece of white paper because such an act is seen as an anti-war protest.
I’ve been thinking, especially as I had to pull a lot of beet plants that just weren’t going to make it yesterday (the secondary planting in the foot-deep compost is still growing well—thanks for that tip, elm!), about my grandmother growing beets and potatoes as a refugee in the Ural Mountains, having left Leningrad with her two children as the German Army Nord closed in on the city for a four-year siege whose winters saw over 1000 people die every month of starvation. About how my grandfather had been sent to the front lines with one rifle for three men and no ammunition; and how later he was rescued after being bombed crossing the Дорога жизни, the frozen Road of Life over Lake Ladoga, my grandfather’s six-foot-two starved down to 108 pounds.
I’ve been thinking about how some people see slippery slopes where others see freedom of expression, and how paradigm shifts in any realm leave many, especially those with power and influence, desperate to hold on to structures and systems that have rewarded them—or at the very least made them feel safe.
And I’ve been thinking of when we landed in Moscow one bleak, cold day in March when I was 14, spilling out from the train from Helsinki into a world that should have been foreign to me but instead had an unexpected flavor of familiarity that has remained on my tongue ever since.
My father and his wife have been talking recently about red lines. What, under an authoritarian regime, you would be unwilling to do or say. What is unacceptable to your ethics, morality, and integrity. They both said that in the Soviet Union—once Stalin and Stalinism were dead, in my father’s case—they had been mostly unafraid to speak up, speak out, and speak their minds. It is different now. Now people must face the reality of prison and decide what they will refuse to sacrifice in exchange for it. It’s easy to sound noble when your actual life isn’t at stake. But it’s also important, they have said, to be sure of what lines you will not cross.
Last night I was looking through photos of the time I lived in the Soviet Union, trying to find something useful to share, but there’s very little. Pictures of open markets, vegetable stalls, a day my sister and I spent at a warm lake the color of urine with the friends we’d made next door. How they grilled shashlik, shish kabobs, over an open flame and sprayed the meat with kvass and some months later, when my sister and I were back in the U.S. recalibrating against culture shock, we heard that the son, who was in the Army along with all his friends, was manning communications at the barricades as the Soviet Union fell.
The photos look blank, empty. A reminder that for events to have meaning they must to be crafted into narrative, no matter how small, how individual. My 15th birthday, as far as I can tell, isn’t among them. But there are the markets and our friends and countless memories of wandering the city with my little sister; and my grandmother whom I finally met less than two years before she died. Taken together they build a story in my life that has shaped nearly everything else.
And at the same time they are a point in an arc that is not yet finished. Exile has come around for my family again, and we talk of authoritarians and red lines and loss and regret. Of things that should not have been spoken, and all the things we wish we had said.
Extra bonus photo: Red Square, 1991, not really anything. A memory that has texture for me but over time will pass into meaninglessness for all who view it.
Apologies for no stuff to read or listen to this week! There has been a lot going on in my life, especially in my family, and I haven’t had the heart to listen to podcasts. Along with the whole run-up to school beginning and all that entails, my time has been short and I devoted a bunch of otherwise-reading time to pulling knapweed and pouring fish emulsion (for the corn and potatoes) and hauling compost around. And being weirdly giddy at the quantity of cucumbers we’re getting. I have tried five times previously in my adult life to grow cucumbers and always failed, so to see plenty enough for three families to pick as much as they want feels pretty good!
Antonia Malchik 