Moving Right Along, Footloose and Fancy Free

Rip off the band aid Leslie. Just rip it off. Stop fussing around the edges needling every little nerve and go tell Aygul that you are changing apartments.

Sigh. This all started two weeks back when I met those two American teenagers. I happily transcribed their advice on lemonade and ice cream and then opened one of those prankster’s cans of spring loaded peanuts that I haven’t been able to since reseal. I knew at the time I was doing it. I could feel myself being sly and strategic as the words came out of my mouth to nonchalantly ask, “So what about your host families? Were they nice? Did they happen to live near the university?” knowing full well that these girls would be leaving empty apartments in the wake of their flights home from Kazan the next day that I could swoop down and prey upon like a vulture. They both gushed and it turned out that the brunette was living with a Tatar woman named Guzel a 10 minute walk from the university and even closer to the carnival of Baumana street. “She walks around naked all the time, but if you don’t mind that she’s a great cook and the apartment is nice.” Noted. I felt like a bit of a jerk both for having been so put out by Aygul’s nakedness when apparently it was cultural and for plotting to win our war through the equivalent of a black ops reconnaissance mission, but on some level I was quite pleased to have the information that could unshackle me from all the “reality” I’d taken on out in the super-Soviet ex-burbs.

However, my tune changed that evening at the apartment when Aygul’s daughter Vera came to visit. She was so gracious and graceful and sat chatting with me in English in the living room about how she’d worked as a waitress at a restaurant in Virginia Beach for two summers and how her boyfriend had done the same program the next year and worked at a Burger King in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a town ten minutes down from the Philly suburb in which I’d grown up, where I’d just attended one high school best friend’s wedding and while there joked to the other about how we should go door to door to visit all of her ex-boyfriends with their matching Phoenixville tattoos while we were in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Aygul walked in half naked looking for a shirt and Vera recoiled and said something in Tatar that had to be the equivalent of “Mom, come on, no one wants to see that!” I smiled empathetically as Vera shook her head and then picked one of the stuffed animals off of the shelf, musing “I brought her this dragon from Bush Gardens.” And suddenly Aygul wasn’t the enemy, she wasn’t some repressed weirdo sexually harassing me, she was just some lovely girl’s embarrassing mom. I remembered the feeling of bringing the crew team to stay at my house when we were racing in Philadelphia one year and how I’d cringed at my mother’s ridiculous snowman collection and her own clumsy but sincere efforts at hospitality. This was the same thing. It didn’t make the fish pie for dinner any more appetizing, (recipe for the daring at home = one thick layer of salted herring, one layer mayonnaise, one layer boiled potatoes, one layer mayonnaise, one layer boiled beets, topped with a final layer of mayonnaise), but it did make me feel like a jerk for publicly framing my frustrations with the well-intentioned Aygul as mortal combat.

A day or two drifted by with most of my time lost to grammar and cheap DVDs of American movies dubbed in Russian bought for “educational” purposes when I found myself in Azhat Arzlanovich’s office waiting to fill out some additional paperwork. His strikingly lean and angular assistant was just sitting there across from me with her severe haircut and jutting cheekbones. She looked a bit bored and I couldn’t help making conversation by asking, “So are there any free apartments in the center of Kazan? Mine is really far away, like almost an hour on the bus. I hear Guzel’s is really nice.” It was a true statement even though I felt very bad making it given my recent détente with Aygul. The assistant leapt into action and before I knew it she had scheduled an appointment for me to visit the apartment of a woman named Aleksandra Valeriovna the next morning who lived only one easy stop away on the metro.

Aleksandra Valeriovna’s daughter Natasha came to pick me up at the university that morning. She had a short boyish blond haircut and was disproportionately lean, long limbed and big breasted in the genetically anomalous way that the vast majority of the girls across Russia seem to be regardless of ethnicity. She was an interesting character. Very dower and yet quirky. She was a freelance web designer who had taught herself English by watching American television in Cyprus where she’d lived for three years with her Tatar husband. They were since divorced but she had a 12 year old daughter at home to show for it who was obsessed with anime and teaching herself Japanese. We got on the metro at Baumana street and I asked how long it would take if I wanted to walk to the apartment instead. “That would be impossible” she said and we proceeded to sit on the subway for 25 minutes.

We got out in an ex-urban wasteland even more desolate than the one I’d been living in with Aygul. I kept asking Natasha political questions as we walked another ten minutes to her mother’s apartment building, trying to determine if it would be worth living all the way out here to get the Russian minority perspective. And the answers to my persistent questions seemed quite mixed. Tatarstan was a rich region, that was good. Former President Shamiev had been really skillful in negotiating a deal with Moscow to get money from the center for Tatarstan while avoiding any kind of extremist nationalist rhetoric, also good. He and his government were mainly crooks, but for some reason, potentially out of pride, they were obsessed with beautifying and bettering Kazan, bringing it up to an “international standard” and this albeit odd was good for the people who lived here. It was however a real shame for those poor kids that now had to study Tatar language in school, that was a terrible waste of time bordering on punishment.

We got into the apartment and the advantages and disadvantages of making the move were clear. There was significantly less space. The rooms were tiny and the kitchen barely fit the three of us as the beautiful white haired Aleksandra Valerievna elegantly tipped her wrist to pour me tea and passed me delicious cherry filled chocolates while making polite conversation. However, there was a clear demarcation of space. I would have my own room that she would not enter in a bra and panties in the morning to rifle through its closets assembling her outfit for the day. She would have her own room which was also the living room that I would not have to keep my own clothes in and said room would keep contained all of the decorative stuffed animals and toys ostensibly from the 1980s including the creepy bust of a doll I remember never having myself but playing with at friends’ houses who existed only from the chest up on a pink platform so that you could focus on braiding and styling her hair. I sat and sipped my tea and the whole time felt like I was cheating on Aygul. I had a creepy doll of my own waiting for me in the shower where it belonged, what was I doing 40 minutes out in the opposite direction leading on this lovely old lady. I said goodbye to Aleksandra Valerievna and Natasha, promising to call them like I was slinking out of the apartment of a guy I’d just mistakenly gone home with but knew I didn’t want to date.

But my extra-apartmental dalliances didn’t end there. I kept finding reasons to drop by Azhat Arzlanovich’s office and smile prettily at his secretary as I asked if Guzel was back from vacation yet and might want to rent a room in her apartment to me. No? Well, maybe then there might be some other host family in the center kind enough to open their home? She smiled angularly back and promised that she would find me an apartment in the center that I could move into on September 1. And once the date was set I hypocritically started feeling bad again. I wanted it to be fate sweeping me into the circumstances of my new apartment not me actively seeking out a better deal. And I’d go back and forth between grumbling on the bus feeling entitled to move and then wondering about Aygul’s financial situation and whether it would hurt her if I left. Blanche, the cat who formerly hated me, decided that she actually loved me and wanted to sleep in my room, just in time for her to go into heat and begin incessantly crying at an unbearable pitch for a full week. And I felt that same tugging between guilt and entitlement as I thought about just picking up and leaving her behind. Some days I felt like they were the lot I had been given and I needed to see the experience of living with the two of them through to its heroic end. Other days I just wanted to get the F out of the apartment.

I once went to a therapist when I lived in New York. It was after the guy I’d been dating co-dependently for three months had come down with encephalitis that had wiped out a small section of his brain and taken much of the person I’d loved with it and I was having a hard time eating. I went to the therapist and I told her about how hard it was taking care of this guy who I still cared about very much but who was only intermittently the person I’d started dating. She asked about prior relationships and I told her about bringing my Georgian rock star boyfriend back to the States with me because I felt it wasn’t fair to leave him in Georgia and then marrying him at the Beverly Hills County Courthouse because I felt it wasn’t fair that I could work in the Parliament of his country and he couldn’t even make lattes at a Starbucks in mine. She told me that I had an overdeveloped sense of loyalty. That was the diagnosis. That and probably some form of PTSD, she said.

And in all honesty I still have a very hard time telling the difference between having an overdeveloped sense of loyalty and being a good person. And inversely, distinguishing between embracing the American individualist values with which I was raised and being a self-serving asshole. I mean was I supposed to just flit on back to the States free and easy leaving Dato chained to the broken concrete of Tbilisi? Was I supposed to just abandon Brian in the hospital and let him navigate the slippery cliffs of post-encephalitic insanity alone? Given the chance to go back, I don’t think I would do any of it differently. And yet in both cases I wound up dragging myself through some of the ugliest human moments imaginable before in the end I wound up severing the same cord I could have quite easily cut well before any mud was slung in my direction. I could have bailed early and got off scott free, untouched, intact but in a way it’s the dirt and the damage still lingering around the edges that give me any sense of being interesting, engaged and accomplished as a person. I still think as a strategy drawing a firm boundary between the physical unit of me and the rest world and then maximizing choices to benefit only the part I call myself won’t pay off in the long run in any way that would be meaningful for me. And any chance I have of doing or saying something that could possibly be of any benefit to society has to involve physically and emotionally trekking through deeply unpleasant territory on its behalf. The question I guess, still unanswered, is how far exactly I have to go to come back with “real” experience and at what point it’s ok to cut my losses and just return to my lucky charmed life and write about where I’ve been. 

Anyway, today, August 31, I was half hoping the assistant would have no news for me but when I entered the office she handed me a slip of paper with a phone number and an address. I marched over to the new apartment open-minded. It was 30 minutes from the university by foot. 25 minutes going back on the irritatingly slow tramway that po-dunks its way along a narrow street. The lobby smelled like dog shit rather than like someone had been gutting fish in the elevator. The separate bedroom that would be mine was a stuffed-animal free zone. The host mother, a retired history teacher, was Russian and chain smoked leaving a dingy haze throughout the house. In other words, this was not some clear allelujah light at the end of the tunnel moment where the rainbows come out and I know in my gut I’m doing the right thing in leaving Aygul and Blanche behind because the other side is just so unambiguously better. Instead I sat with a pot of French press coffee at my favorite café on Baumana street and stewed and felt bad and weighed pros and cons and eventually went back into the office and told the assistant that I would take the new place.

And now, I am getting up from my computer to go rip off the band aid and break the news that I’m leaving to Aygul. Apparently, my sense of loyalty is no longer overdeveloped. I guess this means I’m cured. Or I'm just a jerk.