THEN & NOW For Volodya and Lena

In the black-and-white photograph, you face each other smiling — dad, your dimple showing clearly in prof le, the f irtatious smile dancing on your face, just for you, mom, your long chestnut hair f owing gently down past your shoulders, demurely looking back, more reserved, as was always your nature. T en, unlike today, the two smiles were genuine, your eyes meeting with af ection. It was 1975, two years before you lef all you knew behind, naively giving up on the old life you grew tired of, basing your whole future on dreams and hopes of the new world you knew nothing about. You were thirty three then, high school sweethearts, your birthdays separated by f ve days in February. T ere are no background colors or shapes in the old photograph, just a blank white wall, and you are suspended as in eternity, the moment forever, although I have not looked at this picture in years. I was your only child, the sole survivor amidst the many abortions, birth control a relative unknown in the Soviet Union, even in Moscow, the poorly made condoms usually breaking in moments of passion. United States greeted you with a new language, bizarre customs, freedom you so badly craved but did not know what to do with, and you settled into your life in New York City, trying to f t into this new world, before falling back into the relative comfort of the small immigrant Russian circle, conversing once again in your mother tongue, surviving, continuing. You were wildly successful and able to support yourself with your writing: literary grants to teach at Columbia University and Queens College, hundreds of articles in prestigious American newspapers and magazines, political biographies translated into twelve languages and sold in thirteen countries, f nally: books published in Russia today. However, you fought more of en: dad, you slammed doors, mom, you withdrew and fell into silence. No conversation for days. „И все хорошее в себе доистребили,“ although not quite as extreme as this line from a song by Visotsky proclaims, Russia’s most popular man since Gagarin. T e smiles like the two in the photograph, were gone within the decade, but the marriage persevered, out of habit, the fear of breaking away from each other, the custom of sharing the same loneliness together. I bolted west across the new country and never looked back, leaving you even more alone. I settled in Sitka, the former capital of Russian Alaska, becoming its only current Russian. You used to visit while I was still married, admiring but not fully relating to your American grandkids, my two boys, Leo and Julian, whom I did not teach Russian language or customs. I bring them back to New York once a year now, and you observe with curiosity how handsome, tall, more American and less Russian they become with each new visit. I am sorry I have moved so far away, but you taught me restlessness and homelessness, one place no better than any other, New York City was too dif cult to live in, and I did not want to fall into an immigrant circle or to speak Russian. My wife and I decided, unlike you, to dissolve our marriage, trading new loneliness for loneliness in the relationship gone sour and distant years ago. I did not slam any doors, but my wife grew as silent and introverted as you did, mom, separated and withdrawn from our relationship. We also have photos in which we are smiling happily, with eyes only for each other. T ey are all in color, as if taken yesterday. Your photo, the black-and-white one, is venerable with age, but it is strange to look at, as the moment it shows and all of my childhood, were always full of color and brilliant. T ank you! It’s nice to see you happy and young again, even for the moment long gone, nearly forgotten.

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