I was not traveling light, or lightly. I was terrified, which was to be expected after ten years (exactly) in exile: I admitted to being scared that I might not be allowed to leave the Soviet Union, but this was a red herring of a fear. I claimed not to know what had frightened me so much that I squeezed my companion’s hand until her knuckles turned white as we touched down. I feared I would recognize this country and I feared I would not know it; I feared I would dislike it and I feared I would love it; I feared that my clear and certain opinions about the world and Russia in general and about my relationship to them in particular would be turned inside out—which, of course, was precisely what was about to happen.
What did I see when I imagined Russia? Snapshot memories of a few buildings and streets. The interiors of my grandmothers’ apartments. My parents’ drawn faces when they explained to me why we had to leave the country where I was born, and their growing exhaustion as they took each of the endless steps required to emigrate. February 18, 1981: a day that ended in the gray early morning, as the plane slowly gained altitude over an expanse of snow. I remembered our relatives, eyes red from sleeplessness and crying, lined up in two crowded rows against the chrome barrier that marked the border zone at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo-Two Airport, watching two customs officers go through our belongings, packed into our “emigrant’s suitcases”—cheap cardboard affairs designed to withstand exactly one journey, one way. I ran back to hand one of my aunts my drawing box, barred by customs. I ran back again to take a drag off another aunt’s cigarette. I was fourteen, but this was the most difficult day of my life. We finally stepped through customs, sideways and backward so as to keep looking at their faces, receding now. They waved. Two-thirds of the way to passport control, just before their features became indistinguishable, my mother drew my head close and whispered, “Look at them. You will see all of them again, except Great-grandmother Batsheva. Look at her.” What she said was absurd: everyone knew there would be no return and we would never see any of them. But she turned out to be almost exactly right: I saw all of them again, except for Great-aunt Eugenia, who died later the same year, and Great-grandmother Batsheva, who died in 1987.
As the plane began its descent now, I imagined they would be right there, pushed up against the same chrome barrier, unmoved and unchanged save for being ten years older. I tried to make out their faces in my memory, but I visualized, instead, the face of an actor I had seen in a recent Russian film, or the shadow of an old photograph. I studied every face once I stepped into the terminal, and I suspected every one of being my relative. But I saw them once I got through passport control: they really were there, behind the chrome barrier, and I recognized them immediately.
This is perhaps the place to explain family. The Russian culture and the Russian state have conspired to make the family a tight and almost immutable structure. Your family are the people who will always have to respond. A second cousin twice removed who comes to Moscow to try to get into college or to get medical help for her baby will be your houseguest and your charge no matter how small your home or how limited your means. When she leaves, you may not speak for months or years, but when the need arises or the occasion presents itself, you will simply pick up where you left off. Family consists of people one can trust—and one had better be able to, for the Soviet state held everyone responsible for the deeds not only of his parents and siblings but also cousins, aunts, and even those whose connection was hard to pin down. Thousands of people grew up during the Stalin era in special orphanages for “children of enemies of the people”: having a parent arrested branded them for life. Even in later, gentler times, such as the era in which I grew up, the mere fact of having a relative who lived abroad disqualified one from any number of ostensibly sensitive jobs. Relatives could have disagreements, of course, fights and arguments, but unlike friends, they could not simply drift apart. A rift in a family was almost always a tragedy, and its consequences could be grave.
Growing up, I knew there was a large number of people whose presence in my life was a given. Our exact relationship, as determined by blood or marital ties, was often a mystery to me—I still cannot seem to retain this sort of information, interrogating some more knowledgeable cousin or another only to forget, within weeks, everything I am told. In any case, when I was young, my grandmothers’ relationship hopelessly confused the picture: they were friends long before two of their children—my mother, Yolochka, and my father, Sasha—married each other, challenging the women’s friendship but cementing their bond. To me, the family as a combination of their two clans seemed to go back unimaginable decades: their relationship, since it preceded my parents’ union, was eternal. In fact, they met seventeen years before I was born. I had heard only one story of my parents’ interacting as children: my twelve-year-old father had taken my fourteen-year-old mother sailing and gotten her soaked. This implied a kind of intimacy, and I inferred that my parents had grown up side by side—fated, clearly, to produce me. Their childhoods, as well as the pasts of all the many other ever-present persons, occurred in an imaginary structure the pillars of which were, of course, my two grandmothers. What I understood to be family was very clearly two-headed. Long after I learned that this was not the usual way of things, my grandmothers remained my two reference points, my anchors.
I had been unanchored for ten years now, and the world’s two most important women were waiting for me at the airport; no wonder I was scared.
My two suitcases were stuffed with things for other people: overalls for a two-year-old cousin and a simple camera for a five-year-old cousin, neither of whom I had ever seen; colognes for cousins and uncles who were boys when I left; and impersonal pretty things for their wives, whom I had never seen and who were all, for some reason, named Natasha. For my grandmothers I was carrying big, soft American terrycloth towels, and panty hose. I had never shopped for panty hose before, so just before the trip I discovered its imprecisely descriptive sizing system. I now mentally referred to my grandmothers as “queen-size” and “petite.”
In the hours on the plane the physical difference between the two women had, in my mind, increased absurdly. I was now prepared to be met by a giantess and a midget. But the first person I saw was my uncle Sergei, my grandfather’s son from his second marriage. He was maybe five or six years older than I, and I was fascinated with him when I was a child. He never seemed to know I existed. And then there were my grandmothers. Ester turned out not to be quite so much bigger than Ruzya. She had recently had two hip operations, which made her shorter and slowed her down. She was not an old woman—two years to go before her seventieth birthday—and she had a penchant for bright colors. Her lipstick was a glossy fuchsia. Her skin was always the shade of a good tan, and this was more noticeable now that her hair had gone gray—tight silver curls piled high. She hugged me quickly, and just as quickly—before I had a chance to introduce my companion or say anything at all—ran through her plans for me: it was clear she had not entertained the possibility that I might have made my own. She had planned dinners and visits with relatives, and she had bought theater tickets.
My other grandmother seemed to get lost in the haste and shuffle as we filed out of the airport and piled into my uncle Sergei’s car, an ancient Soviet-made Fiat, a tiny square tin box with bald rubber tires and a cracked windshield. We had a flat before we were out of the airport parking lot, and I helped Sergei change the tire as my two grandmothers looked on with awed pride. We drove to Ester’s apartment, where she handed me ten rubles and a metro pass and packed me off to bed. In the days that followed, Ester proceeded to track my comings and goings with a benign intrusiveness. I submitted, for the most part, with pleasure.
After about a week I went to stay with Ruzya in the small town where she lives with her husband, Alik. I am told that she was striking as a young woman; she rarely acknowledges this. She was still beautiful at seventy-one, when I met her again. Her most remarkable feature, eyes of unlikely gray on the whitest of white—eyes from a child’s drawing, the pure concept of eyes—could still turn heads. When I stayed with my grandmother Ruzya, those eyes looked at me across the table as one looks at a treasure or an unexpected, extravagant gift. She made me meals from my childhood—cabbage pie, mushroom soup, gefilte fish. She told me things about my childhood that I remembered differently or—more often—did not remember at all.
These women knew me. And what did I know about them? I remembered Ruzya’s smell, but I think it was just the smell of fresh air and the thick suede jacket she had often worn. That jacket had long since worn out, and the air was never that clean anymore. I remembered Ruzya’s white-gray hair, straight and light as down, and her brisk, impatient walk, and I recognized this. I remembered Ruzya’s affection and the hard, cracked skin of her fingers stroking my cheek. Or I thought I did. I remembered Ester’s lilting tones and the funny way she pronounced some words, and I recognized this too.
I also recognized the country to which I had returned, and this recognition changed my life. This was a country I had hated for all the anti-Semitic taunts I had heard as a child, for my parents’ constant pained worry that my brother and I would be denied a future for being Jewish, and most of all, for forcing my family to break into two parts—the four of us who went to America, and everyone else, who stayed behind. This was also the place I had loved easily and unconsciously as a child, then tragically, as only a teenager can, for the three years it took us to get out. I felt the full force of this pull on my first trip back.
On my first morning in Moscow I woke up on the low bed in the smallest of my grandmother Ester’s three rooms. The twelve-foot ceiling—ceilings are high in prerevolutionary Russian buildings—made me feel like I was at the bottom of a well-lit well. I remembered the feeling, and I remembered being scared by it as a child, but I liked it now because I knew it. It was about eight in the morning—two hours before Ester would be awake—and I wanted to go out right away, to test the familiarity alone. I dressed quickly, suddenly aware of the conspicuous foreignness of my long pointy shoes. (As anyone who has traveled knows, footwear is always a good indicator of belonging. Most Russians at the time were wearing rounded-toe shoes on thick rubber soles.) I ran down the eight flights of stairs.
Ester lives in the very center of Moscow, in a narrow courtyard off the wide avenue that had just been renamed Tverskaya after decades as Gorky Street. This was the part of Moscow I had known and loved most intensely as a child. I remembered once, when I was twelve or thirteen, making an unauthorized escape from the dacha where we were spending the summer to travel the one hour into Moscow, coming up the long escalator at the Pushkinskaya metro station, emerging at Tverskaya and being hit by the sweet, dry, dusty smell of the Moscow summer, knowing then that this was the place I belonged. I wondered what I would feel now. I wondered, in fact, whether I would feel anything at all. It was early March, which in Moscow falls just outside the dead of winter; there was snow everywhere, in unsightly frozen lumps, old and black. But the morning was sunny, and the sidewalk under my silly shoes was dry and dusty; the dust rose with the warm air, and I felt the smell. I was home. The problem was, I had spent ten years trying to convince myself—and everyone else—that this was not my home. A country that had treated us so badly could lay no claim to that title.
Over the following few days I learned that the problem was even deeper than I had imagined. Not only was this strange and frightening country the place where I felt most at home, it was, in March 1991, undisputedly the most exciting place on Earth. The collapse of the Soviet regime was bloody around the edges of the country, and endlessly sexy in the center, where debates on the most important issues of history and the world were rushing forward, colliding, zigzagging—and producing clear and apparent consequences in the life of the actual country. I had taken a story assignment to get myself to Moscow—it was more of an excuse than a reason to travel, since the magazine seemed to have little actual interest in the article—but now I quickly became engrossed in the reporting. After this trip I would take more and more assignments that brought me to Russia—until, three years later, I would move back permanently. Like many other journalists, I fell in love with the story. But the story often confused me. How much of the past needs to be exposed and examined before there is a future? How much can be forgiven? How much can we understand?
Many years after my first visit I met a historian who had spent the early 1990s going through KGB archives. A former dissident, he had planned to publish the documents he unearthed but ended up keeping most of the secrets he found. He had entered the archives with a clear set of standards and a simple goal: to learn how the KGB had really functioned and then to tell the story. He soon understood that the story foiled the standards and refused to be told. A famous poet’s two best friends turned out to be informers, but in their regular reports to the secret police they painted a picture of her as an avid Stalinist—and this ultimately kept the poet out of prison. A dissident exiled to Siberia finally agreed to denounce his subversive activities just before his term ran out—or so an agent’s report claimed—but as it turned out, he had told the agent he was sick to death of the KGB’s nosing around and felt like returning to his old profession. A prominent pianist agreed to sign on as an informer—only to be dropped as “useless ballast” a few years later, after failing to supply a single bit of information. After reconstructing several such stories, the historian gave up on all the information he found—the relationship between these documents and the lives of those they concerned was impossible to decipher.
The Soviet system aimed to strip its subjects of the ability to choose. The course of history was preordained, and so was the course of human life. Any Soviet citizen who sought to control his own destiny came up against false trade-offs. The poet’s friends secured her safety but sacrificed their own integrity. The dissident and the pianist sacrificed their reputations in exchange for temporary peace of mind. Most Soviet citizens, I think, never questioned this system or their own role in it. But many of those who did spent years and lifetimes in search of a decent compromise—only to discover, sooner or later, that there was no such thing. Each of my grandmothers was burdened with a conscience, which meant that both of them at crucial points in their lives tried to find a way to make an honest peace with the system. They had vastly different ways of doing it: Ruzya made conscious compromises while Ester, most of the time, remained defiant.
In early 1994 I moved back to Moscow. My grandmothers argued about my move, told me that it was a terrible idea but welcomed me and proceeded to worry that I would change my mind and leave again. Once, I almost did. When I moved, I set a limit for my stay in Russia, one that aimed to calm my own fears, as well as my father’s and my friends’. I said I would stay as long as the country did not go back to what it had been. It was an unintentionally vague standard: certainly the process of breaking away from the Soviet past would sooner or later be reversed, and just as certainly, the Soviet regime as we had known it would never be restored. I would have to decide for myself whether the reversal went so far that I had to become an exile again. In January 1995, standing in the shower in my grandmother Ruzya’s Moscow apartment, where I was living the first year back in Russia, I considered whether the week-old war in Chechnya meant I should end my love affair with the country and go back to the United States. Was there a way to remain in Russia without entering into a compromise with the state, which was killing people? This was how I became a war reporter.
I did not tell my grandmothers I was going to Chechnya that time—or any of the dozen or so times thereafter. They would have worried too much. Whenever I was in Moscow, they called me at least once a day to check on my whereabouts. They worried about my safety and sanity and otherwise tried to take up grandmothering where they had left off. I pushed back gently, securing my independence. And I went over for tea and asked endless questions. In return, they told me their lives—and the confusing story I am trying to write. The story of a country that does not know when to forget and when not to forgive became the story of two women. There is also the story of Jakub, Ester’s father, who made his own choices and his own compromises, living in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Bialystok. And there is my own story. It is all of a piece.