Archive for the ‘Personal Essays’ Category

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A preemptive hysterical fit

January 9, 2012

I have to spend 13 hours on a packed train with a baby very shortly. The baby is in a screamy mood.

I need time and space to finish my book and I do not have these things.

You know what, I wish my jaw would stop hurting. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK, JAW?

I’m tired of fretting as to what kind of a future our son is going to have. I mean, he won’t have a trust fund! What kind of parents are we?!

I’m tired of fighting.

I missed a deadline with a play because I am too tired and because I have writer’s block. My head feels as though it’s made of cotton wads.

I hadn’t noticed Caitlin Flanagan’s sexist, presumptuous article about Karen Owen and Duke last year – I was busy becoming a parent and such – but it has since been pointed out to me. The odd thing about Flanagan is that she would be a really good writer, if she were a little more brave and a little less of a snob. If she didn’t extrapolate her own anxieties unto others, but focused on why she has them in the first place. Still, I’m tired of the fact that people like her launch writing careers after “holding forth” at dinner parties and so on, while the rest of us have to bust our asses. The only reason why I bring this up, of course, is Flanagan’s own sneering contempt for women who must bust their asses.

I’m extremely tired of being told that I am a bad parent by the people who are closest to me. I’m tired of hearing that “the baby is not developing properly” when he’s developing nicely according to every single damn source I have read. So how about you keep your “helpful advice” to yourselves, bastards? Before you take an arrow to the knee, and such.

I miss sleep. I mean real sleep here. Not the fake bullshit that passes for sleep around here.

I’m tired of not having a proper home, one that at least feels like home. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I am not a very fancy person, no matter what rumours you may have heard. I would like a balcony onto some quiet dvor. And think that the real estate bubble in Moscow was and is a crime against humanity.

I’m tired of visas and work-permits and constantly feeling as though I am on the edge of some bureaucratic disaster.

Incidentally, I want to take a sledgehammer to Russian bureaucracy.

I’m tired of uncertainty and really wish my hair would style itself.

Hysterical gif is hysterical:

Posted in Bad News, Duke, Lyovka, Personal Essays | 6 Comments »

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The comforts of home

December 30, 2011

Sasha & Marina's house. Voronezh region, Russia. From the documentary "Katya, Vitya, Dima" by Alexey Zhiryakov.

When I was in high school, my friends and I feared the kind of ordinariness that could one be borne out of the boom of the 1990′s. The walls of our houses could only cave in on us in the metaphoric sense.

Because my parents had money during that period, I thought I had the following two choices in life: grow up to be great, or grow up to ride around in a minivan. It was the assumption one makes as a child in an upper-middle-class home: the idea that one would even have a set of unfashionable wheels to be miserable about.

But I didn’t imagine such future possibilities for myself because I’d never been poor – I’d just never been poor by Soviet standards. And America then seemed to be made of wealth, though I didn’t think of it as wealth, it was just how Things Ought To Be. The continent was made of rock and money.

In the colder months, the Big Dipper hung its ladle above the home of the retired Irish couple across the street. White Christmases were a bit hard to come by in North Carolina, but we did alright without them. I hung lights around the windows of my room year-round. When we first moved into our house, I picked the bedroom that faced the street and not the woods. Squirrels nibbled on the boxes in the attic and sneaked their way across our nightly dreams. A magnolia tree was planted in the mortgaged soil and flowered every spring – until the spring it didn’t. Everyone once in a while, I look up that house on Google Maps. I still remember the address and telephone number by heart. I think I will them until I die – unless (and I realize I always say this) dementia happens to me first (who says old age doesn’t have its perks?).

On Christmas Eve this year, Lev had trouble getting to sleep. His grandma was in town, so she picked him up and rocked him when he had an outright crying fit. I cracked the window open and curled up in my pajamas, listening to the wind whispering across the snow drifts. Every year in Moscow, some of the homeless will freeze to death, even during the warmest December in the last five years. At a time like this, you learn to be grateful for what you have.

Since leaving the old American home, my relationship with my mother has suffered. I suppose in a way, she has yet to accept the fact that I began living my own life, as opposed to living as an extension of her own hopes and dreams. She plays “gotcha” with me at every opportunity. Husband too tired to take baby out in his stroller? I married a lazy jackass. I take half a Saturday off to go to the banya and swim a few laps in the pool? Baby “is not living in a loving household” and must be taken away by his grandparents in order to ensure his survival.

This situation is made worse by the fact that my husband and I are currently renting a flat the approximate size of a matchbox (the family home is “too hot right now” – a.k.a. my mother’s dispute with the co-owners sluggishly continues, and there is no way I would want Lyovka to feel unsafe in his own home). Which is why I’m glad to be in our old apartment in Kiev at the moment, which is the sort of place where one can at least wander away from an argument.

Arriving to Kiev in the morning all bleary-eyed, Alexey and I collapsed on my old sofa bed without even bothering to fetch a blanket. Little Buddy slept between us in his blue fleece hoodie, so tired that he didn’t even need to be rocked. The cat wandered in and gave us a strange look – strange even by his standards, that is.

While we were waiting for a taxi at the train station, my father called to tell us that the heating had been turned off inside our building – a typical incident around these parts. Though it was restored later in the day, the morning was still cold. My mother came in and covered me with her shawl and brought a blanket for Lazy Jackass. There’s a buttload of construction going on across the street, but the eternal stray dogs are still there, howling. I think their howls must be etched into the ground and the trees and walls and the sky by now.

What is home? It goes no further than your body and the bodies of people you love – everything beyond that is a wilderness. Bodies degrade as homes do, but the former is not yet mortgaged or occupied.

At this time of year, we put up garlands of lights around familiar objects in an attempt to beat back the darkness – we’re old pagans with knowledge of electricity. We claim the streets with our lights, and the darkness hangs back a little, turning away and pretending as though it has something better to do this evening.

Alexey and I leave Little Buddy in the care of his granddad and go walking the streets in the early evening, wandering into an old Greek restaurant that seems to exist solely for the purpose of money laundering – and good tzatziki. Prices in Kiev seem comical after you spend a substantial amount of time in Moscow. I put my head on my husband’s shoulder and listen to the noisy office party taking place next door. When we come back, granddad is hopping about in a jester’s hat with bells – while Little Buddy remains stubbornly displeased. I pick him up and wander my childhood apartment – this is the room where my great-grandmother died. My brother sleeps here now, under a huge American flag – whenever he’s home that is, which is not that often (my brother is smart). The room where my grandfather died – with the artificial Christmas tree glowing in the corner. Little Buddy seizes a snowman ornament and sends it flying to the floor. The snowman remains cheerful and unscathed. The cat gives a disdainful look that suggests that he could never get away with such nonsense.

We’re home for now, I think. We’re home as much as it is possible to be so.

Posted in America, Personal Essays, Russia, Ukraine | 2 Comments »

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People write me about student debt

December 6, 2011

And some of them are talking about wanting to end their lives. They are not speaking from “weakness” or “stupidity.” They’re just tired. They feel done. “I’ve never had serious issues with suicidal ideation, but damnit, this is causing that for me,” one woman wrote – she ended up having trouble with her loans due to mounting health problems. Debt collectors are harassing her 81-year-old grandmother. Every time she applied for a forebearance, her paperwork was conveniently “lost,” she says. She suspects they wanted her to go into default early. Are we honestly going to be OK with it when it happens to more and more people?

Since my piece on student debt was reprinted by AlterNet, I’ve had all sorts of trolls showing up here, in the meantime. Here they are, distilled to their essence:

Pay the money, bitch!
It’s gone, baby, gone. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be willing to negotiate with the loan company for a fair amount, considering all of the money I have already sunk into my loans. If I’m in a position to negotiate, I will do so. Neither am I above asking for help with my loans. But most of the people close to me are also having financial troubles.

You’re a thief! You planned this! Got a fancy education then decided you didn’t have to pay the money back!
Ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Coward! You ran away to Russia!
I’m in Russia on a work visa. As a former USSR citizen and wife of a Russian citizen, I am entitled to residency – but in Moscow, that’s a prohibitively expensive process for me at the moment. In my husband’s hometown, it doesn’t make economic sense. I didn’t “run away” – though working abroad was ultimately a smart decision for someone with my skills and background. Many people in similar situations cannot say the same.

That’s what you get for being uppity and a part of the “me generation”
What about the generations that came before? Our collective values as such that people are considered “uppity” for wanting to get a good education. And they’re such that a good education comes attached with ridiculous costs. And they’re such that when you are 18-year-old, you are told that student loans are “a good way to build credit.”

Now responsible people like me will have to pay for your sins!
Responsible people have ended up bailing out Wall Street. At this point, we need to re-think the entire system of lending in this country. Not to mention re-thinking higher education and its costs. I could be quiet about my debt problems, or I could go public with the issue – but not as a means of going, “Hey guys! Take responsibility for my problem!”

Well, you just suck. As opposed to me. I mean, look at me! *hold on, let me dust off the halo for a second* Where was I? Ah, yes. The only thing your example proves is that some people in our society are bad apples. I worked hard all of my life – and will never be in the situation you’re in. I’m not a freeloader or a thief – and neither am I an entitled jackass who thinks that everything ought to be handed to me on a silver platter. That’s the difference between you and me. That’s why I matter. That’s why you don’t matter – aside from being an example of how not to live one’s life.
I had a guy tell me once that the only reason I *needed* student loans in the first place is because I was not smart enough to get into university “on merit.” Smart people can always score a full ride to a school of their choice, you see. Everyone else should not go to school – or have the good grace to be born rich. Of course, he and his family would never end up in my shoes. Except that years later, they did. When their eldest daughter got a rare illness and the insurance company screwed her. That was when their financial free-fall started. The man who said those hurtful words to me now works as a sales clerk – way past retirement age. His family home has been repo’ed. I’m not saying this because I want to gloat – what happened to them is a goddamn tragedy. And it goes to show. Under the current system, none of us are safe from harm.

Its your parents’ fault! They should have saved up for college!
College costs too much in the United States. Most normal families can’t afford it. It doesn’t seem like a problem at first – because of course something great ought to cost a lot! Right? It made sense to me as a kid. If we don’t think that people ought to have adequate access to health care, when it comes to education, we’re even worse. And we’ve completely devalued vocational schools and made apprenticeships obsolete, which compounds the problem.

They ought to strip you of your citizenship! You ought to have your child taken away! I hope the lenders DO drive you to suicide!
I’m including this as an example of how vicious ordinary people are to other ordinary people. Pitting us against each other is clever. It’s something that has always been done, throughout the ages, by those in power. Throw a few bones to the rabble. Let them fight each other for scraps. Sell them a convenient fairy tale about how they have every chance to become the next Bill Gates in the meantime – even though an entire economic system’s existence depends on a bunch of them being in poverty, while the rest cling desperately to middle-class status. It’s a fool-proof plan. Or is it?

Posted in America, Bad News, Dirty Politics, Personal Essays | Tagged , , | 49 Comments »

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Student debt story: Dear Sallie Mae, I can’t afford you. You’re too high maintenance. And your cutesy name sucks

December 3, 2011

I’ve been in a panic these last few months. Making minimum payments on my student loans serviced by Sallie Mae Inc. was no longer merely a challenge – it was getting impossible. After making some awful sacrifices to refrain from defaulting (see more on that below), I’m in a corner.

I am aware of the total lack of consumer protection associated with student debt. I knew that if I was unable to make my minimum payments, they would hit me with late fees, penalties, etc. They would harass me. In ruining my credit history, they would make it impossible for me to get access to basic services. Forget about taking out another loan – I’m talking about not being able to rent an apartment. And defaulting would not only mean a ruined credit history, it would mean that my debt would double, triple, quadruple, etc…I would be a slave (serf) forever.

But I took a long, hard look at the numbers, and I realized that I am already a slave (serf is an appropriate word, see comments below).

Here is a screenshot of the current status of my Sallie Mae loans as of November 27, 2011 (click to enlarge):

how sallie mae screws people

Notice anything?

Original balance: $37,099.00

Current balance: $35, 908. 41

I’ve been in repayment since 2006. I had to do one deferral – as to not default. I signed up for a program to minimize my payments that, I was told, was beneficial to someone who is going through financial difficulties – yet I regularly made payments over the minimum payment.

Because Sallie Mae helpfully provides a payment history, I was able to whip out a calculator and count up the exact amount I have paid over these last few years.

That amount is $23, 449.65

I was done before I even knew it. And applying for more deferrals will send me deeper and deeper into debt. Decades and decades of payments – as I grow old. There’s no end in sight. The system counts on this. The people setting it up knew that most of us would not be able to sustain payments over time.

Of course, the lending industry has its own arguments.  Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in America, Bad News, Dirty Politics, Personal Essays | Tagged , , | 93 Comments »

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‘Till the fat lady sings

November 23, 2011

Will 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.

Posted in Lyovka, Personal Essays, Russia | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

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Things that I can’t write about right now

November 18, 2011

I 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.

Posted in America, Lyovka, Personal Essays, Russia | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments »

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When we was fab

October 8, 2011

Even 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.”

Posted in Lyovka, Personal Essays, Pictures, Russia, Stories | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

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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.

Posted in Good News, Lyovka, New Drama, Personal Essays, Russia | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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Another still from “Katya, Vitya, Dima”

September 19, 2011

Graduation in a rural village, Voronezh region, Russia

This is one of those movies that has seriously reminded me of my age. Not necessarily in a bad way.

I suppose it’s natural for Alexey to shoot a film that’s mostly about kids – now that we have our own kid. And I’m glad I’ve been involved in this project from the start. Being his wife, it was inevitable, but some people don’t realize just *to what extent* I’ve had to be involved: whether it’s giving editing suggestions at 4 a.m. when I’m pumping breast milk, or sacrificing the family budget when we suddenly need a new computer monitor.

In our household this month, we’re dealing with a little baby boy, a hysterical director trying to finish a documentary he single-handedly shot and edited, and a cranky new mother who’s just gone back to work and who’s just had to deal with her new play premiering at the Lyubimovka festival. You can imagine what it’s been like. Or don’t, actually – if you don’t want the nightmares to haunt you.

I’m proud of us for not having gone completely insane, though. The other day, with the nanny spending the night at our place, Alexey and I sat in a kitchen of a hostel on Moscow’s busy Garden Ring, listening to the legendary playwright and screenwriter Slava Durnenkov desribe the equally legendary Hagia Sophia like only Slava Durnenkov can. A part of me wanted desperately to be home with Lev, but another part recognized the fact that I needed my walkies. I wound up ejecting Dima Bogoslavsky from the bedroom so that I could pump. Bogoslavsky is probably the biggest success of this year’s Lyubimovka – his play will soon premiere at the Mayakovsky Theater. Now that Mindaugas Karabauskis is in charge of that place, living playwrights can actually, you know, have their premiere there and stuff.

Speaking of the Mayakovsky – thanks to the nanny, again, we actually went to the Mayak restaurant next door after a night of readings at the festival. I like the Mayak – I just don’t like it on the weekends. On the weekends, some of the guests try extra hard to remind everyone that they’re freewheeling artist-types, and bang on the piano extra hard as well. It was good to sort of have a social life again, though, wreathed in smoke or otherwise.

The reading of my own new play, “The lives of living people,” went fine. Not great – but fine, considering the pressure on Alexey to edit the movie and hold rehearsals, and considering the fact that I was re-writing the new draft in the heat of the summer, with an enormous belly weighing me down. The best part was realizing that the main heroine, as interpreted by glamorous Alexandra Rebenok, is kinda a bad person.

That night on the Garden Ring, Slava asked us – “Who financed the film project? Who are the other crew members?” We had to explain that there was no funding, it was just Alexey and me, and our money. We had to explain that there was no crew. I haven’t realized before how fantastical that might seem from the outside – that this movie got done, and that it looks the way it does, and that it happens to tell a pretty profound story straight from the margins of Russian society.

I suppose we’re allowed to feel tired.

Posted in Film Reviews, Good News, Kultur, Personal Essays, Russia | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

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A still from Alexey Zhiryakov’s “Katya, Vitya, Dima”

September 9, 2011

katya vitya dima by alexey zhiryakov

“Katya, Vitya, Dima” is the English title. The working title in Russian is “Дом у дороги.”

A good wife must promote her husband’s work at every opportunity – which is working against me at the moment, because anything I might say may be suspect. “Oh, of course she would say that.”

It’s a shame, because I watched the rought cut version last night, wiped away the tears, and said something like, “Well, hell, darling. It was certainly worth it to have you gone so much in the last trimester of the pregnancy.”

The movie was shot in the spring and summer of 2011, in the village of Shestakovo, Voronezh region, Russian Federation. It focuses on a married couple and their three kids. It’s a documentary whose style personally reminds me of Sofia Coppola.

I’ll write more about it when I have the chance to gather my thoughts.

Posted in Film Reviews, Good News, Personal Essays, Russia | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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