Hugs, more hugs: we are on the platform now. I can see it there straight away, even before she says anything, even before she smiles – Katya’s luminosity, quiet and peerless. Nothing has changed. It is all still there. What an antidote it is to the closet cynicism masquerading as common sense, that tells us not to get carried away with our leaps of feelings and faith, to do risk-assessment before getting on planes and trains to see people who may turn out to be figments of our imagination. I turn to Katya’s mum, Nina, who is visibly moved by the great cocktail of tears and intertwined arms, and hug her. We are two strangers hugging, two adult women who have no idea what the other one is really like and whether we will like each other at all. But there is no sizing up, no checking each other out, only an unspoken exchange of gratitude. In the space of that hug, Nina thanks me for stepping in when she was too far away to take care of her daughter and I, just as silently, thank her for the way she brought Katya up.
We drive through town to Katya’s flat, and it is on Katya’s soft bed, within minutes of our arrival, that Billie has her sweetest sleep yet. Throughout our stay Nina serves us the kind of food that requires the very best ingredients, hours of preparation and meticulous planning. This food is a sign that in this home we are guests of honour. Both Billie and I are relieved by the absence of must-see attractions. Stary Oskoclass="underline" founded in 1593; powered by the mining, metallurgical and smelting industries; current population about two hundred and fifty thousand; average age thirty-five. For an outsider, a double outsider really – an expat urbanite – it is hard to stave off depression while walking around such a place.
Evgeniy Grishkovets, a much-loved contemporary playwright, himself a boy from the provinces, says that these small Russian towns are all essentially the same. He has been in very many of them; he knows what he is talking about:
Sometimes you would walk along the main street of such a town and all of a sudden you’d catch yourself looking into one first-floor window, and it is clear that in front of you is a kitchen. And the curtains are this colour… and wallpaper… and lampshade – orange, plastic – and near the window is the back of a man… And you know everything already… what they are talking about, what is in their fridge, what is on their table…
Yes, that’s how it feels even to one who has not lived in this country for two decades. ‘It is as if you gathered the dust, which forms into small rolls in the hard-to-reach corners under the bed, and stuffed your mouth with it.’
I see Nina on the balcony of the family’s ninth-storey apartment, with folds of grey sky above her head. For one moment, the sky looks like the autumn sea and I imagine Nina and the whole family living in a warm seaside town somewhere far away from Stary Oskol. It is a futile fantasy, I know, even condescending perhaps, but I imagine how different her life could have been if she was not sent here after finishing her university studies in chemistry, one of the ‘young specialists’ assigned to a burning industrial project X.
Nina is a chemical engineer, her husband a metallurgical engineer; here is one more engineering family just like ours. Engineering was once a profession of considerable prestige, but by the 1970s and ’80s when I was growing up, its devaluation was almost complete. It seemed almost like a default job for the Soviet Union’s urban, tertiary-educated middle classes: four engineers for one technician was a normal industrial ratio. And there were the countless jokes, in which the figure of a ‘simple engineer’ stood for social ineptness. Certainly, few professions were paid lower wages.
There comes a moment during our stay: Billie after a shower, her hair in a towel, one of her legs resting on Nina’s lap, Katya’s hands around her hand. I am embarrassed. Must we involve a cast of thousands when it comes to a mere toenail, broken and now bleeding? Yet there is something about this minor medical intervention that feels like home, like the very essence of my childhood. The mother as a ‘Jill of All Trades’. The soothing seriousness with which a trivial medical problem is treated – witness the great display of iodine, antiseptics and bandaids next to Nina. ‘Mum always wanted to be a surgeon,’ says Katya. ‘Let her do it.’
But Nina seems happy, even contented, though it was not her decision to make her life in Stary Oskol. Here she married, had Katya and her older brother. She watched the town grow. The place was really desolate when she first arrived. It is much greener and prettier now. She did not have to choose it to love and accept this place. God knows, I have mutated into such a different breed. To me the freedom of choice, the ability to move from one city to another, and to walk out of the wrong job, is fundamental to my sense of self and the way I live. But being here I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if we had stayed in the world of playing the hand you are dealt, instead of moving to the one where the pack is constantly reshuffled in search of aces. Katya’s family is not much like my family was before we left, but there are certain recognisable fundamentals that trigger in me, quite unexpectedly, the realisation that our current nomadic existence is merely the sequel to a much more settled time, when we could not conceive of any other life but the one we had in Kharkov. These days I can only imagine my family in disassembly and reassembly modes, stretched across continents, always missing half of its members at birthdays. But how could I ever forget that we all started out in a very different place, a place from which our current life seems unimaginable? And that we are, in some kind of unknowable and volatile ratio, both the people we were then and the people we are now?
Having fast-forwarded through hours of swimming competitions, we are watching a home video of Katya’s first-ever day at school. September 1 is the start of the academic year and an official state holiday, the ‘Day of Knowledge’. It has always been a big deal, but especially since the events in Beslan, Northern Ossetia, when over a thousand people attending school celebrations were taken hostage by terrorists. How it all ended is well-known, although it will probably be forgotten unforgivably soon: by the end of a bungled rescue operation, more than three hundred and fifty people were dead, half of them children.
In the video little Katya’s hair is short, the way it was when we first met. She is wearing a white bow almost the same size as her head. Her back is extra-straight. Serious, solemn and eager, she is going to school as if to a cathedral. Amid flags, balloons and flowers, made-up and dressed-up mothers and camera-wielding fathers jostle for position. The first-graders are triumphantly walked in by the teachers while the rest of the school watches on. A boy from the final grade symbolically carries a ponytailed girl from the first grade on his shoulders while, with proudly shaking hand, she rings the school bell for the first time this school year. The unbearable triteness of the principal’s speech welcoming the new students into the school family is followed by a student concert filled with equally trying music, dance numbers and long poems so bad they come close to rivalling the epic industrial poems about the ecstasy of exceeding production targets. But watching all this school kitsch, I, a longstanding enemy of schools, have to work hard to hold back tears. This is not just some outbreak of nostalgia. My tears are not just for my own childhood but for Katya, on the video so touching in her nervous eagerness, her sense of the occasion and the way she is all alone, separated from her family, at the mercy of her teacher who seems pre-emptively exhausted by the demands of the job. Other kids on the tape are just as touching, like little chicks taken out of their pens and placed in the middle of a highway. I look at Billie, hoping for something. She is not entirely uninterested, but she has the ‘sitting through someone else’s home video’ face on.