(a preface, of sorts: this is somewhat long, personal and inspired by my forgetting that some 18 years ago we landed in this country for the first time. Jon Zolsky, my dad, posted his take on it here. This is somewhat belated mine.)
The Other Side of the Atlantic
The year of my rebellion ended on July 31st, 1991, with my behind firmly and irrevocably jammed into the seat of the largest airplane I'd ever been on or even imagined, a Pan Am Boeing headed for JFK.
The year in Moscow had been a blur of me running through the cobblestones of Arbat, away from my dad, the kid-catcher. It was a year of falling in love with big cities, music, sidewalk cafes with warm salami sandwiches and demitasse cups of scalding hot chocolate that ran their bitter-sweet silk course through each evening. There were artists painting the faces of Americans, with their gleaming teeth and glossy hair, for a buck. There were collections of Russian dolls, lining the sidewalks, and all manner of peddlers, long haired young men with earrings, wearing ACDC t-shirts. That was my crowd - I knew them all, their dreams and nightmares. I, at sixteen, belonged to this strange tribe. They could recite poetry and mug tourists for petty cash for cigarettes with the same finesse. We played guitars, we sang, we smoked. We were a few dozen philosophers, poets and thieves, congregating on the steps of dark staircases of old brownstones, smelling of cigarette butts and urine, warming ourselves up by burning someone else's fences on damp concrete. We were full of love, lust and magic, and we ruled the world.
Home was in the suburb of Moscow, an hour's ride by train. I always took the last one, empty, save for a few drunkards and an occasional band of Tartar youths, armed with knives and looking for easy prey. I was immortal, until on one of these trips a bear of a man picked me up by my coat collar and hung me out the busted window of the rapidly moving train. I was smoking in between two cars. He wanted a cigarette. I had none left. He eyed my tear stained face and did not drop me.
Home was in a huge condo building, on the 13th floor. Of that place I remember nothing, save for the overwhelming desire to run away, and run away I did, until daddy caught me, tipped off by a co-worker as to my location on one of the downtown streets, and that one time, smacked me across the face in front of my more grown-up friends. Two months later, I fell in love with a boy who dwelled in a suburb on the other side of the sprawling city, and my escapes from then on were predicated on a kiss from the one I was going to love forever.
There was no hope of getting a window seat on the flight. I sat there feeling utterly alone, my hands still smelling of the black roses he brought to the airport - he always picked the most beautiful bouquets of roses. I had no idea what, if anything, of what I owned got packed, having shown up at the apartment an hour before we had to leave for the airport after a week-long absence, - the time I spent wisely, contemplating not coming back at all, staying behind with the man I loved, only then my parents and my brother couldn't leave either, and they waited so many years to do this... Guilt made the choice for me and I would resent my parents dearly for it for a long long time.
Books had their own travel arrangements and were stacked on some dock in a huge container, promising to show up in New York in a few months. Before slamming the door to the appartment one last time, I spotted a tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and as much as I did not want to read that book, ever, I had no choice. The book kept me from thinking about anything at all for some 13 hours of the flight, and succeeded at drowning out the noises of crying kids while amplifying the sense of loss I was reeling from to Biblical proportions.
JFK greeted my lumbering family of four greyly and loudly. There were lines everywhere, signage directing one to various queues in a language I didn't understand. All eyes were on dad, the only one of us who spoke and read English, having been an English teacher by trade for some time, but he seemed just as confused as the rest of us. Somehow, we made it through customs. We were ushered onto an escalator that was going to take us down to the street level and outside. I desperately needed a cigarette. From just above me I was shaken out of my dreaming of a Marlboro and fresh air daze by chaotic loud Russian of my parents, screaming at me to follow them. Something was wrong... We had to go back up to the level above. We may have been called back by customs, or we left something behind, but we all seemed scared, and we ran up the down escalator, dad carrying mom, in a race against the laws of physics, and to the amusement of people whose common sense would have never let them do that. People, who were born into a certainty that for every escalator that goes down there is bound to be one that goes up.
When we made it to street level again, mom opted for the door closest to us, with a big red sign on it "Emergency Exit Only". Until the alarm went off, no one realized that we opened the wrong door, and I walked away from whatever commotion was created and the resulting yells of the parents. Leaning on the wall of the airport that was stained gray and dirty, a far cry from the gleaming white New York of my imagination, I lit that cigarette, and let the tears run down my face, quietly. I was now, for the first time, alone. The first word I would utter in English, with the thickest of accents, would be a surprised "Thank you", directed at the dark-haired middle aged man in a black blazer, whose outstretched hand held a snow-white handkerchief, and who implored me in rapid Italian to take it. "It's gonna be ok, bambino, it's gonna be ok..." was my soft welcome to the new world.
Over the next few weeks spent in a steaming hot, filthy, roach-infested hotel on Twenty-Eighth and Fifth, I would learn that it's not necessary, and indeed somewhat weird, to bring your own bag to go grocery shopping; that New York city rats were fantastically large, and that it was easiest to blend in on busy streets, like Broadway, which was only a short walk away. I would also learn that I was carrying a child.
Our books and the man with the roses would forever remain on the other side of the Atlantic.
Copyright (C) 2009, inna hardison. please, don't steal from the starving artists, it's illegal and well, just plain freakin' wrong! :-)
Inna Hardison is the owner of Ha Media Group, a full service small kick-ass ad agency.
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