pressed Borya to herself so tight that he cried out, but he didn’t try to wiggle free.
“Wait here, kitten.”
Before waking up Anton and Pavlik, she tiptoed into the hallway. The bananas were gone, as she’d suspected, along with the tomatoes, oranges, cheese, Anton’s favorite smoked meat and sausages, and the wine. She rummaged in the suitcase and pulled out the green Yugoslavian dress. Made of high-quality silk, it had hardly gathered any wrinkles on its long journey east.
2012
This morning, a phone call from an unfamiliar foreign number interrupted my game of golf. I winced, recognizing Russia’s dialing code, and let it go to voice mail. I would have done the same with any unidentified caller. You never know what guise the past might put on to haunt you. I had my habitual postgame round of cocktails with my golf partners, all California retirees like me, and returned to the condo I shared with my sister, Angela. She wasn’t home. I took a long, cool shower, then went to the patio and looked out for a long while at the red terra-cotta roofs of our condo community, which, if not for the palm trees that stuck out here and there among the old Cadillacs and swimming pools, almost succeeded in looking Florentine. I listened to the voice mail twice. The message was from my former best friend. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-eight years and hadn’t spoken for twenty.
“Tolik, is it you or is it not you?” his message began. His voice was thin but cheerful; he must have been putting on airs. He’d gotten my number through an improbably coiled chain of acquaintances, he went on to explain. “How are things? Family? It’d be nice to talk of our old adventures. Do you still play tennis? I’m in Voronezh, still.” I waited to hear what he wanted, but perhaps this was something he was saving for the conversation proper. He gave his number with the country and city codes and hung up.
I went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, and took some deep breaths. Sputnik, my salt-and-pepper schnauzer, jumped up next to me, wagging his joystick tail. Then he hopped back down and planted his muzzle on my knee. Behind his bushy eyebrows his black eyes begged for a walk, and a snack, and love. For everything at once and right away.
Tolyan and I had been through the trenches of youth together, his loyal presence a watermark of authenticity on so many of my best memories. I should have been happy to hear from him. But what I felt was acute annoyance at this rather minimal invasion of my privacy. Maybe I’ve become too American. Or not yet American enough.
As I go about my long day, performing tasks I don’t mind, thinking either about what I now have the time and mind space to notice—a beautiful flower or an intricate cloud formation—or the people who matter to me—my daughter, Sonya, my sister, Angela, my wife, Marina—I am sometimes shocked into a fleeting physical weakness by the realization of how fast the time has galloped by, each winter marked by the increasingly passionate moaning of my once broken shin. And by the fact that I am here and Tolyan is still there, whereas we started out together and young.
We were both named Anatoly; I was Tolik for short, and he Tolyan. We were born a year before Stalin’s death in a small town on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, in the northeast. Despite its isolation, every Russian of a certain age still shudders at the mention of our hometown, Magadan, which was once the gate to the most brutal Stalinist labor camps—the most remote island in the notorious Gulag Archipelago. Besides mining gold, tin, and uranium in the permafrost basin of the Kolyma River, the prisoners were engaged in extensive civil works, building the first roads and houses, as well as the Park of Culture and Leisure, the cinema, and the stadium, with its adjacent Palace of Sport. I still remember a brigade that worked on a five-story building across from mine. The construction site was blocked off by a fence—rows of barbed wire strung between eight-foot-high wooden beams. Several makeshift watchtowers were positioned around the perimeter. Canvas-top trucks brought the prisoners in the morning, when I was on my way to school, and carted them back to the camp at sunset. By then the security had been relaxed: the prisoners were not shackled, and the guards were not poking their napes with Kalashnikovs.
Although my mother had reprimanded Tolyan and me when she caught us talking to the prisoners through the fence, we became friendly with many. The scent of the Khrushchev Thaw was in the air; their hopes for freedom were high. At night we snuck in through the spaces between the barbed wire and hid cigarettes in agreed-upon places. In return, the prisoners carved toy guns out of wood and left them for us in secret spots.
By the mid-sixties, half of the town’s population consisted of ex-convicts, some living and working side by side with ex-guards. Many former prisoners were criminals, but there were equally many people with higher education who were not allowed to leave Magadan—doctors, teachers, geologists, engineers. My father knew and worked with many of them. He was in charge of the petroleum supply for the whole region. Whenever I asked him what those people had been imprisoned for, his response was: For having a long tongue. Writers, artists, and musicians of national fame had sat in the Magadan camps, and productions at the local theater were on par with those in Moscow and Leningrad, but back then we kids didn’t understand. Schools until recently didn’t teach this layer of history. Besides, our heads were crammed with mischief. There was no space for anything else.
Tolyan and I were unruly but quick-witted enough to get through school with minimum effort. And we were lucky. Our skinny backsides were forever saved by bells, snow days, and convenient illnesses—our teachers’ or our own. We were called to the blackboard only on the days when we had, on a hunch, prepared our lesson. Everyone smoked in the bathroom, but only Tolyan and I never got caught. We skipped piano lessons and went sledding on our folders, leaving our parents to puzzle over why our sheet music was always wet.
We crawled through the small underground tunnels by the old cinema, which we called “the catacombs.” What with the mysterious trapdoor at the end of one tunnel—behind which there surely lay a chest of Kolyma gold guarded by the ghost of the first prospector, Bilibin—the risk of death by suffocation or drowning didn’t enter our minds. We stole still-hot bread from the city bakery as the slow, fat baker loaded the trays into the truck bound for grocery stores. Tolyan was my upstairs neighbor, and I spent hours at his place watching music programs on TV and staring at the blurry black-market photographs of Swedish porn magazines that had been confiscated from the photo lab at the university by Tolyan’s father, the senior detective at the police headquarters. We also played with his spare revolver, until one day it shot and shattered the crystal chandelier. Now that I think of it: that massive defitsit chandelier was probably a very serious bribe.
In eighth grade, we were suspended from the Young Pioneers brigade for bad behavior and, free of “volunteering” duties, spent the summer hiking and grilling shashliks. In those days, my big passion was zoology, and on weekends I helped out at the small zoo in the Park of Culture and Leisure. There was a yellowed polar bear named Yulka, an emaciated fox, a balding eagle, and a sad-eyed deer. Though Tolyan didn’t care for such proximity to the creatures of the north (the cages were rather stinky) he tagged along, unable to bear exclusion from any of my activities.
In the last year of school, all the girls in our grade, at once, gained weight and developed acne. Self-conscious and closed in, they were useless for either friendly or romantic purposes. On top of that, the stadium where we played soccer in the summer and hockey in the winter was put under yearlong renovation, leaving us with nothing else to do but study for university entrance exams.
In
