(Note: You can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.)
I felt my cell phone buzz just as we reached a lull in the party conversation, so I reached into my pocket. We were well past the part of the evening when anyone still felt the need to be polite. Even the birthday girl herself, a flatmate and acquaintance of mine, was already lolling in her boyfriend’s arms on the couch, leaning so far over I could practically see up her dress. The screen glowed: four missed calls from Eliza. ‘Call me, when you have a moment, please call me,’ she had texted, in addition to the calls.
I was surprised to hear from her. The last time we talked she had warned me that she couldn’t call this week because one of these days, I forgot which, was День защитника Отечества (Den zashchitnika Otechestva), Defender of the Fatherland Day, in Russia, and she was going with a friend to watch the fireworks above Petersburg.
I called her back.
‘Lizochka!’
‘Did you hear about the invasion?’ she asked.
Of course. We all had. It had all just happened: the minute the tanks had crossed the border, the news had been beamed nonstop all across the West. Somehow everyone already knew how seriously to take it, because for once it wasn’t one of those countries like Brazil or Afghanistan or Palestine, where you weren’t supposed to care too much if they flooded or had a huge earthquake or got bombed nonstop and millions of people died. This one was existential somehow, as far as I could tell because it was in Europe, or because the people involved were white. But all the same I cared. When I saw the travel advisories, my first thought had been of Eliza. She was the love of my life.
‘What do you think I should do?’ Eliza asked. She sounded slightly tipsy. In the background, her Russian grandparents – who weren’t really her grandparents, just an elderly, affectionate Russian couple who had been hosting her during her year abroad – clinked glasses. They had a nightly ritual of drinking cognac and tonight, for the first time, Eliza told me, they had invited her to join them.
Eliza was gathering opinions from just anybody: from her parents, from her Russian friends, her American friends, her Russian literature professors from back in undergrad. She wanted mine, and she wanted that of my boyfriend in Oxford, who was a master’s student in International Relations and liked to make wild prophecies, mostly scenes of disaster. I just ignored him. Maybe he was Cassandra and I was the people of Troy, too stupid to believe in the future even when it was spelled out for me. But whenever he spoke, all I heard was a medical student giving out doctor’s advice. Maybe once they finished their training they’d be qualified to counsel, but for now, what more did they know than the rest of us?
Only a week later, she decided to leave. By then all the Western companies had already pulled out of Russia, including, critically, the credit card companies. The rouble was crashing and China hadn’t yet stepped in to help with the banks. They shut down the international airport in Petersburg, so Eliza took a long bus ride from Petersburg to the Finnish border, spent a night in Helsinki, then flew to England, to me.
She hadn’t wanted to leave: she’d only agreed to go when the last of the yeses turned to no’s. She had lived among the Russians in normal times, even in a few joyful times, and now she wanted to be among them in their shock and horror too. There was one especially beloved Russian literature professor, an American, whom Eliza worshipped and was modelling her life after, who in her own youth had studied abroad in nineties-era Russia, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the American travel advisories had smacked of a similar hysteria. I think you can stay, it always sounds worse than it is, this professor told Eliza at first. Eliza had already ignored the State Department warnings once, last summer, still boarding the flight to Pulkovo Airport though the Covid travel advisory had made it sound like travelling to Russia would lead to certain death. It’s not so bad here, she had reported back to me once she arrived. But this time, within a few days the optimistic Russophile professor had nervously changed her mind, saying that it somehow felt different than before. Even the Russians were telling her: You, American – you should probably go.
When she appeared at the train station in Oxford, I handed her a box of chocolates and hugged her. What else was there to do? She was thin and pretty and solid when we held each other, but smelled fresh and foreign, which I guessed must be the smell of Russia. She came with a backpack and a suitcase and she was wearing her ‘November parka.’ The rest of her things, including her cello and thicker ‘December parka,’ were still at her Russian grandparents’ house in Petersburg because we all thought the war might only last a month or two.
But meanwhile I would gladly take it: a few days, a week, anything, whatever time there was until she could go back. Best friend, sister from the sweet youth of our university days, co-parent of our future children: when had we last seen each other?
At her Russian grandparents’ house, she had hastily hoisted a big suitcase atop a rickety wooden wardrobe. Now she felt guilty.
‘They’re really old, I hope they won’t injure themselves trying to move it,’ she said.
In my flat we unpacked her things together. She did everything with an absent look, which I understood, though I missed her badly, though I was trying my best to encourage her to arrive. ‘I brought you chocolates too,’ she said when we had almost finished, kneeling on the ground and pulling loose candies out of her backpack in fistfuls, tossing them to the floor in a big heap. They were chocolate-covered wafers wrapped in bright yellow paper, and each wrapper bore the name Алёнка (Alyonka), printed below the face of a ruddy-cheeked baby. It was such a classic Russian confectionary and point of pride that they had handed out one to each passenger as the plane landed in Petersburg, she told me. The name was also a variant of Alyosha, a pet name she’d come up with for me in undergrad, after the youngest brother in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The coincidence of the candy pleased me. It was like some cosmic assurance that I still belonged in her world. And I needed assurance, because sometimes in moments my head seemed to be stuffed with cotton and her voice would come to me muffled and distant, as if we were drifting into separate dreams.
‘Catch me up,’ I said.
‘Where should I start?’
‘From anywhere, whatever’s easy. Start from the present and go backwards.’
The week after the invasion and before she left, she had walked to twelve separate orthodox churches and lit a candle in each, to pray for the end of the war. ‘I prayed in Russian: don’t let Putin do nukes.’ Before that, she had watched the world-famous Bolshoi dance Swan Lake, and wandered into a random auditorium just in time for the cello finals of the international Tchaikovsky concerto competition. Earlier in the winter, she had gotten the Sputnik V vaccine, just like everyone in Russia, and then promptly came down with a bout of Covid, just like everyone in Russia. The previous autumn, walking the streets, she had heard a mother say to her child, harshly: ‘Why are you crying?’ Except that there were multiple words for ‘why’ in Russian: почему (pochyemu) which asked about cause, and and зачем (zachyem) which asked about result. And the mother had used the second one, which meant that what she said was not Why are you crying? but more like, What good will it do you to cry?
Even Defender of the Fatherland Day wasn’t all bombastic posturing, said Eliza. It was a sort of parallel to Women’s Day: a men-and-boys holiday. In schools, all the little girls would conspire to get identical presents for all the little boys, and each girl was assigned to one boy to give her gift to. It felt very Soviet, somehow – the uniformity of the gifts, the symmetrical pairing of girls and boys – but cute, too, touching.
‘There’s one thing I didn’t tell you about the fireworks,’ she suddenly burst out later that evening after dinner. We were standing in the backyard, in the dark. From the ends of our cigarettes, flecks of ash snowed onto the young grass.
‘Tell me, then.’
‘They were just so beautiful,’ she said, exhaling softly. ‘I thought maybe I just hadn’t seen fireworks in a long time, but even my Russian friends said so – that they were extra beautiful this year. And then the next day Putin sent all those tanks across the border. And we wondered: could it have been on purpose?’
Her face was twisted into an expression of pain. She was sick with the realisation that beauty could be weaponised: that it could unwittingly make you feel positive about something as violent as war.
So what if it was, I almost said. Wasn’t beauty one of the few good things that could be produced by something as tragic as war – in the form of fireworks, or great art, for example? Beauty didn’t justify war, of course, but you could still be moved by the magnificent triumph of lights bursting across the sky for the same reason you were moved by epic tales of heroes and villains – they were all, in their way, primal reversions to the foundational struggle between life and death; looking at each, the veneer of civilised life peeled away and revealed that we were still, at our core, just unreasonable, organic things, full of beauty and terror.
We had fought about things like that since undergrad. I remembered that once, back then, in my Latin class, the class was reading excerpts from The Aeneid and out of nowhere I’d started sobbing right there in the classroom because of Vergil’s description of the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus – these two worthy and dignified heroes, both committed to facing their fates though only one of them is destined to survive. And Aeneas so close to letting Turnus off the hook in mercy, sword paused in the air, until he suddenly sees the unforgivable sight of Turnus wearing the belt of the dead young man Pallas, whom Aeneas still loved with a mix of fatherly and romantic love, and out of pain and passion he strikes the fatal blow, in a frenzy of rage so petty, and glorious, and human. And Turnus saying only: Equidem merui nec deprecor, as he lies on the ground and gazes softly and steadily into his vanquisher’s eyes. Indeed I have deserved it; I beg no mercy.
But when I told Eliza afterwards, she just frowned and shook her head. There had been scenes like that in The Iliad, too, which she remembered being forced to read in her literature class, but she hadn’t wanted to cry – had only been thoroughly disgusted by the displays of masculine insecurity, by the extensive physical descriptions of war.
‘I could have done without fifty gory chapters of heads rolling,’ she’d said. She was, instead, moved by scenes of quiet domesticity: Andromache washing and nursing her infant son, while already weeping because she knows that both he and his father are about to die. Years later, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace at Eliza’s urging and, when we compared notes afterwards, it was as if we had read two completely different novels. I remembered the shy, anxious Captain Tushin, crying and hurling cannons into the dusty battlefield at an enemy he had no chance of beating. Eliza remembered Countess Rostova and Princess Drubetskoy embracing and weeping, their friendship laden with all the complications of longtime female friendships. ‘They wept because they were friends,’ she’d read aloud to me in English, from her well-worn Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, ‘and because they were kind; and because they, who had been friends since childhood, were concerned with such a mean subject – money; and because their youth was gone…’
Maybe these had always been meant to be mixed together: war, martial beauty, with hearth and home. Before I came to England, she and I had lived together, just for a summer, in a small apartment near UPenn. On the Fourth of July, in our Philadelphia apartment, Eliza made chickpea curry, and then we smoked cigarettes on the balcony, which was really a fire escape, and drank white wine. There had been others there too. I remember Eliza’s little sister stamping out spotted lanternflies one after another as we waited for the show to start, and I remember that one of Eliza’s other friends, a depressed schoolteacher our age, who lived and worked in the city, was telling us about her breast reduction surgery. After sunset, the fireworks had begun, popping faintly and delicately like gunshots, blossoms over the city skyline. I remember I was in love with everything. There were no others like Eliza; there was no city like Philly. The red brick edifices of our apartment block, almost glowing at sunrise and sunset, the stairs leading in a Z-pattern from one floor to another. Below us an old woman came out every morning with a baby and sang to it while rocking back and forth on a rocking chair, as if out of an old movie.
But tonight in England, far away from all that, we came back inside after cigarettes and watched a live interview with some Ukrainian writers on Zoom. Everyone kept asking stupid questions. We were so dumb in the face of what was happening. We were so dumb, period. What could we give them with our attention that could be of any comfort? Or what, exactly, did we want them to tell us?
‘Where are you now, Lyuba?’ the interviewer asked anxiously. ‘Are you safe?’
‘My son is with relatives in Kiev,’ said Lyuba, a pale and beautiful Ukrainian poet with tired eyes. ‘I am in Warsaw, reading at a festival, but next week I will go back.’ She read us a poem called ‘Decomposition,’ which described scenes of war until, by the end, even the words themselves were broken down, fragmented, nonsensical. Afterwards we sat in a heavy, awkward silence. When we couldn’t take it anymore, Eliza logged out of the Zoom assembly.
‘We should get snacks,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
And suddenly we were undergrads again, young and vigorous, letting everything cut us deeply. All those icy nights back in America! Sleepy and empty from problem sets and essays, we would walk to a local shop for snacks or hot pizza, carting everything back in our arms, chattering to each other, re-animated by the cold. Other students would filter in one by one, themselves bled white from late-night study, until eventually we were all sitting together, speaking nonsense in slurred syllables under low light, tipsy with tiredness. There’s a scene I can pull up as if spun out of the air, as if it were a painting: Eliza in a gathering of our friends, some of us on couches and chairs, others cross-legged on the floor, everyone leaning against each other. We were eating store-bought chocolate brownies with scoops of mint frosting. Eliza heaped a generous spoonful onto a brownie, then took a big bite, laughing as she spoke.
‘I really like how, in nineteenth-century European literature, the women are forever collapsing onto couches in fits of emotion,’ she was saying. ‘And they were called hysterical fits. I think I would have had a lot of those.’ The lamplight glinted off her cheeks. She was radiant.
Here, tonight at Tesco, she was glowing again and it was as if the old days had returned.
‘Can you believe it?’ she asked me, her high, sweet voice softening the harsh fluorescent lights. ‘Just two biffles together in a new country, getting snacks!’
‘What kind of snacks do you want?’ I said, laughing.
‘One salty thing, and one sweet thing. As long as it’s not potatoes or sour cream,’ she said, brushing her fingers absently along the cans of tuna and green beans on the nearest shelf as we walked toward the refrigerated aisle. Картофель (Kartofel, potato), сметана (smetana, sour cream): These had formed the basis of her diet in Russia. And as for sweets, she missed things with a spongy, cakey texture, because Russian sweets came mostly in the form of candy or biscuits, she said.
In the end we left with a tray of twelve cupcakes: chocolate, lemon, yellow cake with jam, each decorated with a different virginal Easter animal. At home, Eliza bit into a lemon cake with a chick on the frosting.
‘I didn’t even taste that,’ she said. ‘I think I just felt a hit of dopamine here.’ And she pressed the centre of her forehead with a long, graceful forefinger.
There had been times in the old days when I spent the weekend at Eliza’s, having what felt like one never-ending playdate, playing games of Eliza’s imagination: tasting random things out of her parents’ fridge and guessing their identity with our eyes closed, listening to music from our laptop speakers while holding hands, taking turns guessing the names of the performers and composers. After a while we would get restless the way children get restless watching other people eat, and we had to break out her cello and my clarinet to play something together. It always went the same way: you began full of self-respect, with some kindergarten-level duets, then got more and more drunk on music and joy until we were stumbling through duets so difficult neither of us could play them, and we were dizzy laughing. In Petersburg, said Eliza –
In Petersburg she had also played cello, in a community orchestra. But somehow they played with more soul there, the Russians, even though their technique wasn’t as good: whereas the Americans always played more stiff and wooden, though with more technical flourishes and better intonation. Were the Russians really so earnest, or was it Eliza’s earnest love for them, that made them glow in my imagination like that? I wanted to go there, to the picture in my mind. What did they sound like, rehearsing? What did they say to each other? How did they understand Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Borodin, with their real Russian душа (dusha)? What did it sound like?
Tonight with frosting on her nose we listened and played more guessing games. From my laptop the sweeping notes of Rachmaninov’s cello sonata unspooled and passed over us again and again: cello, piano, cello, piano. The cello melody was a thin wire stripped from the piano that threaded silently around your neck like a garrotte. It was assassination by beauty. Eliza called out the artists with a familiar pleasure: Yo-Yo Ma, Rostropovich, Capuçon, Jacqueline du Pré…She had perfect ears, small and precise, and when she leaned her head on me I could feel the metal coil tightening around my neck, that and the delicate silk of her hair with its clean cottony smell.
When I first arrived in England, and Eliza had just arrived in Russia, I started reading The Brothers Karamazov every day after dinner. I was preparing for our reunion, whenever it might be, like evangelicals waiting for Judgment Day: every day you had to believe it could be any day now, even though the evidence showed only an unbroken string of dashed hopes. And I was studying Russian too, so that when she returned I could speak to her in her new language, and we could tell each other exactly what we meant. I told myself I could do it, fuelled by talent and desire. But it was as if the pandemic and my mother and this new world had given me a new brain, which used to be a steel trap for words but now kept confusing мост (most, a bridge) with мозг (mozg, the brain), бумажка (bumazhka, a little piece of paper) and рубашка (rubashka, a shirt). While meanwhile Eliza built her new world without me. When she described her Russian grandparents drinking cognac, I thought of the cognac the Karamazovs drank after dinner in that novel, the evening getting ever more maniacally joyful and frenzied and debauched as it went on. She was recreating that Russia, the one from the novels, element by individual element! She was foraging for symbols in that world, starting with the bottle of cognac, and finding meaning in them that even the Russians themselves didn’t see! And she was slipping away into that world, leaving me on this side to read about her and her adventures.
But still I liked to imagine her with that cognac and her grandparents. I liked to imagine her happy. I remembered one night in undergrad when Eliza and I were sitting at the table with a bottle of something else, maybe whiskey. I don’t know where it came from – god knows it didn’t belong to either of us – but somehow it had just appeared and sat there on the table, full. I remembered how she had poured herself one capful after another as we talked, something I’d never seen her do before, and how happy she had been and how much I had loved her as we chatted and laughed until stars entered her voice, and some time later we were walking back to my house through the sweet-smelling night air and the whole sky was miraculously dusty with the same stars, a kind of beauty that would never become pedestrian to me.
‘I wish you would stop telling that story,’ Eliza said tonight, testily. ‘It makes me look bad!’
‘Why?’
‘Because it wasn’t my whiskey!’
Then, maybe because we were sharing a bed, she offered to read me something. ‘This is the first story I was ever able to read entirely in Russian,’ she said. ‘But the English is really good too. A Cold Autumn: by Ivan Bunin.’
The summer we had lived together in Philly, there was one day when we were coming back to the city from a day trip, and as I was driving us in my dead mother’s mini-van over single-track roads that wound through the green woody countryside, Eliza had read aloud to me Turgenev’s short story, ‘The Singers’. The story took place in a countryside somewhere, with a singing competition between two peasants in a pub. As she read, I laid the action over the Pennsylvania landscape. They weren’t in that pub, they were in a burger joint in downtown Philly where Eliza and I had once eaten dinner with her parents: a dark room, with a slightly sticky floor, that smelled lightly of smoke. The Russian peasants were drinking in the corner, and we were all listening with rapt attention to the music. At the end, when the narrator walks out of his own scene and goes outside to fall asleep drunk out under the stars, and wakes up to hear the one little boy calling out to the other, ‘Antropka-a-a! Dad wants to be-e-at you!’ I imagined the boys with their bright, prepubescent voices calling from the sun-soaked grassy hills around us – one on this side, one on that side…And we were somewhere else, together – Eliza and me, walking through the world of our books, making observations and laughing.
But tonight, in the Bunin story, it was autumn, and there was no singing, and we knew it was a different world. ‘Ну, друзья – это война,’ sighs the narrator’s father, coming in with the newspaper to announce the breakout of the First World War. (‘Well, my friends, it’s war.’) And there was no mistaking that for real life, because in real life they were being arrested just for using that word, or even for silently carrying around copies of War and Peace.
But in the story, the narrator spends one last night with the love of her life before he goes off to war, and that night is crystalline and slow. You can hear every line the young couple says to each other: you can see the texture of the snow, the glow of the moon over the furry pines. And then he goes off and gets killed, and the next thirty years pass by in one or two paragraphs. ‘И это всё, что было в моей жизни — остальное ненужный сон,’ she says. ‘And that is all there has been in my life. All the rest has been a useless dream.’
And then I understood about Eliza: she was trying to be close to me, but these were the useless years to her, between when she had been in Russia and when she could go back. And maybe I was in a blurry phase too, because of my mother and the pandemic and this weird waking dream of being somewhere I never imagined I would be. We were just…waiting, for real life, for the current of reality to link back up with the chain of memory, so that things could make sense again. But when, exactly, would that be? And until then: зачем ты плачешь (zachem ty plachesh)? What good will it do you to cry?