by Lev Golinkin
“Can you do something for me?” she finally said. “Can you promise me that if I tell you something, you’ll believe me, if just for a moment?”
I didn’t say yes, or maybe I did and I just don’t remember.
“Can you promise me that you’ll believe me when I tell you that everything that you just told me—the hating, the beating, the kids in Russia, your friend Oleg, the mirror—can you believe me when I tell you that it’s not your fault?
“It’s not your fault. I just want you to believe that.”
I wanted to tell her I’ll try. I wanted to tell her I will. I wanted to kiss her. There were times when I was with her that I felt I could, or I should, and it would just feel right. I wanted to take whatever it was that whispered that a beautiful girl would never be interested in a zhid, and tell it to go fuck itself.
I slid open the glass door and stepped out into the empty campus.
* * *
The matches refused to ignite. They jerked across the matchbook and did nothing, or caught fire and instantly puttered out. I kept tearing them off and striking them and cursing them and cursing the wind, and at some point after I’d gone through seven or eight, I realized that there was no wind, and I couldn’t light a match for the life of me because my hands were trembling.
Something was different. As I fumbled with the matches under the still black sky of Alicia’s backyard, suspended between the momentary sparks in front of me and the dim glow of her window, where I knew she was still standing, I knew beyond a doubt—something had changed. The cold sky, the frozen grass littered with burnt matches, my dorm on the hill somewhere ahead, all of it was eerily distant, and I found myself shrunk inward, my senses focused and acutely self-aware.
I felt wrung out and exhausted, weary and victorious. I was scared, terrified, more than I had ever been. I commanded my hands to be still, and with a single deliberate motion I lit my cigarette, walked toward the hill to my dorm, and didn’t look back.
There’s a complacency that comes with hopelessness, a strange relief in giving up. You don’t have to try anymore; you can just lie, and that’s it. I can’t explain it except to say that it feels safe, or rather that it used to feel safe, because by the time I had finished my cigarette, swiped my entry card, and heard my feet clanging on the brown stairway of my dorm, I knew that I could no longer be safe in my misery.
Years of yearning had finally broken out, and a rhythm, long ignored, beat through me. To be happy, to no longer feel empty and unwanted; to work with the world, to become a full person. To have a real identity, not one based on numbers. Alicia. Appalachia. Service. Hugs. Walking through campus. People saying hi. Saying hi back. Not feeling shitty. Louder it grew, steadier, and surer. To be desired. To desire. To have someone need me, to let someone in. To look in a mirror …
I could feel the fear and the hatred welling up within me, surging, stretching, registering danger, rallying, scrambling, scratching at my heart, and reminding me of how weak I truly was.
The cadence did not stop. The cadence grew stronger.
To be able to sit down with another human being and let them hold my soul for a moment, to hold it and return it, and to do so without judging, or controlling, or hating, and to do the same to them—that was the gift of Appalachia. That was the gift Alicia gave me.
ONE MAN, ONE JACKET
Tijuana, Mexico, January 2003
“Is it always this awkward?” the guy next to me whispered.
“Depends on the group,” I muttered. With this group it’s awkward. Tonight will be especially awkward. Tonight will suck.
“Don’t take it personally,” I said aloud. The room was silent. The doors were shut, the shutters were shut, nothing was lit but a tiny stub of a candle, and I could barely make out the people next to me, and still I felt fifteen pairs of eyes hone in on my sweatshirt. “Trust me, don’t take it personally,” I added, but they couldn’t trust me and I couldn’t blame them. These people were sad and confused, and throwing empty platitudes at them wasn’t helping.
An outburst of growls and yipping drifted up through the shutters of the migrant house. In the mornings, the city buzzed with trucks and day laborers, evenings brought drunk tourists from California, but this late at night, Tijuana belonged to the dogs.
Shut your mouth, let it go, they’re not going to jump off the roof, they’ll be fine, pleaded years of training, but as much as I wanted to listen, I couldn’t. Problem was, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Oh, I’ve had free lunches, too many to count, free suppers, free clothes, free rides, but some things aren’t paid for with money. I could feel the debt pricking me like a splinter in my mind, telling me to speak. It was the most frustrating obligation, a quiet little IOU in your head, the easiest thing to brush off, and also the most impossible.
A cheap convenience store matchbook slid around its cover inside my right hand. In, out, in, out, my fingers fumbled with the cardboard. Across in the other sleeve, my left index finger kept digging at the soft flesh below the thumbnail. I had a hood on, a hat on, I had my sleeves pulled out over my hands and the ends bundled up so you couldn’t see a single fingertip, I had both bundles shoved far into the sweatshirt pouch, and still I felt naked. I prayed for the darkness to obscure me, wrap me in the safety of its gloom. I prayed for the shutters to pull themselves a little tighter, I begged the candle to burn a little less, just a tiny bit, for just five minutes. Suddenly I felt the wind knifing through the sweater and the thin layer of shirts, and I was two feet shorter and twelve years younger, and shaking from the cold.
* * *
“One man, give one jacket,” instructed Hilberto earlier that evening. “Be careful. No time to try on. One man, one jacket, next man, next jacket. Understand?”
We filed out of the van and into the church parking lot. The sun was setting as the hills of Tijuana receded into the night sky. Tijuana was an earth-toned city, a massive sprawl of squat, box-shaped buildings intermingled with squat, box-shaped shacks. As the day faded, the earth got browner and the shacks became grayer and the whole area seemed to sink, as if the hills themselves were burrowing into the ground, seeking shelter for the night.
I was in Tijuana with a Boston College student group working at La Casa del Migrante, a large homeless shelter that resembled a cheap motel. This afternoon, Hilberto, La Casa’s director, asked the male volunteers to assist him with a clothing donation at a local church, where a long line of men had already assembled. Inside the church storage room waited boxes stuffed with sweaters and jackets collected by San Diego parishes. Judging by the desperation of the men in the hallway, these types of events did not happen often.
Hilberto repeated his warning and unlatched the door, and the men rushed in. They moved quickly, so quickly that we had to devote half of our group to crowd control alone, trying to prevent an all-out stampede. I barely had time to reach for another jacket before the next man was already there.
I straddled two worlds. The volunteers behind me were caught in a hurricane, a whirling frenzy of cardboard shuffling, opening, emptying, collapsing, vanishing. Every time I turned back for more jackets, I was struck by how quickly the boxes were disappearing. It was like looking at time-lapse photography that compacted several hours into a few frames.
In front of me, nothing changed. The line wound around a corner, making it impossible to see its end. I was so busy shoving jackets that I was barely able to see anything but the men’s hands, which instantly replaced one another, making it seem as if there was just one hand in front of me, an empty, weathered hand that kept coming at me from some inexhaustible source of empty, weathered hands.
The volunteer next to me handed out the last jacket, and we froze. The men in front didn’t move but the line behind them kept undulating, shoving, pushing, until those around the corner rushed forward, spilled into the room, and realized all of the jackets were gone. Some were angry; all were disappointed. Our group stood still, unsure of what to do, when Hilberto sho
uted something in Spanish, then pointed to the limp heap of cardboard: “Put in van, then get in. Thank you for help.” He ushered the men outside, locked the room, unlocked the van, and climbed in. I joined him.
I could see the church parking lot in the van’s side mirror. The church was functional at best; it looked like a shabby middle school, and only the lonely cross reaching up to the sky imparted it with any sense of sanctity. Outside, small groups of men were dissipating, returning to their homes or going in search of one. Our volunteers remained in the lot, standing alone or squatting on the pavement. Hilberto and I sat in the van. Hilberto stared ahead, an impassive look on his face. “You cannot let it get you,” he said. “You do your job, and you go home. You need to make yourself a heart of stone, because if not, your heart will break.”
I said nothing. Hilberto lived, as I had once lived, in an imbalanced world, where the number of jackets was markedly fewer than the number of jacketless men. It was an unforgiving ratio, as true in Vienna as it was in Tijuana. It was a world where cynicism and despair waited around the corner, ready to pounce on any act of kindness, a world where you smile at a refugee kid and give him a black bomber jacket with golden zippers and he snaps at you for no reason. You can’t let the situation consume you. I understood. It was probably why I was the only volunteer ready to go home.
Back in the shelter, we held reflection, a nightly exercise to debrief the group. Reflection was tough that evening. People were saddened, utterly. Many felt guilty, as if they were responsible for the lack of jackets in Tijuana. Others felt that the angry, desperate stares of the men had been directed at them. I was fighting the urge to walk out of the room. Thinking about my past was uncomfortable; speaking about it made my hands shake, made me want to run, be someplace else, but the guilt was too strong. I owed a debt to the Joint and HIAS workers in Austria, to the blond girl who gave me a jacket at Madame Eva’s house, to Oswald Prager, who pulled us off the train station in Vienna, pudgy Mr. Prager in his crumpled blue blazer who almost drowned in a sea of migrants and still kept his shit together. I owed them, and tonight, twelve years later, the bill came, pried open my mouth, squeezed out the memories, compelled me to say something encouraging.
So I hid in the darkness and spoke of Eva’s house, the house with the red door, and the girl who made me feel warm, gave me a chance to be a child for a few moments. I stressed that even though we helped only a small number of people, we made an enormous difference in their lives, warming their nights, enabling them, I hoped, to get jobs, get money, help their families.
After reflection ended, I padded out to the shelter’s top-floor walkway. Three stories of silence stretched below. The migrants went to sleep early: they worked odd jobs and long hours and would be out hunting for more work at dawn. It was cold, and I was tired and tempted to go to bed, but I couldn’t: five minutes earlier, I had assured the group they shouldn’t take it personally, but it was different for me. I crouched against the wall and lit a cigarette, my eyes drifting up with the smoke. It was hard to see the stars. The sun had long since set, but it never got dark in Tijuana. A sickly glare hung over the city: the glow of carnival lights and strip clubs on Avenida Revolución, of sprawling highways and factories, and, overshadowing it all, the massive floodlights that lit up the U.S.–Mexico border.
I made my body as still as possible and then I left; I floated up through the courtyard, out of Tijuana, out of Mexico. I bent my entire will, and I sent myself across the ocean, to Vienna, to Eva’s, to the girl who once handed me a jacket, who smiled at me, whom I sneered at, who probably went home wondering what on Earth she did to make me hate her. For years I thought of her quiet smile, her demeanor, her warmth. For years I still felt ashamed for lashing out at her. I hoped she understood I was just a stubborn kid, that it was instinct, and sitting in that courtyard in Tijuana, after all that time, I was finally able to smile back at her.
KILCOYNE
Chestnut Hill, Mass., March 2003
Everything came to a head in March of my senior year, as I sat in an empty Boston College cafeteria, sipping a coffee, sipping away the end of college. I had just informed my parents that I was not going to med school. Mom and Dad reaffirmed, in no uncertain terms, that I was a failure who had wasted the past twenty-three years of their lives and thousands of dollars of their hard-earned money, not to mention the enormous sacrifice of emigration. I had braced myself to hear all that. Mom and Dad had gotten their citizenships, voted, paid taxes, but America would never be their country. I knew it every time I heard them refer to Americans as them, and Russia and Russians as us and ours. I was reminded of it when Mom would come home in her security guard uniform, or talk on the phone to her friends five thousand miles away. “The day you graduate from med school is the day I can go and find a noose, because everything I needed to accomplish here will be done,” Dad told me, again and again, in high school and in college. Now Dad won’t be able to hang himself and it’s all my fault. It would’ve been hilarious if it didn’t hurt so much.
Across the cafeteria table from me towered Dr. Kilcoyne, my freshman-year philosophy/theology professor and advisor, who had unofficially retained the latter role throughout my time at BC. The man had always instilled me with awe, in the true sense of the word: admiration mixed in with a healthy bit of fear. Standing in at six feet five, 250-plus pounds, the undisputed holder of several advanced degrees, Francis P. Kilcoyne was the type of professor one expects to find in movies like Dead Poets Society, not on an actual brick-and-mortar campus. He had traveled the world, supervised archaeological digs in the Middle East, and worked a couple of stints for the government in Washington. Prior to December finals, he had the class at his house for Christmas dinner; several times he nearly bankrupted an all-you-can-eat buffet by taking his advisees out to lunch. He’d bonded our class into a unit, not just faces stocking a lecture hall, and even three years later I always stopped and chatted with my old classmates. Kilcoyne’s only weakness was ties: he wore these comically short, dinky ties that rested atop his belly, the tips poking out in front of him, and as childish as it was, on the few occasions I’d been forced to wear ties, I made certain mine were nice and long, the opposite of those donned by the man who surpassed me in everything else.
We sat in a forgotten corner of the cafeteria and talked about the twin options I saw before me. Both had begun with hope, and both had ended in disappointment. For Mom and Dad, who’d roamed a strange land depending on the mercy of others, who learned firsthand that there are cats in America, med school embodied safety: financial, social, lasting, and complete. It was the quintessential American Dream: to transplant oneself to a foreign country, endure the myriad sacrifices of being the first generation, and retire in peace knowing your children will thrive. But for me, who’d racked up achievement after achievement only to remain No One, med school loomed like a gargantuan trophy for an endless mantel that stretched beyond the horizon, an insatiable trophy case that would never be full. So what if No One has an MD after his name? What’s the point of the American Dream if it isn’t your dream? I couldn’t explain it to Mom and Dad at the time, and even afterward it would take them a couple of years to understand, but then again, it would take me a few years to see their side as well.
My second option was equally, if not more, frustrating. After Boston College, chasing accomplishments and scurrying from one address to the next was no longer possible, because I finally recognized that behind each achievement, emptiness still lurked. I loved my freshman mentoring and community service trips, I’d walk across campus and say “hi” to people and feel connected, and be at peace, but as much as I had tasted that feeling of belonging, true engagement remained beyond me. Every time I got close to someone, every time I edged out a little too far, the overwhelming urge to protect myself would kick in like a stubborn governor function set inside me and I couldn’t do a damn thing to fight it. As cliché as it sounded, I told Kilcoyne, I felt like I was standing before two paths, both dead e
nds. I felt like I had no future.
“You don’t, of course,” Kilcoyne coughed. “You do not have a future. But it’s much more serious than that.”
I wasn’t looking for a “there, there” (Kilcoyne wasn’t the type), but the immediate confirmation of my fears skewered me to the chair. Not having a future seemed pretty damn serious on its own. I almost didn’t want to know what could be more serious than that.
“It’s important to realize you’re heading down a potentially dangerous path. You’ve got a bit of knight in shining armor in you—you’re an idealist, and you want to make a difference—which in itself is not a bad thing. But be careful to always stay in touch with reality: there’s the dream, the desire, and then there’s the real world, where not everyone wants to be helped or can be helped, and it is crucial, crucial, to be able to negotiate between the two worlds.”
The professor was hunched over the table. His normally placid face tightened as if an electric current had shot across it, and his voice pierced me. It was quiet, barely above a whisper, and what came across more than words was the rhythm, with its sharp yet quiet pauses, like the muffled cadence of a drum. I’d heard that voice before, but only a handful of times, in the classroom, when Kilcoyne spoke of something important and dangerous, very important and very dangerous, like the bloodshed and hope intrinsic to and triggered by Jesus suffering on the cross, or of the false allure of Fascism, of Jews rising up in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Buddhist monks immolating themselves in defiance of the Vietnam War.
