by Zhanna Slor
> Maybe?
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my dreams. Problem was I didn’t really have any.
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come visit me here. Really and truly.
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go back for basically my whole life.
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whole life. Too bad we couldn’t switch!
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Then the conversation ends, and besides a few more innocuous messages that don’t amount to anything, it never picks back up. Not on Facebook anyway. But it doesn’t matter—because I think I know where Anna went.
OCTOBER/
NOVEMBER 2007
ANNA
________________
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Before Zoya, the closest I came to returning to Ukraine was in high school, during a Baltic cruise, when we spent a day in St. Petersburg. It was a weird trip; even though it was my first time back abroad, I had become anxious the last week, spending so much time locked in a room with my parents, and was looking forward to finally seeing Russia. But being Soviet refugees back in Russia was strange. On more than one occasion we overheard the Russian tour guides joking about how fat and ugly the group from our cruise ship was. They didn’t notice we could understand them; that’s how American we’d come to look in our bootcut jeans and Adidas sneakers. No one suspected us of being in our homeland. Maybe because it wasn’t our homeland anymore. The Jews had gone with the ruble, after all. And like my parents said, we were Jews first and Russians second—at least, this had been the case in the USSR. Our passports listed Jewish under nationality. Who knew, maybe we were Americans first now, or refugees first. I wasn’t sure. My identity was such a mess. It was sort of like wearing layers during the time of year that Autumn turns to Winter: when it’s freezing out, you appreciate every one. But when that sun comes out, you want to shed half of it to the ground; you feel suffocated. This is what identity could feel like, for me, sometimes. Like wearing too many coats, then not wearing enough.
I didn’t know what we were in Russia. Travelers, tourists? In the markets, old ladies asked my parents where they were from; they said we had peculiar accents. My parents were surprised to hear this—how could they have developed accents in their native language?—but they mostly found it funny. They didn’t care. It wasn’t the same country as the one we abandoned in 1991. This was not a visit home any more than the afternoons we spent in Sweden or Norway. We made our way from site to site like the rest of the Americans, buying souvenirs, old teacups and various sets of Russian nesting dolls, as if we were people who didn’t already own these things. We walked around the Hermitage and ate piroshki from street vendors. I wanted to feel the weight and freedom of our past, let it fill me with completeness, but all that happened was that I spent all my money and then got tired from all the walking. I had no connection to St. Petersburg. I’d never been there before. Around seven, we had to go back to the boat.
When we returned to Wisconsin, my parents agreed that one day back in Russia was more than enough for them. On future trips they traveled to China and Australia and London; they had no interest in returning to Russia, or anywhere near it. Had we moved to LA or New York like many of my cousins, perhaps I would not feel whatever deep, deep longing had nestled its way inside me where homesickness once was. But I could not change the past any more easily than I could change myself.
“Hi,” I tell Zoya, once her face appears in front of me. Despite our previous internet correspondence, I feel nervous, so I take out another tiny nugget of pot and put it in Sylvia Plath and smoke it. Soon, my emotions dissipate into the air. It is hard to hold onto a thought, let alone a feeling when you are high. I’m not sure I am ready, nor am I sure what exactly you’re supposed to do when you see your potential half-sister for the first time, but I no longer feel so nervous about it.
“Hi,” a pixelated Zoya tells me from the other side of the world. From my hometown. The place I wanted to go more than anywhere else for years and never could. Even though I can only see her pixelated face and half a wall, I suddenly ache with the need to be there in person.
“Hi,” I say again.
Zoya giggles a little. “This is weird,” she admits. The lousy resolution resolves itself, and I am able now to study her face, which I do. The first thing I notice is her eyebrows, light brown, plucked too thin for her broad forehead. Then her small blue eyes, which appear a bit sunken behind her full nose. Her upper lip is slim, but her bottom lip is full. Her lips are quite pleasant. As are her shoulders, which are compact and narrow. I expand my vision more outward to try and understand what combination they make, and I conclude quickly that these attributes in no way combine towards something familiar. She is pretty, but she looks nothing like me or my dad. There’s nothing in her appearance that would make me think we are remotely related.
This is both a relief and a disappointment.
“So…how’s it going? How are you?” I ask, unsure of what to say. If I knew this was, in fact, my sister staring back at me, I would maybe act differently. I’d be dying to know all the details of her life, what her interests are, and what she is like. Even if she were simply a new friend I would want to know these things. Because I don’t know, and she is not a random person but someone who believes something that could potentially be very damaging, I am not sure if I should be more cautious or more welcoming.
“Okay,” she says, also nervous. I continue to scrutinize her face a bit more: though she looks nothing like us, nor does she seem very Jewish, she most certainly looks Russian. I can quite often spot a Russian person before they even say one word; my whole family can. Though if someone asked me what exactly makes a person look Russian, I don’t think I could answer. I just know.
“Alive,” she adds, letting out an uncomfortable giggle.
“I’ve been thinking,” I eventually start. “Why don’t you move to America instead? It might be easier, at least with the whole Jewish angle.”
“America is no longer an easy option. It hasn’t been since the nineties,” Zoya explains.
“Oh. Really? Why?”
“After the Berlin Wall fell, the prime minister of Israel urged Europe and the States to stop granting refugee status visas to Soviet émigrés, because they were not refugees, they already had a homeland in Israel, and were only moving to America for economic reasons.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I say.
“Yeah. It’s okay. Israel is fine too.”
“You really want to go there though? With all the crazy religious people and everything?
“What’s your issue with Israel?” asks Zoya, picking up on something I barely register myself. “Israel is great. I went there for three months, and I didn’t want to leave.”
“Really? Why?”
“The food, the culture, the buildings. It’s so...alive. There are people out all the time, eating and drinking and smoking, laughing. They have that here too, but it’s mostly tourists. Everyone’s poor. In Israel, sure some people are poor, but there’s not so much difference between poor and not poor, like here. And at least there’s hope. There’s...life.” She turns around and looks behind her at something. “Can you wait a minute?” she asks me, then her head turns into a pixelated blur and disappears off the screen.
This gives me the opportunity to study her living quarters more closely: I see faded flower-print wallpaper, peeling at the edges, spread across much of the room. An old wooden table covered in loose papers. Books stacked on the floor under what appears to be some bus maps. It’s not much smaller than my own, but it seems far older, and far more cramped, though this probably comes from a severe lack in organizing skills. There is no visible door, nor a
ny useful furniture besides the foldout couch and table. In combination it resembles the sort of room I’ve seen in photo albums of old Soviet apartments. This doesn’t exactly surprise me. When my grandma Mila last visited Chernovtsy, she said the building next to our old apartment on Ruska St., which had been under construction when we left, was still not done. At that point, ten years had passed.
“Sorry,” Zoya says when she returns, now wearing a large purple down coat over her body, re-pixelated. “Our pipes froze again. I tell my neighbors to keep the water running when it’s this cold, but they won’t do it. They’re narcomanee, so what can you do…”
“Narcomanee?” I ask, unfamiliar with the word.
Zoya mimes a needle in the arm. “Heroin,” she says. “It’s a big problem in Ukraine. It’s cheaper than cigarettes now.”
“Oh,” I say. As if I need any more reason to feel for this poor woman. It’s amazing she isn’t a junkie like her neighbors. I find that I like and respect her all the more given these circumstances, especially seeing that she doesn’t seem particularly unhappy, at least any more so than anyone I know in Milwaukee. “I’m sorry.”
Zoya shrugs looks into the distance. She definitely knows what she’s facing, and is clearly doing everything she can to change her destiny. It makes me feel weak in comparison. I have so many options open to me and yet I still only do what my parents tell me.
“Listen, I have a request to ask of you. But you can say no if you want to,” she says. She shifts in her hard, wooden chair and starts pulling at a strand of hair somewhat obsessively. I recognize this tic: the fixation of a smoker wanting a cigarette. There’s an ashtray behind her so I’m not sure what stops her. Instead of lighting one up, her face turns serious.
“Go ahead.”
“A while ago I found a DNA testing place in America. My friend translated everything for me. The way it works when someone lives out of the country is they ask you to register for a number online, and then you send a cotton swab with your DNA to them in an envelope. The person in America gets a whole kit. They have to send in the kit labeled with the registered number to match up with the cotton swab; then they do the test or whatever,” she says. “So I only need your dad’s address to send the kit. I’ll pay for it obviously.”
As the details of this revelation hit me (a tad belatedly, as I have to think about each word for a long time), I snap back to reality. “Oh my God. No. Don’t send it to my dad,” I say in English. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“I was worried you might say that,” she says, disappointed.
The thought that she was seconds away from sending my dad a DNA kit! Goodness. Surely she could find his address with a quick search online, at least in real estate records. Does she really lack any foresight? Between the vague message that looked like spam and the idea of sending a kit to my parents’ house, I’m starting to wonder if she has a severe impulsiveness issue or a severe lack of intelligence. Or if there is something else altogether I am missing.
“The thing is I already sent in the swab and even got the registered number and everything,” Zoya adds.
“Please Zoya. Don’t. Let me think of another option, okay?”
Zoya starts to chew on her hair, deep in thought. She doesn’t respond.
“What’s the big rush anyway?” I ask. “You already waited this long.”
Zoya stops chewing her hair and scoots her chair away from the desk. The screen pixelates again before focusing in. She opens her coat to point at something. Right as the connection solidifies again, making the image come into focus, I understand what she’s pointing at.
It’s a giant pregnant belly.
“Oh,” I say.
“I already waited too long as it is,” she says.
“How far along are you?”
“Far,” she answers. “Six months or so.” She looks down at a piece of paper. “98990 w. Oakwood Lane. This is the right address for your papa?”
“Yes, but—” I think about this for no more than two seconds before coming up with a solution. It’s two seconds I may come to regret. And yet, I don’t see any better options. What if my mom accidentally opened mail addressed to my dad? “Please don’t send it to him. Send it here,” I say.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe by the time it gets here we’ll know more. I can try to convince my dad to do the right thing.” Or I can take the test, I think. But I don’t say it aloud, because I don’t want to make any promises so soon.
She looks at me skeptically. “Do you think he will agree with you? That it’s the right thing?” she says.
A weird question to ask, if she were to know my dad at all. My dad always does the right thing. He’s practically Captain America. He’s Captain Russian American. “Of course he will. Once he thinks about it? Definitely.”
“Because I’m not so sure he’ll agree with you,” she adds.
“What do you mean?” Outside, it begins to rain, the drops echoing off the roof. It makes the whole conversation feel ominous somehow. I get up to close the window before responding.
“According to my mom, he knows all about me. She thinks that’s why you all left. Thought.”
“That’s impossible,” I tell her. And utterly ridiculous, I think. We left because we were Jews. Because the Soviet Union was a terrible place. We left because we wanted to.
“Everything is possible,” Zoya counters, her mood visibly altering. “If you don’t know that, then you’ve lived a very different life than I have.”
I frown, annoyed now. “I’ll message you my address,” I tell Zoya. “Okay? Worst case, I’ll take the test myself,” I add, even though I probably shouldn’t. It seems to me the best option, at least off the top of my head. If Zoya is really my dad’s daughter, it will blow up his whole life to take this test. And he must believe there’s a chance of it or he wouldn’t be so opposed to my talking to Zoya. If he was thinking clearly, he would have already realized that was the best solution from day one, not blocking her and forcing her to contact more family members. I’ve always thought of my dad as a very intelligent man. How does he not realize that ignoring something doesn’t make it go away?
I guess even smart men have blind spots.
Zoya seems to relax now; perhaps it was what she was after all along. “Fine,” she mumbles. But it looks like the best option, the more I think about it; I won’t have to argue with my dad, and if the test turns out to be zero then no one else has to know about this fiasco. I’m relieved just thinking about it. “Let me know when you get it. And thank you.”
“Sure. And write me your address too,” I add at the last second. “Just in case I will need it.”
“Okay. Thank you, Anastasia. I hope we can keep talking. I would like to get to know you.”
“Me, too,” I say. I mostly mean it. But the conversation has admittedly irked me. I spend a lot of energy then convincing myself I am doing the right thing. After she logs out, I turn the computer off, and smoke the entire bowl in Margot’s pipe myself, until I’ve entirely annihilated my brain cells into a coma. Then, all day long, I repeat those words in my head: Do you think he will agree with you?
For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer to this question.
ANNA
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CHAPTER TWENTY
Consequences don’t always appear in one fell swoop; sometimes they are jagged, ripping slowly through the course of your everyday life, like dull scissors cutting fabric. One moment, everything is as it always was. And the next? Landslide. I didn’t know this, because I had never really done anything before that might produce adverse side effects. I’d never argued with my parents. I got good grades. I paid my rent on time. But there’s only so much goodness to go around before the world begins to show you its true colors. Before those colors start to rub off on you like too much paint.
In short: things are about to get sticky.
It starts one
day towards the end of November. I’m at the door of Fuel, about to buy myself a Fat Vegan sandwich—I’m not a vegan, but occasionally I try to become one for a few days—when I walk almost directly into Abby. She stops about an inch from my face and backs up.
“Whoa. I did not see you there,” she says, in her pleasantly hoarse voice. In her hand is a black coffee thermos, a giant pleather purse with feathers, and a burning cigarette. She leans over and gives me a half-hug. “How is it that I never see you anymore and we live together?”
This is a good question. I’d barely seen her since she tried to burn her clothes in the yard, and my landlord happened to come by and see her. Let’s just say he was not happy. Abby had been lying low ever since. The house had been quiet all around, in fact. “Where you going right now?” I ask.
“Foundation. Ed called in sick,” she says, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Hey. Have you heard from August lately?”
I shake my head no and steal a drag from her cigarette, if only to get it away from the feathers on her purse. When I give it back, I place it in her other hand.
“He hasn’t called me in a while,” Abby whines. “Last I heard he was in Atlanta. He went there to introduce a girl to his mom.”
“Really? That was fast,” I say. “What’s her name?”
“Box.”
“Box? That’s her name?”
“You know train-hoppers,” she shrugs. “They’re always making up new names for themselves.”
“Well, there are names, and then there are inanimate objects.”
Abby does not seem perturbed by this. “It’s no worse than Twigs the Clown,” she tells me. “Remember him?”
A shiver passes through me then, as I remember how I’d made out with him at a bonfire under the bridge. I don’t know why, but I’d felt so dirty afterward, like it had rubbed off on me or something. And I was also pretty dirty, I had to shower as soon as I made it home. “True,” I manage to agree. “Train-hoppers should really come up with a different word for clown; it’s not even in the same genre to juggle swords and spit fire instead of making kids balloon animals.”
