Over the years people have asked me "what is [country x] like," or "what are people in [country y] like," and I try to come up with an answer. I often do better in response to questions of the first type than the second, but ultimately, either way, I'm not sure my success rate is very high.
Especially, as I said, regarding people. It feels like I should know the answer. It feels like other people are able to generalize effectively about culture and national characteristics, but ... I always find myself immediately aware of counter-examples that defeat my best attempts. Hungarians, I have been told, are "melancholy," but then I think of Andi and Agi and Szabi, and nobody would use that word to describe them. Brazilians, I am told, are "laid-back and fun-loving," but then I think of Mariana or Dennis, and while they're both certainly happy people, they're also focused, hard-working, and professional.
So I don't know. I'm a little better to speak about Americans, because I've seen us from the outside — and have seen enough people from other countries to understand ways in which we differ, but as for what commonalities there are among people in Cambodia, or Mexico, or Germany? I'm afraid I'm not the best source. Neither Walt Whitman nor America is alone in containing multitudes, it seems to me.
(Though — a brief digression — I do tend to joke that, among the last three countries I've lived in, while Hungarians are sad and frustrated at their country's diminished standing in the world ("nobody gives us the respect we deserve!"), which is obviously silly, and Americans tend to be overly jingoistic and impressed with themselves ("we're number 1!"), which is equally inane, the Czechs, alone in my experience, have their heads on straight: "We're a small land-locked country in Central Europe with in some ways an interesting history but certainly no claim to international superiority, and ... let's have another beer." To which I say, "right on."
Anyway, back to Russia. I have met lots and lots of wonderful, charming, helpful Russians, and I'll get to them at the end of Russia week, but ... not today.
Today I'll go back to the summer of 1996, the end of my first year in the Russian Far East (RFE), when my father came to visit. Actually, no, let me go back to July of 1995, when he put me on a plane to Russia (via San Francisco) at the Roanoke airport, and while my mother and ....
No, wait. Just for fun, let's go back one more day, to July 8, 1995. My mother and sister had come to Lexington, Virginia, to see me off, and Saturday morning —the day before my departure — my father, wanting to take some family photos, positioned us outside his house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At one point, as he carefully positioned me near a pile of chopped wood, I looked down and saw three bees sitting, unmoving, on my arm. "Huh," I thought. "That's certainly unusual." Turns out my father had innocently positioned me right next to a beehive, and said bees were objecting to my presence. All three of those bees immediately stung me, which was ... quite painful. My father was horrified and felt tremendously guilty, which I have to admit, helped with the pain (which, in any event, was completely gone in a minute or two).
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| We did go ahead later and get the photos. |
The next morning the four of us drove to Roanoke Airport, and as we all waited, looking out at the tarmac, for my flight to be called, I noticed that my father was crying. We're not a particularly emotional family, in that particular way, and I remember being charmed and touched ... but also a bit amused. I hadn't thought of this as a particularly emotional leave-taking; my family traveled and moved around a great deal, and it was hardly unusual to leave for another place. Indeed, neither my mother nor sister was crying, and my father had never cried (that I had seen) before, so it was ... odd. But sweet.
Let's now move to a year later, in Yemar Bay, outside Vladivostok. My interest in Russia had come from my father in the first place, as he had studied the Russian language in college during the height of the Cold War (leading my grandmother to ask him, in all seriousness, "don't you like it here?"), had defended Khrushchev to me in my initial attempts at political engagement, and had visited Moscow in the late 1970s (bringing me back a Moscow Olympics bag and a Russian Pepsi bottle). So there was little doubt he was going to visit me at some point during my service in Russia.
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| Спасибо, папа |
Still, it wasn't an easy visit for him. He had just had a large tumor removed from his foot a week or two before, so was on crutches. The RFE, at the time, was not in any handicapped-accessible, and I didn't have a car, so ... this was not an easy process for him. Indeed, seeing someone on crutches or a wheelchair was a highly unusual sight at the time, I later learned, in large part because they were usually left to rehabilitate (or live, out of sight) in hospitals, sanitoria, or other special care facilities. You just didn't see people with limited mobility, there, then.
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| Not that we didn't have fun! |
But he came, and struggled to get around for those 8 days. On one of those days he and I took the elektrichka into the city, and (slowly) I took him to some of my favorite places, include my favorite pizzeria for lunch and the hill on top of the city with a view of th bay, and then we walked through the GUM department store, on Svetlanskaya St, the main drag. The store covered an entire city block, and the doors at the back end were essentially on the main plaza, from which we had immediate access to the last elektrichka of the day, scheduled to leave at around 6:10 pm, to take us home.
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| Earlier That Day |
We got there at, I don't know, around 5:30, and we explored their souvenirs and what-not, before, at 5:50 or so, we heard the announcement that the store was about to close and we should all head out. We had moved over the preceding 20 minutes from the main entrance to near the exit at the other end of the store, so walked to those doors, but ... found our way blocked by an officious 50-year old Russian man, who informed us that the back doors were already closed, and we would have to go back through the entire store and leave from the main entrance. "But he's on crutches!" I pointed out, "and we have very little time! Can't you just ... open the door and let us go out this way, please?" He was unmoved. "Nilzya," he repeated. Not possible. I begged one or two more times, but he was inflexible.
Rapidly running out of time, we turned and got to the front of the store as fast as we could — again, my father on crutches — then had to race back the entire length of the store on the street ... now 6:03, through the ploschad (now 6:05), up the steps leading over the train tracks (now 6:08), then down the steps leading to the platform (now 6:09), and got into the train as it slowly started to pull out of the station.
Exhausted. Panting. Furious.
My father somehow managed to avoid being physically sick, but never in my life had I seen him so absolutely depleted, destroyed, and on the verge of ... well, maybe not death. But he was covered in sweat, on the verge of throwing up, and unable to speak for 10 minutes or so. He was wrecked.
(It occurs to me that the guilt he felt for putting me on the bee hive the year before doesn't hold a candle to the guilt I felt a year later (and continue to feel) at this. We could have left the GUM earlier (or skipped it entirely). We could even have simply paid for a taxi! (Which might have cost us $20 to take us all the way to Yemar Bay -- horrors!). But no, since getting to the train was still a possibility, we both just went for it. Stupid.)
We did, finally, make it home an hour or so later, but he was forced to cancel our plans for dinner at the Kanunnikovas, and I think they were a little disappointed. Our explanation that "we only just made the train" was not, I think, considered fully satisfactory, though they, as the wonderful people they are, pretended to accept it.
Ok, almost at the end of the story (you're going to make it!). A day or two later I took my father to the Vladivostok Airport, located up in Artyom. Several Russian friends came along to see him off, including Margarita (the mother) and Konstantin (the early-20s son), who had hosted me during training in Artyom.
The night before, my father had sat me down to explain that he had, several years before, been diagnosed as HIV positive. He had not wanted to trouble me with the news at the time (sigh), but the tumor that had been removed from his foot had been, he and his doctor had agreed, the first sign of full-blown AIDS, and things were likely to go downhill fairly quickly now. I was shocked, of course, and saddened, and I immediately asked him if I should leave the Peace Corps and return to the States with him. He dismissed the idea immediately, saying that that was why he hadn't wanted to tell me in the first place — this was the great adventure of my life, and he was proud of me for doing it — and he promised that, when he really got sick (in a matter of months? weeks?), he would tell me and then we could decide what to do.
All of a sudden his tears as I was leaving the US made more sense — he had assumed he would never see me again, at least in full health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this time, as I said goodbye to him at the Vladivostok Airport, I was the one crying. Margarita, not understanding the circumstances, nonetheless felt I was a sweetly emotional young man, and attempted to console me, repeatedly noting that I would see him again in a year. Which was kind of her.
For what it's worth, upon arriving back home, my father was among the first recipients of the famous AIDS cocktail, and he lived a good and full life for another 23 years, before dying in 2018 of pancreatic cancer.
So ok. Still, to that Russian guy in the GUM department store: "I get it, it was your job. And you weren't supposed to make any exceptions. But, in a world where you probably had fewer then four people in crutches in your store every year, and none who needed to catch the last train to Yemar Bay right at closing time ... come on, man, swap your professionalism for a little human compassion and decency!" My father always said that people who are empowered to say no think that they need to use it — why would they be given that power if they weren't supposed to use it?
My father, I believe, was a more compassionate and understanding person than I am.
Moral of the Story: Don't make your father race through 1990s Vladivostok on crutches? Seems like a good rule, though rarely invoked.
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