Amerikanka

A bookish girl goes to Russia in the summer of 1997.

We flew for twelve hours from Seattle to Copenhagen and two more hours to St. Petersburg, then rode into the country on an ancient tour bus, in which the only people who returned our American smiles were big-breasted women in photos affixed to the windshield with yellowing Scotch tape. By the time we stepped off the bus in Pskov, my eyes were watering uncontrollably. Some of the other students in my group were actually crying. I may have looked like I was overcome with emotion, but really I was just exhausted. It was late June in 1997. My twenty-first birthday.

I was greeted by Lena, my Russian host sister for the next eight weeks, her parents, thirteen-year-old brother, and boyfriend, Zhora. Somehow, we all squeezed into one Lada. The Russians made me sit up front, pointing at my legs to indicate that I needed the front seat because of my height. Zhora, who was taller than me, folded into the back with the others. Looking out the window at the Soviet architecture, I remembered a movie that I’d watched in my college Intro to Russian class. It was a romantic comedy about a man in Moscow whose drinking buddies put him on a plane to Leningrad while he’s passed out on New Year’s Eve. The man wakes up in Leningrad and makes his way to what he thinks is his apartment in what looks like his building at his address, Third Builder Street, only to find the apartment occupied by a beautiful woman. Romance and hilarity ensue. According to my teacher, Russians watch this movie on New Year’s Eve like we watch It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas. My heart quickened when we pulled up to a gray concrete building that looked identical to all the surrounding buildings. I could hardly believe I was here.

Smiling girl with dirty hair on a Russian bus in 1997. Photo by Mae Costello.

My family in Texas did not understand my interest in Russian. Growing up, I knew only one bilingual person: Stephen, a pastor at our church who, according to youth group scuttlebutt, knew at least seven languages. Once on a Wednesday game night, I volunteered for cleanup duty so I could ask him about his abilities.

“You want to know how to learn a language? Here’s what you do,” he said, pointing down at the spot previously occupied by a board game called Life. “See this piece of furniture right here?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it called?”

“Um, a table.”

“In English, it’s a table. In German, it’s der Tisch. So if you want to learn German, you have to teach your brain to look at the table and not think ‘table’ but, instead, think “Tisch.”

This was intriguing. If I could escape from English, maybe I could escape my life, become a new person with new thoughts. I had always felt different from the girls in Sunday School who played with Barbies and devised elaborate dance routines that I could never master. I was tall and awkward, but it wasn’t just my body that was different. The other girls cared mostly about being “cute” and “sweet”—and when I opened my mouth, they made it known that I was neither. I stopped going to church as soon as my parents would let me, and not long after that I left Texas for a college 2,000 miles away, in Washington. That’s where I discovered Russian. When concerned adults asked what I was going to do with a degree in Russian literature, I didn’t have a solid answer. I was less concerned with what I would do, more concerned with who I would become.

Inside the apartment, Lena’s mother showed me to the kitchen table and served me a plate of boiled potatoes and dumplings. I stared down at white globules in a pool of yellow oil. I hadn’t moved my bowels in at least twenty-four hours and did not feel like regaining my appetite was likely in a room full of curious Russians and their questions. I could not speak or understand any of the words I supposedly knew—my mouth was not obeying me, and my ears were completely lost. When I pushed the food around my plate with a piece of brown, spongy bread, Lena’s mother laughed and asked the room whether “all Americans eat like that?” That much I understood; it helped that she squeezed her shoulders up to her ears and moved her arms daintily around her ample bosom in a perfect imitation of my discomfort. Then came hot tea with lemon and sugar and flower-shaped butter cookies from a tinfoil sleeve. The tea was good, so I praised it repeatedly. I wanted to make a joke about Texas, where the tea is always iced, but I was not capable of humor in Russian. Not the intentional kind anyway. At last, the family departed, and I was alone with Lena and Zhora.

That night, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday in a dilapidated warehouse in the middle of a field, where the only indication of merriment on the exterior was a faded sign above the door with ‘80s-looking squiggles, music notes, and block letters that read “Super Club.” On the inside, Super Club felt at first like nightclubs I’d been to at home: dark, smoky, thumping with loud music, and crowded with young people yelling to be heard. The similarities stopped there. This being Russia, I was not surprised that no one carded me to enter the club or buy a drink, but I was surprised when the drink handed to me was gin and tonic in a can labeled in English: “Big Willy.” These were words that I actually knew in Russian! I managed to explain to Lena and Zhora that the name of the drink had a double meaning in English, and they thought it was so hilarious to hear me say “bol’shoi chlen” that they called their friends over and demanded I repeat the story. It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by a crowd of young men for my first round of “question the American.”

What kind of sports do Americans like? What kinds of drugs? What kind of music do young Americans listen to? Do you like rap? Can you understand the lyrics? Shouting mostly in Russian, with a smattering of all the English they could collectively muster, the young men begged me to translate “Jungle Boogie” from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, which had just come out in Russia. “Sada,” they asked me, “what does it mean, ‘get down’?” “It means to dance,” I said. “Tantsevat.’” There was more to say, but I didn’t know how.

Finally, I broke away from my interrogation to visit the bathroom, where I discovered another difference. I was no stranger to gruesome nightclub bathrooms and had studied Russian long enough to be able to discern the Ж on a ladies’ room door from the M on the men’s room, a distinction that trips up a lot of tourists. I had even heard about the “squatty potties,” but that didn’t mean I was ready to poop into a literal hole in the ground. I was especially unprepared to poop into a hole while squatting and leaning forward to hold the flimsy stall door closed with my left arm. However, the cramp in my gut was not waiting for a more pleasant environment. I was in the bathroom long enough that Lena came looking for me. “Sada,” I heard, “Are you okay?” “Da, okay!” I called out and silently prayed to whatever god hears ex-Baptist girls that she wouldn’t wait for me.

My first night in Pskov felt like it would last forever. I had arrived in Russia just after the summer solstice, when the North Pole tips closer to the sun and the sky never completely darkens. Russians call this time White Nights, or Belye Nochi. I have no idea what time it was when my new roommates and I stumbled out of the club and into the pale gray light. We walked arm in arm, Zhora in the middle between Lena and me, through a field of tall grass that would eventually become paved roads and lead us back to our apartment. Thinking I was being careful, I broke away from my companions to step around a rickety old board inexplicably placed in the grass. I lost my footing, and my right leg plunged into a hole. “Sada!” Lena shouted, “tebe nada khodit’ na doske! Krapivy!”

I lay flat on my back in the damp grass, stunned, the right side of my body tingling as I processed this linguistic input. I knew the phrase, na doske. Before leaving for Russia, we had been told that our host families might ask if we were capable of sleeping on a board, or na doske. I’d been relieved that no one in Lena’s family had asked me this question. I recognized the word krapivy too; it reminded me of herbal tea, and suddenly I understood why my skin was crawling and my heart raced like I was high on Ecstasy: the board I had tried to avoid was not an obstacle but a bridge over a pit of stinging nettles.

I closed my eyes as the pain washed over me, and I remembered Pastor Stephen’s advice. I knew that I would never see a board again without thinking of na doske, just like I knew I would never think of nettles again without the word krapivy. No one had said that learning a new language would be painless. All the nerve endings in my body surged, but then the wave subsided, and my veins pulsed with joy. I could feel myself changing.

On paper, I had a Russian host family. In reality, Lena’s family had left her to attend college in town while they moved out to their dacha in the country. Thirty years later, I’m still not sure how much of this arrangement I understood before I arrived in Pskov. Common sense suggests my Russian teacher, a hippie from West Texas named Larry, may have handpicked me for this housing assignment, recognizing that I was more mature than some of the other American students, having lived on my own for a couple of years before college. But I don’t remember feeling prepared. In my memory, I only grasped that I was to spend my summer in the care of 18-year-old Lena and 17-year-old Zhora after Lena’s family failed to return to the apartment for many days in a row. And once comprehension dawned, I was thoroughly intimidated. I would be the senior member of the household, even though I was as helpless as an infant in this new world. The other American students would have the benefit of living with a Russian mother who would cook meals that didn’t come from a box in the freezer and speak Russian slowly in predictable patterns. (The relative ease of understanding the mothers mitigated the fact that the Russian host fathers were incomprehensible.) My teenage roommates, on the other hand, talked like my friends back in Austin: fast, idiosyncratic bursts of language filled with the proper nouns of pop culture, ellipses, and allusions to shared memories.

In later years, I would be grateful for the linguistic boot camp of living with Russian teenagers. But at first, I thought the only benefit to my unusual situation was that I got a room of my own.

About a week into the summer, I was alone in my small bedroom when I heard a soft sound and looked up to see a folded piece of notebook paper sliding under the door. Handwritten in pencil on the outside of the paper was the word, “E-mail.” On the inside, the note read, “May I please to sit with you and be shut up? I do not like to be alone. – Zhora.” I sighed. Lena was elsewhere that day. I had spent the weekend in Moscow with the other American students, and this was my first opportunity to unload my observations. I wanted to be alone with my notebook. But here was this piece of paper and its cleverly packaged intrusion on my privacy: Zhora knew that I was eagerly awaiting the local university to grant the American students access to email—a process that, for mysterious Russian reasons, was taking forever. Zhora was killing time that summer, too, waiting to be called for his mandatory military service in Chechnya. Why be bored apart when we could be bored together?

I opened the door and gestured to Zhora to come in. He stepped inside and sat down on the floor cross-legged, holding a magazine that he barely looked at. After a few minutes, I put my notebook away and we went into the kitchen for tea, which he insisted on making for me. He smashed a healthy spoonful of sugar with a fork into a thin slice of lemon at the bottom of a teacup before pouring in the hot liquid. It tasted exactly like the tea that I’d praised on my first night in Pskov. This became our ritual for the rest of the summer: we sat on the balcony, drank tea, smoked, and talked about our two countries.

Our balcony overlooked a communal courtyard in the middle of several identical buildings. When I went out to the balcony with Zhora for our first cigarette of the day, I often looked down to see Russian children playing around the body of an old man who drank by the stairwell, asleep face down in the sandbox. One morning, something brown whizzed past my head and shattered like glass on the concrete path below. I looked up to see the babushka upstairs tossing out stale loaves of bread. Zhora was oblivious to these remarkable events; his singular focus was our cross-cultural exchange.

With his floppy brown hair, broad shoulders, and concave chest, Zhora became for me a kind of living Russian textbook. He had thick brown eyebrows in perfect semi-circle shapes, like two parentheses tipped over, and his eyes burned intensely when we talked. On the rare occasions that I made Zhora smile, I felt like I’d won first prize in something. He was deferential to me in a chivalrous way, always opening doors for me and lighting my cigarettes, but he had no qualms about correcting my Russian. During one of our late-night talking sessions, after Lena had wandered off to watch TV, he reached across the table and grabbed my jaw, pressing my cheeks in with his strong fingers. “Sada,” he instructed, “you open mouth too much when you speak po-russkii. Russia is wery cold country. We do not like to let out heat.”

According to the Russians, Zhora, who was from Belarus, spoke Russian with a noticeable accent. I couldn’t hear it. But I wondered if being an outsider gave Zhora a different perspective on Russia and Russians. If I observed, for example, that Russians found it cruel to neuter their pets yet had no problem dressing up a heavily sedated bear like a Cossack for the amusement of children at the park, Zhora would debate with me. Lena was a psychology major, but Zhora was the one who expressed interest in people and the words used to describe them. Once our hands brushed when he was passing me a cigarette, and he asked if I was cold. “Oh no, I just have cold hands,” I said, and taught him the phrase, “Cold hands, warm heart.” Zhora smiled like a kid with a new toy. Days later, he told me about someone cruel: “She has hot hands, wery hot hands.”

Lena also wanted to teach me, but her lessons felt more maternal. “Smotri i uchis’!” (“Watch and learn!”) she pronounced as she made bliny for the three of us, Zhora and I oblivious to the cooking process in our heated discussion of “batter” versus “dough” in Russian and English. Lena was petite, but everything about her was curvy: round eyes; button nose; honey-brown hair styled in a bob that rolled under at the ends. Her English was halting, but when she spoke Russian her voice was deep and melodic, and her laughter sounded like chiming bells. It was Lena’s job to feed me, an assignment she pursued with enthusiasm at the beginning of the summer. Eventually, her interest in teaching me Russian cuisine fell victim to my vegetarianism, which perplexed all the Russians, and the fact that she was an 18-year-old girl on summer break.

The first time we went to the dacha for the weekend—the whole family crammed into the Lada again, this time driven by Lena’s 13-year-old brother—I hoped that my lessons on the balcony with Zhora would continue in a new context. When we arrived, I followed him into the tidy kitchen and watched him remove from the freezer an unlabeled bottle and a white cube wrapped in paper, from which he cut a smaller cube. I stood there while he took a swig of the moonshine and chased it down with cold fat. I knew these objects because I was a student of Russian culture; Zhora didn’t say anything or offer me any, which I think had more to do with my gender and nationality than my stance on animal products. After his snack, he went out to the garden and worked outside all day with Lena. I offered to help, but when they asked, “za chem?” (“what for?”), I had no answer. I could help with housework in the apartment. “I love to wash dishes” was the first Russian phrase I had mastered. But I had no experience on a farm. Even without the language barrier, I wouldn’t have known what to do. So I stayed inside on the couch, reading Dr. Zhivago in translation.

At dusk, my roommates returned to me, and Zhora and I went outside to smoke. We leaned on the fence and looked out at the sun setting over the fields. The sky was hazy pink and orange and seemed to go on forever. Zhora finished his cigarette, leaned down, and scooped up a stalk of long grass that he put in his mouth to chew. I tried not to stare. I had not known that people actually did that outside of old Westerns. Beyond the dacha, the village was nothing but a small cluster of cottages linked by two gravel roads that intersected in what I guess you could call the town center. As Zhora and I looked out into the distance, blurry masses on the road began to take shape. There were two forms, one on each gravel road, increasing in size as they approached the intersection. We stopped chatting and listened; we could hear a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. I could not make out what they were yelling except for one word that kept repeating: blyat.’ This was Russian profanity and the reason we were not allowed to say “blah, blah, blah” in language class. I hadn’t learned how to use this word, so I listened carefully.

As the man grew closer, we could see that he was stumbling from side to side of the narrow gravel road, the top of his heavy body listing. The woman, also bulky, was stomping like a charging rhinoceros, and now I could see that she was not alone. Beside her was another woman who looked younger, based on clothing and girth, but also pissed. Father, mother, daughter, I assumed, perhaps because of the way they moved toward each other as if pulled by a centripetal force, their screams intensifying as they neared the intersection. Just when it became clear to me that there would be a collision, it happened. The smaller woman beat the man with her fists over his back and neck as he tucked his head into his beefy arms like a turtle, his body acting instinctively despite what must have been mostly alcohol in his veins. The older woman pulled out a two-by-four that I had not noticed until that moment and commenced beating the man, all three poor souls moving together down the road now as one six-legged, wailing beast. The women were herding their man, but his spirit was not broken. I heard him yell, “Ya rodil blyat’!” (“I gave birth to a whore!”) as they shuffled off into the sunset, a jerking, reeling mass of flailing limbs and Russian expletives. Zhora looked at me with his always-serious expression. “Country life,” he said. Then he spat out the grass and went inside, leaving me awestruck.

I would wonder all summer, and for decades after, whether the language barrier prevented Lena and me from becoming better friends, or whether the problem was me and my memories of the little girls in Sunday School who told me I wasn’t like them. At 21, I had not developed a knack for friendship with other women. Zhora and I communicated better not only because of his English, but because I had a habit of aligning myself with men.

In the spring before my trip to Russia, I had performed in my college’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I was Elena Andreevna Serebriakova, the beautiful and dilettantish second wife of a much older professor, who moves with her husband from Moscow to his family estate in the country, thereby upending the lives of all the hardworking people who live there. On stage I wore a pink dress with a corset, a bustle, and a voluminous skirt and gestured coquettishly with a little green fan as I sashayed across the stage, languishing in the imaginary heat, tempting suitors, causing mischief out of boredom. I’d never felt so girlish. When I arrived in Pskov, I was still in shock at being cast as an object of desire. I was beginning to make peace with my gender, but it was a fragile truce.

In Russia, my gender was not “woman” but Amerikanka. My Americanness stuck out as obviously as the waifish, long-haired young man in poet sleeves whom Lena pointed out in the park one day, noting: “Smotri, eto nash goluboi!” (“Look, that’s our homosexual!”). I wore khaki hiking shorts, a black tank top, and black Danish walking sandals almost every day. When I walked around town with my wide-legged stride—the walk that my grandfather in Texas called “pulling a trailer”—my nationality was visible from a mile away. Every day after my Russian classes at the university, I walked back to Lena’s apartment with my Russian-American friend Olga, the only student from my college whom I deemed serious enough about speaking Russian to hang with me. Crowds of little boys sometimes followed us, throwing crabapples and yelling things about Americans at our backs. I couldn’t understand their words, but I knew they weren’t nice. Olga and I ignored them and kept walking as hard little balls rained down all around us and bounced off the sidewalk like a sudden hailstorm.

Lena and her friends each had a specific otdelenie, or major, that was designed to lead to a certain job after college. My life seemed frivolous in comparison. At home, I was studying Russian with no ambition other than to be a person who could read Dostoevsky in the original language. When I wasn’t in class or my work-study job in the writing center, I walked around my college town, stopping in at coffee shops with my notebook and cigarettes. I had acquired the word flâneur, meaning “stroller” or “saunterer” in French, and I imagined myself as a flâneuse, the female equivalent of the Parisian man about town. Meanwhile, Lena and her friends had been specializing since high school, training to enter the workforce and raise a family. I felt younger than them, even though, in reality, when we went dancing at Super Club or brought a bottle of vodka and stakanchiki (little cups) to picnics in the park, I was often the oldest one in the group.

On weekdays I attended classes with the other American students, where we studied organizational charts of the city government and heard lectures about the largest exports in the region of Pskov. I learned more Russian on the weekends, walking around the city with my notebook: watching people, eavesdropping, occasionally stopping on a bench to capture a scene. There is one page in my journal about street vendors on an ancient bridge in the city center who sold dried fish wrapped in newspapers to old men. But mostly I wrote about women. Girls whispering to each other as they walked hand in hand across the bridge. A mother and daughter sharing the burden of a heavy shopping bag, each taking a handle, speaking in low, urgent tones as they passed me. In my head, my mother’s voice tsk-tsked at the pre-adolescent girls in black patent leather miniskirts and stilettos. I was impressed at how they managed those heels on cobblestone streets. Even when the outfits didn’t scream jailbait, they were always unquestionably feminine. It was like the government handed out uniforms for every stage of womanhood. I wondered at what age a woman received her obligatory headscarf, the item that we refer to as a babushka in English because it is so associated with a Russian grandmother.

Zhora wore an apron and yellow rubber gloves while he washed the dishes and swept the floor of our apartment in his boxer shorts, confounding everything I thought I knew about Russian men. But he was old-fashioned in public, putting his hand out for me to hold when we stepped off the bus or walked down the stairwell in our apartment building. When I went out with my roommates, Zhora’s eyes darted from side to side to see if anyone took note of our troika. As we exited the building one evening, the old drunk at the stairwell entrance stared googly-eyed at the spectacle of us and muttered something under his breath about devochki i malchiki (girls and boys) in an international tone of disapproval. Zhora rolled his eyes and retorted, “I babushki i sobachki!” (“And grandmothers and doggies!”). He sounded annoyed, but I could tell from his swagger that he was pleased.

With no parents around, Lena’s apartment became the designated party location. Every weekend, young Russians gathered around the kitchen table and spilled out onto the balcony in endlessly fascinating combinations. I could not figure out the sexual politics of this place, and my curiosity made Lena blush. In response to my pointed questions, she confided in me that she and Zhora did not have sex, even though they had been living together for almost a year. “If we live like man and wife,” she said, “I won’t get to go out and see my friends.”

Back home, I had rushed to shed my virginity as if my hymen were a champagne bottle to be smashed against the hull of adulthood. But Lena wanted to remain a girl for as long as she could. At the time, I took Lena’s answer as another quirky example of what Larry called “Russian logic,” like how she knew that a rickety board in a field meant protection from a pit of stinging nettles. In hindsight, I think Lena knew something that I hadn’t yet learned.

One morning in July, I got out of bed, crept quietly into the kitchen so as not to wake my roommates, and turned on the faucet to pour water into the kettle for my coffee. Thump, thump went the pipes, and a thick brown substance dripped slowly into the sink. The water in Pskov was never that great—it came out yellow and sulfurous and had to be boiled before it could be used. Cold showers were frequent. But this was new. Shit, I thought, afraid I had broken something. When Lena and Zhora awoke, they confirmed the nonexistence of water. In one of those surreal half-communications that made living in Russia feel sometimes like a waking dream, I gradually understood that this was a planned thing. The government had turned off the water for reasons that were either not offered to me or were offered but not understood. The logical Russian response to this development was to leave town for the weekend.

The entire town of Pskov seemed to have the same idea, judging by the crowded bus stop to which we arrived with our backpacks, shopping bags, and pillowcases crammed full of snacks, drinks, and, of course, stakanchiki. All the American students and their Russian counterparts were there. When the bus pulled up to the stop, the crowd swelled forward, practically lifting me off my feet and pushing me towards the door. My stomach clenched with dread. This is simple math, I thought, there is no way all these people are going to fit on that bus. I hesitated, but Zhora elbowed his way forward through the crowd, muttering excuses to all the protesting babushki, who looked only slightly more annoyed than usual. He boarded the bus with our bags and turned around, holding his hand out to me. “Sada, nu davai!” (“Sarah, come on!”) There was nothing to do but hold on tight.

Aboard the bus, Russian etiquette dictated that the elderly people sit and the young people stand in the middle and hold on to whatever looked stable. I was smashed so tightly between Lena and Zhora that I couldn’t possibly fall. When the air grew fetid, the standing Russians shouted for the seated Russians to open the windows. Silently renouncing all the times I’d cursed my height, I closed my eyes and inhaled a surprisingly familiar aroma from outside. It was the grape bubble gum smell of mountain laurel, short trees dotted with clusters of fragrant purple blossoms, abundant in the Texas hill country. I aimed my nose at the window and breathed in the smell of home. Below, an ancient babushka, her face an atlas of lines, stared up at me with watery blue eyes and said something to Lena in rural babushka Russian that I couldn’t have understood even if I’d been taking Russian for ten years instead of only one. Lena smiled and responded, “Amerikanka!” The babushka laughed toothlessly with what sounded like sheer delight. “Amerikanka!” she repeated, still laughing.

At last we reached our destination, extracted ourselves from the bus, and hiked to a clearing in the woods near a large pond. We were met there by Zhora’s cousin, Kyril, a headbanger in thick plastic glasses and a Metallica shirt. In no time, the wilderness was transformed into a party scene. A young, painfully sincere Russian professor played English classic rock on his guitar. We ate fruit, chocolate, cookies, and whatever else people had grabbed on their way out of town and drank copious amounts of Baltika beer and vodka. When the sky darkened, someone built a fire and the professor began playing traditional Russian folk songs.

The change of music was too much for Kyril, who led a small group of revelers over to the pond. “Davai krichim!” he shouted (“Let’s scream!”) He counted off, “raz . . . dva . . . tri” and we all screamed as loud as we could at the moon. Someone suggested skinny dipping. I stripped, jumped into the cold spring water, and swam out into the middle of the pond where everything was quiet. The White Nights were over. The sky above me was inky black and dotted with more stars than I had ever seen. As I floated in the water and looked up at the blanket of diamonds, I wondered what my character in Uncle Vanya would have felt if she’d been free to tear off her corset and go skinny dipping in the moonlight. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so restless. Maybe she would have found her home. One second later, I heard Lena’s fully clothed voice from the shore, yelling, “Sada, chto s’toboy? Ty golaya?” (“Sarah, what is with you? Are you naked?”)

That night, Lena, Zhora, Olga, Kyril, and I slept crushed together in a red tent meant for two people, our bodies so close that I don’t know whose hand reached out and touched me under my shirt, stroking from my breast down to my waist. All the blood in my body rushed to my groin, and I felt a familiar twinge in my pelvis as I tried to make myself as still and small as possible. I didn’t want to encourage the person attached to the hand, but I couldn’t move away without waking the rest of the tent. Frozen, I waited silently for the hand to recede and spent the rest of the night in a state of half-wakefulness, uncomfortably wedged between the others on the hard Russian ground.

I awoke early the next morning, and Olga and I shared a cigarette by the shores of the pond. “That Kyril kid kept trying to sleep-fondle me last night,” she said and rolled her eyes. I didn’t know that “sleep-fondle” was a word. Did other girls know this word? I hadn’t planned on saying anything about the hand. I asked Olga what she did, and she looked at me like I was stupid. “I pushed him away, duh.”

I envied Olga. She seemed tough, like I imagined I would be if I’d grown up like her, with Russian Jewish parents who emigrated to the U.S. to escape the Soviet Union. That morning I wrote in my journal:

While in the woods, one needs to pull up a tree & write. So here I am. We all went camping. My hair looks like a bird’s nest, & I think all my teeth have knitted themselves wool sweaters. I got sleep-fondled by Kyril last night. But it’s alright; I was mildly annoyed at first, & then it became kind of exciting to see how far he would go.

I did not have a word for what had happened in the tent, so I borrowed Olga’s. But getting “sleep-fondled” failed to name what had transpired inside my body: involuntary physical reaction; panic; fear; absolute certainty that any move on my part would make things worse. “Kind of exciting” was not the right description either, but at least it expressed my ambivalence. When I saw Zhora in the daylight, I tried not to wonder whether I had failed to protest because I thought the hand had belonged to him. What interests me now is not who touched me but how I told the story in my journal, as if I could rewrite what had happened and how I felt.

In early August I reached a milestone. I was reading Dr. Zhivago on the balcony when I overheard Lena ask Zhora, “Gde yablochnyi sok?” (“Where’s the apple juice?”). Zhora responded, “Sada vypila.” (“Sarah finished it.”) Without looking up, I called out, “Izvinite!” (“Excuse me!”) I heard silence, then surprised laughter. It occurred to me that my roommates had been talking about me in Russian all summer. I could understand more of these domestic exchanges every day, but I still felt a long way from fluency.

Some days I felt like I had always lived in Pskov with Lena and Zhora. Other days I worried that Lena was annoyed with having to speak slowly to me and explain little things about her world, such as why, six years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I still couldn’t find tampons at every store. Our relationship felt more strained after the camping trip, but I didn’t know how to address that topic with her, and I didn’t try, instead filling pages of my journal with near-erotic descriptions of peanut butter, which was even rarer in Pskov than tampons. Back home, my Russian professors had insisted that my character in Uncle Vanya was infected with toska, an elusive Russian concept that has been described as nostalgia mixed with ennui. I felt differently now that I was here. Maybe Elena Andreevna was like me: a flâneuse, adrift in the country.

On the last day of classes, I walked back to the apartment by myself in white-hot afternoon sun. I had almost reached our building when the old man who drank in the stairwell and slept in the sandbox staggered towards me, calling “Devushka! Devushka!” (“Young lady! Young lady!”) I noticed his rheumy, unfocused eyes and outstretched arms, but I didn’t move fast enough: he lunged at me and grabbed my breast before I could swat him away. There was nothing to be done about this molestation. I might as well have complained about the feral dog that brushed against my legs on the city bus. I walked upstairs and started packing.

We hosted a party on my final weekend in Pskov. The weather was hot but more languid than stifling, like August in the Pacific Northwest rather than my native state. We opened the door to the balcony and put out boiled and salted new potatoes, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from the dacha, brown bread, a watermelon, and all the beverages: vodka, beer, Pepsi, sparkling water—a Russian meal seemed to require at least three glasses of different liquids at every place setting. I wore a red sundress with little yellow and white flowers that I’d brought for special occasions. The apartment filled up with all the American students and their Russian hosts, plus a burly guy I’d never seen before who spoke only to the other Russians and did not return my smile. Something on the kitchen table caught his eye. I watched as he picked up the small bottle of Tabasco I’d brought from home and held it up to examine the label. “Poprobui,” I said. (“Try it.”) He tried it and spent the next five minutes howling in pain while he banged his fist on the table.

My victory was brief. “U nas arbaz!,” I yelled, trying to entice the Russians to come outside, where watermelon lay on a small table on the balcony among beers and ashtrays and stakanchiki. They looked at me with confused expressions. I tried again. “Arbaz!” My frustration growing, I tried explaining, with the words I knew in Russian, that I was talking about the big fruit that is round and green on the outside and red on the inside with little black objects. Comprehension dawned. With cries of “Oh, arboooz, arboooooz!,” the Russians moved to the balcony, laughing at the silly Amerikanka who didn’t know the difference between “arbaz” and “arbuz.”

I cut the watermelon into two large pieces. Smoke, Russian dance music, and half-Russian, half-English conversations swirled around my head. For no reason at all—unless, of course, you count the vodka, the summer’s end, the grabbing hands, the crabapple-throwing boys and Tabasco and my mad impulse to test the borders of absolutely everything—I spun around and slammed one half of the watermelon into the face of the nearest man, who turned out to be the burly Russian. There was a moment of silence. He looked like he wanted to hit me, but he did not, and then others started grabbing chunks of watermelon and tossing it on their neighbors. Sticky with watermelon juice and tipsy with vodka, I leaned against the wall and felt suddenly dizzy. My knees buckled and I slid to a seated position on the balcony, hugging my knees close to my chest. I felt something new and fluttery in my chest. I was exhausted but not sleepy, hungry but not empty, filled with longing for a place I hadn’t left. Toska? I didn’t think so. If there was a word for this emotion, it was in a language I didn’t know.

I never saw my Russian roommates after that summer. I tried to find Lena on social media once, but she has a common last name, and after a few minutes of searching for her laughing eyes in profile pictures of sturdy middle-aged women, I felt ashamed and quit looking. I don’t even know Zhora’s family name. I hope Lena still laughs like chiming bells. I hope Zhora’s sense of curiosity survived Chechnya. I look for him every time I see a baby-faced Russian soldier on the news, even though I know he would be in his forties now, like me.

I realize now that any time I travel somewhere for the first time, a part of me thinks of it as a rehearsal. As though this present time, which is always non-ideal for some reason, is only a precursor to a time when I will come back under better circumstances: alone instead of with a group; or with more money, more knowledge, more time. Certainly, when I traveled to Russia in 1997, I thought it was only the beginning of an adulthood in which I would frequently be “hopping across the pond,” comfortable walking the sidewalks of all the major European cities and able to order a meal or ask directions in all the languages of Western Europe plus Russian. I was collecting information for my next visit—an event that has not happened and, given recent events, has now moved into the realm of the unthinkable.

My photo album from the summer of 1997 is mostly filled with pictures of American students and Russian monuments. In one picture I am kissing Chekhov’s tombstone. In another I have whimsically thrown my arms around a bust of Lenin. I have no memory of either pose. In my favorite picture of my roommates, Lena sits in Zhora’s lap, smiling sweetly. Zhora’s mouth turns up ever so slightly at the corners but not quite enough to counteract the intensity of his gaze. Sometimes I stare at their images, as if a picture could confirm that the summer was as important to them as it was to me. Finding nothing, I am left to marvel that our lives intersected when and where they did: at the summer solstice, on the brink of adulthood, in between the Cold War and whatever this is now.

There are no pictures of the balcony at Lena’s apartment, the dacha, or the tent. None of the events that shaped me that summer were caught on film, only in my notebook. But there is one picture of me from that summer that I love. It was taken at someone’s backyard party in Olympia, not long after I returned from Pskov. I am the only person in the frame, but I’m clearly in conversation. My eyes are narrowed, almost squinting, and my lips slightly open, mid-comment. I am probably explaining something about Marxism or Russian poetry; I was a bit insufferable in my last year of college. In my left hand I hold a coffee mug (which, I remember, held vodka and orange juice) and I am gesturing with the cigarette in my right hand. I look thin but not too thin, and the tops of my blue-jeaned legs are wide apart, almost like I’m bracing myself. My white blouse is a cheap Goodwill find; neither it nor my jeans fit me well. But I don’t seem to care. I look like a woman who knows who she is, where she stands.

Young woman with a cigarette and a mug in her hand. Photo by Mae Costello.

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This essay was originally published in the Spring 2004 print issue of Witness Magazine.