Snow in May

The last thing I remember before the operation is pleading for the doctors not to cut my ski boot. My Yugoslavian skis and boots were my most prized possessions and had cost a month’s salary. The diagnosis was closed fracture of the fibula and tibia, spiral, comminuted. Tolyan had stayed with me in the hospital late into the night.

This all happened on March 8, International Women’s Day. We had planned to attend a big dance at the Palace of ProfUnions later that evening. While I was enjoying the post-bone-setting morphine haze, Tolyan tried to call our girlfriends to let them know what had happened. But they had already left for the dance.

Mine was Lily, a little hourglass-shaped Jewish olive, with amber-clear eyes and a bead of a birthmark above her lip that drove me crazy. She was engaged to a rising Jewish academic, which I didn’t see as a problem at the time, at least not my problem. Lily ran to my apartment every other night. Who was I to stop her?

She visited me at the hospital three times. Each time the sight of me in bed with my broken leg in traction, supported by various slings, weights, and levers, brought her to tears. Poor Lily would put her bag on the stand near the bed—although many of my other, less mindful visitors simply hung their bags right on the weight—and stand shyly by my side. Then, her hands would hover above my full-leg cast, brush against my arm, and land over her mouth. She would kiss my forehead so tenderly that a wave of itching sensations rushed down my broken leg. I would seize my metal scratcher, insert it down my cast, and poke about savagely, moaning from pleasure and pain, which would trigger another bout of tears from my beautiful Lily.

The fourth time, it wasn’t Lily who came but her mother. Our affair had come out.

“You almost ruined my daughter’s life,” her mother yelled in a deep, operatic voice. She was fat, almost a perfect square—the kind of woman Lily would probably become in her older years, after having children. “I’d kill you if you didn’t look so miserable. I’d make sure you’re an outcast in this town.”

Suddenly I wanted to laugh, though her threats were far from empty. Lily’s father had a high position in the local Party Committee. In Magadan, where everyone knew everyone’s business, reputation was important.

Lily’s mother went on detailing my lack of morals, of sympathy for a young girl’s heart, of respect for their family and my family, of respect for myself. Lack, lack, lack. But the blade had narrowly swung clear of both Lily’s head and mine, and I wanted to celebrate. My broken leg had saved my career. Moreover, it provided a blameless, romantic exit from my relationship with Lily. I knew all along that she wasn’t the girl I’d marry even if her engagement broke up, and our inevitable separation, if protracted, could have taken a much uglier form.

Tolyan wasn’t so lucky. He was smitten with Anya, an air-headed girl with a lean figure and a voice that went with campfire guitar as smoothly as vodka goes down with salted herring. While Tolyan nursed me at the hospital, Anya let herself be swayed by a former classmate of ours, a certain Seryoga, at the Women’s Day dance.

“You didn’t have to stay at the hospital. You could’ve just gone to the dance,” I said when he told me the news.

“That didn’t occur to me.” Tolyan gave me a shaming look.

“Well, she showed her true nature. Why do you need a girl like that?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. There’re always more. Seryoga will play with her and dump her soon enough. That’s the way he is,” he said, picking up my metal scratcher. “What’s this for?” He put it in his mouth and chewed, making a disconcerting sound. “Brutal age, rough manners, nyet romantismy,” he concluded with a quote from one of our favorite films.

I spent another month at the hospital. Tolyan and I grew out our hair, mustaches, and beards, which made us look like nineteenth-century Russian merchants. When he visited, we drank tea in character—out of saucers—and flirted with the nurses. After I’d been moved home, friends and girls stopped by to help with groceries and laundry, and to make sure I followed doctor’s orders of three hundred drops of vodka daily. I enjoyed three more guilt-free months of reading. I was a big fan of Thornton Wilder then. While reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I wondered, just like Brother Juniper does in the novel, whether there was any logic in who got into accidents or became the victim of various unfortunate events. Of course, breaking a leg was a disaster not on the same scale as dying in the collapse of a bridge. Still, maybe I’d been plunged into this parallel, slower life to learn a lesson. Maybe Lily’s mother was right: it was time to grow up. That meant getting married. Surprisingly, this thought no longer threw me into panic.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered unduly in heavy self-reflection. Apart from a few physical inconveniences, I loved living in my favorite striped mohair robe, away from my job, which didn’t prove to be as exciting as I’d imagined when I went off to the aviation institute in Riga. I was often awake at five in the morning after reading all night to hear the first birdsong of the day. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” had just made its way to the northeast and played from the radio in every open window. Sometimes, when reading or watching soccer on TV, I’d forget about my white underwear boiling in a giant pot. The water and bleach would spill onto the stove and then the floor, and this way the whole kitchen would clean itself in minutes. Life was good.

In July, the doctors removed the cast. Later I’d find out that the fibula had grown back at a slight angle: the soles of my left shoes would now forever develop holes before the right ones even showed signs of wear. I hobbled outside on crutches to exercise my legs. The stream of friends and well-wishers thinned. Everybody had gone on vacation. Tolyan and I played Battleship over the phone, unable to do any of the things that made the cold summer in Magadan bearable. (Tolyan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find another tennis partner.) Finally, his father helped us obtain two-week passes to a sanatorium on the Black Sea and off we went to seek a cure for our bachelors’ ennui.

It was there that I met my future wife, Marina, who was on vacation with her friend Lenka. I still remember my Marina’s green bikini and the giant sagging straw hat, which was quite ridiculous, but on her seemed utterly stylish. Under the hat she had fantastic bangs. On top of it all, she was that mythical creature—an actual pianist and a piano teacher—whereas Tolyan and I, and everyone we knew then, had quit the fashionable, parent-ordered piano lessons after a year of family-wide suffering. A funny story: when I had first asked her what she did for a living, she said that she worked as an instructor. I, however, heard “on a tractor” and was considerably impressed, for days picturing her astride a tractor in the fields of golden wheat, her cheeks red and eyes shining.

Marina didn’t take me seriously. I fell in love. While I crabbed after her through the toe-wrenching Crimean pebble beach, trying to impress her with my intelligence and wit, Tolyan was stuck with the plain Lenka. When he found out, though, that her father was a high-ranking Party apparatchik in Voronezh, with money and connections, she at once became a lot less plain. I realize now that Lenka was the type of girl whose beauty would have been awakened by a truly great love, which Tolyan could neither give nor inspire.

At the close of two weeks we said good-bye to the girls and spent the following months clogging the phone lines with long-distance calls. As soon as my leg was strong enough to bear the weight of a bride, Tolyan and I decided to visit Marina and Lenka in Ulyanovsk, their and Lenin’s hometown. I arrived in my most fashionable outfit: a blue plaid blazer, plaid shirt, and navy pants I still had from my European days in Riga. I told myself that as soon as I saw Marina again I’d know. And I did. She met me at the airport in a scarlet dress with white polka dots and giant horn-rimmed glasses, her chestnut hair in a thick schoolgirl braid. The now legendary welcome dinner awaited me at her apartment: meatballs that had congealed overnight into one pot-sized meatball mass and had to be cut with a steak knife.

We married the next month. Tolyan married Lenka because if one must have a wife, it might as well be an apparatchik’s daughter, he had reasoned. Perhaps I should have foreseen trouble. But the little sense I possessed at twenty-eight was hopelessly drunk on Marina. I wanted Tolyan to have what I had—the wedding, the young wife. We, after all, had known our brides for the same amount of time: two weeks plus the phone calls. Our chances seemed equal.

The weddings took place on the same day. Back then it was a simple affair: you signed the book at the civil registry office (I remember a big oil portrait of Karl Marx on a whitewashed wall behind the officiant), took pictures next to the war memorials in town, and partied at a restaurant until morning. It was the first time my parents met Marina and I met Marina’s mother, Olga, who was the chief doctor of a polyclinika in Syktyvkar, a city in the north. I remember being a little bit offended that she’d brought an extra pair of wedding rings, in case we’d forgotten to buy ours. She didn’t trust me yet. She’d also brought a family album for me to catch up on my bride’s family tree. They came from the Terek Cossacks, with a wild-card Mongolian babushka somewhere down the line. Marina didn’t know her father; Olga had left him because of his gambling addiction when Marina wasn’t yet two.

I still remember a particular photograph in that album. Marina’s grandmother, a chubby, smiling woman in a floral dress, points out something in a book (her finger raised in a teasing, teacherly manner) to Marina’s step-grandfather—a much skinnier, tired-looking man with a curly cowlick and linen pants pulled up high above his waist. And he looks at her with the most perfect mixture of attention, humorous suspicion, and love. Marina said she’d seen the ghost of this grandfather after his death—her grandmother’s second husband; the first one had been accused of being a Japanese spy during Stalin’s repressions and had sat in one of the camps close to Magadan.

What touched me most in that picture was Marina’s grandmother’s ear. It was the exact shape as Marina’s: long and narrow, the lobe the same width as the top. It was then that I felt Marina and her whole lineage of feisty women, including the Mongolian babushka, were now my family.

After our honeymoons—mine in Bulgaria and Tolyan’s back in Riga—we took our brides northeast. At first, Marina and Lenka complained about how far Magadan was from the continent, from their parents, and marveled at how close it was to Alaska—a fabled place that was once Russia and now inaccessible America. Soon they acclimated to the weather and began to love, like us, the quiet white days after the snowstorms. They noticed that despite Magadan’s extreme remoteness, they were surrounded by intelligent, professional people, who were always willing to help. Survival in the harsh north, especially back in the Soviet times, was impossible without friends and reliable acquaintances.

Marina found work as a piano accompanist in the wind department at the local arts college. On the weekends, we all went mushroom and lingonberry picking, grilled shashliks, and sang songs, accompanied badly on the guitar by Tolyan. He’d learned a few chords back in his days of courting Anya. With the first big snowfall I was back on the slopes and teaching Marina, who had never skied before.

My newlywed life was not without surprises and discoveries. That happens even if one makes a proper acquaintance first and then signs the marriage registration, but we were good candidates for getting used to each other. Tolyan and Lenka weren’t so lucky. It was clear from the start that they were catastrophically incompatible. At first, they tolerated each other because of the novelty of marriage. Later, Lenka tolerated Tolyan because she wanted children. He was still a flirt and a heavy drinker. When he wasn’t playing tennis with me, he lay on the couch and watched soccer. Sometimes Lenka called me to whine about Tolyan’s behavior, as though I’d sold her a defective product. What could I do? I had lost my power over him; he was now her responsibility.

Three years later, Marina and Lenka gave birth, within weeks of each other. Perestroika was taking root in the country and at home. We named our daughter Sophia, after my grandmother, Sonya for short. Tolyan’s son sustained an injury at birth and, the doctors said, would be severely disabled for the rest of his life.

Tolyan and Lenka were devastated, and so were Marina and I. We couldn’t shuttle between Sokol and Magadan as often with the newborns. And when we did see each other or talk on the phone, Marina and I couldn’t fully express our joy about our daughter, nor did we know how to sympathize properly with Tolyan and Lenka. How could we ever come up with the right proportion of understanding, concern, and encouragement? How could we ever truly relate?

When their son turned one, Tolyan and Lenka moved to Voronezh. I didn’t try to talk Tolyan out of it, though I knew he would be unhappy there. It would have been me against Lenka and her family. And what could I offer him in practical terms? Now he would be unhappy anywhere. The few times I’ve thought back to our separation, I am always struck by how undramatic it was. I remember picking up Tolyan’s skis at his place for safekeeping and how he had held on to them a moment too long. In the background, Lenka was screaming on the phone, and his son was wailing. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. My real life had already begun and was waiting for me back at my apartment, whereas Tolyan’s was slipping out of his hands.

In Voronezh, Lenka’s father had arranged for a two-bedroom apartment, which by the standards of the day was shockingly spacious for a family of three. He helped Tolyan get accepted into the Party and found him a position at the local aviation agency. Tolyan, I could tell from our still-frequent phone conversations, was miserable. All of his life he’d lived in pursuit of his own pleasure. Now, the care of a sick child—a child, he said, he wasn’t crazy about having to begin with—was like a second, more stressful and time-consuming job. It soon became apparent just how spoiled and selfish Lenka was. Her papa could solve only so many of her problems.

Tolyan’s unraveling progressed quickly. He drank earlier and earlier in the day, slept at his desk at work. He and Lenka started having affairs. Eventually, their new paramours moved into the separate bedrooms in their apartment, and the kitchen became a veritable battlefield. When the Union collapsed, Tolyan’s father-in-law lost his Party power. Without his patronage, Tolyan and Lenka were both fired from their jobs. They exchanged their apartment for two smaller ones and finally divorced. Tolyan was picked up by a good woman, who, for some reason, decided to save him. (Oh, Russian women! Many of them still live by the principle “Doesn’t matter what he is, as long as he’s mine.”) Lenka took on the custody of their son.

The last time I heard from Tolyan was by phone in ’92, shortly before I moved to America. His second wife had sobered him up, and they tried to launch a business importing knockoff brand clothing from Poland. Tolyan refused to cooperate with the local mafia for his “protection” and was beaten up. The business folded. Brutal age, rough manners, indeed. On top of that, he got into a car accident and couldn’t walk for a year.

I was surprised at how adamantly he interrogated me on the subject of tennis. Did I still play? At our old courts in the Park of Culture and Leisure or at the Palace of Sport? How often and with whom? Since my daughter’s birth, tennis wasn’t my tenth or hundredth priority, I said, though not dismissively, in honor of our good memories on the court. This seemed to disappoint him gravely. Then he asked after his skis and we talked about the skiing accident. How young, strong, and healthy we were then, with our whole lives ahead of us. In fact, looking back over his life, Tolyan said, he didn’t know what it all had been for. He was a failure at work, at being a husband and a father.

“What about your new wife? Aren’t you at least a bit happy with her?” I asked.

“You’re going to laugh. I keep thinking about Anya.”

Anya, the one who got away and was caught in the memory like a fly in amber.

“You stupid old goat.”

“Have you heard anything about her?”

“No.” The lie jumped off my tongue instinctively. Anya was still in Magadan, with two daughters. The older one was Seryoga’s, although neither he nor the father of her younger daughter, Asya, were around. Asya and my daughter, Sonya, attended a ballroom dance studio in the same Palace of Prof-Unions where Tolyan and I used to go to dances. I had recently run into Anya at one of the ballroom competitions. She was heavyset, her hair faded, her eyes tired and wet. We talked for a few minutes, mostly about our children. Her older daughter was studying piano, she told me with pride. She didn’t ask about Tolyan.

I contemplated whether this information would make Tolyan feel better or worse. “Well,” he said, “at least it worked out for one of us. Imagine if you hadn’t broken your leg then?”

I could have told him that nothing was his fault or mine, that he was simply unlucky. I could have asked him whether there were any medications prescribed for all his bruises or anything else he couldn’t get in Voronezh that I could try to procure for him in America. I could have invited him for a visit. But something inside me turned cold and protective. I was wary of dragging so much bad luck into my new life, nervous about Tolyan’s dormant alcoholism, the possibility of his wanting to involve me in some dubious business scheme. A good-for-nothing childhood friend was better left in childhood.

We exchanged a few more reminiscences and hung up.

It was a beautiful afternoon in Southern California, and I decided to take Sputnik to his favorite beach. As I drove, Sputnik breathing fast into my ear, I continued to think about how luck is distributed among the living—a subject I’ve been ruminating on often lately. I began to understand why Tolyan might be so eager to get in touch with me. For him, the years when our paths ran parallel to each other were the peak of his life. I could only imagine to what legendary proportions our youthful friendship had grown by now in his imagination. For me, however, those years were a takeoff strip, not the flight.

While Tolyan and Lenka hit each other over the head with frying pans in Voronezh, I was living out a happy routine in Magadan. Work, home, grocery stores, day care (then kindergarten and school). Marina cut her thick, dark hair into a bob, which sat on her head like a thatched roof. Sonya was growing up healthy, beautiful, and ambitious. She shined at school, which in time would be converted into the English Lyceum, with an emphasis on learning English. She studied piano at the special section for gifted children at Marina’s college (the poor child was not allowed to quit) and pursued passionately a hundred other interests from basketball and ballroom dancing to theater, figure skating, and astronomy. She often talked about becoming a doctor, like her grandmother Olya. I could never get her to love tennis as much as I did, but she liked to ski. When I showed her the fateful spot where I had fallen and broken my leg—the accident that led me to her mother—she bent down and whispered “thank you” into the snow.

In the summers, we took Sonya to the Black Sea or sent her to her grandparents, Marina’s mother in Syktyvkar or my father in Ukraine. My mother died when Sonya was eight. Two years later my father met another woman and moved with her to a small village outside of Kiev called Milaya—“darling.” He now had a vegetable plot, a chicken coop, and a goat.

By the time Sonya was born, I was vice president of the Department of Commercial Transportation. Due to my youthful misadventures with the Young Pioneers, political reservations, and, in large part, lack of desire to invest time and effort, I’d never joined the Party and that made further promotion unlikely. I developed good relationships with the head of my department, Vasily Lavrentiev, and the vice president of the Aviation Administration, Afanasy Prokhorov. I could barter my access to distribution of airline tickets for favors and defitsit items. My hours were leisurely. I had plenty of time to spend with my daughter and to appease Marina in the kitchen by frying an occasional fish and potatoes.

In ’85, a new man from Moscow, Davydenko, was appointed president of the Aviation Administration and immediately set about getting rid of the old guard. He stirred up half-fictitious criminal cases against a slew of heads of various departments, accusing them of faulty accounting. In those days, the economy was mostly on paper; it was easy to find evidence of just about anything. Prokhorov and Lavrentiev were sentenced to two years of “work for the development of the national economy.” Prokhorov, a bear of a man, served out his term as a truck dispatcher, cramped all day in a tiny radio booth. Short and rotund Lavrentiev, on the other hand, was comically appropriate as a loader at the bakery, the same one from which Tolyan and I used to steal bread when we were boys. The town was outraged by the injustice, but we could do nothing.

In the end, the legal drama turned out for my benefit. When several of Davydenko’s men, having no prior experience in Magadan aviation, failed to handle the position of the commercial transportation VP, I was appointed to fill it.

In ’87, perestroika began in earnest. Food shortages started to occur even in Magadan. I stood in endless lines for meat, milk, and butter; then, just as my turn was coming up, I phoned Marina to bring Sonya to the store to show to the sales clerk. Three meat coupons, three family members accounted for. Marina got a mushroom haircut and highlighted her hair with ashen streaks. Prokhorov and Lavrentiev were acquitted and restored to their former positions—and I had to give my post back to Lavrentiev. There were no job openings, so Prokhorov created a nominal position for me: director of special programs. I had no official duties and absorbed the overflow. In my free time I studied English. In ’89 and ’90, a passage to America opened via none other than Alaska. The first charter flights were organized to Anchorage, Juneau, and Seattle. Children’s choirs and sports teams began exchange programs. Rotary and Lions Clubs and the Seventh-day Adventist Church descended on our backwater shores in a flurry of philanthropic and missionary activity. Americans wanted to invest in Magadan’s gold and fisheries, and see the ruins of the ill-famed Gulag.

In time, the agency developed an international aviation department, and I happened to be just the right man to head it. After I had translated one or two short documents (looking up every word in a dictionary), I was hailed as the resident English-language expert. And, as I wasn’t tied up in any other projects, I flew to Moscow to take a course in international aviation and then to Alaska to study the American side of the operation. For the first time in my career, the fact that I’d never belonged to the Party was beneficial; my work visa application was processed without a hitch. I think of my first encounter with America aromatically: the coffee and cinnamon of the hotel lobby, the lilacs of the bathrooms, the deodorant of people unadulterated by sweat. Though, I must say, even the bright, smiling America could not eclipse the impressions of youth—the cobblestone streets of Riga, the view through my paper window.