airport

on August 23, 1996, my parents drove me to the St. Petersburg International Airport. it was then a small barrack-like building, three kilometers away from the much larger domestic terminal. my father pulled up to the curb and, once we unloaded the luggage, left the car there.
inna and johnnie and olya and misha and sveta and lionya had promised to come and see me off, but i didn't actually count on it. the international airport was poorly served by the city's public transportation system; the bus from the nearest subway station took an hour. what a long way to go, and for what? to then have to say good-bye? how sad, how pointless. i wasn't feeling well. i was still hung over from the party two days before. my face was still puffed up and itching from the mosquito bites. my period had started, and though i didn't believe in pain management, i decided to take an analgesic for the flight. i was nervous. (in therapy, lately, i've observed that i don't use the word "scared." i'm not very good at recognizing the feeling of fear until it becomes anger or sadness. i remember being anxious. i was very, very anxious)
my friends were there, at the airport. some of them had hitchhiked, caught rides, and got there before me. they teased my dad about being so cool as to drive up to the airport door exactly on time. johnnie handed me a tape with an injunction to not listen until i was actually airborne. each friend found a moment to take me aside to share their latest news. each promised to write. and then my flight was being called to registration. it was really good-bye.
though no, not really. the airport building was small and see-through. the queue zigzagged, and after each step of the registration process, i would look toward the entrance, and see everyone, my parents, my friends, still there, waving madly. that went on for what seemed hours. the zigzagging, the processing, the waving. i could not hold back the tears. by the time i got into my airplane seat, i was just bawling.
then followed another small torture. though the international departures were housed in a separate building from the domestic, the two airports shared the same landing strip. so the international flights had to taxi for about fifteen-twenty minutes to get to that strip. we rode through the fields of unmowed wild grasses edging the forest, where sparse birch trees gave way to pines and firs. i could see the tops of the pines waving in the wind. august was mushroom season, and i could practically smell the boletus and the russules growing in that off-limits forest where nobody was picking them.
i fished out my tape deck and put on my headphones. i heard johnnie's voice. instead of making me a mixtape, he'd made his own recording. this was as unexpected as it had been unprecedented. it was a mix of the songs he knew i would like and he knew i wouldn't like and the songs that he was just learning to play. front and back--ninety minutes of music. my neighbor in the airplane, whoever he or she was, must've been pretty scared at that point. i looked like a big girl. how many more tears was i capable of?
finally, the plane took off. i looked and thought i caught a glimpse of an old apartment building where we lived when I first started school. then, mercifully, we entered the cloud cover. exhausted, i fell asleep so soundly i didn't wake up until the plane touched ground in Shannon, Ireland.

the goodbyes

today is the 19th of august, and I'm becoming very conscious about my timeline. the Russian internet is filled today with the memories of the 1991 coup, when the conservative wing of the communist party tried to oust Gorbachev, and Yeltsin emerged as the defender of the liberal freedoms. on august 19, 1996, Yeltsin had just stepped in to his second term. he had won the reelection just barely (and by means that we now know were far from honest), having lost positions as a result of Chechen war and the continued economic woes. the first Chechen war was drawing to its close, but it had become clear that conflict was simmering all around Russia and the former Soviet lands. my male friends all had gotten into the universities, but nevertheless, the danger of draft weighed heavily over their decision-making. by entering universities, my female friends and i received the tacit permission to fall in love for reals and to experiment sexually though we were as tacitly aware that our years were numbered and really what we needed to think about was marriage and children. careers too, but since so few of us were going to study the subjects we felt passionately about, careers felt very secondary. love came first.
on the 19th of august 1996 i did not yet have my passport back from the American consulate, but i had a ticket to Rochester for august 23rd, and i called a party, to be held on the 21st. after graduation that june, I had seen my friends only intermittently. this would be the last good-bye. my brother was at a math camp, and my cousins weren't around either, so i didn't get to say a proper good-bye to them. i did not invite the boy i'd been dating that summer, my first boyfriend. none of my other friends knew him, and it would be awkward. i don't remember how i said good-bye to my childhood friend from dacha. i have a feeling we played the last badminton game together and shook hands. during that last year we had gone on what i think now were a couple of dates, but things had been forever awkward between us. we'd known each other too well and loved each other deeply but the relationship between families was weird and we couldn't really handle it. that's how it seems now. there were too many people involved.
i was saying goodbyes that week as though i were leaving home forever, even though my father managed to buy me a ticket with an open return date. unlike Nabokov and Brodsky, and the people of their generations, who had been forced out of Russia without possibility of return, I was free to return. thinking about this now, i see that very freedom as a heavy burden of responsibility weighing on my shoulders. unlike the generations before me, i was supposedly making a free choice, so i better make the good one, the right one, the one that would lead me to everlasting happiness. if i did leave, I was not allowed to come back until i made a success out of my life -- no regrets allowed. i have not since admitted to having any regrets in life. frank sinatra can admit to having a few, but Olga will have her way without any. sorry for this silly reference, i'm drinking wine and trying to put myself in the mind of a seventeen-year old.
in a way, in 1996 I was saying good bye to the world that ceased to exist in 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. i was saying good bye to the opportunity to build something new in its place. my friends and i had read enough realist novels to expect that we would all change and grow apart, and this was the first step toward that. though, talking about novels, I had also read more than enough socialist realist novels, and so i swore loyalty and collected everyone's mailing addresses and promised to never change and hey i did good i actually did hold back the change for a good number of years and hey i am still in touch with so many of my friends and am so much better able to express my feelings toward them due to improvements in emotional vocabulary but hey none of that changed the fact that i was leaving

stereotypes

в 1996 в Рочестере я оказалась одной из первых россиянок из пост-Советской России. были ребята иммигрировашие со своими родителями в Бруклин и несколько лет раньше, были ребята из Казахстана и Узбекистана, но вот так вот что прямо из Питера в Рочестер -- таких не было.
от меня ждали, что я буду представлять россию в буквальном смысле. например, организация международных студентов устраивала костюмированную вечеринку, где всем студентам предлагалось нарядиться в национальные костюмы. у многих студентов из индии были с собой сари, с удовольствием переодевались и студенты из японии, малайзии. а мне что делать? надевать кокошник и сарафан, что ли?? (когда-то в моём счастливом советском дествте мы с мамой сооурдили изумительный кокошник из картона и бисера, но даже вспоминать об этом было как-то неловко). я принялась объяснять всем, что на самом деле, я из еврейской семьи, и вообще в пост-советской россии национальные костюмы это отстой. пироги я тоже не пекла, а борщ хоть и приходилось готовить, но это потому, что особого выбора не было.

на вечеринку национального костюма я не пошла, хотя на красивые сари посмотреть и хотелось, но долго проблему игнорировать тоже не получалось. жизнь в россии интересовала всех поголовно, от парней в общежитии до моих профессоров и начальниц в библиотеке, куда я устроилась работать. а что в россии едят на завтрак ланч и обед? в россии правда все очень умные? ты наверное с детства танцуешь в балете и занимаешься фигурным катанием?
чтобы как можно вежливее объяснить свой отказ одевать кокошник, я быстро научилась при первой же встерче с новым человеком представляться иначе: я не из россии, а из петербурга, балет не люблю, люблю Битлз, и вообще я не русская, а из еврейской семьи, бОльшая часть которой находится в израиле. впрочем, с таким ответом тоже время от времени случались проколы. как, например, при встерче с дейвом, который вырос в еврейской семье под Филадельфии и не понаслышке знал об иудаизме. при разговоре с ним быть еврейкой по паспорту становилось тоже как-то неловко. в питере, в моём окружении, были ребята, которые ездили в сохнутские лагеря и которые занимались в синагоге. я была не из их числа.
не помню, подсказал ли мне кто-то, обсуждалось ли это, скажем, на занятиях международного бизнеса, или я со временем сама догадалась, что стереотипы трудно разрушить, отвечая в лоб на продиктованные ими вопросы. а может быть, это урок из крёстного отца, it's not personal it's just business. вопрос -- признак заинтересованности собеседника, и нечего злиться и раздражаться, когда тебе в очередной раз предлагают водку на вечерине. водку со льдом, т.к. россияне привыкли к холоду.
поиск креативных ответов на продиктованные стереотипами вопросы -- вот, на самом деле, огромный стимул к творчеству

air-conditioning

In August 1996, Rochester was oppressively hot and humid. The heat caused me considerable discomfort the following summer, and during all three summers that I spent in Rochester without air-conditioning, but when I think of my first summer days in Rochester, it's not the heat that comes to mind, but the cold.
I'd never been exposed to air-conditioning before. I'd hardly been aware of the existence of air-conditioning as a practical technology outside of science fiction novels. Not even my father's car had an air-conditioner. For one week a year when the weather in St. Petersburg climbed into the 70s, people took cold showers and made cold soup for dinner.
Every indoor space in Rochester seemed air-conditioned on high (except, later, it turned out, student housing). My host parents took me to Wegmans, K-Mart, Sam's Club, and all I remember is being extremely uncomfortable and wanting to get back outside into the heat. From the store to the back seat of the car, where I was also too cold. I soon learned that I wasn't supposed to open the car window when the air-conditioning was on. They explained that the air-conditioning had levels, and tried to adjust the blowers just right, but I wasn't used to having a blower directed at my face, and so couldn't tell whether the temperature was too hot or too cold. It was just wrong.
When the time came to go to orientation at RIT, I put on my stockings and heels, suffering through the day of being alternatively too cold inside and too hot outside. How did people manage stockings in these conditions? It turned out, they didn't. Most of the students around me, men and women, wore jeans with something that looked like oversized pajamas on top. T-shirt was a new word in my vocabulary. Another new word: sneakers. These were what I considered gym shoes. Few women wore make-up, unless they put it on so carefully that I didn't even notice.
I recalled having a conversation with a friend, back in St. Petersburg, about her aging grandmother, who, though she hadn't left the house in some years, began each day by putting on her powder and mascara and lipstick. "She just doesn't feel like a human being without it," my friend said. We both agreed: her grandmother was a strong old lady who didn't allow old age to get to her. Wearing make-up to one's dying day was the example of womanhood to aspire to.
The college students around me decidedly treated the college as though it was some kind of country village. The whole atmosphere was very country side. People rode their bikes, lay down to rest on the lawn, and, to my amazement, some even took off their shoes in the classrooms. Campus buildings were surrounded by nature: woods on one side of the property, swamp on the other. I saw a squirrel! There was talk of deer! Having spent every summer of my life in the countryside fifty kilometers north of Petersburg, I'd never seen a deer in my life.
My host family had a decently sized back yard, and it was a sign of true luxury that all of the plants they grew were purely decorative. They could've grown tomatoes and cherries and plums, but they didn't need to.
When the sun neared the horizon, the smell of freshly mowed grass stood in the air. The full sky was brightly lit with stars. I heard chirping of a myriad of voices, which from novels about Ukraine, I decided must've been the cicadas. It was a shame to have to sleep behind the closed window, but because of the air-conditioning, the windows were supposed to stay closed. Intimidated by the machinery of the blinds, I kept them shut too.

огни большого города

Отправив меня в Штаты в 1996ом году, моя семья начала заботиться о том, чтобы держать меня в курсе петербургской жизни. Родные слали мне вырезки из местных газет. Вырезок у меня накопилось много, одна чудеснее другой. Вот, например, статья (от, согласно пометке на газете, 24/10/96) о создании памятника фонарям разных эпох у Смольного. Что ж, идея хорошая.