the first time i went to russia my friends there gave me this tape. it was music by boris grebenshikov, a russian rock star. it changed my life in the sense that it cemented my love affair with those friends and that place and time. as we flew home i listened to that tape and had a deep gratitude and a thrill of excitement that i had discovered something i was meant to discover, that something very right had happened. when i returned to moscow to live there for 3/4ths of a year that feeling continued, expanded, grew roots and spread. i ended up speaking the language with some facility and promising my friends i'd be back every five years. i went back in '96, five years later. now it's 2006 and i haven't been back again yet.
one of the people in that apartment where i heard grebenshikov for the first time was yulia, who now lives in los angeles, has a green card, and has a daughter who is a US citizen. yulia recently went back to moscow to see family. her ex-partner sergei, the father of her son and my close friend (also part of my first moscow experience) is an alcoholic. the last time i spoke to him he asked me for money. i said, "when?" he said, "tomorrow."
i didn't send it, and i haven't spoken to him in over a year. my russian has become so lame that it automatically becomes even worse while i'm speaking it because i realize in the process how bad it is and that stilts it further. but i spoke to yulia on thursday and was relaxed enough to actually express myself on a basic level as well as understand most of what she said. i didn't quite understand the details of some medicine sergei is taking for his alcoholism, something you take which keeps you from drinking because if you drink while on this medicine you die. i didn't catch the details on that.
when i came back from my 9 month stay in moscow i was really happy to be back in the united states. i felt that something had sunk in and i could continue life. i sometimes wonder how it would have been if i had stayed. i wonder when i'll go back, and how long i'll stay there. i wonder how it's changed. when i work with my students on chekhov scenes i think about going to chekhov's house in moscow, not far from the american embassy. it's all museum-ized and almost impossible to imagine chekhov there. yet something still moved around in that house. or maybe i was projecting.
i sat on a park bench on tverskoy boulevard and read a book, snapping it shut on russian flies. i let my hair and beard grow long. i tried to disappear into the muscovites. i tried to eradicate all trace of an accent. i avoided my mom's american bible study friend whose husband was working construction at the embassy. it was fifteen years ago.
i have transferred the grebenshikov tape to cd. it is crackly, with truncated songs and awkward transitions. i have lost the visceral thrill of that music, but i remember the way my heart beat differently when i heard it, all that spring and fall until i went back.
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