In ’96, just as I thought that my life couldn’t get any better, there was another power shakeup at the Aviation Administration. As soon as I had finished setting up the business from scratch — every detail, from the American way of de-icing airplanes to the printing of tickets — the new bosses fired me. A few months after I returned to Magadan, Marina left me for a TV journalist of local semifame. Her hair was long and red. Sonya was thirteen, too old to lie to about certain things.
For a year I floundered. Then I decided to prove to Marina that leaving me was the biggest mistake of her life. I joined one of the young airlines that cropped up during the first fertile years of capitalism, contacted several investors I’d met in America, and worked with red-eyed determination. After a couple of years, we had a fleet of five planes. By ’99, I was back in Anchorage on my own terms. So, in a way, I was fortunate that Marina left me, too.
I took Sonya with me so she could attend the last two years of high school in America. She catapulted to the top of her class and went to Princeton on a full scholarship. In college, she entertained ideas of becoming a film director, an actress, a photographer, and, briefly, even a fashion designer, but in the end she stuck with her childhood dream of following in her grandmother Olya’s footsteps. She’s twenty-eight now, an oncology resident in New York. When she finds the time, she dates. She is not the kind of girl who’d jump into marriage after two weeks. In America, young people are cautious, afraid of the losses that may come with marriage and love. While in the USSR, most of us had nothing to lose but innocence — and even that we usually managed not to lose much of. Sonya is wiser than Marina and I were at her age. And if she makes a mistake, I hope that luck will come to her rescue, just as it has always come to mine.
Marina moved to Anchorage a year after Sonya. By then her relationship with the TV journalist had disintegrated. She let her hair grow out to her natural color and cut her bangs, which made her look so much younger. I hadn’t divorced her because, having no official relations in America, she wouldn’t have been able to immigrate, and Sonya needed her mother. We are still not divorced; there was never a hard-pressed need for it. Marina still lives in Alaska and is friends with many other Magadan expatriates. We often speak on the phone. She has almost forgiven me for the ways in which I had disappointed her, and I have almost forgiven her betrayal. After all, she’d been nothing but a positive influence in my life.
In 2011, our little airline company ceased flights between Anchorage and Magadan — there was no longer a market. Perhaps Americans had become disenchanted with the way Russians did business. I wouldn’t blame them. The portal of friendly associations and opportunistic marriages had shut. Instead of taking a four-hour nonstop flight across the Bering Strait, those who wanted to visit relatives now had to connect through Seattle, Seoul, Vladivostok, or through Los Angeles and Moscow — all the way around the globe. In the summers, it would probably be easier to paddle over in a canoe, fingers crossed and betting on the old Russian avos—“what if.”
What if, what if.
My partners and I disbanded the company, paid our debts, and called it a good run. Then, after more than fifty years of snow, vicious winds, and icy nights, I moved to California, where Angela had been living for years and working as a manicurist. Hers is a whole other story. I live quietly now, minimally, in the golden land of dreams, which to Tolyan and me had once seemed farther than the moon. I manage a few properties. I try not to tax my luck.
* * *
I’d been walking on the beach for almost an hour — my exuberant Sputnik so wet and happy — thinking about how readily I always dismissed Tolyan’s disabled child. I’d tucked that tragedy between a hapless first marriage and a failed career. But, surely, this misfortune had influenced his life in ways I couldn’t imagine. How was the boy now? I almost didn’t want to know.
On the other hand, knowing Tolyan, I could as easily see him as an emotionally and physically absent parent to a healthy child. Children were not one of his great interests, nor was his career. Though, how many blows on the head could one take until one finally decided it was safer to stay on the ground?
Perhaps I had misinterpreted Tolyan’s comment back in ’92, and he didn’t blame me for what had gone wrong in his life. He simply wanted to reconnect, and that was what today’s phone call was about as well.
How much of my life did he know? What news, what rumors had reached him?
Or maybe he wanted to ask for a favor. If he had sought me out, the favor was probably big. Russian people had a notion that all Americans were rich and powerful, and definitely all Russians who had made it in America. First, it wasn’t true. And second, he didn’t know what it had really taken, all the dirty details. My family didn’t know. He couldn’t just show up and pick the fruits.
I was getting a headache. These were silly things to get so worked up about. Like a wound-up toy, Sputnik jumped up over and over to a stick I held at shoulder level. For the next three days he would have to lie stretched out on the carpet “without hind legs,” as we say in Russia.
Tolyan had been present at the pivotal moments of the first thirty years of my life. But he was incidental, not critical to my progress. A mere cobottler. I would have achieved all the same things with another ski- and tennis-obsessed man-child by my side. If I hadn’t broken my leg and Tolyan’s father hadn’t gotten us tickets to the Black Sea sanatorium where I’d met Marina, I would have met someone else. There has always been a surplus of good women in Russia.
On the other hand, maybe luck was like a magnet, and to function my positive pole required his negative one. The prospect of calling him back made me angry. I hurled Sputnik’s stick into the ocean, and he took off after it.
I felt a stab of pain in my chest, and at once I was certain I was about to die. I will die.
I sat down slowly.
All my senses had burrowed deep into my body, and I knew that if I opened my mouth I wouldn’t be able to speak. I felt as if I were holding my naked heart in the palm of my hand and it was pumping there, laboriously, trying its best but not making any promises. I held it as carefully and tenderly as I could, with awe and fear, like I once held my newborn daughter. I needed to take a breath but was terrified that if I did, I’d drop it. I’d drop my heart on the hot sand and die.
This horrible feeling lasted for about three minutes. Finally, the pain loosened its choke hold. Was that my first heart attack? I’d have to see the doctor. Luckily, I could afford it.
Sputnik was yelping and licking my knees and hands. He’d retrieved the stick and brought it to my feet. I grabbed his wet neck and kissed him on his bearded snout. I was overwhelmed with relief; it flowed into my past and reinforced its stitching. I’ve forged a good life.
The platinum waves broke on the shoreline and retreated, broke and retreated, leaving ribbons of froth and trash in their wake. A plastic bottle without a label filled with water and leaking. Green and brown seaweed. A feather. I closed my eyes and took a full-bodied breath.
No, the magnet theory of luck is a preposterous idea.
I have to take better care of myself, that’s all. I’ll swim laps in the pool when I get back to the condo and call Sonya afterward. She’ll be happy to hear about my cardio efforts. I won’t mention the heart incident; she has enough to worry about as it is. I won’t tell her about the cognac and the good chocolate I have every night, while Angela and I watch Russian news and talk shows on satellite TV. Though Sonya probably knows; somehow she always knows everything. I’ll spend half the night reading from The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, a book I highly recommend. Sputnik will snore next to me and kick me from time to time, dreaming of the chase.