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.
