CITIZENS OF NO-LAND

In December 1991, a little more than a year after we’d left for good, the USSR collapsed. I was in Vegas visiting Mom and Roxy for the first time since they’d moved when the Russian cable channel we were watching made an abrupt switch from the Moscow Christmas special to the Moscow newsroom. The newscaster, a wiry man with a pink nose the size of a golf ball, announced with a startled expression that the Soviet Union was no more. Perestroika had swept the nation on waves of anxious excitement. But not everyone was celebrating. Gorbachev (the guy with the birthmark shaped like North America on his head) had planned to transform the country into a Russian version of the United States, but something went wrong and the system abruptly crumbled. The Soviets, who hated the idea to begin with, bitterly accused Reagan of filling Gorbachev’s head with renegade ideas just to break up the union. In some religious groups rumors of the Western Devil tricking the unsuspecting Russian leader into a faulty contract circulated. The sales of Faustus spiked.

In Mom’s one-bedroom apartment, Roxy and I sat on the floor with Mom poised on the edge of the couch, a soup ladle in one hand. Roxy used to ask to play with the Soviet passport Mom kept in a tiny metal safe. It was red with a golden Soviet State coat of arms in the middle. Not that Mom valued it, just figured it might come handy. “We are still USSR citizens,” she’d say. That always made me nervous. Life in America was proving to be complicated, but everything from commercials to music playing on the radio came with just enough hope to keep us going. I wanted but one thing from Russia now—the rest of my family—but it had a claim on me.

In reality it was the one place we officially belonged until the American government approved our applications for green cards. This was how it worked for most immigrants I knew. First a resident visa sent by a citizen or a permanent resident; then, if you behaved, a green card; and only after having the card for five years could you apply for the ultimate prize, citizenship. Most of us give little thought to the importance or the meaning of a homeland. Not until we ourselves are foreigners fighting for acceptance, stripped of all ranks and titles and viewed as inferiors, do we miss that privilege. The process of becoming a citizen is daunting. Suddenly your character is questioned and what you were as a citizen of another place is erased and must be proved all over again, even if you are ninety and have been slowly forgetting important things such as your kids’ names or an impressive military career. You have three choices: stay, live as an illegal alien, be deported. For the young, the choices are made by the adults, so the effects aren’t felt as much. But for everyone else this process can be tricky and laden with temptation. Some years later Vova, Dad’s drummer friend, was lucky enough to get a resident visa from an aunt. He messed up when he was caught in a scam that included sleeping with single rich women and then cleaning out their houses of everything but the door handles. He was sent back to Moscow and blacklisted, meaning he could never come back to the States. Unlike Vova, it seemed, we no longer had a place to go back to in case a life of crime appealed to us.

“What’s going on?” Roxy asked, frowning at the TV, then at Mom.

“You know the place you were born?” I said.

“So?”

“It doesn’t exist anymore.”

Roxy jumped to her feet, following me into the kitchen, where I dumped our dishes in the sink. “Where did it go?”

“Oksana, shut up!” Mom cut in from the couch.

I leaned on the doorframe separating the kitchen and the dining-room area and crossed my arms, fingertips icy against my skin.

“So does this mean Roxy can have your passport now that we’re citizens of no country?”

“What have they done?” Mom said.

The immigrants and those who stayed behind had seen change slowly chip away at the Communist ideologies as far back as the eighties. But it wasn’t all good change. Food started to disappear off the shelves, paychecks shrank, and the crime rate increased. As naive as it sounds, the more enthusiastic folk believed the republics would enter into a state union, like the United States, and go on with nary a hiccup in their daily lives. These were probably the same people who thought communism should’ve worked in real life and not in theory alone.

I had heard my grandparents quarrel only once. It was over Grandma Ksenia’s Bolshevik father, who maintained until the minute he died, in 1952, that the Soviet people would soon practice the goodness they held within them. There would be no crime, and anyone would be able to walk into a store and pick up groceries for free. Money would be used for toilet paper in a utopian society straight out of Milton’s imagination.

“My father was a patriot,” Grandma maintained.

“A fool, like the rest,” Grandpa said. “Our country is no different from any other. All run by one master. Greed.”

In Mom’s Las Vegas living room I heard her whisper, “I guess we’re staying for good.” I was quite startled. Had she thought about returning to Russia? I never did, because no matter how complicated things were in America, to me they had seemed unbearable back home. This event tossed my family into a state of limbo for a little while, as if we were kids of parents caught up in a vicious divorce, which felt painfully familiar. I remember how awkward it felt telling people where we came from, and how my personal sense of identity, screwed up as it was already, became almost impossible to distinguish. Being a Soviet citizen was one thing I knew I was for sure. All of a sudden, even that was taken away. But it was also a cleansing of sorts. There was no going back, because the country we knew, like the family we knew, was no longer. The sole option now was to make a new home.