OKSANA KOSLOVA

Students

NINA ORLOVA HAD THE PALEST, thinnest face and hoped to apprentice to a haircutter. Gregory Rakuzin had been an engineer in Irkutsk but he came with his wife and two children and so was driving a taxi seven shifts a week. Maria Volozova could have been only eighteen and every bit of German grammar baffled her but she wished, she said, to become a teacher like me. Ilia Fet worked three jobs and was saving to bring his family and when they were all situated he would work even more jobs and then open a video shop on the Kantstrasse. Raisa Goldshtein was in her thirties, her hair was jet-black and straight, she was talkative and rather loud and made no bones of her aspiration to one day run the finest escort service in Berlin. Sasha Tabachinksy would learn German because he had to but he would write his novels in Russian. There were others as well. I can hardly describe, do justice, to the hopefulness of these people. It was on their faces every minute, in their schemes and deductions. It suffused their efforts. They looked at me as if I were the key to some kingdom they could clearly imagine but not quite grasp. But soon they would, of course I presumed they would, they would figure it out and everything would be fine and they would write home to whoever was still there about their success.

But first they would look at me with hope.

You may suppose how disturbing this was, to be looked at in such a manner every day of the week. It came to seem like an accusation against me. Among other things, why was I even working here? A volunteer, no less, as if I were already taking on the protective coloration of a rich woman. Why wasn’t I home painting? Why was I giving back to my tribe and was this even what it was?

I adored those faces of my students. There were even days when I went home and tried to paint them, but I couldn’t capture their desire, as I had too little of my own. After three months at the émigré center, I quit. They begged me not to. They must have thought I was competent, or some such. But their begging only served in my mind to increase the unrecoverable distance between us. If I could have traded my life for any one of theirs, I would have.