To our fortune or misfortune,
Simple is the truth:
One shall not revisit porches
Left behind in youth.
I know this poem very well. This is probably one of the few poems that I still remember by heart. Shpalikov, a well-known Soviet screenwriter and poet, tried to warn me from making this nostalgic mistake. However, I did not listen to him.
A cold early winter morning in Voronezh. There was no snow, only the black Voronezh soil and dirt reflecting the dark skies over the working district, to which I came by train. I had finally reached the “Pridacha” railway station, which was recently renamed to the soulless “Voronezh-South”. The very same station, which led my grandmother and I to our summer house. I went down the Tsiolkovsky street, passed the Aircraft factory, and at its entrance I came up to a group of workers.
– Muzhiki, spare a light, please
– Here you go.
I dreamt of this when I was a child. To come up to the workers of the factory, where almost all of my ancestors worked. Come not as a foreigner, not as an intruder, but as an
integral element of the scenery. The scenery of our Left Bank district, or, as we call it, the Gaza Sector. I fulfilled this childhood dream. There were no questions as to why I was there in my autumn coat during a -16 frost. No questions as to where I am headed to. I thanked the workers and, shaking from the frost, continued my trip.
Even if we find our mecca
Perfectly alright,
We won’t hear the sought-for echo,
Neither you nor I.
Yes, I dreamt of one day becoming a worker of this factory. It was either that, or a prime-minister (I tried to be realistic, so I did not dare to become a president), or a pilot. I dreamt of having friends from my workshop, drinking beer with them, and having smoke breaks. All these workers were ideal to me as a child. But I asked myself: how many of them support the ongoing war? How many of them were trying to kill my friends?
I was going down the Tsiolkovsky street, smoking my cigarette and thinking of how everything changed. The Aircraft Builders park, which was founded based on the work of my grandmother, my great-grandfather and others, where I was fooling around at the age of 9, reading books at the age of 14, was locked. They started charging people to enter. They brought some animals there, they made it into a Zoo Now I could only look at it, but not enter. Just like a bear from this zoo, I was walking along the fence, without a single chance to pass through it. They locked me out.
Finally, I reached the Leninsky prospect. Our house was nearby. I had to buy the flowers for my grandmother. I went right to the nearest market. At this market I would buy newspapers for my grandfather, and my grandmother would buy magazines with scale models for me. She never thought about the price. She just wanted to see me happy. Now I wanted to see her happy, so I entered the flower shop and asked for 9 roses.
– Three thousand rubles, – the seller announced her verdict.
– Do you have change for five thousand?
– Do you have anything smaller?
– I have two and a half for sure, and some Armenian drams. Listen, maybe I can give you the rest with drams?
– Why the hell would I need drams?
Indeed, why the hell did she need it? Why the hell did I think that for three years that I was away from this city, the people would change? I looked at her, remembering how ten years ago at the same street my grandmother was asking another salesman to sell us a pie when we were short of just 10 kopeks. Her attempts were in vain, afterwards she told me: “Here you go, only zhlobs (greedy and mean people) in our city”. Ten years passed, and I understood: the old joke about a dictionary claiming that “Zhlob is a native of Voronezh region” was still true. I checked all my pockets, scraped together some money, and finally got the flowers.
I would travels to the former
Certainly forbid.
And, my brother, do not stir me,
Let me rest a bit.
There it is: the house. Leninsky, 9/4. Second entrance. Apartment 18. Telephone number: 49-04-46. If you were to wake me up at night and ask, I would tell it to you as a prayer. I do not know why my grandmother made me learn it by heart: I did not walk alone when I was a little boy. Still, from then on whenever I saw an old disc phone, I typed these digits in an unachievable attempt to dial the past, probably. I approached the entrance. It was snowy and covered in ice. Twenty years ago, on these stairs I was jokingly asked by our neighbor, Duska, whose I am. “I am my granny Raya’s, from the 18th apartment”. I was quite precise: I did not have a developed personality at the age of four, but I had my grandmother. I was Anton just to the same extent as I was granny Raya’s grandson.
The bench on which Duska was sitting had been replaced, but the stairs were the same, even though they were renovated. Despite that, they still had deep indents; they were still slippery. Granny Raya fell from them a year ago, and spent the whole winter and spring at home.
I recalled Duska’s question. I really did not want to be asked this question now by anyone. Not only because my grandparents did not know that I was coming, but because I just did not know what to answer now. Who am I? A grandson who finally came to his aging grandparents after three years abroad? Why did I decide to do it only now? Where was I? Why did I emigrate? Too many questions, and since I answered all of them during an interrogation at the border a week ago, I did not want to answer them again. To my horror, the entrance door was opened from the inside. I prepared myself for a conversation with the neighbors. A young family came out from the entrance.
– Good morning! – I tried to be as friendly as I could.
– Good morning. – sullenly answered the family all at once.
The fear was in vain. I went to the second floor. Rang the bell. The lock clicked. The door was opening.
– Oh, he came nevertheless, and did not even warn me! Slava, look, who came! – happily said my grandmother.
I returned to my childhood. The same wallpapers. The same rooms. The same furniture. The very same cot, lying on which ten years ago I thought for the first time, that at some point all of this would be no more. I had no smartphone, no Internet. Just books, my grandparents and just three days to fill the growing void inside me. The void of being torn away from the people who were always next to me.
Lest – who’d hinder me? – like lightning
I would take a dive
On a felt-boot into nineteen
Forty-four or five.
In that year, I have an inkling,
There, where – man alive!
Will remain my mom unwrinkled,
And my dad alive.
I have changed during these recent three years. Emigration generally changes a person a lot. When my grandparents were raising me, I was too idealistic. I was raised with old books about the Red Army, and during the relatively peaceful years I, a ten-years-old silly boy, was dreaming of war, of feats. I wanted to grow up and sacrifice my life for my country, for my people. Now my country has started a war, and it seems that the whole city of my childhood, the whole fabulous Voronezh became the Berlin of 1945. I still would agree, if offered, to sacrifice my life, but only to stop this country from killing people. Only when I came back to this place, I understood, that the city of my childhood is no longer existed.
My grandparents changed as well: grandmother is fighting cancer and grandfather consumes state propaganda. The man who unveiled Ukrainian culture to me, told me about the Ukrainian language, was now supporting the atrocities which Russians committed in Ukraine to my grandmother’s horror. The cot that I used to sleep on is covered in debris. My grandmother wants to clean it, hoping that I will come back at some point. But I cannot. Your childhood ends when you no longer can revisit it. And I have to agree with Shpalikov: I can’t see the sought-for-echo there now.
