Wrong Country

CHAPTER 7

Running Away

A common response to trauma is an escape from feelings when feelings are too much.

G. Boulanger, Wounded by Reality

My second year of university had a sudden, utterly terrible turn. It began in the same fashion as the first year: lectures, practical studies, walks around the town with Seriozha or by myself, movies, and visits to his friends. He introduced me to his mother, who didn’t like me, but I didn’t care about her impression of me. Besides, I didn’t like her as well. She was a single, possessive mother, controlling her son. The only appealing feature in her was her white, as snow, thick, luxurious hair gathered on her crown in a heavy knot. The hair added some sort of nobility to her figure.

I lost my virginity to Seriozha on my 20th birthday (we both did), but it was an imperceptible step for me; I yielded to his blandishments. I liked him, but we were simply friends, not a couple of lovers. He wrongly perceived our “affair,” consummated only once, as a love. He was disturbed by my indifference, by my wish to spend time in my dorm with other people. He was a homeboy and didn’t like the dormitory at all. On our winter vacation, on the day of my leaving for Voronezh, he wanted to see me off, so he came to the dormitory and didn’t find me in my room. None of my roommates knew where I had disappeared. Poor Seriozha began packing my suitcase and couldn’t hold back his tears. This is what I was told when I came back to my room. My suitcase was almost ready, but there was no Seriozha. He couldn’t stand my disregard for him. He left. I spent my time with my friends, drinking wine and celebrating the end of the semester. So, it was the end of Seriozha and me.

After winter break, I began to lead a more active social life. I even went to our dorm dances. For that, we had a big dance hall on the second floor. The student council provided the music. The twist was a favorite dance of that time. I couldn’t twist, but I could do the foxtrot. And as an old-fashioned girl, I loved to waltz passionately.

One Sunday, I went to dances, and a tall, handsome young man invited me to dance. He introduced himself, mentioning that he had studied German. This is all I remembered. The following morning, I woke up in his bed, next to him, in the male room, with three more men sleeping in their beds. What happened? Why was I there? In a man’s room with an unknown sleeping man? In panic and horror, not understanding what had happened, I left the room. While living in the dorm, I never heard a girl spend a night in the male room with a guy. It would be known and discussed in the student council meetings. What exactly happened? And why do I not remember anything?

It was early Monday morning. The dorm was still quiet. Everybody was sleeping. I went to my room but couldn’t go to bed and lie down. I was in confusion. I put on my winter coat and rushed out of the building. It was a very nasty morning at the end of February. The wet snowflakes fell on trees, buildings, and me. Those wet flurries added even more to my confusion. I was running in blank despair along the streets of Vasily Island, seeing nothing, my glasses covered by moist snowflakes, my feet wet. I was cold and hot at once. But I could not stop. I didn’t know how long I was on the streets or what time it was; when I couldn’t run, I walked and walked. I remember my crazy walk-in circles, wet feet, coat, and scarf askew to one side. (Looking back on it, I remind myself of crazy Raskolnikov, running around the same Vasily Island in despair.)

Tired and feeling guilty and ashamed, I returned to the dorm in total exhaustion. The building was quiet as before, but now it was almost empty because students had left for university. I was thankful for the solitude and quietness. It calmed me down. I went to the kitchen and made tea for myself. When I got warm, I retrieved my suitcase from under my bed, packed it with clothes, toiletries, shoes, and books, put on my still-wet coat, and, with my suitcase in one hand and my bear in the other, I left the dormitory.

I took the first tram I saw at the stop, sat down, and senselessly stared into the frosted window. I dashed out when I saw the tramway approaching the Vitebsk Railroad station. I entered the station and saw a line of people in front of the ticket booth. When it was my turn to buy a ticket, a cashier asked where I wanted to go. I didn’t know. She asked several times, becoming irritated. Finally, to stop this silly long moment, I asked her to sell me a ticket to the first leaving train, in any direction. She offered me a ticket to Polotsk. I bought a ticket.

I knew nothing about that town except that it was located in Belarus. I found a train, a hard carriage (I bought the cheapest ticket), and my seat. Across from me, a young woman was sitting with a small child. They were lightly dressed despite winter. The boy was crying or whimpering all the time. I gave him my bear, which was bigger than this boy. Poor boy! I made him happy. But his mother couldn’t believe that some unknown young woman could present her poor child with such an incredible present. She felt uncomfortable. Yet, I was glad to make a child happy in my awful condition. I, myself, in my wartime childhood, never had toys. Recently, I bought this colossal bear with my father's money as a present from him to myself. Of course, he knew and cared nothing of my psychological traumas because of him. The following morning, I arrived in Polotsk.

I knew not a soul here. I found a hotel (the only hotel) and paid for three days in a shared room. My roommate, a woman from the nearby city of Vitebsk, came to Polotsk on business.

I needed a job as soon as possible. I didn’t care what kind of job it would be. Any job. I had money only for four or five days. So, I asked the front desk clerk about the possibility of working around Polotsk. She assumed that I could find a typical laborer job on the extensive construction of a plant an hour from Polotsk. So, I took a bus to this place. The place happened to be “in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of nowhere, stranded between nowhere towns.” (G. Dyer). The workers of this construction were living in the barracks (I’ve had plenty of barracks experiences in my life, so I had to move to the USA to escape them). They drove to work and back for half an hour to their settlement, to another “nowhere.” The construction was one joyless place, the barracks, the other. I could stand it only because I was as automatic as a zombie. Every morning I got up with my roommates (it’s always four people in the Russian dormitory room), washed very quickly in the washing room with cold water, walked to the cafeteria to buy something for breakfast, then to the bus, which took us to the construction. Work was dirty and brutal. Our uniform was a pair of tarpaulin pants, a tarpaulin jacket, boots, and a headscarf. We worked with fiberglass (or glass-cotton, as we called it) and had to protect ourselves from the tiniest glass splinters. We put extensive layers of fiberglass between the walls of a building. I worked in the brigade of young women.

Don’t remember any faces or any names. After the drudgery of work, we returned to our barracks by the same buses. We washed in the cold washroom; there was neither hot water nor shower rooms; then we went for dinner in the workers’ cafeteria. On Saturdays, after work, we went to a bania. The only entertainment we had was a singing of the popular chastyshki. I didn’t participate in it, but I could listen if I was in the mood for some distraction.

I had to write to my parents and explain why I was living in some Novo-Polotsk and not at the university. I delayed my letter because “the past was so painful, it seared and burned, tortured consciousness” like T. Dreiser’s Clyde. I had no idea how ‘to explain’ my insane escape. It dawned on me, at last, what I left behind: my almost two years of university studies were lost, my student life-the seminar rooms in the ‘catacombs,’ the libraries, and an idle, pleasant talk with my friends, the magical city– all was in the past now and no future. I sent my new address to my mother without any logical explanation, and she was distraught. Then, belatedly, she got and sent me an official letter from the University informing me of the expulsion for non-attendance. My father wasn’t upset about my sudden departure from the University; he just assumed I had run away with some young man. Very close, but not with, or from …

My youth came at the time of James Baldwin's novel “Another Country,” and my terrors were so close to his terrors (although for different reasons): … what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented… to the extent they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty: precisely because they lived in the dark…

One day, a young man stopped his car in front of me when I, bone tired and dirty, dragged myself to the bus after work. A nice-looking guy, he had come to this construction site for a week or so on business from his Minsk Company. He was a building engineer. He offered to give me a lift to the workers' dorm. Every day, he would meet me after work and bring me to my dorm. I washed quickly in cold water, changed clothes, and met him (whose name I forgot) in the cafeteria, where we had dinner. Then we went for a walk in that joyless settlement. He also lived there, but in better conditions; he had a room for himself in the building for the businesspeople who visited the construction site. Once, he met me after work with a bouquet of roses. Where could he find the roses in this drab place? And how ridiculous I looked in my dirty tarpaulin clothes with the beautiful roses in my dirty hands!

Day in and day out - six months had passed since I came to this construction, and one day I realized the pointlessness of my staying here. It was a dead end. But how to untangle, unwind all the confusion I made of my life? I was ready to leave. But where? To the University? I inquired with the Dean of my Faculty if I could return to the second semester of the second course in the Russian department. I received a negative answer to my inquiry: The Faculty did not have a vacant place. I punished myself severely – I lost two years of my studies at university, and for what? Why? I couldn’t explain. I went dancing. What happened after the dance? Did I drink a lot of wine? Vodka? Did I have a blackout? I was unable to recall anything. Too late to ask. Instead, my guilt, shame, disgrace, and panic returned because I had to go back to my mother and somewhat explain about university. Meanwhile, I wrote her a letter about my return to Voronezh for one and a half months and then of going to Leningrad University for the entrance exams. I had to restart University as a new student from the first course.

My new acquaintance, a pleasant Jewish guy, had already left for Minsk, but knowing that I was going to Voronezh, offered me, first, to stop in his city and then continue with my trip to Voronezh. He will have booked a room for me in a hotel for three days. I agreed. Thus, I saw Minsk, the capital of Belarus, meaning -White Russia. Plain city, nothing interesting.

But three days, spent mostly in his car, going around the city, made me uneasy. Being a talented guy and knowing Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin by heart, he transferred Onegin into a modern student story, using Pushkin’s shining iambic rhythm. His poem was funny and witty. His gentle manners, intelligence, and good job rendered him an excellent young man with a promising future. Instead, he complained about his sad life and loneliness. Why has he been so lonely? Where were his Jewish and Russian friends, male and female? He made me sad talking about his unhappiness.

But I had no wish to go into his psychological problems. I would leave in two days and never see this nice guy again. At the same time, I couldn’t explain my uneasiness sitting next to him, and my suspicions were aroused. He tried to kiss me, I evaded his movements, and he understood. He brought me to the railroad station to buy a ticket to Voronezh. When I offered him money for my stay at the Minsk hotel, he refused to accept it. I felt awkward. On the eve of my departure, we bid each other farewell with some embarrassment. He gave me Feuchtwanger's novel “The False Nero” as a present, and I tried to solve the puzzle, which of us was false in our situation, this young man or I, his heroine from that novel…

Back to Voronezh

I sleep poorly with strangers

And my life is not my own

Osip Mandelstam

As usual, a train slowly lines the platform. I see my mother waiting for me. When I come down, she is shocked by my appearance: “You look like you are from prison.” “Almost,” I joke. She didn’t expect to see such a grotesque person instead of her student-daughter. I am too thin, skin and bones; almost black, so tanned I am; and poorly dressed: a T-shirt, sports pants, canvas shoes. She feels ashamed to bring me to our apartment building: everybody knows me as a student from Leningrad University. And now, who am I, and - from where? We go to her brother, my Uncle Oleg.

Many years had passed since he had happily married my first teacher, Lidiya Pavlovna.

In fact, the happy time was short. But they brought to the world two boys, and after that, she became a heap of troubles: she stopped caring about the two little boys, found lovers, and then spent some time in a “yellow” house, as Russians call the Psychiatric Hospital.

Now, he is married to another woman. He sees his sons seldom. They are adults, married, and lead unhappy lives, especially the older son. Lidiya Pavlovana is already dead. Being in the army, his older son Valentin got a high radiation dose and became an invalid. Slowly, he is losing his muscles. Soon, he will be moving in a wheelchair only. A young, illiterate village girl agreed to marry this young invalid only because of his two-room city apartment, which would allow her to escape her village life. She brought her mother to Voronezh to live with them, and both were rude to him. It was a painful situation for poor Valentin.

His younger son, Volodia, who graduated from a technical school, works at the Radio and Television Factory. His wife is his coworker. She is from the village, also, like his brother. I met her only two, maybe three times in my life. She is not sociable; she has no interest in anybody or anything but her husband.

Uncle Oleg is a chief accountant for the military construction unit of the Soviet Army. Due to the respectability of this organization, he (not in the army) secured a one-room apartment downtown, located next to Lenin Square. (Every city in the USSR had a Lenin Square.) They furnished their room only with bare necessities, without even a sofa. I sleep on the floor to the disgusting sounds of their lovemaking, as the dry friction of two scrapers. That continues for the whole month. I love my uncle, but not his wife or the dry, grating sound of their lovemaking.

My mother came to see me two or three times during my stay at my uncle's. We had to discuss my future. I cost her dearly. I can’t count on my father's support. He is so distant that I don’t even consider him a father. My mother’s relationship with me is not a nurturing type, but she feels responsible for me even in my adult age. She agrees to support me again for five years at Leningrad University. What else could she do with her odd daughter? I never explained to her my escape from university. How could I – at our distance, in our so non-closeness? And she? She never asked.