‘Look at what this bitch has done to my ceiling. She has flooded us all. I will get to her yet. She will be begging for mercy.’ I can see Rimma Evlampevna squirming silently as she listens to Tatyana going off. She cannot afford an enemy like that, not in her building. Natasha looks at me. Both of us can see Rimma Evlampevna shrinking – this is what the world has come to; this building never used to be like this; we had some decent, well-brought-up people here. She is visibly embarrassed. Embarrassed, and also deeply sad. I remember when I was discussing anti-Semitism with Svetlana Kandeeva, the teacher I met in Kiev, that she told me how sad many Ukrainians and Russians felt about their Jewish neighbours leaving the country. At the time I wondered if this was wishful thinking on the part of a natural-born optimist. But now, standing next to Rimma Evlampevna, watching her face, I can see at least for a moment precisely what Svetlana was trying to tell me.
We stay for five unbearable minutes, then take our leave. Rimma Evlampevna hugs us and tells me to send her best wishes to my parents and, of course, to my sister, Inna. I feel strangely calm, almost still inside, as the three of us walk out of number 78 and head towards the other places that made up our world – our dvory, our bakery, our library, our shop with toffee lollies sold by weight and, of course, my old school. ‘Mum, I am not going in,’ says Billie. ‘I do not feel comfortable being at a working school in the middle of the day on the other side of the world.’
Sasha doesn’t want to see me. My Sasha. In fact, she has not wanted to speak to me for years. This is not the first of our dry spells. We lost touch once before, a few years after my family left the country on the day she turned sixteen. Some sweet sixteen she had, counting down the last day on earth with her best friend and then spending the evening at the train station seeing us off. Before we left, I gave her a bouquet of flowers that I had been saving up to buy for almost a year. What a bunch of flowers! They were long, almost her height, and had to go into a floor vase. (I cannot quite recall how her mother happened to own such an exotic object.) I wanted Sasha to have something of me that was big and tall and would last a long time. If I could have given her a hundred of these flowers, if I could have surrounded her by a forest of them, I would have. I was desperate to leave something behind to protect her from my absence.
For the first few years we wrote countless letters and spoke on the phone a few times when we could afford to. Then it all stopped in a way that the most intense of long-distance friendships sometimes do, suddenly grinding to a halt, and it is hard to figure out exactly why – someone moved again, someone hit upon hard times, someone began to wonder what was the point of it all. Sasha and I reconnected a decade or so later, post-internet, but not before I called every single household listed under the same surname as hers in Kharkov’s online directory. My telephone marathon turned up no traces of Sasha (not surprising, as by now she had a different surname), but when I hung up after the last call – talk about embodied memory – the six digits of our mutual friend’s old home number suddenly lined up in front of my eyes in perfect sequence. I called the number straight away, without stopping to think about what it might mean to speak to that friend, Tanya, after all these years. Her sister-in-law answered, and soon Tanya and I were crying together on the phone.
We had all been in the same class at school, Sasha, Tanya and me. Tanya was athletic, smart, popular, well adjusted and not Jewish. In other words, she could have had a rollicking good time at school if only she had not chosen to stick by her difficult Jewish friend (me), the one with a propensity to fall out of step with ‘the collective’ and a habit of picking fights with teachers and peers alike in the name of ‘justice’. I realise now that Tanya’s sturdy loyalty was even more remarkable given the fact that she did not come from a Jew-friendly household. Sasha and I were always an item, but Tanya was close to both of us, and in my absence Sasha and Tanya grew closer still.
Once Tanya had put me back in touch with Sasha, it seemed like everything was all right. But after our first long conversations, so easy and joyful, so lacking in strain that I declared to all those sceptics around me that real friendships do not die, they simply hibernate, Sasha no longer wanted any part of it. In fact, as she made abundantly clear, she wanted me to stop calling altogether. ‘There is nothing connecting us in the present,’ she said, or something perhaps less palatable still (my memory has been all too gentle with me on this point). ‘This friendship till death do us apart business is nothing but hot air.’ It was, she said, a dangerous illusion that we could sustain our friendship based on the past. The past was all good and well, but it was no substitute for a shared present. I disagreed but, of course, she had a point. I wondered what was behind my dogged insistence that no mountain was too high and no ocean too deep for our friendship. It was never my style to force myself on anyone, but with Sasha I was fighting not to let go.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I can hear you, but what if you actually don’t mean it; what if you are simply in a crap mood? How about I hang up now and call you in a month? If you still feel the same, I promise to stop calling.’
She still felt the same in a month.
That was in 2003 if I remember correctly. And now, at the end of 2008, Sasha is still refusing to make contact. But Tanya, gorgeous and slim (and this after two kids), is genuinely excited about seeing me. She loves me still, although she too, once the surface is scratched, feels hurt and abandoned. She too, deep down, cannot quite forgive me my disappearance and the fact that I still get to call the shots all these years later, just like when I left. These days, after borders have been opened up, people who leave can decide when and for how long they pop back into the lives of those who stayed. Tanya tells me about some of our classmates who have emigrated to various countries in the West and who have everything worked out when they come back to Kharkov for a visit: a tight schedule of dirt-cheap dentists and gynaecologists, merchandise to stack up on, quick suntan at some Black Sea resort and, in the middle of their full ‘cultural’ program, they catch up with their former friends in two-hour blocks.
‘How much time have you got for me?’ Tanya asks when Billie and I meet her at the train station near Kharkov State University, where she works as a lecturer. I don’t understand the question at first, but then I get it – Tanya expects me to have allocated a certain number of contact hours to her before I move on to someone or something else. I instantly scrap most of the plans in my head. I would rather see only a very few people on this visit, and see them properly so they never feel part of my touring schedule, slotted back-to-back. We spend the evening with Tanya’s family – her son, Nikita, who is eleven, unexpectedly bonds with Billie and wants her to teach him English. As Tanya and I sit in the kitchen talking, I hear Billie’s voice repeatedly enunciating the word ‘diary’ in the distance. Tanya and the kids come to see us the following night, partially on Nikita’s insistence.