A surprise was waiting for us in Snizhne. Dad had gotten a new TV and spent the evening tuning it. It was probably his way of apologizing for his absence from the funeral, and he boasted that I would finally be able to watch the Ukrainian channels. That didn’t make Babushka Galina happy, and she banged the bottom part of the sideboard with her cane several times. I’d noticed her defiant cane use before, though I didn’t understand the reason for it. She always did it when Dad came home. I’d checked the contents of the sideboard: a stack of face soap. Once some buckwheat appeared in there. Mom noticed my glances and told me what it was about. Babushka didn’t like new trends and didn’t believe in Dad’s business plans. She didn’t think pieces of paper like stocks had any value, since salaries and pensions were either paid in cans of fish, cotton wool, or pieces of soap, which we could make gravy out of for the potatoes next winter if we didn’t have anything else. As Mom told me about the situation, it occurred to me that at least we could seal the windows for the fall; Babushka always shoved paper or fabric rubbed with soap between the frames. As I thought about this, I felt some satisfaction that at least one thing would be right. It was as if I had surrendered to the fact that we would stay in Snizhne. It was as if I was just as sure as my grandmother that my father’s business activities wouldn’t produce a real livelihood, even though the directors of the factories and mines were getting rich. They were all setting up their own business, trading coal for all manner of things, and some of Dad’s old acquaintances were also involved, one of whom lived in the city of Donetsk and had even bigger plans than Dad and Maxim Sokolov. Dad never took us to his meetings. And no one ever talked about the briefcase of dollars he’d brought to Snizhne. I began to suspect that I had dreamed it all, Dad hiding the briefcase behind our couch in Tallinn and me checking what was inside during the night. Maybe I had been asleep when I saw the same briefcase in the footwell of the truck, too.
The new TV channels didn’t bring me any comfort. All of the dubbing and interpreting of the scant foreign program offerings was handled by one man, and he sounded like he had a clothespin on his nose. His nasal translations were awful, and I began to fear that I would forget everything I’d learned from television in Tallinn, my meager English and Finnish. I heard that some people got a channel that broadcast American cartoons without dubbing, but we weren’t that lucky. And Mom wasn’t speaking to me in Ukrainian anymore. The language just disappeared. One night she called me Alyonka in Russian, not Olenka, and she didn’t even notice.
I didn’t understand what was happening to us. In Tallinn I had trusted my father to know how to arrange everything for the best. Now my faith in his business skills was gone. Sometimes I happened to see him from a distance in the city as he led a bunch of thugs with shaved heads somewhere or explained something excitedly to some boys dressed in sweatpants and leather jackets squatting against the wall of a building.
Once, on the kitchen table, I found a rerun request written by Babushka to Central Television. Mom had already signed Babushka’s request that they replay The Slave Isaura, about a Brazilian slave girl’s journey to freedom. The form demanded my name, too. As I dropped the envelope into the mailbox bound for Moscow, I realized how insane it was. Just like everyone else, I found myself anxiously looking forward to the telenovela The Rich Also Cry and other old programs that had been dubbed into the wrong language, and that always had women with narrower shoulders than on Dynasty.
Maybe that was when I started planning to run away, as I stood in front of that mailbox. Or at least it occurred to me that I needed dollars and papers. Though I was registered in Tallinn, I suspected that soon my Soviet passport would be useless. I wasn’t sure whether I was a citizen of any country at all, whether I’d be able to get anywhere but Russia with my propiska, or whether we might even need a visa to stay in Ukraine. This didn’t concern my mother the same way it used to. She waved her hand—Dad would handle everything. There was no point worrying my head about such things.
No one else in our family would be leaving that backwater.