“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 perfect 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.”