I’m not sure if I remember this, or if I just remember the old, faded photographs: a tiny blond girl with the knobby knees and oversized racket. I sometimes wonder if I’m still the same person who picked up that racket. Very quickly the game changed from the simplicity of hitting to the complications of coaches and lessons, matches and tournaments, the need to win, which is less about the trophies than about beating the other girls. I can get fancy and sweet about it, but at bottom my motivation is simple: I want to beat everyone. It’s not just the winning. It’s the not being beaten. Ribbons and trophies get old, but losing lasts. I hate it. Fear of defeat is what really drives many of us. I say “us” because I can’t possibly be the only person who feels this way. This might never have occurred to me had I not started writing this book. When you look, you notice patterns, connections. You see things in a new way.
I’ve often asked myself: Why write a book?
In part, it’s to tell my story, and it’s also to understand it. In many ways, my childhood is a mystery, even to me. I’m always being asked the same questions: How did I get here? How did I do it? What went right, what went wrong? As I said, if I’m known for one thing, it’s toughness, my ability to keep going when things look bad. People want to know where that quality comes from and, because everyone is hoping for their own chance, how to acquire it. I’ve never figured it out myself. In part, it’s because of who knows? If you look too deeply, maybe you destroy it. It’s my life and I want to tell it. I talk to reporters, but I never tell everything I know. Maybe now is the time to open up the door for more questions, and to make sense of my life and get down the early days before I forget. I hope people take away every kind of lesson, good and bad. This is a story about sacrifice, what you have to give up. But it’s also just the story of a girl and her father and their crazy adventure.
TWO
Where should I begin?
How about Gomel, a city in Belarus, its muddy streets and forest paths straight out of a fairy tale? It’s near the border with Russia, a short drive from Chernobyl in Ukraine. My father met my mother in school. What were they like? What were your parents like before you were born? It’s a mystery. My father will tell you he was a genius. And charming. My mother, Yelena, will not agree. He could drive her nuts. He was the kind of student who doesn’t do the reading and skips class, then strolls in and nails the test. School never was important to Yuri. He figured he’d outsmart the system, and there was no teacher who could tell him how.
Yuri was out of school fast. He was in the world by age twenty, working a job I still don’t really understand. He led crews that maintained smokestacks, the sort that spew. He traveled for that job, taking planes to factories all over the country. He spent days on a scaffold, hundreds of feet off the ground, maintaining whatever had to be maintained. Had the Soviet Union survived, he would’ve done that until he was old enough to retire. But the Soviet Union did not survive. It was, in fact, coming apart in my toddler years. If I asked about it, my father would say, “Gorbachev didn’t have the balls.” My father believes a person must be tough to hold anything together—a household, a career, even a country. He knew almost nothing about America. To him, it was blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll and keep the rest. Same with tennis. He did not know about it, did not care. In Russia, tennis was for deposed aristocrats. Yuri played ice hockey and loved to mountain climb, which may explain his life atop the smokestacks.
My mother is beautiful and petite, with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. She’s better educated than my father: aced high school and college, then went on to get the equivalent of a master’s degree. She loves the great Russian writers (when I was little she read me stories and made me memorize passages before I could understand what they were about). By 1986 she was living with my father in a house on the edge of town. There was a yard in front and a forest in back. My grandparents were not far away. My mother’s parents lived in the far north, Siberia, which will be important. When my mother and father talk about those years, it sounds like Eden. The house, the trees, and the shade under the trees, a young couple very much in love. They were poor but did not know it. The house was small and drafty but they did not know that either.
Then it happened: my uncle gave my father a tennis racket for his birthday. It was a joke. Only rich people played tennis. But a club had just opened in Gomel and my father thought, “Why not?” He started too late to become a great player, but he’s a natural athlete, and got good quickly. He fell in love with the game, read books and articles about the stars, watched the Grand Slams on TV. He was preparing himself, though he did not know it. He was in training to become that strange and exotic thing, a tennis parent.
(This is where you’re supposed to laugh.)
One morning in April 1986, as she was working in the garden, my mother heard a rumble in the distance, like thunder. She was wearing a scarf on her head and no shoes, her feet in the dirt. She looked at the sky, then carried on. At first, it was no more than that—just something that makes you look up. She was soon to be pregnant with me, her only child. The rumors started that night, wild, terrifying tales. What exactly caused that rumble? There was smoke in the sky the next morning. That’s when the rumors took shape. These concerned the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. People said it had exploded, that radioactive material had been thrown into the air and would rain down on everything. As if an atomic bomb had been dropped on us. When people went to the government for information, they were told everything was fine. Still, there was panic. Families were packing up and heading off. My mother got a call from her mother, who’d been able to learn more in Siberia than my parents could forty miles from the explosion.
“We called your mother and told her to get out,” Grandma Tamara told me. “Chernobyl was lethal—it killed all living organisms. It was an invisible death. We knew this because we’d met a man who’d been sent in as part of the cleanup. He said the radiation was off the scale. At first, the officials said nothing. People were not even advised to close their windows! Everyone just kept living as before. I remember this man telling us: ‘The mushrooms coming up in the forest are as big as dinner plates!’ When he took pictures, all the film came back overexposed. This man died at forty-five or fifty years old. All those workers did.”
My parents went north. Other people stayed. My father’s mother stayed. Years later, we’d go to her house on vacation. We’d be amazed by the huge forest mushrooms. Everyone said it was caused by radiation, which makes you wonder. My mother and father are not small, but are not big either. I am six foot two, not counting heels. I tower over them. So where did that height come from? My father says I grew because I needed size to compete. He’s a believer in the power of human will. But my mother was about to be pregnant with me when the reactor blew, drinking the water and eating the vegetables, and continued to drink the water and eat the vegetables after she had gotten pregnant, so who knows?