1974
12 June
Princeton
I have a new friend. Dottie, wife of the new assistant minister at All Saints’ Church, where, when the mood strikes, Yasha and I may be found in attendance, fifth pew on the right, nearest the aisle. I always bring a box of raisins for Yasha to snack on when he starts getting restless. (He enjoys the music too.) Dottie’s bony, balding, ministerial husband has a soothing voice and prominent front teeth. During his maiden sermon to the congregation, he spoke about the decade that he and his wife and two children spent as missionaries in Uganda before coming to Princeton (no wonder he looks so underfed, poor man), and how the experience of being an outsider in life, that is, a person without community who must seek community in all its flavors, is in its way a gift from God. At that moment, I glanced at the side pew by the pulpit and discovered a slight woman with bright eyes and a flange of dark springy hair corralled into a bun staring back through the seated faces directly at me—a welcoming nod of the head from her, which I was unsure what to do with, before she turned her attention back to the speaker. Yasha required another raisin then, and I did not think about the woman again until I found her approaching me on the lawn outside the church after the service was over.
My husband was a bit nervous today were her disarming first words.
The minister is your husband?
Assistant minister, I should say. She extended her hand. Dottie Carpenter. Like you, Mrs. Evans, we are not from here.
You know my name? My voice perhaps suspicious, though I shook her hand.
Oh, I know more than your name. I’ve read your book. What an extraordinary life you’ve led. May I ask how long you’ve been worshipping at All Saints’?
I told her—honest about my irregular church attendance, but declining to give the reason: that I consider the physical place of worship irrelevant, be it All Saints’ or no saints; for God, at least as I understand Him at this moment, is the same everywhere, He is no demagogue. Just as all religions are equal, none above the other.
Yasha, pulling at my skirt, wanted more raisins. I gave him some.
And this must be your son, Dottie Carpenter said, bending down to get eye level with him.
Yes, this is my Yasha.
Hello, Yasha. Did you enjoy the music?
A shy paroxysm, then Yasha handed the odd church lady one of his precious raisins.
Why, thank you. Aren’t you a polite boy. And handsome too, with those big black eyes.
Yasha emitted a reply that, while full of meaning, was nothing like speech. He wandered a few feet away to pick a tiny butter flower that somehow had escaped the lawnmower’s guillotine.
My son doesn’t speak yet, I said. Never intending to make such a confession, let alone to a stranger; but once it was out, I tasted bittersweet relief in my mouth.
The assistant minister’s wife placed her hand on my arm. You mustn’t worry. Think of Einstein—not a word till he was three, then all at once whole paragraphs bubbling out of his mouth. I’m sure your son will start speaking soon, Mrs. Evans. He looks like he has a lot to say.
And I did: I thought of Einstein. We were in Princeton, after all. Then I came back to earth.
His school recommended a speech therapist. You know the Morris School? After what I have seen, Mrs. Carpenter, I refuse to send my child to state education. State anything.
I can imagine.
You agree about the speech therapist? It’s a good idea?
I believe the best idea of all is God’s love, Mrs. Evans, Dottie Carpenter observed with a calm smile. But I’m sure the rest can’t hurt.
24 June
In the speech therapist’s waiting room, Yasha amuses himself on the floor with a toy fire engine and a lollipop with its wrapper still on. We are the only patients. A receptionist of the Woodstock generation—complete absence of brassiere support and hoops for earrings that might fit around my wrists—coolly buffs her nails, ignoring us as I sit struggling with the parental questionnaire, five pages long and full of intimate invasions:
Subject’s parents’ ages?
Any family history of mental illness?
Any family history of alcoholism or drug addiction?
Any particular stresses in the child’s home life?
Answers to which have taken me a lifetime. And yet here I am supposed to regurgitate them on command, like some mother seagull being pecked at by her chick? For a doctor’s exorbitant fee, no less. Well, I do my best. The thought of there being something wrong with Yasha, some tainted packet of his grandfather that I have brought with me across the ocean, nauseates me to the core. I look over, find him watching me, my little human questionnaire, and muster a smile from nowhere.
The doctor will see you now, says the receptionist in the Janis Joplin Halloween costume. I hand her the paperwork and gather Yasha by the hand, and we follow her into a room that is like Dr. N’s psychiatric office in Scottsdale, minus golf clubs and life-threatening cactus, but with the addition of a paper-covered examination table.
The speech doctor himself is hardly much older than Janis, bearded and wearing an ill-fitting half-length lab coat over brown corduroy trousers. No wonder he has no other patients. After a carefully enunciated greeting, he disappears into my questionnaire as if it were some paperback bodice ripper. I pull the wrapper off Yasha’s lollipop and pop it into his eager, speechless mouth. He starts sucking this way and that, registering the pleasant rush of sweetness, then pulling the candy out again to inspect its properties.
Grape, I whisper to my son, hopefully. Guh-rape. He smiles as if Mommy has made a funny joke.
The speech doctor lowers the questionnaire and wheels his medical stool over to where we sit on the examination table. His manner now uneasy, jettisoning his default certitude that he can solve our problems.
So, Mrs. Evans, what exactly is it that has brought you and your son to see me?
Yasha is doing fine at the Morris School, I explain. You know it, yes? Top school, very expensive. His teachers praise his intelligence and quickness for his age, his remarkable vitality.
This is all true, even if the doctor’s mouth currently inhabits a knife’s edge between encouragement and skepticism.
But I am worried, Doctor. Yasha doesn’t speak. Not at school or home. All the other children are speaking, yelling with words, but not him.
I see. The doctor scans the questionnaire again. And I glimpse the dirty evidence of my family history in his hands:
Subject’s parents: biologically OLD.
Subject’s grandfather on mother’s side: __________.
Subject’s grandmother on mother’s side: nervous breakdown, followed by eventual gunshot suicide.
Subject’s half uncle on mother’s side: died German concentration camp, technical suicide, though wartime conditions, etc., must be taken into consideration.
Subject’s uncle on mother’s side: died alcoholism age 41 following time in prison for manic insubordination after father’s death.
Subject’s mother: separated from subject’s father, not unfamiliar herself with alcohol, but rather not specify at present time.
Home life stresses: normal for situations described above, plus other complications.
The speech doctor’s expression by now a death mask of Hippocratic concern. If indeed he knows who my father was, he is a most malicious stage actor. He turns to my little boy and says, So, young fellow, I hear you’re very bright…And thus begins his investigation. While my thoughts catalyze and ricochet between electric points of dread, backward, forward, but always backward, to a stone hovel in Gori where a drunken cobbler beats his son to within an inch of his life, to a Tbilisi alleyway where the son shoots his first victim in the name of revolution, to my mother’s life bleeding into the mattress through the hole she shot in her heart, to Zubalovo, to Kuntsevo, to Sochi, Beria with his gleaming pince-nez, the Kremlin, Lubyanka Lubyanka Lubyanka, to Vorkuta, to Inta, and Aunt Anna and Uncle Stanislav, We don’t have exile. We just disappear, and my father’s blunt palm slapping my face, I am sixteen, Look at you! You look like a whore! Who would want you, anyway—
Mrs. Evans?
The speech doctor speaking to me.
I asked if you’ve had your son’s hearing checked. It’s something we’ll want to rule out first.
I tell him my son’s hearing is one hundred percent fine, I do not need a doctor to know this.
The speech doctor stares at me in confusion, perhaps alarm. And I realize that I have just spoken to him in Russian.
17 July
Peter telephones from Block Island, where they have been on their annual holiday since the beginning of the month. I tell him I can’t talk long, I have a friend over for a visit—Dottie right now in my living room perusing the American volume of Akhmatova that I pressed on her after she ignorantly attempted to praise Tsvetayeva as the greater poet—and he rather defensively says, I was just checking in, as if the call is nothing but an extension of his job, billed by the hour. Even as I hear a door closing on his end and know he must be calling from the phone in his and Martha’s upstairs bedroom, where he is attempting to seclude himself for a few minutes of private talk, forgetting that the walls of their island cottage are as thin as those of any Soviet building designed for eavesdropping by the hidden powers of the State.
What did the doctor say about Yasha?
He said there is nothing “definitive” and the situation is worth “monitoring.”
Well, at least that’s better than you feared, right?
Perhaps my son will speak and perhaps he will not—either way, one hundred and twenty-five bucks cash, thank you very much.
You sound pretty angry.
No, Peter, this is simply my new American voice.
Come on now, Svetlana.
It’s a long hot summer, Peter. At least here, where we do not have the luxury of the Atlantic Ocean and the odd Russian émigré living in the blue bloods’ house.
Okay, I’ll let you go.
I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean anything. How is Jean?
Jean’s fine. Tell me what’s going on with you. That’s why I called. You sound upset about something.
I have a friend here.
Okay, I’ll get off then.
No, Peter, wait…
What?
Nothing.
I’ll call again soon.
Peter? Thank you.
No need to thank me. I like talking to you, it’s not a job. In case you don’t know that by now.
He hangs up.
Back in the living room, I find Dottie on the couch, Akhmatova on her lap and a mug of Lipton on the coffee table. Perhaps she observes complications in my face, but she does not inquire. The woman spent ten years in war-torn Uganda and knows how to be discreet with other people’s sentiments.
Do you know Akhmatova’s Requiem? I ask her.
As if fearing I’m about to give her an exam on the subject, Dottie Carpenter replies meekly, Not really.
During the Great Terror—yes, my father’s—Akhmatova’s only son, Lev, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities. They sent him first to Leningrad prison. Every day for seventeen months his mother lines up outside the prison walls along with the other sufferers—mothers, wives, daughters—hoping to deliver packages of food and clothes to their men. This poem, this requiem, begins on the day when an old woman standing in line next to Akhmatova tugs on her coat sleeve and whispers: “Can you describe this?” And Akhmatova, just another mother among thousands, looks back at the old woman and says, “Yes, I can.” And so it begins:
Seventeen months I’ve pleaded
for you to come home.
Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.
My terror, oh my son.
And I can’t understand.
Now all’s eternal confusion.
Who’s beast, and who’s man?
How long till execution?
I am crying now, I can’t help it. And clearly moved herself, Dottie asks, Does she get her son back?
I stare at my new Princeton friend, wife of the assistant minister of the All Saints’ Church. A compassionate lady, doubtless. Uganda, et cetera. And still, how does one…If you are not a poet. If you never stood in line.
Her son, Lev, spent nineteen years in the Gulag. He was not released until 1956.
Relief softens Dottie’s thin face, brightens her eyes to a fever of hope again. But he was released. Eventually she got her son back. The poem worked.
No, I correct her, perhaps too severely. Poems don’t work or not work. They either survive or they don’t—like Russians. When Lev finally returned from the camps, he felt only great bitterness toward his mother. He felt she should have been doing more to save him instead of writing poetry all those years. He never forgave her.
How terribly unfair.
Maybe.
I can see that my new friend is ready to leave. I lead her outside with promises for another visit soon, then walk upstairs to Yasha’s room, where he has been down for a nap. Thinking now not about my little boy but about my half brother Yakov—the earlier Yasha—and his wife, Yulia. Yakov was captured by the Nazis in July 1941. In August of that year, our father issued Order 270, declaring that all Soviet soldiers who surrendered to the enemy or were captured were traitors to the Motherland. Wives of these traitor soldiers were not exempt—they too would be treated as traitors and arrested. No exceptions would be made, not even for the vozhd’s son and daughter-in-law.
For eighteen months Yulia was kept in solitary confinement in Lubyanka, and later, with the Germans pressing deeper into Russia, she was transferred to a prison in Engels, on the Volga. Then, in the spring of ’43, for no reason that was ever explained to her, she was allowed to walk free. She made her way back home, where her and Yakov’s daughter, Gulia, now five years old, did not recognize her.
It was that same spring, the ghosts tell us, after the unmitigated carnage of Stalingrad, that my father refused the prisoner exchange that would have brought his firstborn son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, home. A month later, my dearest brother was dead.
Now Yasha murmurs something, opens sleep-glazed eyes.
Hello, my darling. Mama’s here. Did you have a nice nap?
Apple juice.
I stare at him, doubting my own ears. Say that again?
Apple. Juice. Mama.
9 August
President Nixon has resigned. On TV in my living room, drinking Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers, to help me through the proceedings, I watch the President of the United States of America declare that he is quitting, though he isn’t a quitter. Good to know. Seated in the Oval Office, the disgraced leader informs us that he is confident he is leaving the world a safer place for the people of all nations. Of course, no mention of what mischief he got up to with FBI, CIA, Internal Revenue Service during his time as Leader of the Free World.
A bit later, Vice President Ford speaks from in front of what must be his charming private home purchased with his own significant wealth. He seems an alarmingly mild fellow. He will become president now. And I say good luck to him.
27 August
After eleven o’clock at night and still a good eighty degrees hot outside, humidity so thick you could drink the air if you were desperate enough. Which I might be, if not for the vodka and beer that I keep always too well stocked in case I start brooding about Josef and Katya again. Once more tonight, after Yasha was down to sleep, I carried my drink over to the chair by the television and planted myself for the duration. A habit I must stop. I feel it in my physical heart sometimes—drink, sitting, stupidity, thickening me like goulash. Watching this Archie Bunker, who is all mouth. Mary Tyler Moore, who would not survive a single day in Minsk. Some child-man called the Fonz. I am just about to beg for mercy when my cultural savior Dick Cavett appears with his ironic delivery and intellectual programming, helping me to remember that I am not a transplanted idiot.
A wonderful lineup of guests on tonight’s show: that magnificent boxer Muhammad Ali, most beautiful Negro the world has ever seen; some impressive woman who performs what she calls political vaudeville theater (now a redundant art form); and finally, Jerzy Kosinski, dashing and slim in European sport jacket and silk foulard tie, yet still looking, with his cunning pained smile and seagull’s nose, like a count in permanent search of his lost castle. There is talk out there—I have heard it myself recently from Dick Thompson, who always knows more than he says—that Jerzy did not actually write his famous book The Painted Bird himself, or that at the very least the horrors he said he endured as a Jewish boy passing as Christian during the war in Poland did not happen to him, or that perhaps he is not even Jerzy Kosinski at all. Cavett, of course, does not bring up these accusations—this is a friendly interview, not like the kind I get nowadays, when they happen at all—though skepticism can be heard humming in the televised atmosphere, giving the moment its satisfying undertow of tension.
I find I can’t take my eyes off this charming literary refugee with the coal-black eyes, the intoxicating impression he gives of a doomed man standing in front of a closed curtain, daring us to look behind it. Naturally I regret the humiliating letter I wrote him after we met that time at Edmund Wilson’s three or four years ago. But the conversation had flowed so freely between us, felt so light-footed and intelligent, we felt so close in spirit, that I suppose I can forgive myself for believing more lay underneath. Not the first time I have been disappointed by someone who turned out to be less than he seemed and whose story was not his own.
But what is the point of thinking about all this now? I must not drink so much. It’s because Peter is not here.
Where is he? He promised he would come see me after his return from Block Island, but he has not come, damn him, he has not come but instead has left me with this helpless feeling that I have always hated of waiting for a man who does not and will not relieve me of my vulnerability of needing him. A man who wields his absence as a power, whether he knows it or not, a man self-satisfied in his own family castle, father and husband, while I sit here with television and sweating glass and little boy upstairs and this restless fucking desire that has nowhere to go.
Something is wrong with the electric fan—blade tick-ticking against its metal cage as if trying to escape. I yank the plug from the wall…And through half-open window blinds see my neighbor, distinguished astrophysicist Roman Smoluchowski, walking his dog down my street. One of those little black tailless creatures bred to live on barges in Dutch canals. Smoluchowski gazing straight up at the heavens as he goes—all the way to the stars, I presume, in their infinite mystery.
14 September
I am buying my New York Times at the kiosk in town when Smoluchowski waves to me from across the street. He is alone today, in houndstooth sport jacket and olive green fedora, with no little dog on a leash.
Svetlana, he says rather conspiratorially, closing the distance between us in a few strides, I have been looking for you.
Looking for me? I regard him. On the whole, I think Smoluchowski a gentleman and an intellectual, with his fine Slavic forehead, trimmed silver beard, and quite good posture for someone his age.
I am right here, Roman. Buying my newspaper as usual. How is your dog?
Bruno is healthy for his years, thank you. Listen, I want to talk to you about something important. Can we go somewhere for coffee?
With Yasha in school until noon, I am unoccupied. Roman and I go to the café on the next block, settle into a booth, and order two coffees, black. He leans forward, his manner scientific yet human.
I am just back from an astrophysics conference in Moscow, he says. At this conference, one day I was approached over lunch by a colleague I had never met. A Russian named Karpovsky. You know him?
I do not.
The man was aware that I teach at Princeton. And he’d heard that the daughter of Stalin is again living here as well. He asked—quietly—if I happen to know you personally. In which case, will I agree to pass on to you some news about your children?
My children? I grab my good neighbor’s wrist where it lies on the table between us—with more strength than is feminine, perhaps, because I see him flinch. Roman, you must tell me now. Are my children safe?
They are safe. Feeling suddenly light-headed, I release his wrist. Now the waitress interrupts with our coffees, and Roman waits until she leaves before adding, According to this man Karpovsky, your daughter—
My daughter, Katya?
Your daughter received her degree in geophysics from Moscow University. Now she is teaching, also geophysics.
Katya was always smart. Is she married?
No. Apparently, she lives with her grandmother.
I am appalled by this revelation but say nothing aloud. My former mother-in-law, a bully and a loudmouth, was the main reason I divorced Katya’s father. And Josef? I ask with trepidation. What about my son?
According to Karpovsky, your son Josef is a doctor at one of the better clinics in Moscow.
This takes a moment to sink in.
What sort of doctor?
Some aspect of cardiology, is what I understood.
Is he married?
He was. But now divorced.
I shake my head in dismay. From the time he was small, I warned him not to marry young as I did.
Men who spend their lives peering at the stars are by nature optimists, I have found. And I see now that it pleases Roman to be able to deliver his news to a lady in emotional turmoil such as myself, so that he might comfort me. I do not blame him for this. It is how men are.
There’s more, my neighbor continues. Svetlana, according to this Karpovsky, your son Josef is a father. He has a four-year-old son.
Now I can only stare at him.
That’s what I wanted to tell you, my dear. You’re a grandmother.
29 September
A hole is growing in my backyard. More than a hole—a pit. And unlike those mass graves my father is now said by historians to have been so partial to, none of this minor suburban excavation, I can tell you, is to be found at Communist prices. The labor here, even Guatemalan or what-have-you, is certainly not cheap; the backhoe is not cheap. I am paying for my American swimming pool the good old-fashioned way—on the installment plan. This is how people do it here, the pool company salesman assures me. Of course he is corrupt, and Peter is apoplectic (for Peter, I mean) at my lack of financial sense, but why should Yasha not have a pool to swim in during these long hot New Jersey summers, when so many of his little classmates at the Morris School have theirs? Or their country clubs, which are not open to all people.
Nelson, head laborer of the three amiable fellows who now seem to live in my yard while destroying it, was born in Guatemala City, which he informs me rather shyly is a place best known for its high rate of murders. Well, he is here now, all five feet, four inches of him (information he volunteered with perhaps a dose of male hyperbole), a survivor and illegal immigrant to whom I am happy enough to give work. He brings his lunch in a metal pail and shares it with his equally small-statured compatriots at 11:00 sharp each morning, three fellows sitting on the curb out front with their feet on Wilson Road. A generous and satisfying lunch, from what I’ve seen; and so it pleases me to imagine that Nelson has a wife who loves him.
Meanwhile, I have stopped checking my bank account except when absolutely necessary. I must be honest with myself: I have allowed this installment situation to grow into a many-headed snake. I say nothing of the mortgage on the property as a whole, an eye-watering debt, which, I am constantly being told, is actually a sign of good financial health. No, the true Hydra begins with the lawnmower, the Maytag washer and dryer machines, the General Electric dishwasher. The Electrolux Swedish vacuum cleaner, known to be the best in the world for real shag carpeting. And now, pièce de résistance, the swimming pool with California blue bottom, which if it ever gets finished (and paid for) will require a pool boy to go with it all, some resident genius to manipulate the filters and heaters and such.
But what else did I expect? Is capitalism not what I aspired to? So much time spent going after things.
And I am no different: I desire these things too—perhaps more than they do. Each sparkling, never-before-needed thing with its price. Each price attached to its system of payment. Each system of payment waiting on wallet, checkbook, bankbook, membership, prayer, victory.
So if I’m winning the lottery and the whole damn show, as supposedly I am, why doesn’t it feel better?
That is no pool in my yard. That is a pit.
23 October
I met Max Kirschner, the journalist and professor, three weeks ago at George and Annalise Kennan’s. Oh, you’ll love Max, Annalise promised me before the other guests arrived, he’s a force of nature. And he knows all about Russia. And it was true, this I could see the moment he walked into the room that evening: a man of formidable years (seventy, according to Annalise) whose lifetime of experience in the world was a raging fire inside him still: tall and imposing, with a brow like a gorgeous ship, he strode right up to me and declared, You and I have a lot to talk about.
Yes? I replied, unable to take my eyes off him.
He was from Philadelphia, he told me, the son of Russian Jews. Crazy about the Revolution, as he described himself in his youth, he’d left to report from Moscow in the 1920s, married a Russian woman, and had two children there. But my father’s Great Terror had driven him out—first without his family, though eventually they were able to follow him to the States.
And where are they now? I asked. Your wife and children?
Here and there.
He went on to tell me about his work with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Malraux; biographies of Gandhi and Churchill.
You’ve read my Stalin book?
No.
I had a six-hour interview with him in 1927.
The year after I was born.
I know. Your father was “unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous, and irresistible.” I’m quoting from my book. But when he talked about you, he couldn’t stop smiling.
It is possible that the immediate impression made on me by Max was not entirely unlike his description of my father. He was seated next to me at dinner; we talked all evening. Dessert was still on the table when he leaned close and said, Shall I drop you home?
His fondness for women, his visceral physicality, was as much his calling card as the cataloging of his own brilliant adventures in my bed that night: this he wanted known, and I knew it; and I suppose I have fallen for him at least in part because of it.
26 October
Max stands at his kitchen-counter island, shoveling chicken chow mein directly from the container into his mouth with deftly wielded chopsticks, managing at the same time to refill our glasses from a bulbous jug of Chianti dressed in a straw basket.
So you see this as a new book?
He is referring to the pages of writing that, at his urging, I recently sent him for his opinion—pages now laid out on the counter between us, amid packets of duck sauce and hot Chinese mustard.
Trying not to sound too defensive, I reply that I don’t yet know what these pages will be—precisely why I asked him to read them in the first place.
Because to speak frankly, Svetlana, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d think twice before trying to publish this material in its present state.
I assure you, Max, I say crisply, I have thought more than twice.
It’s a figure of speech.
I am not allowed to criticize this country?
I didn’t say that.
Maybe you misunderstand my English.
In that case, maybe you should go back to writing in Russian.
Max, I am sick of Russian.
You might be sick of Russian, but it’s the Russian in you that people still want to hear about.
Give me back my pages.
Now don’t overreact. And suddenly Max is smiling, as if he’s just thought of the perfect gift to give me that will make everything better. Tell you what, he says. We’ll write a book together.
I eye him suspiciously. A book about what?
He puts down the carton of Chinese-American food and drains his glass of Italian red wine. He circles the counter in three confident steps and slides his arms around my waist, his warm breath pulsing against my ear.
Oh, I can think of a few things. Can’t you?
1 November
Last night, Max knocked on my door wearing—it took me a moment to understand—a Halloween costume.
A long flowing beard, a wig of thick unkempt hair, and a peasant’s tunic.
I laughed, impressed. Tolstoy?
He looked hurt. Rasputin.
Ah…
And who are you?
Akhmatova, I answered, as though it were obvious.
Later, at the Halloween party he brought me to, we were able to laugh together at the fact that no one present was able to successfully identify either of the characters we were playing. There was a Pocahontas, a Lincoln, a Theodore Roosevelt, an Elvis in attendance, but no Russians.
As the evening wore on, though, and this was unexpected, I found the idea of impersonating one of my own people, especially one I revered, even in such surface fashion, to be a disturbingly alienating experience; I began, in the midst of all those adults playing make-believe like children, to feel homesick.
After only an hour or so, I found Max across the room talking to two women dressed like flappers from the 1920s, or some such. I told him that I wanted to leave.
Have a drink, he said, frowning.
I’ve had a drink.
Anna Akhmatova, he introduced me to his two companions, meet Louise Brooks and Mae West.
Max, I want to go. Please take me home.
His jaw clenched and he sighed loudly through his nose. Be back soon, ladies, he said to them.
The ten-minute ride to Wilson Road was tense between us.
I felt myself sinking. I said quietly, Leaving my children in Russia was an unforgivable mistake.
For God’s sake, Svetlana. It was just a fucking party.
We reached my street. He pulled over in front of my house, but kept the engine running.
I’m heading back to the festivities.
His voice held no warmth. Perfunctory as an afterthought, he leaned across the seat to give me a quick kiss goodbye.
His lips would have brushed my cheek, but I was no longer in the car.