And so, the night before my meeting with Sasha, my thoughts return to Nika and what happened to her. Could there be any doubt that I left too early, when all the events that would make up the bulk of my generation’s shared experience and identity were yet to take place? I left before tanks rolled into Moscow in 1991, and before Gorbachev was put under house arrest in a failed coup. I left before Yeltsin, then Putin, became president; before Russia and Ukraine became separate countries; before an old teacher of ours, one of the most respected and the best, was spotted by her former students rummaging through piles of garbage, looking for food. I left before the opening of the KGB archives, before the word ‘Gulag’ appeared in textbooks, before the Russian version of Wheel of Fortune, before shoot-outs in the streets. I left before Soviet troops were pulled out of the ‘brotherly nations’ of Eastern Europe, before the mass renaming of cities and streets, before you could go into a shop and openly purchase the books of Brodsky, Pasternak and Nabokov. I left before the death of rock musician Viktor Tsoi, which produced one of the most powerful outbursts of public grief in a nation too accustomed to secretly mourning its beloved dead. I left before the start of the Chechen Wars, with their resulting explosions and hostage dramas; before the devaluation of the rouble; before real, unmistakable poverty and hunger. I left too early, I missed the whole point. I was not there when my generation was cornered by history.
Is Sasha right then?
In the morning I leave Billie in bed. She is pleased to just lie around most of the day, covered by a trillion blankets, her battered copy of Isobelle Carmody in her hands.
I recognise Sasha straight away. I always thought her the most beautiful girl in our class (a Jewish beauty with symmetrical features, a dream!). She is still beautiful, but she is clearly worn-out. And she has this Robert de Niro thing – has she always had it and I simply never noticed? – when she laughs, she looks like she may be crying.
I tell myself an hour is plenty. Besides, I have a lot to do today, not the least of which is a trip to the outer suburbs to find Liya Izrailyevna, the de facto wife of my grandmother’s brother, who used to live upstairs from us opposite Rimma Evlampevna and was a beloved companion of my childhood.
I meet Sasha on the street corner, not in a café, which suits both of us. We can just walk alongside each other, exchanging a sentence or two from time to time. ‘Do you remember how you got hit on the head here?’ Sasha asks me as we walk through a big park in the city centre. When Sasha and I were fourteen (or rather she was fifteen, being a year older) we sat on a bench in this park, reading an old Soviet encyclopedia of philosophy published before Stalin’s death – a rarity, which her mum had managed to acquire somewhere. We laughed, because the encyclopedia entries were ridiculous in their dogged insistence on portraying Stalin and his inner circle as the leading philosophers and scientists of their time (as if who they really were was somehow not enough). And then I remember being surrounded by a large group of young men with shaved heads, taunting us and calling us kikes before we somehow managed to push through them and run away. At the time this felt like a very precarious, touch-and-go moment for both of us. When I would retell this story years later, I would always mention how there were enough of these young men to encircle us, and how no one in the lively, busy park intervened to help.
‘No,’ says Sasha, ‘there were only three guys who hassled us, but one of them hit you over the head.’
‘How is it that I have tripled the numbers and managed to forget a blow to my head?’
‘Go figure,’ says Sasha.
An hour passes by, then two, then three. We have a cup of tea in a café just to get warm and keep walking. It is as if both of us are trying to understand what it feels like simply to be in each other’s presence after nineteen years apart. Without much discussion about it, Sasha comes with me to see Liya Izrailyevna. ‘Where is this place?’ she asks after we catch a train to the very last stop on the line and then get in and out of two crammed minibuses. ‘You need to really try hard to find a bigger shithole.’
The instructions Liya Izrailyevna gave my mum are not much help. The routes of minibuses have changed, and every set of directions we get from drivers, passengers, people on the street and in the shops negates the previous lot. I cannot remember the last time I was so confused and lost. I look at Sasha, who does not seem to be the least bit irritated by our misadventure. She seems to accept entirely that this is how things happen – you go somewhere, the directions are wrong, people give you contradictory advice, buses take you in the opposite direction. I stop completely, wondering if it would be best to call the whole thing off. And then I notice Sasha starting to walk.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask, catching up with her.
‘Let’s stop asking people where to go and just go.’
‘But go where? Why walk there and not here? We don’t even know if this place is in walking distance. What’s the point of just going?’ (I am not the daughter of a scientist for nothing.)
‘Let’s just go, Masha,’ says Sasha.
Did we get to the place where Liya Izrailyevna lives? Yes, we did. I cannot explain how and if there was any method at all to Sasha’s madness. All I can say is that I followed Sasha, who did not know where she was going, and we reached the place where we needed to be. Almost on time too.
And the spell – the black spell between us – was broken, which I cannot explain either. Maybe we realised that we simply needed each other just as we did all those years ago. There were no cathartic moments (except perhaps seeing Liya Izrailyevna’s building materialise in front of our eyes, seemingly out of nowhere). I don’t think either of us cried. We did not have a conversation about what happened to ‘us’ and why it all went terribly wrong.
I wondered what Sasha saw that made her forgive me for leaving her, that made her accept that I have not become a different species. Some kind of vision she had about my safe, privileged, easy life in the West – perhaps me walking in white pants near palm trees with a margarita in my manicured paw – evaporated during the hours we spent walking together. Perhaps she simply saw how much like her I was – tough, deeply unsure of myself, cocky, tired, fragile. That the lines on my face were not covered by some super-restorative facial crème, that I wore jeans just like her and no jewellery, that I had to count my banknotes carefully every time I bought a small gift or a souvenir. And as we slowly started talking – about men, money, dreams, crossroads – perhaps she understood that my life was easily as messy as hers, that I didn’t ride into her world on a white horse.
God only knows what we imagine about our friends when we do not see them for decades. Perhaps more than anything we fear them looking at us; we anticipate and fear their concealed appraisal of us: Is this what has become of you? Who could have guessed? And I thought… This becomes especially daunting if the spectre of migration is involved. But Sasha and I did not appraise each other. It just did not happen. Something else took over – a kind of gentleness, a gratitude for something, a silence that did not need to be chased away. Whatever happened in those two decades was not enough to turn us into strangers. Maybe this is all both of us needed to know. Maybe this was enough. We finally said goodbye at nine or ten that night, just in time for Sasha to catch the very last bus home.