Nineteen years have passed, so Tanya and I have no time to waste on chatter. ‘Did you ever think that I would become a maths lecturer at uni?’ she asks. ‘You know, maths dries you up terribly. Do you think I should start all over again? But what should I do? Who did you think I was going to be?’ I always loved this about Tanya – the absence of a defensive posture, the utter lack of preciousness with friends.
Tanya is not the least bit surprised by who I have become. This is what she always thought: with me it had to be something to do with words.
‘What the hell,’ says Tanya, perplexed, after trying unsuccessfully to connect me with Sasha. She doesn’t know why Sasha is kicking and screaming. She thinks it is a pose. Surely after twenty years we all have nothing to lose and at least something to gain from being in the same room together. She gives it one last go. ‘OK,’ Tanya says, ‘Sasha said to give you her mobile number, but don’t get carried away. She makes no promises.’ I am angry, of course, at Sasha for making it so hard, for her giving up on us – after all, how many real friends do we have in a lifetime? But I don’t think that Sasha’s deep hesitation is a pose. I take it to mean something quite basic – If you in your smug self-delusion want to believe that friendships are forever and expect us to bend over backwards on your lightning-fast visit to make you feel that everything is OK, that nothing has been broken, that nothing has been torn, you can go and fuck yourself. That, I cannot argue with. But it is one thing to stay away from her when I am in Melbourne, Australia. To be in Kharkov and not do my best to see her, that feels entirely different, like a form of betrayal.
I know that it is impossible ever to insist on friendship, to drag the other party back in, but nevertheless I refuse to accept a sunset clause, to concede the inevitablity of becoming strangers to friends just because I can no longer see them regularly. To concede as much would mean all my pre-emigration friendships were doomed. ‘Sasha, this is Masha, please give me an hour of your time, that’s all I ask’ – this is my text message, a message in a bottle to you, Sasha. The reply comes surprisingly quickly – ‘OK, meet me at 10.30 am tomorrow. Sasha.’ I lie awake that night. Three blankets are not enough to keep Billie warm; we are hugging each other so tightly as if trying to squeeze any remaining air out between us. I wait for my daughter to fall asleep so I can disappear into my thoughts. I am not vain enough to suppose that in an hour I can convince Sasha to change her mind. This is not what it is about. I don’t want to persuade her, just to see her.
I grew up surrounded not only by my parents’ friends but by my sister’s, and almost all of them I liked. I liked them not just as people but for the quality of these friendships themselves – they seemed exciting and spontaneous, yet also surprisingly stable, glued together by a sense of deeply shared loyalty. Inna was a student at the Kharkov Arts Academy and, although she was hardworking and even brilliant, her bohemian ways were no doubt conducive to relationships that seemed to grow organically because the soil was right and fertile. In her room, she scribbled the phone numbers of friends and acquaintances on the wallpaper, and gradually they took over the walls. My sister had a gift for friendship. One day she would see outside her window a bunch of university students sent to dig a trench in our street – the next day some of these students would be on our balcony drinking coffee and, inevitably, one or two of them would become a proper friend. They were invariably generous and accepting of me, and from the time I was twelve I wanted to grow up with friends like that. As strangely contradictory as it may sound coming from someone who has chosen the unsociable, solitary role of writer, this became my sustaining image of the grown-up me, surrounded by friends, not just one or two but by a gang, a flock, a school of friends, just like my gregarious sister. Watching my parents and Inna at the centre of their respective circles, I understood that that was how people survived in our world, by creating their own well-balanced micro-climates.
To this day, I am sustained in some essential way by the belief that there are friendships that do not need to be lubricated and reconfirmed at every turn, that are strong enough to absorb long hiatuses as easily as daily talk. Such friendships are essentially time-proof, distance-proof. I do not naively think there will be no friction, no shocks, but I trust that our differences can be bridged. (It was just like that with Marina in St Petersburg; with Katya Margolis, the granddaughter of Marina Gustavovna; and with Tanya in Kharkov.) But why should Sasha feel the same as I do about long-distance friendship? I am wrong to expect her to. Perhaps what I am not allowing for is that, though we both lost something when my family emigrated, there was more at stake for her. After all, I was her best friend jumping out, if not out of my own accord, on a particularly sharp curve – her sixteenth birthday, a stage of life when no one can afford to have their closest friend disappear. My timing was terrible in other ways too. No matter how many memoirs and essays are written about the post-Soviet experience of the early 1990s, I can never read my way into even the most approximate understanding of how it felt to live through those times of unravelling. Yet for my generation that era of political change, economic dissolution and mass emigration coincided with the start of our adult lives. The end of 1989 and 1990 witnessed more goodbyes than all the postwar years combined, and the exodus ruptured not only bonds of blood and friendship but something larger, the very social fabric itself. Today, the class I went through school with divides almost equally between those who left and those who stayed. I wonder, ruefully, if my friendship with Sasha is inevitable collateral damage.
Thinking about our generation before we came away on this trip, I remembered a girl my age by the name of Nika Turbina. In 1984, when I was ten, Nika seemed to be everywhere, declaiming the poems she had been composing since the age of four to packed stadiums and concert halls across the Soviet Union. She was on television too, all the time or so it seemed, with her eyes half-closed, reciting as if possessed, addressing all of us in a manner moving in its intensity yet also unnervingly theatrical. I watched her countless times, on the black-and-white television set in our lounge room that also served as my bedroom.
Nika’s debut collection, First Draft, was a resounding success, translated into twelve languages. The book’s foreword was written by Yevgeniy Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko again!), who, for a while at least, became Nika’s most famous and persistent champion. ‘Uncle Zhenya’ she called him. For years the adoring and adorable Uncle Zhenya toured Nika around as if she was a rare cultural treasure (a Fabergé egg perhaps, although that would have been politically incorrect) or, in Nika’s words, a bear cub. Their crammed itinerary included a trip to Italy, where at the age of eleven Nika received the Golden Lion of Venice Award, awarded previously to only one other Russian poetess, Anna Akhmatova (in her sixties at the time of her own award). Uncle Zhenya and Nika even made it to Boston and New York, where The New York Times described her as ‘already a star at age twelve’. In other words, Nika Turbina was rapidly turned into a cultural commodity, and this is in a nation where commodification of culture was seen as one of the deadly sins of the West. But her gift, nonetheless, was unmistakable, compelling many to speculate that someone – a dead genius, a god, a muse – was writing through her. A child could not have written these lines, people said.
Here was a girl of my own age who had everything I could ask for – an authentic talent, the attention of the world, beauty even. Most importantly, she had the opportunity to live her life as a poet. After coming to Australia I forgot to ask what happened to Nika Turbina, until Billie and I were getting ready to go on this trip. Then I Googled Turbina, convinced that she had become some world-renowned performance artist with her own blog and a flat in Venice, still beautiful, still a freak. Instead, Google told me that Nika was dead. Killed in 2002 in a fall from a fifth-storey balcony. No one was sure if she jumped, fell or was pushed off by someone who had had enough of her. It was an ugly, messy death, made uglier by the fact that only three people came to her funeral. This was the girl whose name was known to millions. In my generation, the one most likely to succeed. And now drugs, alcohol, failed university studies, failed relationships, psychosis, had culminated in an idiotic, humiliating death. In my study in Melbourne, I watched on YouTube our little poetess sans frontiers, our baby-faced National Treasure as a young woman, and felt out of my mind with grief.