MARINA
But we told people. You told Kolya almost right away.
ELENA
By that time, Kolya already had Olya. Even before anything had happened with Marina, he had come to me and said, “Elena, I have fallen in love with a girl on Twitter.” And I was like, “On Twitter?” And he said, “We started corresponding on Twitter and I fell in love.” And I was like, “Kolya, I understand how you can fall in love. But on Twitter?” And he said, “You just don’t understand.” So I said, “Well, alright, you want to love somebody on Twitter, that’s fine, go ahead.” By that time we were really living together as friends, and I thought, if he’s fallen in love, why should I stand in his way? So we decided we’d keep living together for a while, at least until our daughter started school, and then we’d see how it goes.
Plus, his girlfriend was living in a different city and it wasn’t clear when she’d come here or if she’d come at all. And then I got involved with Marina and I thought, what a good thing that he’s got someone else. For the May Day holidays, he finally went to meet her, and it was hilarious: Marina was ironing his shirts and we were sending him off to see his girlfriend.
MARINA
I took half the clothes out of his suitcase and had to explain to him that these were not the sorts of things he should wear on a date.
ELENA
Yes, she tells him, “This underwear is faded. You don’t want to be wearing this when she undresses you.” And Kolya was like, “Do you think we’ll be taking our clothes off?” And I was like, “I’m sure of it.”
MARINA
We got involved in March. In June, the two of us went to Bulgaria with the kids for a month.
ELENA
Kolya came for a week. He’d take the kids out for walks and then he’d come back and knock for a really long time to make sure he didn’t walk in on anything.
MARINA
After we came back from Bulgaria, I told Vitya. Elena and Kolya both tried to talk me out of it. They were saying, “Don’t do it, he’ll tell your mother!” But I told him, and he said, “I had a suspicion. All right, if you two are not planning on getting divorces, I guess this is all right. Have a good time.”
ELENA
Both our husbands had the same reaction: they suggested giving us sex toys as gifts. And I was like, “What do we need those for?” And they were like, “But how do you do it?” Kolya was always nagging me to tell him the details, because he thought it was very exciting that his wife had a girlfriend. But I told him we hadn’t had sex yet and were still in the hand-holding stage.
MARINA
Vitya would even walk me over to Elena’s house in the evenings.
ELENA
Vitya is very immature. And he quickly found that this is a very convenient set-up for him, because he didn’t have to take care of Marina emotionally anymore: it was my job now. He’d call me up and say, “Marina is not feeling well. Come over.”
MARINA
I started spending the night at Elena’s once in a while. My parents noticed and weren’t happy about it. They told my son that I shouldn’t be sleeping over at a friend’s house.
ELENA
We were trying to take it slow. I mean, we had children and all that and we didn’t plan to live together. Or maybe we did, but abstractly, in some distant future.
MARINA
But it was hard.
ELENA
It ended up that we were both living in two places at the same time.
MARINA
We would do the food shopping for one home, cook together, then go together to the other home and do the same thing. Same thing with the cleaning.
ELENA
And Vitya started pissing me off, just the fact that he was around Marina all the time. Anyway, it got complicated. And then, in March, their lease was up and the landlord wanted them out. And I said, “Why don’t you move in with me? We’ll see if we can make a go of it together. If it doesn’t work out, so be it.” And she decided to tell her parents.
I was saying, “Why do you need to do it?” And she kept saying, “I want to be honest.”
MARINA
I thought my mother would take it worse, so I asked my father out to a café and told him, “I’m involved with Elena.” And he was like, “I had a feeling. But you should make a sacrifice for your child. If you don’t like men, you don’t have to sleep with them, but you still should live with your husband for the sake of the child.” Then the mayhem began. First my parents tried to send me to Cyprus to live for a year so I could get my head together. I said I wasn’t going anywhere. Then they said they’d take my son away. They said all anyone had to say was that we were lesbians and we’d lose our children. And Vitya and Kolya should of course take the children away from us.
And then they kidnapped my son for the first time. He was spending the night at their house and they were supposed to take him to preschool in the morning. But they didn’t, saying something about one of them not feeling well. I called in the evening to arrange a time to come pick him up, and my mother said, “We’re going to the dacha and you are not getting him back.” I rushed over, but by the time I got to their apartment, there was nobody home. I went to the police, and the police were like, “But they are his grandparents, what are you so upset about?” But I insisted and they called my parents. My mother immediately explained to them that I am a lesbian and they are saving the child. So the police were like, “Young woman, you know perfectly well why they took your son.”
I told my parents that if my son wasn’t home by Sunday, I would find a way to get the police after them. They did return him on Sunday, but they brought him to Vitya’s house, not to us. And then Vitya brought him here. I didn’t speak to my parents for a month after that. Then they called and suggested a reconciliation. I started visiting them once a week, with my son: we’d come over, sit there, and leave. Then they demanded I see a psychologist. They found one who told me that Elena and I had been unlucky in men and that was the source of our problems. I left. I mean, I’d only gone in the hopes of fixing the relationship with my parents.
ELENA
Marina is always feeling bad for everybody. She felt bad for her parents—because, you know, they’re her parents. And she felt bad for Vitya, because he is Vitya and none of this was his fault. And she was really hoping to fix the relationship and to be understood, at least a little bit.
MARINA
Also, my son loves them. And I thought I should try, because they are family. Then I found a counselor myself and we all started going together. That lasted a month or a month and a half.
ELENA
She would come home from these counseling sessions a total wreck. Because her family would say all these horrible things about how she’s lost and I’m using her and how tragic this is and how she is killing her mother and I am using her.
MARINA
The sessions ended with the counselor saying, “Just leave your daughter alone. Your problem is not that she is a lesbian; your problem is that you’ve realized you can no longer control her and you are trying to regain control. You should not be doing this.” I guess that’s when my parents decided that this was war.
ELENA
That was also the point when we moved out of Kolya’s apartment into a rental, which is smaller. And they were like, “The children are going to share a room! That shouldn’t be allowed—they are a boy and a girl!” And we were like, “They are six!” And they were like, “But you sleep in the same bed!” And we were like, “So?”