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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. —Louise Glück, “Nostos”
It looked like something an oligarch would own—black, with aggressive tires and tinted windows and enough rows that they could each occupy one. It was spotless except for a bumper sticker that read, LOVE, GROW, SERVE, GO!, the senselessness of which reminded Ilya of the Young Pioneers slogans that his mother and her friends would recite when they were drunk and feeling cynical and nostalgic.
Two kilometers from town was a crescent-shaped complex of six huge kommunalkas, which had been built for the coal miners and their families.
perestroika,
boudin
samovar
His grandmother mixed extra sour cream into his shchi. She scooped it onto his pelmeni.
had the sort of unkempt nostril hair that felt like an act of aggression.
he remembered another of Babushka’s sayings: embarrassment is a luxury.
syrniki with cream and apples,
Babushka was clutching her podstakannik,
America was a place that existed only in Michael & Stephanie, in the television, in the Cold War corners of their mother’s and Babushka’s minds.
Under communism, the church in Berlozhniki had been repurposed as the Museum of Atheism, and Babushka had not dared attend the covert services that other women held in their apartments, but after perestroika she made up for lost time.
He could almost feel the force of their prayers, like they were leaving a wake as they sped up to an industrious American heaven where they would be answered with ease.
The women of Berlozhniki found this development especially dispiriting. Their lives were filled with men who lined up at the kiosk for a beer before work, and now it seemed that this problem was not particular to Russia, that all across the whole, wide, enormous world, men were worthless.
CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
She was in a miniskirt and heels. The girls all wore things like this despite the weather, as though their vanity were insulation enough,
patronymics?”
Vladimir lit his own cigarette, as straight and even as a factory-made.
;)
portent
how terrified she’d been to bring them to the post office, to write that American address. She’d been too terrified to include a note, or a return address. She’d taken a risk, and there was desperation in it, and permission too. Permission to find Gabe, to help Vladimir. For the first time that Ilya could remember, she was putting Vladimir first.
