playground near our apartment, there were always two big guys near me. I didn’t know they were security men. They didn’t bother me and they didn’t let anybody laugh at me. Some kids tried to make fun of me, calling me “stinky American guy,” but these two men immediately shut them up. I knew that my dad spoke Russian with an unfamiliar heavy accent but again, I didn’t care. I loved my dad and mom and I knew they loved me very much.
When I went to school, my mom explained to me that my dad was an American and if somebody started to poke fun, don’t pay attention. That was easy for her to say, but in reality I sometimes felt very hurt by the jokes of my classmates.
At geography lesson, when my class found out that the highest mountain in Alaska was called McKinley it made everybody look at me and laugh because it was similar to McMillin. One time, unintentionally, the teacher laughed even louder. She looked at me with a kind smile on her face and called me to her desk. I was surprised and confused when she called me McKinley instead of McMillin. It was a slip—she didn’t mean to do it, but it was too late. My destiny was decided. From that moment everybody began to use the incident to tease me… they stopped using my first name and nicknamed me “Kinley” after that mountain. But my classmates noticed that I was becoming tougher.
The first time in my life I was confronted with prejudice connected with my American Dad and my family was when I was seven years old. I was playing in the street near our house with other kids my age. My usual security men were not around. One teenager from the neighborhood noticed I was without protection and he smacked me right in the face. I felt the pain, my eyes started watering and I was ready to cry. I could not figure out why this guy whom I had met before so many times would do such a thing. Suddenly I heard him yelling “You American son of a bitch, get out of here, go home and stay there with your stinking American Daddy. Ha, ha, ha.” I ran home in tears of embarrassment and pain. Once I got there and saw my Mom, I ran to her and held on to her tighter than ever before and asked her the questions, “Why they are calling me ‘American son of a bitch’? Why they are calling my dad ‘Stinking American’? And what is it ‘Son of a bitch?’” My mom was really puzzled. She kissed me on the forehead and hugged me. We were silent for a moment.
After a while she told me to go outside and continue to play like nothing happened. “Don’t be scared. Just know that I will watch and if something happens I will be there, near you. By the way, a bitch is a female dog, and what he said was pretty offensive. But try not to pay attention to it. If this guy approaches you again, just tell him that you know that a bitch is a dog and you are the son of a woman.”
And that was exactly what I did. When I showed up in the street, again the same guy came to me and his eyes were full of hatred. I looked at him and said “I checked with my mom and it seems that you made a mistake. She is not a female dog, and your mom is not a dog too. They are all human beings and they are our moms and we love them.”
I looked straight in the eyes of my offender. Suddenly I noticed a change in his eyes. They started to be softer. And then to my relief I heard laughter. This guy was laughing.
He put his hand on my shoulders and said, “You know, you are funny. I like it.” From that moment I was under protection of this toughest guy in the neighborhood. Nobody even thought of touching this American ‘son of a human being.’
I learned how to fight, worked out at home, and fell in love with sports. Soon I started to be respected for my athletic abilities. At the age of fourteen I was the captain of school’s basketball, soccer, and hockey teams. Suddenly I found that I didn’t have any enemies—everybody wanted to be my friend. By this time my old nickname “Kinley” was forgotten and everybody just called me “Mac.” This I loved because a lot of people called my dad “Mac.”
I started to be a real hero in my class after one very important basketball game. On my team there were actually only two good basketball players—my friend Anatoly and I. We were very close and Anatoly was a constant guest at my home. We both simultaneously fell in love with basketball and as my dad received the American magazine Sports Illustrated from his father, we were all into reading articles about our favorite game. We knew all the College and NBA stars, checked their techniques and the way they threw the ball. That helped a lot in improving our game. The two of us were ready to take five opponents like nothing. Then, just before our most important game, Anatoly got sick and was unable to play. I was alone on the field against five players who were much taller than me, and they were smelling victory. Anatoly was watching the game from the stands. I concentrated like never before. The game started and some kind of inspiration hit my body. Every throw that I made was perfect. I was irrepressible. I made my weaker teammates play better than they ever had. I myself had twenty-one points in the first half and nineteen in the second. Our team won the game and I was the hero in my class until the end of my high school years. Nobody even dared to say anything bad about their half-American classmate.
By that age I became interested in everything about my life and I wanted to know more about my family. I spent a lot of time with my mom at our country home when school was out for the summer break, which lasted almost three months. We had a small one-bedroom cabin not far from Moscow—about thirty miles. One evening during a heavy rainstorm, before going to bed I asked Mom to tell me the story about what really happened fifteen years ago, in 1948. I already knew that my dad, a U.S. Army Sergeant, had decided to stay in the Soviet Union instead of going back to the USA after serving two years in the service.
“Why, after you married him,” I asked my mom, “didn’t you go back to the USA with him? Instead, both of you stayed here.”
“It’s a long story, Volodya,” Mom lovingly began. “Do you really want to know the truth?”
I said, “I’m ready to listen to you until you’re finished.”
Chapter 2
Galina Dunaeva didn’t grow up in an ordinary Russian family either. At home she was called Galya. Her father, Vasilii, worked in the Soviet secret service organization, which was called at that time the NKVD and would later become famously known as the KGB. He was rarely at home, going on business trips all over Russia. Exactly what he did, nobody knew. He never talked about his work at home even to his wife, who stayed at home taking care of the kids.
Galya had a brother, Vladimir who was two years younger. At a time when almost seventy percent of the Russian population lived in communal flats with kitchen and toilet facilities shared by a number of tenants, Galina’s family lived in a three-bedroom apartment. They weren’t far from downtown Moscow near a beautiful park and very close to a notorious Moscow prison Motroskay Tishina, which means “quiet navy area” in Russian. Nobody knew where the name came from but it wasn’t a very quiet area, especially in the 1930s when hundreds of political prisoners disappeared inside its walls. But Galina and her brother Vladimir didn’t pay much attention to the prison; the big park attracted all their attention. Both of them liked sports. In the winter Galya spent all her free time skating on the ice rink while Vladimir played soccer. Every day he and his buddies got together and played for several hours. They didn’t care if it was raining or snowing—after school they were on the field.
Galina’s dad, as a high-ranking officer, had an opportunity to rent a little cabin not far from Moscow where he and his family stayed during the summer break from school. Both Galina and Vladimir were very energetic, couldn’t sit in one place longer than one minute. They often hiked in the nearby areas and enjoyed the extended stays during summer break from school each year. One day when she was twelve years old, Galina, her brother and several of their friends were hiking in the forest near their cabin and found an abandoned house. Galina went up to a window to look inside. Suddenly she slipped, her head hit the window, and the glass broke. One shard of broken glass pierced deep into her neck. A fountain of blood gushed forth like a geyser and she fainted. Vladimir was nearly scared to death and ran
