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Authors: Siobhan Darrow
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dumped on top, making me feel as though I were permanently trapped in the myth of Sisyphus. But it was what I wanted, a regular life and a regular job. Looking back, I realize that it was anything but normal, and that it didn’t free me from my previously jumbled life. Instead, CNN provided me with a journey right into the heart of chaos.
The operation was run on such a shoestring that the pay was miserly. My salary was $9,000 a year. At times I had to sell the Soviet paraphernalia I had collected just to eat. A propaganda poster of Lenin might fetch as much as five dollars at a novelty shop in Little Five Points, the arty part of Atlanta. The lapel pins of Lenin as a youth went for a dollar each. Those often paid for my groceries. Atlanta seemed like a consumer’s paradise to me after having lived in and out of the Soviet Union for almost six years. The supermarkets alone made my mouth water, they were so well stocked. I found that a trip to the bank or to the dry cleaners was a pleasant outing after the hulking heaviness of Russia. In Atlanta the sun shone most of the year; in Moscow I’d go months without a glimpse of its rays. Now I wore sandals instead of trudging through miles of snow, slush, and mud, my feet weighted down by fur-lined rubber boots in a futile attempt to fend off the cold.
One of the other great joys of being back in the United States was being able to talk every day to my best friend, Lori. After wanderingthe world, including several visits to me in Russia, she settled down and married a man from the Italian island of Sardinia. Even though they eventually moved to Texas, her life retained a foreign flavor, what with a constant flow of Sardinian relatives camping out at their home for months on end. They built three Italian restaurants and are raising two children. I am the partially Jewish godmother to her partially Jewish son. Lori was a stabilizing force in my life, a wise witness to whatever was happening to me, giving especially good counsel in the love department. She always helped connect me to normal American life. She was the only person who could get me to purge my closet of unwanted clothes, or finally rid myself of unwanted men. I learned to accept her advice, always.
“What are we going to do with that husband of yours when he gets here?” she asked, referring to my problems as ours, the way she always did. I had been trying not to think about Dima and what would happen when he got out of Russia.
Once I got used to life in America, I realized that I had not gotten Russia out of my system. I often felt nostalgic about the hard days, foraging for food, living deeply with Russian friends, and drinking vats of vodka. Sometimes I even missed the seedy apartments Dima and I had shared. I missed the mournful evenings when his friends came over and we downed a bottle of cognac while he played the guitar as we talked late into the night.
After almost seven years of rejection, in 1987, about a year after I started working in Atlanta, Dima got his long-sought visa to the United States. Though we had decided the marriage was over, when he got out he had no place else to come but to me. We tried living together for a while but it didn’t work: he was so dependent on me and I could barely handle myself in my new life. He had no trouble becoming Westernized, but it made his interests change. Instead of discussing art or philosophy or life, as we had so often in Russia, hewanted to discuss ways to improve his credit, where I was little help, unable to get a credit card myself.
The first time he walked through a supermarket, he was in awe, amazed that an entire aisle could be devoted to dog food. Food was so plentiful, I pointed out to him, that they even sold diet dog food. As a consumer, he soon became picky and demanding, snapping at a less-than-efficient waitress or cursing when the market was out of his favorite brand of toothpaste. It made me wonder, Can the Russian soul survive only in
The operation was run on such a shoestring that the pay was miserly. My salary was $9,000 a year. At times I had to sell the Soviet paraphernalia I had collected just to eat. A propaganda poster of Lenin might fetch as much as five dollars at a novelty shop in Little Five Points, the arty part of Atlanta. The lapel pins of Lenin as a youth went for a dollar each. Those often paid for my groceries. Atlanta seemed like a consumer’s paradise to me after having lived in and out of the Soviet Union for almost six years. The supermarkets alone made my mouth water, they were so well stocked. I found that a trip to the bank or to the dry cleaners was a pleasant outing after the hulking heaviness of Russia. In Atlanta the sun shone most of the year; in Moscow I’d go months without a glimpse of its rays. Now I wore sandals instead of trudging through miles of snow, slush, and mud, my feet weighted down by fur-lined rubber boots in a futile attempt to fend off the cold.
One of the other great joys of being back in the United States was being able to talk every day to my best friend, Lori. After wanderingthe world, including several visits to me in Russia, she settled down and married a man from the Italian island of Sardinia. Even though they eventually moved to Texas, her life retained a foreign flavor, what with a constant flow of Sardinian relatives camping out at their home for months on end. They built three Italian restaurants and are raising two children. I am the partially Jewish godmother to her partially Jewish son. Lori was a stabilizing force in my life, a wise witness to whatever was happening to me, giving especially good counsel in the love department. She always helped connect me to normal American life. She was the only person who could get me to purge my closet of unwanted clothes, or finally rid myself of unwanted men. I learned to accept her advice, always.
“What are we going to do with that husband of yours when he gets here?” she asked, referring to my problems as ours, the way she always did. I had been trying not to think about Dima and what would happen when he got out of Russia.
Once I got used to life in America, I realized that I had not gotten Russia out of my system. I often felt nostalgic about the hard days, foraging for food, living deeply with Russian friends, and drinking vats of vodka. Sometimes I even missed the seedy apartments Dima and I had shared. I missed the mournful evenings when his friends came over and we downed a bottle of cognac while he played the guitar as we talked late into the night.
After almost seven years of rejection, in 1987, about a year after I started working in Atlanta, Dima got his long-sought visa to the United States. Though we had decided the marriage was over, when he got out he had no place else to come but to me. We tried living together for a while but it didn’t work: he was so dependent on me and I could barely handle myself in my new life. He had no trouble becoming Westernized, but it made his interests change. Instead of discussing art or philosophy or life, as we had so often in Russia, hewanted to discuss ways to improve his credit, where I was little help, unable to get a credit card myself.
The first time he walked through a supermarket, he was in awe, amazed that an entire aisle could be devoted to dog food. Food was so plentiful, I pointed out to him, that they even sold diet dog food. As a consumer, he soon became picky and demanding, snapping at a less-than-efficient waitress or cursing when the market was out of his favorite brand of toothpaste. It made me wonder, Can the Russian soul survive only in
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