so much meta stuff going on here
Archive for the ‘Lyovka’ Category
On a lighter note
December 22, 2011Lyovka’s new nickname is “little buddy.” I’m an old “Lost” fan, so when we’re together I sing “you are little buddy” to him.
Have I told you guys that I became a sad playwright recently?
November 23, 2011As did Slava and Natasha.
‘Till the fat lady sings
November 23, 2011Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here’s what she said to me…
I had a friend, a slightly older chap, who had a young daughter – and would complain incessantly about how much OLDER he felt now that she was born. Besides the sheer weight of responsibility – very small children are so frighteningly and touchingly helpless, after all – there was also the fact that he just felt “done.” He was finished with life’s most exciting events, he said: falling in love, getting married, having a baby. To make things even worse, he had money and professional success. There was not a whole lot left to strive for, unless he started a secret affair with some appropriately conniving vixen, and he had the misfortune of being devoted to his lovely wife. It was like living in a country where history was over.
I feel much younger now that I’ve had Lev. History is not over – historic events fly past like bullets, which you have to dodge. You never know which one might undo you or someone you love. I don’t know where I find the strength for anything – or how on earth we have managed to survive so far. I’m contemplating ruinage of my credit history. Debts don’t get smaller, they get bigger. Teeth crumble inside my head. Gossip hisses like static around my husband and I. I feel myself folding and collapsing under the weight of Every Little Thing Gone Wrong – and then, when I’m down there, beneath the pile, I begin to feel as if I am five years old again, and hiding under coats and jackets piled up in an apartment during a party in winter. The coats and jackets retain the scent of snow. It’s dark outside – it’s always dark during the days of my second childhood.
We are not “the deserving poor.” We are survivalists. I used to think that I would just give away my money – give and give it away, not making a dent in my student debt for years and pretending as though that’s the way things are supposed to be, because zero customer protection translates into life ruinage for thousands of people like me – but then my body started falling apart, and I realized that my priorities would have to change. I’ve skimmed on healthcare for years in order to appease the vengeful Sallie Mae god. But I can’t afford to crap out early – because, you know, Lyovka. So when we can afford to go to the sea, for example – we go to the sea, and park our asses in front of it, and stare. We buy good red wine and drink it from mugs and listen to Noize MC.
“Mommy is not going to be a slave to the system,” I murmur to my son as I bathe him. “She’s going to occupy student debt.” “Hawww,” He replies sagely. His eyes are swamp-coloured, like his father’s.
“You didn’t make mommy boring – mommy’s life is at its most exciting yet!” I tell him. It seems hilarious to contemplate my friends – their newfound, self-proclaimed “boringness” like a forcefield around them. In order to be nice and boring, you have to be able to afford it first.
This past winter, when Mikhail Ugarov invited a bunch of playwrights to write on the subject of repressions, I wrote about fear – fearing for myself, my child (I was pregnant at the time), other people whom I love. Slava Durnenkov, meanwhile, had this to say:
“I feel as though I can work. Living isn’t possible – working is.”
And that’s what we do, I guess: we work. We work and see each other through the haze of the tasks in front of us, whether on Facebook or in real life. We pass through each other’s kitchens. We exchange witticisms. There is a memory I have of the Garden Ring: my husband and I walking alongside Slava in the dark (remember – it’s always dark). The pavement is wet. I like Slava. He radiates approval. I am the perfect wife for my husband. “May you live,” he says, clasping our hands, joining us, like a priest. “May you live.”
When I ask my husband if he wants his freedom, he says he doesn’t. “But you and I could have torn up the town for a little longer,” he smiles. “But what about…” I mention the ways in which we still do.
He laughs. His definition of “tearing up the town” is radically different from mine.
Things that I can’t write about right now
November 18, 2011I didn’t notice how I started crying. I had been cutting down a story about deaths in a Russian orphanage specifically designed for the children of female inmates – children born in captivity, like tiger cubs in a zoo (though tiger cubs generally get better treatment). Space on the page was limited, 300 words or so needed to go. I was busy making my usual choices – cut down on some of the details? Trim some of the longer quotes? – when I was surprised to find tears cascading down my face.
“Well, damn,” a voice said inside my head.
Someone passed along a link to the infamous video of Judge William Adams beating his screaming, terrified daughter. I was roughly a minute and a half through before I had to turn it off and look at pictures of cats on the internet.
The voice inside my head became less charitable. “How do you expect to cover the news anymore?” It snapped. “Oh em gee, I’m a mommy now! Somebody get me to cover the more appropriate stories! Like the Moore-Kutcher divorce!”
I pretended as though I didn’t hear and scoured the internet for cheap offers on televisions (“Skyrim” is out and I NEED a new TV).
That voice and I – we’ll need to have a chat eventually, though. We will have to reach some sort of impasse. Our constant bickering is bound to get people to start looking at us kinda funny.
In my last play, I made fun of the “hormonal mommy syndrome,” or, rather, society’s reactions to it – but I am also one of those people who makes fun of the things she believes in (see my previous post on religion, for example). I also refuse to believe that hormones are 100% to blame for increased sensitivity following the birth of a child – after all, you end up getting a completely different perspective on life, and it can take a long while to get used to it.
As I dress my child for bed, I hold and kiss his flailing little arms and legs, the little arms and legs that formed inside me for all of those months, and I marvel at the fact that anyone could ever want to harm this pudgy, energetic little body – whether through deliberate neglect, or worse. I am amazed that violence should even exist outside of movies and video games, somehow tricking my own brain into blotting out the entire concept behind how the human race has come to dominate planet Earth. I go full Godwin on myself – wasn’t Hitler once a helpless, toothless, adorable being who grinned at his mother as she picked him up from his crib? Nature has made me invest heavily into life, and so I find it harder to contemplate violent death.
Young filmmaker Madina Mustafyina, part of the same project that allowed my husband to shoot “Katya, Vitya, Dima,” shot a documentary about a family of bums living outside a village in Kazakhstan. These two odious alcoholics have somehow managed to give birth to a pretty little girl, Milana. Seven-year-old Milana and her parents live in the woods. The mother experiences random, completely unpredictable bouts of primitive aggression. She hits the daughter right on camera. The daughter screams and begs and promises to be good. Later, Milana takes sadistic pleasure in trying to feed a captured bird to a dog. “I will kill you!” She rages at the bird. The bird – small, helpless, dirty – is Milana herself.
When Milana’s mother gets extremely drunk (as opposed to her usual state of being, which oscillates between somewhat drunk and very drunk) and stalks off into the woods to hang herself, Milana screams and begs the other adults to stop her, which they eventually do.
Would Milana have been better off in an orphanage? You know, the sort of place where she would be neglected by the underpaid staff and possibly allowed to choke on her own vomit? What does it say about our world when a small child like Milana essentially has two choices: batshit parents or a batshit state care system? The questions hang in the air. Not even “Skyrim” quite drowns them out at the moment.
These are the things that I can’t write about right now. I’m writing about them anyway.
Baby lion is growing up
November 6, 2011
My parents are in town, so we ended up watching a bunch of our hospital videos that Alexey shot, and I was struck by this little creature, maybe half an hour old, at most, being encouraged by Anna the midwife to feed. “Come on, we need to get those reflexes going!” Anna keeps saying. “Come on, it’s about survival at this point!” But Lyovka is tired after being born and his face is saying, “Bugger off.” He knows he’ll get to feed later. He trusts mom and fate.
Babies change quickly. I remember what it was like with my brother, so it didn’t take me completely by surprise – but still, it leaves you pretty breathless. Lyovka’s new thing is cooing to me whenever I rock him to sleep. It’s like he’s got a bunch of things to get off his chest before he settles down for his nap.
One of the Best Things Ever is waking up with him in the morning – when he starts looking for me and then finds me, and grins widely, like I’m the most awesome person that he’s ever seen. Both Alexey and I try not to let it go to our heads. Before long, Lyovka will have his own hobbies and political opinions, and mom and dad will just be these two annoying people who exist solely to embarrass him. Until then, we’re busy learning to play with various rattles and discovering the joys of Ray William Johnson (it’s never too early for dick jokes and cat videos, is what I think).
Did someone say “baby picture”?
October 9, 2011
o hi
He looks like daddy, but has my hair colour. Not that you can tell from this picture, since most of the hair that exists on his head is currently in the back.
Also, the so-called auto-focus is a sick joke, haha.
When we was fab
October 8, 2011Even after living for just a year and a half in a given city, certain places begin to accumulate memories. Good or bad, the memories are like barnacles – which is to say that they endure, remaining prominent in your mind until new ones calcify on top.
“Now, the Moskvoretsky Bridge…” I said to my brother-in-law on our downtown walk together.
“…Is also a place where you and Lyosha kissed,” he interrupted.
“No! Although, maybe – yes. You can draw an entire city map based on the places where we have made out. I think we’ve certainly covered all of the directions that the metro takes you. But that’s not it. Moskvoretsky involved this incident with a truck full of soldiers. It pulled up next to me on the bridge one evening. I was 17 years old and visiting Moscow. The soldiers started asking me to hop in. I was very scared. But in retrospect, I don’t think they meant any harm. It was summer. I think they were just trying to enjoy themselves – and wondering if they could enjoy me too.”
“Soldiers will do that.”
“That they will.”
We sat under a tree in Alexandrovsky Garden, watching the tourists watch the Changing of the Guard by the Kremlin wall. Back when I was working my first job, at that fine institution know as Regal Cinemas, located at Stonecrest, a nice strip mall (if strip malls can be nice) in south Charlotte, my managers used to try to piss me off by imitating soldiers at the Eternal Flame WWII memorial, carrying brooms for emphasis. It never worked. Or else it did work – and I just tried to not let on about it.
The real Eternal Flame soldiers made me think of my grandfather in his youth. There is that tiny grain of pain that sits in my chest and is stirred briefly when I remember him. I’ve been trying to get it to stop hurting ever since I moved to Moscow. Men whom my grandfather thought of as boys in his time are thinking of finishing their military careers. Time ought to heal – I ought to find a way to let it.
My brother-in-law and I ate bananas and talked about the Russian Landscapes photo exhibition we saw on Manezhnaya Square. As usual, I was impressed by Kamchatka – also, the Krasnoyarsk region, and a gloomy photo of a winter night in Norilsk.
“I mean, Norilsk!” I told my brother-in-law. “It exists! Out there, somewhere! I have only scratched the surface of Russia! I sit in Moscow and do nothing!”
“What are you talking about? You have a job. You write plays. You just had a baby, for God’s sake.”
“I know. I just like to complain.”
“I know.”
There are some things that are easier to do with my brother-in-law. Complaining is one of them. Taking pictures is another. My husband is a zealot when it comes to taking pictures. “Take that crap off your Facebook – you’re embarrassing me!” He roars whenever I snap a quick picture of Lyovka with my mobile phone. My brother-in-law isn’t like that. Which is why we ended up immortalizing our day out like this:
Next time, I'll teach him how to use the focus option on a Samsung phone. Also, my hand looks freakishly large.
My husband is off being an actor in Poland, and couldn’t stop us.
After I got tired of complaining, we just sat under the tree for a while and stared up at the leaves. When we looked down again, we witnessed a scene: Three scary riot policemen trying not to act indimidated when approached by a crazy woman with plastic bags hanging off her arms, her neck, and her belt. The crazy woman gesticulated wildly. The plastic bags contained ominous dark shapes. The scary riot policemen drifted over to the Eternal Flame, clasping their hands behind their backs and pretending to be fascinated.
People who stage protests in Moscow do not get it. You don’t deal with riot police by being all, “I have rights! They’re in the constitution! Look it up!” You deal with riot police by acting batshit insane – or so I’ve realized.
“These are the last warm days of autumn,” My brother-in-law said, apropos of nothing.
I handed him over to his wife by Okhotny Ryad and walked all the way to Tretyakovskaya, past Lenin’s Tomb, the glowing GUM, St. Basil’s, the infamous Moskovertsky bridge on which soldiers like to pick up young girls, and so on. Looking at St. Basil’s, I was reminded of how some of the girls at The Moscow News call each other “creampuff.” “Creampuff” should be the church-museum’s new nickname too. After extensive renovations that were going on back when I was 17, St. Basil’s certainly looks good enough to eat.
On the Moskva River people partied in boats and released balloons up into the evening air. Zamoskvorechye, my once and future neighbourhood, greeted me with its moonlit bell towers and boarded-up windows. Around the bend of the river stood the house where Lyovka was conceived, in a flat that once belonged to yet another tragic Soviet general (I sometimes wonder if there is any other kind). I could see in my mind the eyes of the portraits there, staring into the darkness. All of those beautiful, dead people – who will tell the world about them? It seems this task may fall to me.
I detoured to Pyatnitskaya. Two teenagers walked behind me and discussed their misadventures with making shashlik in the forest. There was the cafe I’d written my third play in. The store I went into when I ripped a stocking – the saleslady insulted me by pointing out that their stockings were all “very expensive.” The basement club in which my husband – who was not then my husband – first kissed me was already gone, and two old men leaned on their canes and argued in the dark courtyard as I passed it by. There was an old U2 song, from the days when Bono didn’t wear stupid glasses, playing somewhere in the distance. I wondered why so many people were milling about and remembered that it was Saturday. People go out on Saturdays.
One time, during the summer, when I was very pregnant with Lyovka, my husband – who was already my husband – grabbed me and kissed me on the corner of Pyatnitskaya, and then asked me if I had remembered. “Remembered?” “I kissed you here a long time ago. It was 5 a.m. You were getting into a cab. Your friends cheered.” “This happened right here?” “Yes, exactly here.” “They did cheer! Those bastards! Then they reenacted that scene over and over again when we got home.”
It’s just a street corner, but a part of us may haunt it in some fashion.
I mused on how spontaneous that whole evening turned out to be. My husband told me he had planned ahead – he had needed to pick a place where we wouldn’t just sit and talk until morning, but a place where we would sit and talk until the middle of the night, and then he could lead me away to dance.
“Oh my God!” I said. “There was a plot!”
You want that sort of thing. You want a handsome man who plots and spins his own narrative. When you’re a writer, you don’t want it to just be you all of the time. You want someone to collaborate with – and that’s what we do.
“I didn’t think I would marry him, of course! He was so much trouble at first!” I had told my brother-in-law earlier. “It mush have been some form of providence! Imagine – if we hadn’t fallen in love – there would be no Lyovka!”
My brother-in-law smiled and rolled his eyes simultaneously, as only he can do.
The metro took me east to be with Lyovka. I read Hans Christian Andersen on the ride over to Novogireyevo.
“It is the time of falling leaves and stranded ships, and soon icy winter will come.”
September 2011 is over
October 2, 2011
I can’t believe that it’s actually over, and I’m expecting to wake up at any point in October and somehow wind up back in September.
I went back to work full time and Alexey nearly finished his film. My mother’s been sunning herself on various beaches of the world, so there’s been zero help at home and we’re spending nearly all of the money we have on our nanny, Nina Ivanovna, who’s not above doing the laundry and the dishes, thank Sweet Baby Jesus.
I somehow managed to write up a new version of my play and sent it off to Modern Drama Week in Kiev – though I think I’d be OK with the fact that a play that premiered in Moscow doesn’t get read in Kiev, if they need me to make room for the newest batch of authors, or just don’t like the play, which is set in Moscow, altogether. Kiev is still where all things began – plays, scripts, and this love affair with Alexey.
The result of the love affair has trouble napping during the day when I’m around, so I put him in his basket, stick it on the floor of the bathroom, and let the water run a little bit. Though I try to use the water sparingly, I have nightmares about the water bill. White noise from the fan just doesn’t seem to do the trick.
The play’s Moscow premiere was alright. I would have asked for something better – my husband cut the two scenes with guns, reading through the synopsis for them instead. You just don’t do that with guns. In his opinion, the problem with the reading was the pace. Still, people got up and said incredibly complimentary things, which surprised me. My so-called generation is classed as the one that came “after the fire-breathing Yury Klavdiev” – i.e., comparatively speaking, we are not as exciting or interesting – but I wouldn’t put, say, Marina Krapivina or Olga Strizhak in that category at all, for example. I’ve been surrounded by interesting people, who are doing interesting things. Perhaps I can learn by example.
In spite of all of these exciting things happening – plays, movies, newspapers, friends, Lyovka slowly learning to lift his head, etc., September has been a tiring, demoralizing month. I feel like the entire Moscow Victory Day Parade has flattened me under wheels and boots – and then turned around and flattened me all over again.
What doesn’t help is that I know that things are about to get more complicated from here on out. The movie will need to have a life beyond the Advanced School of Journalism, beyond Moscow. I’ll have to devote October to English subtitles, among other things.
Fatigue is the ultimate relationship-destroyer. Long before there’s stuff being tossed out of apartment windows, there is fatigue, the gray watchman at the foot of the bed.
Although I’ve fallen into a rhythm – work, baby, work, baby, with occasional flashes of husband-time – it’s not enough, because there is no Natalia-time. Getting to pleasure-read on the metro on the way to and from work does not count. I refuse to believe that it counts. The banya counts, on the other hand – I need more banya in my life.
Then there’s the jealousy of Alexey’s friends and colleagues. If we’re late to some event, I can count on being pulled aside for a little chat about “clipping his wings” and so on – as if my goddamn home life is these people’s business. The fact that we have an infant at home fails to register. Alexey tries to be everywhere at once, and it results in disaster for both of us.
The thing that unites us is the fact that Lyovka has begun to develop a personality. He grins when you come to get him out of his crib, he tries to grab his little green dog rattle. It’s very hard in the beginning, when they’re so small that they kind of don’t register you half the time. Now that Lyovka is constantly chatting away in baby language, communication is being established. Alexey speaks to him in Russian, I do it in English. The nosy neighbors are amazed.
I’m writing about nudism at the moment. Autumn is a third of the way done. Alexey’s off on tour to Poland in just a few days. The trees in Novogireyevo are raining red and yellow. I don’t know what’s going to happen next – I just know that September is over.
Back at work full-time
September 3, 2011It’s way hard – but I’m happy about it, because it brings the right sort of balance for a person such as myself. I get to work on the newspaper during the day, and come home to Lyovka at night, and I’m not overwhelmed by the minutae of home life – though neither do I have the chance to get overwhelmed by what we do at work. My brain just goes into “home mode” once I have Lyovka in my arms – and home mode is something I have struggled with before we had our son.
None of this stops random people from passing judgement – where would I be if it wasn’t for their sage opinions on everything from whether or not using an electrical breast pump is “wrong” to whether or not I’m a “real mother” at all now? Please, don’t hesitate to keep your superior wisdom to yourself, o Weird Dude In the Elevator Who Glimpsed My Breast Pump In a Paper Bag! I genuinely want to discuss the fact how I am a total freaking idiot – because the only thing that worked for your wife is a manual breast pump, and it’s “more natural that way.”
Ahem.
Lyovka, meanwhile, is amazing. He has my hair colour and forehead so far – but looks like his dad otherwise. When he gets upset and cries, he looks like a pumpkin. Or a tomato. We call him tykvochka and pomidorchik, then. “Uh oh, the pomidorchik is starting to grow.”
Our nanny is Ukrainian and knows all about borscht.
I’ve been busy working on a film treatment based on my new play at night – which works out great if Lyovka sleeps between night-time feeding sessions, and not so great if Lyovka doesn’t sleep between night-time feeding sessions.
The deadline is approaching, but there are always more deadlines in sight.
