Natalia A.

Young women, stay away from Hugo Schwyzer

Older women too.

Middle-aged women, this is about you as well.

Men of all ages. Children. Other intelligent life-forms out there.

Everyone, just stay away from Hugo Schwyzer, OK?

Took me long enough to see what a dangerous, unhinged man he is, but I’ve finally seen it.

I sincerely apologize to those of you who have been saying it for years – many of your comments I had missed, others I just chalked up to a two-sided conflict of sorts. You know, people fighting on the Internet, the usual stuff. I never bothered to look closer. I have never imagined that he had been purposefully targeting his critics online, WOC bloggers in particular. Of course, having lived abroad for years now, I’ve had many other things on my mind instead of the feminist blogosphere – but it is also my old stomping ground, and honestly, the fact that we, all of us, let him run there unchecked means that we failed.

I sincerely regret linking Schwyzer approvingly in the past and being chummy with him on Facebook. I had bought into the notion that now that he had his beautiful wife and children in his life, the man HAD to have changed. Who would honestly screw a thing like that up? Stupid of me, I know.

I know a thing or two about what happens when scary men are allowed to run unchecked, which is why I’m saying it now:

People, stay away.

I have an “Idiots on Parade” category for posts on this blog. The idiot, in this instance, is me.

That was a crazy game of poker

…Is how I’m going to sum up the last four years or so. It was funny and scary and cool. I became a playwright, and a mother, and I did a lot of journalism of the sort I’d always wanted to do, and I also did a lot of management that tested me in surprising ways and showed me that we’re all human underneath.

Of course, the really crazy thing is that the funny and scary is only just beginning.

In order to properly reflect on the possibility that my life is about to change yet again, I took a few days off from Moscow and went to Kiev with the toddler. Daddy stayed behind to edit his new project. The toddler and I walked around hand-in-hand, he fell asleep on my shoulder in the restaurant, he saw a lion at the zoo and they made eye contact for a long time. Making him his evening tea, I reflected on the fact that This is it and nothing else matters. And putting him to bed at night, I sat on the balcony with a glass of cognac, and watched the marbled skies above the city turn to midnight ash – as I have done many times before.

The grapevine that my late grandfather had planted with a friend still sneaks its way up our building, and birds fly up and pick at the grapes, nearly flapping their wings in your face. In the dark, the overripe pears from the tree that my grandfather also planted drop heavily to the ground. The crickets start up and don’t stop until even the people stumbling home from the bar in the park have all gone home. The stray dogs, at last, have gone. A new concrete fence encircles their old hide-out. I keep hoping that not all of them were killed horribly by the authorities – and that a few, at least, found a good home.

I spent most of this trip envying people who have some sort of illusion of permanence in their lives. I do wonder, sometimes, if they envy people like me. I wonder if anyone ever looks down from the safety of their well-lit apartment at the grimy sidewalk below, and have that twinge of pain that the wanderers have all gone and taken their guitars and stories with them.

Kiev remains itself. Our love affair is complicated but never lacking in passion. I come here searching for answers and find them in the most bizarre places. Some years ago, it was a guy wearing a Primo Levi-inspired t-shirt bearing the phrase, “If not now, when?”

This time around it was this silly photo of me taken by my brother in our kitchen one morning:

I looked at it, and went, “Aha.”

Stop laughing for a sec and think about it. It’s true that you only live once. And even if you don’t – it helps to think this way. When you close the door behind you, when you climb the afternoon skies, when you look over your shoulder in a crowded street and see the eyes that have been watching you all along – it helps to think this way.

My trolls are the best trolls: Chapter 2436474956

Recently, I wrote something for The Guardian about the latest chapter in the Snowden saga. As usual, there were some solid gold comments – including one from a guy who wants to party in me in furs (while I bring the borscht, of course). Then there was the gentleman who specifically sought me out to deliver this message. Am reprinting it here almost in full – as this will surely go down in history as one of those comments that somehow manage to illustrate everything wrong with the United States today:

While I was reading your Guardian piece on Snowden I couldn’t help that sinking feeling. It was hard to figure out at first. And then I got it…. I realized just how Ukrainian you are. There is a reason why Ukrainians are only good for boxing and brothels and never contributed anything to world culture: lack of talent, lack of originality, lack of basic integrity and pride………..

Were we living in a just society today, you would be tried for treason for abusing your adopted homeland with this Snowden nonsense. Your [sic] as much of a traitor as he is. Make no mistake, those of us who actually care about the United States of America will be watching you. Youre [sic] the poster child for immigration reform, and I don’t mean that stuff about opening our borders up to more worthless scum.

I did a little googling of your person and found you to be a classic traitor in the honest sense. All that whining about the student loan industry (THAT ALLOWED YOU TO GO TO COLLEGE, HOW UNGRATEFUL ARE U….?) and the fact that American men are apparently not good enough for you and so you married a Russian.

Well I hope he hits you regularly since thats the only thing these guys are good for. Though to be honest if my woman ever spouted the kind of lunacy that you peddle as a journalist I would beat the crap out of her as well. Sorry was that politically incorrect? Do I care?

And of course: she’s a feminist! Every good-for-nothing hack of the female variety is a feminist nowadays. Hey feminists were respectable back in the day and some were great Americans, but now we have to sit and listen to YOUR stupid opinions.

All you have going for you sweets are your baby blues and oil money. I guess you’re a step up from the average immigrant in this country, but not by much. I hope you go to hell and find out exactly what they do to traitors there.

I don’t know what’s the most special thing about this letter. Is it the casual switching from “you” to “U”? That bit about oil money? The unexpectedly stylish alliteration of “boxing and brothels”? Whatever the phrase “classic traitor in the honest sense” means?

What do you think?

The gloomy Sunday that wasn’t

These waning days of July have been bad. The weather is maddening – in a city that gets so little heat and light, people require a proper summer. When summer peters out a month and a half early, as if the quotas on warmth have been reduced like the quotas on foreigners, you don’t know quite how to respond. Well, aside from responses that just involve screaming “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck” very very loud at odd hours of the day.

Being trapped in the city makes it worse. Lev and I are due at my parents’ in Kiev next weekend for a few days, but I don’t think I even have the strength to look forward to that. When children are a certain age, the patterns hardly change. You don’t get any rest with children. That’s just how nature designed the process. You do get a lot of joy and excitement and random Instagram moments – but not rest. Not stillness.

When the weather began to turn in Moscow, I started thinking, “Another year?” Another year of waiting for the sun to return. The rains that turn to snow that turn to black ice that turns human bone to mush from a certain height. The ghostly outlines of outdoor cafes. Lev’s feet getting too big for his boots. Another unsanctioned protest and wondering when the other shoe will drop. Telling yourself half-heartedly that “maybe Thailand this winter” – and almost being relieved that you can afford nothing. Phone calls from the dentist wondering where you’ve been, and no longer being sheepish about responding with the truth – which is to say that dentists are a luxury right alongside space heaters.

And through it all, you wait for the day that your visa is not renewed, or the day you wake from troubled dreams to discover yourself transformed in your bed into Edward Snowden – or something. You wait for the illusion of home to fade away again like it has always done before. Just like nature reclaims human dwellings, so do governments reclaim whatever small, honeycomb spaces humans like to call their own. You wait and you get tired of waiting – and go for a walk.

Moscow has a way of fooling you in late summer. It greets you in the morning – gray and wrinkled with the wind – and then it mellows slowly, growing golden around the edges. Never promising anything, never explaining. Never harder, never sweeter. Moscow is a deadpan city where no one is ever waiting – except for people who matter.

On the day that I enter the last year of my 20s…

I remind myself that there are ways to be old and awesome:

I’m also very, very grateful. I’m grateful for the love I’ve experienced over these years, and the pain, and the boredom (like Eddie Izzard says, you can’t be afraid and bored at the same time). I’m grateful to my family, my colleagues, stereotypical Frenchmen who hold their cigarettes in their long fingers just so, the bureaucrats with an unexpected and angelic gleam in their eyes, the sunrises over strange streets, the laughter on the stairwell, the church bells in the dark, and the winds that change direction unexpectedly at night, ruffling your hair with a paternal hand and moving on.