Prologue

I am writing this almost fifty years later.

I'm sitting in a small hotel room in Hong Kong. It's contained. Quiet. There are very few distractions.

The idea to write these stories wasn't mine. It came from a close friend. I had never shared the darker parts of my life with him - or with anyone. He may have assumed this would be an easy read.

It isn't.

What came out is a series of scenes. Some light, some dark.

I wrote them as I remember them, without smoothing anything out or trying to make them more acceptable. I didn't try to present myself as a hero or a victim. I have regrets, but my mistakes are part of who I am.

Scene 1. Early Conclusions

I don’t remember exactly when my first suicide attempt happened. I was fourteen or fifteen.

The reason was simpler than most explanations people want. I didn’t see a reason for existence in general - mine included. Not sadness. Not boredom. Just the feeling that nothing was worth the trouble. Life looked like a system that required constant maintenance without producing anything that justified it.

That first attempt is the most vivid memory of my childhood. Not emotionally vivid - visually. Almost photographic.

I remember the process. I remember the container: a small glass jar that had once held honey, about two hundred milliliters, shaped like a miniature barrel.

I remember the taste well enough to know I never forgot it. Salty. Slightly bitter.

I remember drinking it.

I remember placing the jar under my bed afterward, like leftover equipment after a finished experiment.

I remember the blanket. I lay on my back and covered myself carefully.

I waited.

Not fearfully. Curiously.

I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t praying. I was waiting to see what would happen, the way you wait for a reaction you believe you’ve set up correctly.

Nothing happened.

I got up later and went for a walk. Life continued.

My mother found the note I had left under my pillow. Years later, she still had it. She kept it like an artifact, as if it belonged in a museum titled Things That Almost Happened.

Scene 2. The Moscow Train

I grew up on a small military base outside a town called Rybinsk.

On a map, it was not very far from Moscow. About four hundred kilometers. In practice, it felt remote. There was no direct road. The only connection was an overnight train that ran three times a week.

The schedule made it convenient for a day trip. It arrived in Moscow around six in the morning and left again around ten at night.

In the early 1980s, when I was still in school, people used it for shopping. Butter, sausage, meat, milk products — basic things that were often impossible to buy in Rybinsk. Even though my father was in the army, and the army had its own supply system, we still regularly lacked ordinary food.

Schoolchildren got a fifty percent discount on train tickets during the off-season, so my parents sent me to Moscow again and again to shop.

At first, that was the only reason I went. Later, I also went because I liked it.

A lot of people from nearby towns used the same route. There was even a joke:

What is long, green, and smells like sausage?

The Moscow–Rybinsk train.

I used those trips for more than shopping. Whenever I could, I went to museums and art galleries.

My favorite was the Pushkin Museum.

One winter day, I was on my way there and bought an ice cream first. Moscow ice cream was much better than the kind we had in Rybinsk. This was not an especially rational decision, because it was minus thirty-five outside.

There was still a long line in front of the museum despite the cold.

I walked along it holding my ice cream. Some of the people waiting looked at my ice cream with open hostility. It probably made them feel even colder. I decided that on this particular trip I could skip the cultural part.

It was not a wasted journey. I still had the ice cream.

Scene 3. Continuity Disguised as Choice

I moved in with a girl when I was sixteen, one month before I turned seventeen.

It didn’t feel like a choice. It was a series of events that led there.

By that time, I was already trying to stay away from home. I didn’t get along with my parents and retreated to a small summer house far outside town. It was March. There was snow on the ground. The temperature stayed below freezing. The house had no heater. Getting there required more than an hour of walking.

Her name was Alex. I was at her place doing homework. She was not my girlfriend. Just someone I spent time with. I was sixteen.

When it was time to leave, her mother realized where I was living. She didn’t argue. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t raise her voice or make a scene. She simply didn’t let me go.

I stayed that night. There was no discussion about permanence. No plan. I stayed the next night. Then another. Then it stopped being a question that needed answering.

Alex and I were both rebellious teenagers. We questioned school, authority, expectations, anything that looked fixed. Not loudly. Just consistently.

My mother did not take it well. It wasn’t about me leaving. She framed it differently — said I had found a “better mother.”

When I came home to visit, she shouted that I should return home. I refused. Not out of defiance. By then, I treated it as a decision.

I stopped talking to my parents completely.

A few months later, I became seriously ill.

I had a high fever that lasted a week. No one knew what it was. A doctor said it might be sepsis. He explained that sepsis could be fatal, in the same tone someone might use to discuss the weather.

My parents came to see me.

We reunited under the assumption that I might die. Whatever conflicts existed before were suspended by the possibility of finality.

It turned out to be measles.

Severe, but survivable. The prognosis improved abruptly. So did everyone’s posture.

After that, my parents stopped trying to bring me home.

We stayed together. Eventually we married. But that came later.

Scene 4. Practice Run

My early marriage wasn’t the first time I tried to leave home. The first time I did it seriously, I was fifteen.

I didn’t run away alone. A classmate came with me. I don’t remember him explaining why. Maybe he did and I forgot. Or maybe he didn’t need to. I knew exactly why I was leaving.

At home, I didn’t feel like a person. Not in the way that mattered.

Once I asked my mother, “What is the point of life if I cannot live forever?” She shouted back that I was selfish.

I had just gotten my first photo ID. Not a passport. Not anything that would matter outside the Soviet system. It was a small Komsomol membership booklet — thin paper, a photo glued inside, stamps showing monthly dues paid on time.

That stupid little booklet ended up saving us over and over again.

We left without money. No savings, no food, no realistic plan. If we weren’t on overnight trains, we slept in train stations. Every night, militia patrols walked through, methodically checking documents.

We handed over the Komsomol IDs.

They worked. Every time.

Even though we were technically on a nationwide search list, nobody asked questions. The stamps were paid. That seemed to be enough.

We spent about two weeks riding trains.

We had no money for food.

We did have a goal — because fifteen-year-olds always do. We decided to go north, past the Arctic Circle, into the tundra. The plan was to survive by hunting rabbits and small animals. We carried 16-gauge hunting guns in our backpacks, with ammunition for birds and small game.

We were serious.

We were also catastrophically naïve.

We reached Vorkuta in November.

Cold doesn’t need description there. It announces itself immediately and without discussion. We bought the cheapest food available: two loaves of black bread. It tasted like mud and had the texture of plaster. To make it edible, we poured salt on it until the taste disappeared completely.

We left the station and walked into the tundra.

After maybe two hundred meters, we stopped.

We didn’t argue. We didn’t negotiate. We just looked at each other, sighed, and said the same thing at the same time:

“Let’s go back home.”

Reality had arrived quickly and without negotiation.

The way back was worse. We hid on trains. We misjudged directions. We ended up in towns that were dead ends.

My friend tried to sell his watch to a stranger and got robbed instead.

On the way to one of those dead ends — Veliky Ustyug — the militia caught us without tickets. We paid the fine with what should have been food money and went hungry instead.

“Veliky” means “Great” in Russian. I’m still not sure what was supposed to be great about it.

What I remember is mud.

The streets had no asphalt. Sidewalks were made of wooden planks. When you stepped on them, they bent slightly, and mud pushed up through the cracks. Walking felt like negotiating with the ground.

We were hungry. We had nowhere to stay and no clear way out.

So we went to a local museum.

I don’t remember the exhibits. Only one thing stayed with me: a large sack of some chemical product — probably fertilizer — labeled as a proud output of local industry. It didn’t feel like something that belonged in a museum. Then again, neither did we.

To correct our direction, we got on a train going back and got off at a small hub station called Yadriha.

It was barely a station. A platform, a low building, and a few one-story houses around it.

We stayed there for two nights, waiting for a train we could use.

While walking around the station, we noticed empty wine bottles scattered near the tracks. We collected a few and brought them to a shop, hoping to get some money.

That turned out to be a surprisingly good idea.

In the Soviet Union, glass bottles had value when returned. Milk bottles were worth 15 kopecks. Wine bottles 20.

We adjusted our strategy immediately.

We started looking for bottles deliberately.

It worked. We collected enough to buy bread — and, more importantly, tickets to the next station. Not real travel, just enough to get onto a train and ride until someone noticed and threw us out.

Near the end, we missed our station entirely and ended up in Moscow. There we split. He used the same hiding-and-guessing method to get home.

I went to family friends outside the city, borrowed some money, stayed two days, and then returned home.

By the time I got back, I was sure I had done something beyond repair.

Instead, almost nothing happened.

At home, no one said much. No punishment. No real conversation. No questions.

At school, there was a Komsomol meeting. The conclusion was that I should not have done it, and that if it happened again, I could be expelled from the organization.

That was all.

Scene 5. Forward Without Direction

My first attempt at leaving home wasn’t only about getting away.

I also wanted to be on the road.

For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, movement felt comfortable to me. Being in transit was easier than being stationary. I suspect my parents sensed this. Before I ran away again, they gave me a small amount of money and suggested I travel instead - visit relatives around the country.

I had relatives in many distant cities. Syzran, Chelyabinsk, Bryansk, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad. My father was an army officer. Over the years, he had been assigned to different bases, and family accumulated around them. Every school break, I went to a train station and got on a train without much planning.

Trains were slow. We used to say they stopped at every pole.

The upside was that they were sleeper trains. You got a full-length bed. If I was lucky and managed to buy a slightly better ticket, there would be a mattress, a pillow, and clean bedding instead of just a wooden bench. There was still no privacy, but there was some comfort.

I still remember the feeling of getting on a train, sitting by the window, and watching the platform slide away when it started moving.

Soon after departure, the conductor would bring bedding: two sheets and a pillowcase. You had to make the bed yourself. Later, they would return with a glass of tea with two cubes of sugar wrapped in paper with the railroad logo on it.

If the journey lasted several days, there was a restaurant car. I was too shy to go there. I survived on whatever food I brought with me, or on what could be bought at station stops.

At longer stops, the train could stay at a station for twenty or thirty minutes. That was enough time for local women - babushkas - to set up a small business on the platform. They sold homemade food: boiled chicken, piroshki, simple things.

You stepped off the train, bought what you could, and got back on before it left.

The only problem was that you could never be sure about the quality. They knew they would probably never see you again.

Getting to my closest grandmother in Syzran took about seventeen hours, even though the distance was only around a thousand kilometers. From the station, it was another hour on foot to her house.

I never stayed long in one place. Not because I was uncomfortable. I just wanted to keep moving. After a few days, I was back on a train, sleeping somewhere else the next night, in another house.

I could stay on the road for a month or longer without getting tired.

Motion gave me a sense of progress that I didn’t feel otherwise. Being stationary felt like being stuck. Movement felt like forward motion, even if there was no clear destination.

I was always curious about what was coming next - after the next stop, around the next turn.

At the time, it felt sufficient.

Scene 6. Things You Were Not Supposed to Touch

The girl I moved in with after leaving the summer house - Alex - eventually became my wife. But before the children, before the years passed and the distance accumulated, we did something forbidden.

This was the late Soviet Union.

Not the most brutal period of the regime, but not benign either. Some areas were still untouchable. Especially if you were a party member, or part of a party family.

Religion was one of those areas.

That alone made it interesting.

I don’t remember exactly how my future wife and I started talking to an Orthodox priest in a nearby village. It didn’t seem planned. At some point, he offered to baptize us at his home.

Secretly.

The secrecy mattered more than the theology. Not because I was worried - at the time - about consequences for myself or for my father, who was an army officer and a member of the Communist Party. Mostly because the phrase secret baptism sounded compelling.

We were baptized in the priest’s house, in his living room.

There was no church. No proper setting. Just a small inflatable children’s pool placed in the middle of the room. It was yellow, slightly faded, the kind meant for summer, not for rituals.

He filled it with water, but not enough.

We went one by one.

There wasn’t enough water for full immersion, so the process became something in between what it was supposed to be and what was possible. I stepped into the pool and sat there while the priest used a metal vessel - something proper, something that belonged to the ritual - to pour water over my head.

He followed the words. The sequence. The structure was intact.

Only the environment wasn’t.

It felt improvised. Not incorrect, just displaced. As if the ritual had been relocated into a space where it didn’t belong - and that was exactly the point.

The secrecy mattered more than the form.

The wedding happened a few months later.

It was in a church this time, but still not in the way it was meant to be. The ceremony took place in the middle of the night. The building was closed. The doors were locked. The light was minimal - just enough to see outlines.

There were almost no people.

The priest.

A night watchman.

An old woman who may have been helping, or simply present in the way some people always are.

No family. No witnesses. No one to mark the moment.

Orthodox weddings require crowns - heavy metal crowns placed on the heads of the bride and groom. In a proper ceremony, they are held above your head by someone standing behind you.

We didn’t have that option.

There was no one to hold them.

So the priest placed the crowns directly on our heads.

They were heavy. Immediately uncomfortable. Mine kept sliding down, pressing into my ears. I kept adjusting it slightly, trying not to interrupt anything.

I remember waiting for it to end.

Not because it lacked meaning. Just because it was long. Orthodox ceremonies don’t adjust themselves to your patience.

Standing there, holding that weight on my head, the symbolic part disappeared. It became physical.

Stand.

Listen.

Wait.

Don’t let the crown fall.

Eventually, it ended.

We walked out into the night, unnoticed.

Which was the intention.

My family was atheist. Some distant relatives followed Jewish traditions. My then-future wife had Polish roots; her grandmother was Catholic. None of that played much of a role. Orthodox Christianity was simply the option that was available locally, without travel or research.

Scene 7. The Plan Must Be Fulfilled

In the Soviet Union, military service wasn’t a choice. It was a draft system. Two years. Mandatory. Almost prison-like. All men were expected to go.

I knew it was coming. I was eighteen. Time had stopped pretending to be abstract.

I had no desire to serve. Not for ideological reasons. Not out of rebellion. It just didn’t make sense. Especially because my first child would be born while I was gone.

I tried to avoid it medically.

I had high blood pressure. Real enough to document. I collected records. Nature helped. Strong emotions reliably sent the numbers up. I helped a little too - tightening muscles during measurements, breathing wrong on purpose. The results were convincing.

At first, I was told I wouldn’t be drafted. Or at least that it would be delayed.

But the draft numbers were low that year. And in the Soviet Union, plans weren’t forecasts. They were obligations.

I was called in again. Another medical examination. The doctor looked at the number - 160 - and waved it away. He said it meant nothing. Everyone serves the country.

I arrived at the base with a group of other recruits. It turned out not to be a base at all. It was a factory.

This wasn’t surprising. I already knew that most of the Soviet army functioned as free labor. Soldiers who never trained. Workers in uniform.

In that unit, no one touched a weapon for the entire two years. No leave. No visitors. No excuses. Just factory work. Every day.

During my first medical checkup there, my blood pressure spiked again. I was terrified. The numbers were high enough to alarm the medic. He shouted at me. Said he didn’t want to be responsible for a workplace accident. Said he would send me home.

That calmed me down.

My blood pressure dropped. The evidence disappeared.

The doctor stared at the chart. Then at me. Then made a decision that had nothing to do with medicine.

He sent me for a psychiatric evaluation.

He told me he didn’t care what they did with me. He just didn’t want to see me there again.

During the evaluation, I told the psychiatrist I would not be able to handle two years away from home. He sent me to a psychiatric institution, probably less because of what I said than because of how I looked when I said it.

Scene 8. Institutional Weather

I spent two and a half months in the psychiatric institution.

It was a contained ecosystem. A very specific population.

When I was admitted, I didn’t know what to expect. I was afraid they might send me back, so I overacted. That wasn’t difficult. The previous three weeks had done most of the work.

I lay on my bed and cried silently. The doctor noticed and moved me to a separate room. Patients called that room “Nadzorka,” which loosely meant “watch room.”

My bed was placed between two people. On one side, a young man who claimed he was Lenin. On the other, a burglar named Vasya. He told me he had shot two policemen after a break-in. His story sounded less absurd than the other one. Later, I learned he was one of the criminals on probation.

I saw several moments when large male nurses had to restrain violent patients. It was done roughly, but without unnecessary cruelty. Hands and legs were tied to the bed with towels.

After a few days in Nadzorka, I was moved back to the regular room.

I met a political dissident. We became friends quickly.

He learned that my father was Jewish. He was Jewish as well. After that, no clarification was needed.

When he was discharged, he gave me a pair of slippers with bright blue soles and a checkered shirt. I still remember the color.

There were soldiers there too, and I was one of them. We had not been sent for treatment. We had been sent there administratively.

We weren’t really patients. We were labor.

We were assigned to whatever unskilled work was needed. In my case, the assignment was unexpectedly tolerable.

I worked with a few alcoholic patients collecting dead wood in a nearby forest. It was June. The weather was perfect. The forest was birch. The work was slow and unhurried. It felt less like labor and more like exercise.

At lunch, my coworkers prepared chifir — a very strong tea. One pack for two cups, boiled until there was nothing left to extract. It was a substitute for alcohol. A chemical compromise.

Food was the weak point.

There was no meat. No fish. Mostly barley kasha. It was edible only in the technical sense. Hunger did the rest.

What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed the absence of choice.

I didn’t decide where to go. I didn’t decide when to eat. I didn’t decide what came next. Everything was already determined. My role was to comply.

I found that restful. It was what I needed.

Even now, I remember my time in the institution with a certain warmth.

Scene 9. Trade School

One thing about Soviet education was that by the time you finished high school, you were also supposed to leave with a practical qualification.

You didn’t choose it.

You got whatever was available.

Mine was training as a lathe operator.

One day a week, instead of regular classes, all the boys in my class went to a small training workshop. Since we studied six days a week anyway, losing one school day didn’t feel especially tragic.

I learned just enough to use it.

Before my final year of high school, I spent the three-month summer break working for money at a small maintenance shop on the military base where my father was serving. The shop was simple: two lathes, a few other machines, and not much else.

I liked it.

Partly because the work kept changing. We fixed whatever needed fixing — mostly plumbing, sometimes electrical equipment. Sometimes there were no drawings, no schematics, no written instructions. A repairman somewhere on the base would explain the problem over the phone, and I was expected to make the part before someone arrived on a scooter to pick it up.

It became even more educational on the days my experienced coworker didn’t show up because he was drunk.

Because the shop did repair work, there were occasional slow periods. When that happened, my coworker had another system. He did unofficial jobs for base staff — small personal favors using shop materials and equipment. They paid him not with money, but with technical alcohol.

That was the currency.

The base supplied technical alcohol for work purposes. He used state materials to do private jobs, and private customers paid him in state alcohol. That was a concise introduction to the mechanics of the socialist economy.

The problem was that he usually drank it the same evening, sometimes even in the shop. The next day he often couldn’t come to work. Much later I learned that he died of alcoholism in his thirties.

After high school, I joined the same shop full-time.

I didn’t seriously consider continuing my education. I hated school too much. It was not a good environment for a child with what would now probably be called ADHD. The structure felt punitive, and I had no reason to believe further study would be any different.

I worked in that shop for almost a year before I was drafted into the army.

After I came back, I returned there again. But by then it had become obvious, even to me, that I did not want to spend my whole life doing that kind of work.

Scene 10. A Different Kind of Study

The only realistic option for further education was the local university in Rybinsk.

There was also a part-time program, which made it possible to study while keeping a full-time job. So Alex and I both enrolled in the same course: computer hardware engineering.

That was when I discovered something unexpected.

Studying was actually enjoyable.

It was so different from school that it barely felt like the same category of experience. There were still mandatory subjects that belonged more to the Soviet system than to actual education — History of the Communist Party, socialist economics, Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

Alex helped me enormously with the boring parts. She made it possible for me to get through what had to be endured and concentrate on what actually interested me.

Even the Marxist-Leninist philosophy class turned out to be memorable, mostly because the professor was writing her doctoral dissertation on artificial intelligence. For the late 1980s it was unusually progressive.

I was operating machinery for eight hours a day, then studying for four more. After my daughter was born, there were sleepless nights on top of that. It was manageable only in the technical sense.

Then my life changed abruptly.

During one class, a professor came in and said he needed an engineer for a research project. I applied.

I got the position.

Scene 11. Between Two Trains

The job was at the same university where I was studying.

My life became easier. For the first time in a while, I could spend more time with my family, and I enjoyed that a lot. My second child was born. The kindergarten both my daughter and son attended was next to my university building, so it became my job to take them there every morning - by stroller in summer and by sled in winter.

I remember winter mornings especially well. I pulled a sled through snow-covered streets, two children wrapped in layers, taking them to kindergarten before going to work. The town was quiet. The air was sharp.

There was a shortcut across the railway tracks. It was unsafe, but the route was much shorter, and that was usually enough to justify the risk. Many people used it. Everyone treated the danger as normal, even though accidents happened from time to time.

It almost happened to me once.

I was hurrying to work alone that day. A freight train was blocking the shortcut. Walking around it would have taken too long, so I decided to climb through. The freight car had small steps on both sides, so getting up was easy enough. But as soon as I did, the train started moving.

I rushed to the other side and jumped down without noticing that another train was coming from the opposite direction. I had only enough time to pull myself back and stand still in the narrow space between two long moving freight trains.

That was enough.

Scene 12. Where Things Worked

At the university, work and study stopped feeling separate. What I learned in class was useful in the lab, and the lab made it obvious what was worth learning. Things either worked or they didn’t.

The research project in our lab was exciting. It was related to space, and in the USSR anything connected to space had priority. By Soviet standards, it was cutting-edge. We had access to some of the best equipment available at the time. There was even a dedicated computer in a separate room. Computers were huge then — the size of several refrigerators — and still called minicomputers.

I had already done a few electronics projects at home. I knew the components. I knew how to solder. In that lab, that was enough.

We were building testing equipment for a radar system that would be sent to Phobos, one of Mars’s moons. I designed and built two components for that system. One of them earned a patent.

In the Soviet Union, the state owned the patent. The authors received a small cash payment and a publication credit. By academic custom, there were four names on it. Mine was second. The first was the professor, head of the project. The third was my colleague, who reviewed the design. The fourth was the person who handled the paperwork.

The spacecraft carrying the instrument we had spent years testing finally launched. The start was perfect. All systems worked. I even saw my boss on television in the flight control center. For a moment, it felt as if all those years in the lab had actually led somewhere. Then the mission was lost for a disappointingly stupid reason. The solar panels ended up parallel to the sunlight, and nobody noticed until the battery was dead.

While we were building the equipment, I found myself spending more and more time writing code to control it instead of soldering hardware. Eventually I realized I liked software more, for a very practical reason: fixing mistakes was much cheaper there than in hardware.

After the mission was lost, I moved to a newly formed software department and became a full-time developer. I was leaving the cutting edge of the space program, but I also felt that the USSR was unlikely to catch up with the West in hardware. In software, we still had a chance.

Tetris felt like proof of that. It was created in the Soviet Union, and once it appeared, it was obvious that software could travel farther than any machine we built.

The original Tetris was copied onto our lab’s big computer. We had games before Tetris, but they were dull. Once Tetris appeared, everything changed. There were five of us in the lab who wanted to play, and only one computer, so we started coming in early to get it first — sometimes a few hours before work. We kept a leaderboard. We discussed scores. There was even a legend from the lab next door:

“You know, Ilya scored 7,500.”

At that time, I thought I would stay in academia, get my PhD, and do research.

Then everything changed.

Perestroika happened.

Scene 13. Predictability Collapses

Perestroika dismantled most Soviet exit strategies at once.

One of the defining features of the Soviet system had been predictability. Life was uncomfortable, but legible. You knew what you would earn years in advance. You knew when you would receive a state apartment. You knew what education translated into which career path.

When that structure collapsed, many people were left disoriented.

Some were devastated.

Others noticed opportunities.

I was in the second group.

I started looking for work in the private sector, which at that point was still a novelty. I applied to a company called Paritet.

I climbed the stairs to their office floor. In front of the door, a man and a woman were smoking. I didn’t know who they were. I had a piece of paper with the director’s name on it and was reading it aloud, saying I was looking for him.

The man I was addressing turned out to be the director. The woman was his deputy.

I told them I was looking for a job as a computer specialist.

They stared at me.

I repeated myself.

Nothing changed.

On the third attempt, recognition appeared on their faces. They told me to come inside and wait.

What I didn’t know at the time was that a few days earlier the company had received a letter from organized crime demanding payment. They had asked for advice. The advice was specific: don’t expect large men. Expect someone unremarkable. Someone casual. Someone who would pass along details.

Then I arrived.

They assumed I was there on behalf of the mafia. I assumed they were confused by my qualifications. We were both wrong in compatible ways.

I got the job.

Officially, I was hired to do basic PC support. Shortly after, I encountered two new words: email and network news.

At that time, the internet in the Soviet Union didn’t arrive as websites. It arrived as infrastructure.

When the planned economy disintegrated, the immediate crisis was not ideology. It was coordination. Producers, suppliers, and customers had lost their connections. Network news helped fill that gap: text-based discussion groups organized by topic, including commerce.

Large deals were negotiated there. Grain, metals, equipment. Volume mattered more than presentation.

It was all offline. A few times a day, my modem dialed a Moscow number. It uploaded outgoing messages and downloaded whatever had accumulated — email, news groups, requests. Then it disconnected.

Paritet’s main business was not computers. It was grain. Hundreds or thousands of tons per transaction. Computers were the owner’s hobby.

When I showed him what network news could do, he understood the commercial value immediately. He asked whether I could become a relay node for the local business groups. I said yes.

That is how I became the first internet relay in the region.

Clients were willing to pay thirty dollars a month for access. This was before websites. Before browsers. Before anyone imagined the internet as a mass medium.

I also used it for myself.

There were email-based file servers. You did not browse them. You sent a command. Somewhere, a program read the request, processed it, and replied with the result.

One of the most popular was an e-book server.

You sent the file name of a book. Some time later, it arrived in pieces as email attachments.

That was how I read The Lord of the Rings. In Russian, of course.

It was not a cheap way to get books. Long-distance calls cost money. Data transfer cost money too. It would have been far cheaper to buy a printed copy.

But there was nothing to buy.

So this was the system.

It was all unlicensed. Illegal, technically. Early digital piracy, before the term existed.

Scene 14. The Cost of Change

I remember food stores with empty shelves. Literally empty. At any time of day, there was usually only one thing you could count on finding: salt.

For basic products like bread or milk, you had to get to the store long before it opened and wait in line. Most of the time, there was no choice involved. You bought whatever happened to be available.

We had a coupon system. Each person received coupons - for example, enough to buy two hundred grams of meat products per month. But even that system was failing, because often there was no meat to buy at all. The coupons existed. The food didn’t.

One day, Alex’s mother came back from somewhere deep in the countryside with about two kilograms of chicken necks.

That night felt like a feast.

She made soup first. Then we pulled the necks out, stripped off the meat and skin, picked through the cartilage and scraps, and made tiny patties out of whatever we could recover. It was memorable not because the food was good, but because there was enough of it to feel like abundance.

Other days were less lucky.

I remember opening the refrigerator once and realizing there was nothing left to make dinner for my children. We were fortunate in one respect: we could still go to my parents. My father, as a former military officer, had access to slightly better supplies. So we never truly went without food.

But it was still an unsettling feeling - having no food at home and knowing there was none in the stores either.

That period changed me permanently.

To this day, throwing away food feels painful.

The coupon system also produced absurd side effects. There were vodka coupons too. Every adult was entitled to two bottles a month. People who didn’t drink used vodka as payment for services - plumbing, repairs, favors - instead of money.

Money had become unreliable. With shortages and hyperinflation, it didn’t mean much.

Vodka was a harder currency.

Scene 15. New Wires, New World

To set up the internet connection, I had to learn a lot of new technology. Back then, that was difficult for an obvious reason: there was no internet full of websites explaining how to do things. In the Soviet Union there were no useful books on the subject either. All I had were the operating system manuals and trial and error.

I spent very long hours in the office because I was excited and wanted to make it work. At one point, I realized I no longer remembered my home phone number. I turned to the saleswoman sitting next to me and asked if she knew it. She stood up and walked away.

A little later, the director came to my desk and told me to go home. He also said he did not want to see me in the office for another week, until I had rested properly.

The people in that company shared the same spirit — helpful, decent, unusually kind. I still appreciate that.

The Soviet Union collapsed while I was working there. The internet relay I had set up ended up playing a very small and local role in those events, but still a role.

The three days of the GKChP were emotionally difficult for most of the people I knew. Perestroika had raised expectations very high. We were all craving change, and suddenly it felt as if all of it might disappear.

I went to the university to visit my former colleagues in the software department. Nobody was working. The mood was too stunned for that. The women were crying almost nonstop.

At the time, the GKChP controlled the official media, so it was difficult for Yeltsin to get his messages out. Internet newsgroups turned out to be one of the few effective channels. I remember passing the latest news and Yeltsin’s directives to the local newspaper, Rybinskaya Pravda.

One day the paper came out with two large directives printed side by side. One, from the coup leaders, said that Yeltsin was a traitor and had to be arrested. The other, from Yeltsin, said that the GKChP were criminals and had to be arrested.

The readers were left to decide which version to believe.

Most people I knew supported Yeltsin. Everyone wanted change. Nobody wanted to preserve the rotten system. But people had also been raised to fear authority. Support was quiet. I do not remember anyone going into the streets to protest for either side.

As a result of all this, I realized that I was living in a different country without ever moving my chair.

Scene 16. Dual Signatures

I started my own company.

Not suddenly. Not as an act of courage. It emerged gradually from helping a friend. We were implementing a system to calculate the cost of medical procedures for hospitals and clinics.

There was demand. The country was transitioning from state-funded healthcare to insurance-based care. Insurance companies needed numbers. Hospitals didn’t have them.

I registered a company, rented a small office inside a children’s hospital, and hired two programmers.

For a while, things worked.

Then I received a contract from the city administration to procure personal computers for all local hospitals. It was supposed to be my largest deal.

Reality intervened.

The contract with the city was in rubles. The suppliers priced everything in dollars. While the money was in transit, the exchange rate moved from eight hundred rubles per dollar to twelve hundred.

The math stopped working.

I downgraded specifications to fulfill the contract. Even then, some components were impossible to obtain. A few hundred floppy disks turned out to be the hardest part.

Cash flow collapsed. I barely found money to pay my employees.

I stopped sleeping.

Eventually, I decided to solve the problem structurally.

I went to the city office and met with the head of the health department. I told him that private companies could not be trusted with a task as critical as supplying computer equipment to all hospitals. I proposed creating an official IT department within the city health administration.

He was from the old Soviet school.

He agreed.

I was twenty-three.

He asked me to organize the department. I became a government employee responsible for accepting the hardware purchased under the contract.

I was also the owner of the private company supplying that hardware.

My signature appeared on both sides of the documents. Literally.

It didn’t feel right. But this was a transitional time. The Soviet system had already collapsed, and the new one hadn’t fully formed yet. Rules existed, but enforcement was selective. Structures were still there, but their meaning had dissolved.

The head of the health department knew exactly what was happening. There was no attempt to hide it. His priority was simple: keep the documents intact, make the system function, avoid unnecessary complications.

I transferred my employees into the new department and closed the company. The missing floppy disks were written off.

The problem was solved.

The cost was several months of insomnia.

I have never owned another company since.

Scene 17. Hospital Logic

Having an office in a children’s hospital came with a certain emotional overhead.

One evening I was staying late in my small room — my “office.” The door opened without knocking. A doctor from the emergency room walked in. A friend.

He didn’t speak. He lit a cigarette, which was unusual for him. His hands were shaking.

I didn’t ask anything.

After a while, he started talking. During his shift that day, three children had died. Separate cases. Separate moments. The kind of distribution that feels statistical until you are the one present for all of them.

That was too much even for someone who had spent years in emergency medicine.

The hospital had its advantages as well, though they belonged to the same informal system as everything else.

I could bring my own children to be seen by specialists unofficially. No paperwork. No waiting. Just conversations. This was standard practice. In that system, connections were more reliable than money and more practical than status.

Doctors had their own parallel economy. Off-the-books consultations were common. Extra income. Flexible ethics.

One of my friends, Sasha, once did a sonography exam for a large German shepherd. In a children’s hospital.

No one involved found this particularly strange.

Once in a while, I returned the favor.

I was used as a test subject for new equipment. When the hospital received a brand-new Omron endoscope, it did not spend much time in storage. A doctor named Valya came to my office, took me by the arm, and relocated me to her lab.

I was placed on a bed. The device followed shortly after.

It was uncomfortable. She turned the monitor toward me and narrated the procedure as if it were an educational film. I learned more about my internal state than I had asked for. Some irritation. Minor issues. Nothing urgent.

I was mostly waiting for it to end.

What struck me most was not the equipment itself, but the way doctors reacted to discovery.

One day Sasha ran into my office visibly excited.

“I found cancer\!” he said.

He showed me the printout, pointing at a small dark spot with professional satisfaction. It was his first confirmed case. For him, it was a milestone. A successful detection.

For someone else, it was a diagnosis.

Both were true. Only one was visible at that moment.

By the time I was preparing to leave the hospital, I wanted to leave something useful behind.

I wrote a Tetris clone.

There was one central computer and multiple dumb terminals connected to it across departments. Doctors could use them during quiet moments.

For a while, it worked exactly as intended.

Then the head of the hospital called me in.

He was not enthusiastic.

One of the ER doctors had been trying to finish a game while a patient was waiting.

I was asked to remove it.

I did.

It seemed reasonable not to be indirectly responsible for delayed medical care.

That was the end of recreational computing in that institution.

One person had demonstrated the edge case.

The system adjusted accordingly.

Scene 18. No Security, No Distance

Two people, both named Serg, contacted me from a larger nearby city. They knew I had set up the first internet relay in the region.

They were building a network for a large telecom company, Yartelecom. Officially, the goal was to connect regional offices to headquarters. Internet access was an unofficial side effect.

They needed help setting up the regional office.

So I did.

The office was a small room inside a local telephone station. A desk. A PC running Unix. A few modems. Two unstable chairs. It was not an impressive setup. The impressive part was that it worked.

This was my first real online internet.

There were no websites yet. Nothing to browse in the modern sense. But there was also no security. From my room in Rybinsk, I could use the finger command and see who was logged into a university mainframe in the UK. If I had spoken English then, I could have started a text conversation with any of them.

At the time, this felt like magic.

My favorite demonstration was “finger whitehouse.gov”.

The response was always disappointing in a very impressive way. You could not see who was online, but you could send an email to the president@whitehouse.gov or the vice-president@whitehouse.gov. For people around me, this was enough.

Then there were the newsgroups.

A substantial part of early internet traffic was devoted to transmitting naked women through systems clearly not designed for that purpose. The images arrived chopped into text fragments, which then had to be reassembled and converted back into something visible. It was inconvenient, slow, and absurdly labor-intensive.

Suddenly material like that was accessible through patience, software, and bad phone lines. This was not the official promise of the internet, but it was a persuasive one.

The actual money, however, was elsewhere.

The real commercial value was in business newsgroups. That was true for Paritet with its offline internet, and it was true for the new telecom department I helped build. Customers were willing to pay for information that could make or save money.

I felt mildly uneasy about it.

I had created a competitor to a company I liked and respected. But after I left, no one there seemed especially interested in keeping that business alive. Within a few months, Paritet’s clients had migrated to my new venture.

That resolved the ethical problem in the usual post-Soviet way: by making it irrelevant.

Then Mosaic appeared. The first actual browser. The first real websites.

I went around showing people.

Friends. Offices. Anyone willing to sit still for a few minutes.

I showed them hyperlinks. I showed them websites in California. I showed them that you could order pizza delivery on the other side of the planet.

At the time, this required a certain innocence. There was no encryption. No meaningful security. If you wanted to buy something, you typed your credit card number into plain text and hoped civilization would survive the experience.

Unthinkable now.

At the time, it felt normal enough.

One day, while I was enthusiastically explaining the internet to a small group, I noticed that one woman was taking notes. She turned out to be a local television reporter.

A few days later, she came to my office with a cameraman.

We did a long interview. I explained the internet. I demonstrated what it could do. I performed the role of regional prophet of the digital future.

None of it aired.

The cameraman had a hangover. His hands were shaking. The footage was unusable.

Some time later, while waiting for something unrelated, I was flipping through a printed computer magazine.

There was a small advertisement.

Programmers needed in Moscow.

The listed skills matched mine exactly. No optimism was required. No interpretation either.

I called the number.

We arranged an interview.

That was enough.

My Moscow period was about to begin.

Scene 19. Write Code

I was in Moscow, sitting across from the owner of a reasonably large IT company. It was a French company, and he was French, though he spoke decent Russian. Their main business was point-of-sale and back-office systems for retail chains.

From the beginning, I behaved like a manager. This was probably a mistake. He was looking for a programmer.

I also mentioned that I could bring a team. I was thinking of people from my former company and from the department I had built. That may have influenced the outcome more than my technical skills did.

Two weeks later, I arrived in Moscow with Olga, one member of my healthcare department team. Soon after, I brought in three more: one Serg from my telecom period, and two from the healthcare department.

The company provided temporary housing. That was my first experience living in a rented apartment. Once again, I was in an environment I assumed was normal and only much later realized was not. The owner had a key and what she considered a perfectly natural right to enter the apartment without warning, without knocking, without any visible distinction between her property and our temporary existence inside it.

It was a two-bedroom apartment with a small kitchen near Savelovsky Station, fairly central by Moscow standards. One evening, Olga and I were drinking tea when the owner—a woman in her thirties, probably—burst in and immediately started yelling. According to the agreement with the company, she said, the apartment was only for foreigners, not for provincial people like us.

Then she calmed down.

Then she accepted our offer of tea.

After that, she seemed to decide we were not especially dangerous and allowed us to remain on her premises. Still, on her way out, she removed all the paintings from the walls. Apparently trust had limits.

A month later, we found another apartment. We still lived as roommates, because we couldn’t afford anything else.

At the office, we spent the first two months learning the system and the business.

Then the original core development team left. All of them. They went to competitors.

The workload tripled.

So did our salaries.

At the time, this felt like a reasonable exchange. Moscow was expensive, and energy could be converted into money with unusual efficiency.

At first, I kept trying to act like a manager. Eventually, the owner stopped me.

He told me plainly that he hadn’t hired me to manage people. He had hired me to write code.

That turned out to be a relief.

I was far more comfortable with computers than with people.

The salary made something else possible.

I rented an apartment large enough to bring my family to Moscow. My wife and our two children moved in.

We reunited.

Scene 20. Allowed to Exist

In the Soviet Union, living in Moscow had been a privilege. The collapse of the country did not change that. It only removed the language that justified it.

You needed propiska — a residency registration. A stamp in your passport stating that you were allowed to exist in the city.

Without it, you were temporary by default.

Police checks were routine. At any time, an officer could stop you and ask for documents. Failure to produce the correct stamp could result in a night at the station.

There was an alternative procedure.

A small bribe usually resolved the issue. Five or ten dollars was enough. Rubles were not accepted. It had to be cash. U.S. dollars.

I used this option several times.

We were illegal immigrants in our own country.

Despite that, we tried to build a normal family life. The children went to school. Alex stayed home for a while. Later, she started looking for work. She had some experience with publishing software.

By chance, the wife of one of my coworkers was looking for someone with those skills. They arranged an interview.

Afterward, my coworker pulled me aside and said bluntly that Alex needed to see a psychiatrist. She had not made much sense during the interview.

I dismissed it. I thought she had simply been nervous.

Meanwhile, the country was supposedly moving toward democratization. The propiska system was moving in the opposite direction. It was becoming stricter.

The principal of the school my children were attending called us in. He said he liked our children. He said he understood the situation. He also said he could not risk it.

The children had to leave. I had to stay.

Scene 21. Early Signals

The children went back to school in Rybinsk. Alex traveled back and forth, trying to spend time with both parts of the family.

One evening I came home and found that she was not there, even though I knew she should have been. There were no mobile phones then, no practical way to find someone once they disappeared into the city. Moscow was not a place where absence felt neutral.

I went outside and started looking for her. It did not make much sense, but it felt better than waiting at home.

After a few hours, I found her walking back from the train station. She had gone to a church.

I was angry. Not because she had gone there, but because she had left no note and had let me imagine everything else.

I tried to explain that she had frightened me.

She said that demons were speaking through my mouth, and that she had done nothing wrong by trying to get closer to God.

That should have been a signal.

It was not the first one.

I should have paid more attention.

Over time, she spent more and more time with the children in Rybinsk, and less and less in Moscow. I visited when I could.

That was how the drift began.

Scene 22. Escalation

At some point I began receiving strange phone calls. Vague warnings. Suggestions that my actions would lead to consequences. No accusations. No details.

This kind of ambiguity was familiar. A standard mafia technique. Say nothing concrete. Let imagination do the work.

At first, I didn’t understand what I had done.

Then someone visited my family. A large man. He handed over an envelope. Inside was a blank sheet of paper.

The meaning was clear.

Eventually, the source became obvious.

I had recently started working for an American–Russian company. Its development center had been opened in Moscow. Labor in Russia was dramatically cheaper than in the United States.

I was trying to recruit a friend from my previous company—the French-owned firm I had worked for before moving on. That company had recently hired a new head of security.

He came from a background where intimidation counted as professionalism.

To him, an employee leaving wasn’t a business issue. It was a security failure. Something that required a response.

I told my boss what was happening.

He immediately took me to meet the head of security at our own company.

Both men had been KGB officers.

Our security chief was new. He was eager to establish his importance.

What they discussed escalated quickly. Plans. Countermeasures. Scenarios where force was the default.

That frightened me more than the phone calls or the envelope.

I stopped the discussion.

I said I would handle it myself.

No violence. No weapons. No theatrics.

I went to the French company and spoke directly to the people involved. Calmly. Without leverage.

My friend stayed.

Not for long.

Later, he found a job in the United States and left the company anyway.

Just not for mine.

Scene 23. Residual Procedures

While I was working for the Russian-American company, I traveled frequently. Two trips from that period stayed with me. Both because of people I encountered - but for very different reasons.

On one trip, I met people who were unexpectedly open and generous. On the other, I saw a different kind of human behavior, one that felt disturbingly familiar.

I’ll start with the second one.

Most of my travels from Moscow took me to Lviv. On one of those trips, I was rushing to catch a flight back. I ended up last in line at customs.

What followed was a leftover of the Soviet system - both in procedure and in attitude. The country had collapsed, but not everything had been dismantled.

In the Soviet Union, customs controlled not only what you brought in, but also what you took out. Gold jewelry was a regulated item. Any of it. When entering the country, you were required to declare every piece. When leaving, the list was checked item by item. Any discrepancy counted as a violation.

I watched the inspection of the woman in front of me.

The customs officer - a woman who carried herself as if authority were a personal achievement - went through the list of declared items. The list didn’t match. The woman had forgotten to declare a very thin wedding ring, barely a few millimeters wide.

The officer said she couldn’t allow such a valuable item to be taken out of the country.

Then she paused.

The woman became visibly anxious. I was angry. But experience has taught me something important: never argue with officials. They could destroy your day, or worse, simply because they could. If they had a formal reason, they would use it.

So I stayed silent.

After a long pause, the officer told the woman to remove all her gold and place it on the counter.

She did.

Small earrings. Two rings, one with a stone, one plain. A thin necklace. The officer arranged them into a small pile using a scrap of paper, then turned to me, the next person in line, as if the woman no longer existed.

I had nothing to declare. My check took seconds.

Border control was next. The airport was small; it was right there. Except the border guard had stepped away and closed the booth.

I turned back toward customs and watched the end.

After another pause, the officer pushed the pile of jewelry back toward the woman with the same piece of paper and said, in a tone designed to humiliate:

“Take your gold… golden woman.”

I don’t like violence. But in that moment, I felt an impulse I rarely feel. Not because of what she said, but because of how she said it.

What struck me later was that I was outraged - but not surprised.

It all felt consistent. Familiar. This was how systems behaved. This was how power sounded when it spoke.

Only much later, after living outside of the ex-Soviet Union for a long time, did I understand something important.

This wasn’t normal.

The system itself wasn’t normal.

Scene 24. Open Doors

Another business trip took me to Lithuania.

A colleague and I arrived in Vilnius by train. Vilnius is in the west of the country. Our destination was Mažeikiai, in the northeast. We considered several options and decided to take a taxi, effectively crossing the country.

It was a long ride. Several hours.

The driver was friendly. Talkative, but not intrusive. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, only that time passed easily. We weren’t bored.

Somewhere in the middle of the trip, he asked if we were hungry.

I assumed he meant a café or a roadside restaurant.

Instead, he said we could stop by his apartment and have lunch there. His wife would cook.

There were no mobile phones then. He couldn’t call ahead. We just turned off the road and showed up.

His wife didn’t hesitate. She cooked for us. No questions. No awkwardness. No sense that we were inconveniencing anyone.

They didn’t charge us for the food.

I don’t remember exactly what we ate. That part didn’t stay with me.

What I remember is how natural it felt. Two strangers welcomed into someone’s home, fed, and sent on their way without ceremony.

The system around us was still broken. Corrupt. Inefficient. Unreliable.

But many people remained human.

If anything, surviving inside that system seemed to make them more attentive to each other. When institutions failed consistently, mutual help became the only dependable infrastructure.

That stayed with me.

Scene 25. First Day, Reduced to Survival

The software we had developed in Moscow needed on-site support in New York. I was chosen for the role, despite not speaking English.

It was my first day in a New York office. The client was Ellen Tracy, an apparel company, so the world I was entering belonged less to software than to fashion.

I was supposed to meet a Russian-American coworker at the entrance of an office building on the corner of 41st Street and 7th Avenue, in the middle of the Garment District. I arrived early. Very early. I waited for nearly an hour.

I wasn’t bored.

I stood in Times Square and watched. People, cars, buildings. Everything felt new and slightly alien. I remember I was afraid someone would speak to me and I would not understand a word.

I don’t remember much about the office itself.

That wasn’t because it was unremarkable. It was because I was terrified by something very specific: I had to speak English.

Not read it. Not write it. Speak it. In real time. With consequences.

Without the language, everything was opaque. Conversations happened around me. Decisions were made. I followed by watching faces, tracking tone, guessing intent. Pattern recognition substituted for understanding.

Fortunately, my Russian-American coworker stayed close. He translated when necessary. Filled gaps. Explained context. He acted as a buffer between me and the expectation that I would immediately function in another language.

That helped.

Enough.

By lunchtime, my cognitive capacity was mostly gone. He took me out to eat.

It was a small Italian sandwich place between 41st and 42nd streets. Nothing notable from the outside. Probably invisible to anyone who grew up there.

This turned out to be a critical decision.

The sandwich was hot, heavy, unapologetic. Bread, meat, sauce, cheese - nothing subtle, nothing restrained. I ate it and felt something close to peace.

I remember thinking, very seriously, that this must be what the gods eat on Olympus.

This was not metaphorical.

I came from Russia. I was not spoiled when it came to food. We had sustenance. We did not have abundance presented as a casual lunch option.

That sandwich recalibrated something.

The sandwich shop is long gone. A glass tower replaced it. I still remember it better than most offices I worked in.

The office was still intimidating. The language problem did not disappear. I was still lost more often than not.

But I had learned something important, very early.

Even when I didn't understand what people were saying, the environment itself could still be generous.

Scene 26. Visa

Before I could go to the United States, I needed a visa.

I went to the embassy for the interview. The clerk reviewed my documents, looked at me, and said - without hesitation - that the United States already had enough criminals.

My visa was denied.

My American boss was standing next to me. I was calm. He was furious. He argued immediately. Asked questions. Threatened escalation. He talked about senators and complaints. He treated the rejection as an error that needed to be corrected.

The reason surfaced quickly.

The immigration lawyer handling our paperwork had a reputation. He worked with people operating close to legal boundaries. The embassy made a simple inference: if you used that lawyer, you were probably the same.

My boss clarified the situation.

A week later, the embassy called.

They asked one question.

“Are you a programmer?”

I said yes.

They told me to come pick up my visa the next day.

The stamp was placed in my Soviet passport. It was still valid, even though the country printed on its cover had ceased to exist years earlier.

A few days later, I was on a plane, ready for my first day - terrified, but excited.

Scene 27. An Anchor Point in the East Village

One day, in our Fair Lawn office in New Jersey, I met my boss’s son. He spoke Russian, which already made him easier to talk to.

During our conversation, I mentioned that I liked rollerblading. He did too. He asked whether I wanted to go rollerblading in the city.

I was very glad he asked. I do not think I would have gone on my own. I was good at rollerblading, but I was intimidated by unfamiliar places, especially places that felt fully American, non-Russian-speaking, and governed by rules I did not understand.

We skated downtown — Battery Park, Pier 17 — places that meant nothing to me then and later became familiar.

At some point he said he had a friend who might also be interested in rollerblading.

That was how I met Kat.

She lived in the East Village, near Union Square. She came out, we skated around for a while, and later ended up at her apartment. We drank wine and talked until late. I missed my bus back and slept on her couch in the living room.

After that day, I never saw my boss’s son again.

But I stayed friends with Kat for many years.

Before I met her, I did not like New York very much.

After that, a few times a week, I would go to her apartment after work. Sometimes we spent time together. Most of the time, I just used her place as a base: I changed out of my suit into a T-shirt, put on my rollerblades, and went out to explore the city.

Kat’s apartment was also a gathering place for her friends. Gradually, I became part of that circle.

At some point, I realized I was no longer afraid of the city.

Scene 28. Soon

Time moved quickly.

I was in the United States on a visitor visa. Six months. Non-negotiable. When it expired, I had to return to Moscow.

That part was expected.

What surprised me was how much New York had already changed me.

What I missed most were the friends I had made there. I had grown close to them quickly, and once I was back in Moscow, their absence was what I felt first.

I missed the city too — the density, the energy, even the roughness of the streets, the efficient indifference I had learned to move inside. I hadn’t realized how much of it I had absorbed until it was gone.

I told the company I wanted to return.

They said they would arrange a work visa. They said it would happen soon.

I asked when.

They said soon again.

Soon took several months.

Four, approximately.

The company was consistent in one regard: it didn’t pay much attention to the lives of its employees. While I waited, I couldn’t commit to anything. I couldn’t rent an apartment because I might be leaving any day. I couldn’t afford a hotel because I wasn’t leaving yet.

This was my first experience of couchsurfing.

For four months, I stayed wherever I could for a night. Friends. Acquaintances. Sometimes the office, sleeping under my desk. I planned day by day, assuming impermanence was the safest strategy.

Then, without warning, soon arrived.

The work visa was issued.

It had been approved in advance.

Scene 29. Arrival Instructions: Figure It Out

When I arrived in the United States again, my boss picked me up at JFK.

That felt reassuring. Temporary, but reassuring.

He drove me to Fair Lawn, New Jersey. We talked on the way. Work. Timelines. Practical details. In the evening, he stopped in the middle of town and let me out.

That was the handoff.

He told me to find a place to live and drove away.

I stood there for a moment, recalibrating. The instructions were clear. The execution path was not.

During my first visit to the United States, I hadn’t lived in the city. I was based here, in Fair Lawn. At the time, the company had arranged housing for me in the home of one of their friends. I stayed in their daughter’s room while she was away on school break.

I assumed the same arrangement was in place this time.

She opened the door and looked genuinely surprised.

I assumed my boss had warned her. He had not.

She asked where I planned to stay. Her daughter had returned. The room was no longer available.

I explained, calmly, that I had nowhere else to go.

She paused. Then agreed.

She put a mattress in the basement, next to the washing machine.

There was a tiny shower room and a toilet. I could barely fit, but at least there was a door. When laundry wasn’t being done, I had some privacy.

When it was, I navigated through hanging sheets, pillowcases, and underwear to reach the stairs, the shower, or the exit.

This became my first American apartment.

She charged three hundred dollars a month.

At the time, it felt expensive.

At the time, it also felt like progress.

It didn’t take long to understand that this was not where I belonged.

Scene 30. Clarity in Maine

My closest New York friend - Kat, the woman I met early on, the one who quietly anchored me to the city - invited me on a road trip to Maine. Another guy came along.

We had a good time. Camping. Hiking. Smoking. Sitting around a campfire doing nothing in particular. The kind of trip where nobody is trying to optimize anything.

At some point, we stayed in a motel.

One room. Two beds. Three people.

The other guy took one bed. I took the other. And both of us were, without saying it out loud, waiting to see what she would do.

I was very much into her. I didn’t dramatize it, but I felt it. I was quietly hoping.

She didn’t choose me.

She chose the other guy.

And that was that.

Surprisingly, I was okay.

Not in a performative way. Not in an I’m fine, really way. I was genuinely relieved. Knowing where I stood was better than uncertainty, better than empty projections and half-built futures that only exist because no one has said no yet.

Their romance didn’t last.

Our friendship did.

We’re still good friends.

Looking back, I know my life would have been completely different if she had made another choice. Not necessarily better. Not worse. Just different.

That stayed with me. Not as a wound, but as a correction.

Sometimes clarity is the kinder outcome.

Scene 31. Back to the City

I didn’t belong in New Jersey.

Not because of the laundry hanging above my mattress in the basement. I had grown up in the Soviet Union. I had seen worse.

The problem was simpler.

It wasn’t New York.

I got lucky again. A friend was moving within Brooklyn and offered me his old apartment in Borough Park. That was how I got my first place in the city.

I had no idea how I would pay for it. The salary from my Russian company was nowhere near enough to cover the rent.

I didn’t worry about that. I assumed I would solve it by the time it became unavoidable.

Eventually, my gas was shut off. I couldn’t pay for it. Electricity was still on, despite the same problem.

Food became minimal. I lived on overripe bananas sold for pennies at a local grocery store.

This wasn’t dramatic. I could have borrowed money from friends. I chose not to. I wanted to see how far I could go before it became necessary.

One evening, I tried to reheat leftover Chinese food in its aluminum container.

That was when I confirmed the gas was gone.

I experimented with alternatives. A windowsill heater. A hair dryer. None of them worked.

Eventually, I used a clothing iron.

It was inefficient, but functional.

That felt like a reasonable outcome.

At work, things shifted. They found a better English speaker to handle the client site. I was reassigned to the Fair Lawn office.

That meant a daily commute from Brooklyn to New Jersey.

It was long, but easy. I traveled against the flow. The trains and buses were mostly empty. I didn’t mind the distance as long as I ended each day back in the city.

Luck intervened again.

I found a roommate — another Russian guy. He had been living in Brighton Beach in a room with a window facing a subway curve. Every passing train produced a high-pitched metallic scream. Trains ran all night. Sleep was optional.

Convincing him to move was not difficult.

I had never lived with a roommate before. That brought its own small humiliations.

Once, after trimming my beard, I left a bit of the mess in the sink. He pointed it out and asked me to clean it up. I was embarrassed far beyond what the situation required. In my head, leaving a mess behind was exactly the kind of thing that proved I was still a villager pretending not to be one.

Since then, I have been careful. Wherever I go, even in public bathrooms, I try to leave the place as clean as I found it, or cleaner.

Even that felt like progress. I was still improvising, but at least now I was doing it in New York.

Scene 32. Exposure

I was twenty-nine when I moved to New York.

For the first time in my life, I felt genuinely unencumbered. Not because responsibility had disappeared, but because it was finally far enough away to stop pressing on me every minute. The kind of freedom most people exhaust in their early twenties arrived for me much later.

I did not waste it.

There were nights out. Parties. Substances. Nothing extreme. Nothing self-destructive. Just enough to loosen structure and see what happened without it.

I was not looking for a relationship.

Then one woman started paying attention to me.

At that time, I had very little self-esteem. I did not think I was worth much effort from anyone. So when she said she wanted to come visit me, I was confused. Not because the trip was far, though it was. Mostly because I could not understand why she would bother.

At the same time, after separating from my family, I felt empty and missed attachment more than I understood.

I did not realize how exposed that made me.

Her attention did not bounce off. It went straight through. Before long, we were dating.

After a short while, I became obsessed with her. I thought about her constantly. I looked for every chance to be with her.

Once, my boss said I might be sent to another city for a long-term project. I remember how terrified I was by the idea that I might not see her. That was when I understood it had become a dependency.

I still could not resist it.

I do not think she expected the intensity of my reaction. Maybe she wanted a small adventure on the side. I do not know.

We spent a few months together.

They were the most emotional months of my life.

The relationship burned quickly.

Then it stopped.

She decided to return to her husband.

The aftermath hit harder than anything before it. Not sadness alone, but collapse. A physical weight. Sleeplessness. The sense that something essential had been removed without warning.

I was unprepared for how heavy it was.

I had lived through systems failing, countries dissolving, institutions threatening violence. None of that had disarmed me the way this did.

I was left alone.

And this time, the loneliness was unmistakable.

Scene 33. Motion

My outlet was rollerblading.

I was living in a tiny studio in Brooklyn Heights, right by the Brooklyn Bridge. I would put my skates on outside the building and ride across the bridge, through Chinatown, up one of the avenues, and into Central Park. That was my usual route.

Sometimes I went farther.

I would set out without a destination and just keep going wherever the streets took me. I used the Manhattan subway map to navigate. That turned out to be misleading. On the map, uptown looked compact. In reality, it kept going. One day I skated all the way to Washington Heights and discovered that what looked close on paper could take forever on the ground. I also learned that Broadway has real hills once you get far enough uptown, around Harlem.

It was an unexpectedly effective way to learn New York geography.

It was also one of the few things that helped.

Motion had always worked on me. It gave me something close to relief. Not resolution. Not understanding. Just a way to keep going without sitting still inside my own head.

On my birthday, I decided to do something small for myself. I went to a café on the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue. It was called Anyway cafe. For some reason, it was popular with local Russians.

I was sitting there with a coffee and a piece of cake, celebrating alone, when I heard Russian at a nearby table.

Something in me gave way.

I picked up my coffee cup, walked over to them, and said, “Today is my birthday. Can we celebrate it together?”

They welcomed me immediately.

For a while, I stayed in touch with those new friends. My state didn’t allow for much of that. But that birthday stayed with me.

I remember the loneliness.

I also remember that, for one evening, it gave way.

Scene 34. Almost Missed Appointment

I had accepted an offer from a more proper American company.

I was thinking about how to leave. I liked the company I was working for. I liked the clients. I liked my coworkers. The only problem was that I was not making enough money to live on.

Fortunately, my boss gave me a clean and somewhat dramatic exit.

Cell phones were still a luxury. If you wanted to meet someone, you agreed on a place and a time. If something went wrong, there was no way to explain it. You either showed up or you did not.

That matters here.

I had arranged to meet a friend at the uptown bus terminal. Friday. After work.

That afternoon, my boss asked me to fix his daughter’s computer. I tried. The problem resisted quick solutions. Time passed.

As the meeting time approached, I told him I had to leave.

He said, “You are not going anywhere until you fix this computer.”

That meant missing the appointment completely. No notice. No explanation.

Something snapped.

I slammed the door and told him I was never coming back. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

I could afford to walk out.

So I did.

There was a one-month gap before my work visa for the new job arrived.

I did not have much money, but I had one useful certainty: in a month, I would be earning twice as much. For the first time in a while, I felt no pressure.

During my time at Ellen Tracy, I had become friendly with the company’s Russian CIO, Steven. When he heard about my situation, he found me a student who was learning Visual Basic. It was the dot-com era. Everyone seemed to be learning Visual Basic. So I earned a little extra money teaching him.

The rest of my time I spent rollerblading.

Sometimes around lunchtime I stopped by Anyway Cafe. I had become friendly with the chef. He would make me a free dish out of whatever was left in the kitchen. In return, I sat with him at a small table outside and listened to his stories.

It was an unexpectedly good month for someone between jobs.

Scene 35. Efficiency Theater

I joined this American company during the dot-com bubble with a simple assumption: that private companies were built around efficiency.

That assumption didn’t survive long.

My first assignment there was simple, but tedious. It involved manual code manipulation. Four developers - including me - were doing the same repetitive task side by side.

After a couple of hours, it became obvious that the work could be automated.

So I wrote a script.

It did the job quickly and correctly. The kind of solution I expected to be encouraged. I went to my boss to report it. The four of us, I explained, could move on to something more productive.

He didn’t react the way I expected.

He took me aside, into a corner of the office, and lowered his voice.

“Use your script,” he said. “Then spend the rest of the day browsing the internet. Don’t show it to anyone.”

That was the instruction.

At the time, this shocked me.

I had assumed efficiency was the primary goal. I hadn’t yet learned how many other factors shape decisions: compliance, optics, risk, budget cycles, headcount justification, or simply keeping people employed until the next spike in work.

I know that now.

Back then, all I felt was disorientation.

For a moment, it felt uncomfortably familiar.

Like a system I thought I had already left behind.

Scene 36. Collision

A few months later, my wife Alex and children joined me in New York.

I welcomed it. I believed - quietly, without saying it out loud - that this might stabilize things. That proximity and familiarity might heal what the previous months had broken.

It didn’t.

While we were still apart, I noticed something unsettling during phone calls with my wife. She spoke about events as if they were happening in real time. Witches living next door. Curses placed on the children. Needles hidden in pillows. Someone drilling through a wall and spraying cursed water into the room.

At first, I didn’t know how to respond. The descriptions were vivid and detailed. They didn’t sound metaphorical. They didn’t sound like exaggeration. They existed in a register I didn’t understand.

Eventually, I learned that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Paranoia.

I tried to understand. I wanted to help. But the experience was surreal in a way that offered no obvious response. There was nothing to argue against. Nothing to reassure. Logic had no entry point.

I brought them to the United States anyway.

We moved into my apartment in Brighton Beach.

A woman living with schizophrenia.

A man still destabilized by a recent emotional collapse.

Two teenage children.

One bedroom.

Around that time, I changed jobs. The new position was objectively better. It paid more. But not enough.

Even small things required calculation. A subway trip to Central Park for all four of us felt expensive enough to avoid. We stayed local. Brighton Beach became our boundary.

The children started public school without knowing English. They were dropped into an environment where they couldn’t communicate and were expected to adapt immediately.

They were under strain.

So was everyone else.

One evening I came home from work and my son showed me what he thought was an achievement. He had figured out how to order a movie using the cable TV remote.

It was a pay-per-view.

We didn’t have much money. I got angry. I yelled at him.

I saw his face change - from pride to confusion, then to something closer to devastation. I didn’t stop. I kept explaining why this was a problem, why we couldn’t afford it, why he shouldn’t have done it.

He stood there and listened.

At the time, it felt justified.

Later, it didn’t.

I still remember his face in detail. Every time I think about that moment, I feel it again.

Years later, he mentioned it casually. He asked if I remembered how silly he had been, ordering that movie.

That was how he framed it.

I told him I remembered. I told him I was wrong. That I shouldn’t have yelled at him. That it wasn’t his mistake.

He was surprised.

He said it was fine. That he didn’t hold it against me.

It reduced the weight I carried.

Not completely.

The memory stayed intact.

The situation did not resolve itself.

Scene 37. Interim Solutions

It didn’t take long to understand that the situation wasn’t going anywhere.

I left.

I didn’t have money for another apartment, so I started couchsurfing again — this time in New York. In the evenings, I would call friends and ask a simple question: could I stay the night?

I was lucky. I had options.

Only once did I run out of them. That night, I slept in a park near the Cloisters with my laptop in my backpack, using it as a pillow. It cost more than everything else I owned.

One of the friends who answered my calls more often than the others gradually became more important. Probably because I always called her first. I liked spending time with her. She was very energetic, and her energy cut through my loneliness.

I spent more and more time with her. After a while, she became my girlfriend.

We traveled together — Thailand, then Alaska. We had a good time. But it did not cure my broken heart the way I hoped. Mostly, I was just following her wherever she wanted to go.

Once she told me that all her previous boyfriends had been depressed, and that I was the only one who wasn’t.

At the time, I thought I had not earned that compliment.

Then I thought maybe I was simply very good at pretending to be normal. She was studying psychology at Columbia and still did not recognize my mental state.

Later, she became my second wife.

Again, I followed.

It wasn’t a love story.

It was more a convergence of circumstances. I had a stable job. I was earning reasonable money. There was potential. She was ten years younger than me and still in college.

It made sense on paper.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking critically. I was still recovering from the previous collapse. I was not ready for another relationship, but I did not recognize that yet.

Scene 38. West 149th Street

We rented an apartment on West 149th Street. Harlem.

We were two white people in the entire area. That part was obvious. What surprised me was how little it mattered.

I didn’t feel unwelcome. If anything, I felt comfortable. Most of the people around us were families with kids. City College was nearby. Life on the street felt local, routine, uninterested in explaining itself.

There were specifics, of course.

Not long after we moved in, I was walking to the subway when a young guy approached me and asked if I wanted to buy drugs.

I said I wasn’t interested.

He looked at me and asked, genuinely confused, “Then what are you doing here?”

I said I had just moved into the neighborhood.

His face changed immediately.

“Really?” he said. “What’s your name?”

I told him.

After that, every time he saw me on the street, he greeted me loudly.

“What’s up\! How you doing, my man?”

It was casual. Public. Unforced.

I felt at home there.

Scene 39. Red Jetta

My Harlem mornings began on the side of the West Side Highway.

I stood there with two coffees from a small Spanish café nearby, waiting for a red Jetta to appear at the exit.

The car belonged to Yuka, a Japanese coworker at the new, more American company I had joined after leaving the Russian one.

We both lived in Manhattan, but the office was in Little Falls, New Jersey. I was in Harlem. She lived on the Upper West Side, near Central Park.

At first, she mostly worked at client sites while I stayed in the office writing code. When the dot-com bubble began to slow down, client work decreased, and she started coming into the office more often.

Around that time, my boss suggested I ask her for a ride to New Jersey. The commute from Harlem was slow and inefficient. He explained this to me in Russian and told me to ask her myself.

I prepared the sentence in advance.

When I finally spoke to her, what came out was hesitant and broken. She listened patiently. Only later did I learn that my boss had already warned her. He had not believed I would manage the request on my own.

She agreed.

From then on, when she pulled over, I got in, handed her one of the coffees, and took the driver’s seat.

I only had a learner’s permit. I needed practice to pass the exam. She provided it.

She would fasten her seatbelt, open her makeup bag, and calmly put it on while I drove us toward New Jersey.

I was not an experienced driver. There were probably moments when she questioned the arrangement. She never said so.

The commute took about an hour each way.

At first, there was silence. Dense, awkward silence. She was the only non-Russian speaker I interacted with regularly. My English was still minimal.

Sometimes I tried to tell a story.

Once, halfway through one, I ran out of vocabulary and stopped.

She did not.

She pulled the car onto the shoulder of the highway and turned to me.

“I’m not driving until you finish your story.”

So I finished it.

It was not elegant. But it was complete.

After that, I spoke more.

Her method worked.

At the time, the future still seemed bright.

Then things started falling apart. The dot-com bubble began to implode. The consulting company stopped getting contracts, and I began looking for another job.

A recruiter called about Morgan Stanley. I went through the interviews and got the position.

At the time, I took that for granted. Later, I understood how lucky I had been. My English was bad. I could barely explain myself. Technical skill carried me through.

A few weeks after I left, the consulting company fired most of its staff.

Yuka was among them.

She was on a work visa, so she had to leave the country almost immediately.

I did not realize how much I was going to miss her.

Scene 40. The Morning It Became Real

One morning, on my way to the 145th Street subway station, I noticed smoke rising from downtown. When I reached a clear view along St. Nicholas Avenue, I saw that it was coming from one of the Twin Towers.

A woman tried to stop me from going into the subway. She said a transformer had exploded in the tower, and that the subway might be dangerous if the building collapsed. I told her I was getting off in Midtown, so I would be fine.

I went to my Morgan Stanley office on 49th Street. Back then, there was a direct view of the towers from there.

Nobody was working. Everyone was standing by the windows.

Then we saw a plane hit the second tower.

My boss reacted immediately. “Spread out,” he said. “It’s not safe here anymore.”

At that point, we were still thinking the planes themselves might fall into Manhattan.

I took the elevator down and stepped out into Times Square.

It looked normal.

Tourists were doing tourist things. People were walking around as usual. Nobody seemed to know what had happened. There was no direct view downtown, no announcements, no sirens.

I tried to take the subway back to Harlem, but by then the trains had stopped running.

So I walked home.

As soon as I got back, I turned on my small television. I did not have cable. The main antenna was on the tower, so most channels were gone. I found one that was still broadcasting. It was showing a live feed from downtown.

I watched the tower collapse.

That was when it became real.

For a couple of years after that, I could not bring myself to go downtown, below Houston Street.

Scene 41. Deferred Endings

By the time we moved to Harlem, my ex-wife Alex and the children had returned to Russia.

The money I sent was enough for a decent life in the small town they moved to. That part became stable. What had once been emotional responsibility turned into a financial routine.

We stayed in touch. She continued treatment. Her condition stabilized.

Mine didn’t.

I was still carrying the aftereffects of the earlier collapse. The intensity had faded, but the damage hadn’t fully healed. It took time for my critical thinking to return.

When it did, something became clear.

The woman I was living with was not a good match.

I tried to leave. She cried. I stayed.

I tried again later. The same thing happened. I promised to give it another chance.

This pattern repeated.

Eventually, she went to Europe for a one-week trip.

When she came back, I was gone.

Scene 42. Interruption

I moved into a studio in the East Village, on 1st Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets.

It was tiny. Everything in it was scaled down. Space, light, tolerance.

That was where my second suicide attempt happened.

Not because of recent events. Not because of relationships or accumulated losses. By then, those explanations felt irrelevant. I was simply exhausted. Emotionally depleted. I could not see a future that included me.

That was enough.

I went to a pharmacy and bought razors. Then I came home.

I tried to fill the bathtub with hot water.

The water turned cold when the tub was about one-third full. The boiler was as small as the studio.

I waited for it to reheat. It took forever.

I tried another approach. I boiled water on the stove. That also took too long. I could not produce enough of it to make the bath usable.

I sat there, recalculating.

At some point, I made a cut.

Then I heard someone crying in the neighboring apartment. The walls were thin enough that nothing stayed private for long.

It was loud enough to register. Or maybe I was just waiting for a sign to stop me.

In any case, it was not how I wanted to feel in what I assumed would be the final moment of my life.

I stopped.

I said to myself, Fine. I’ll do it later.

Later never came.

Scene 43. Recognition

I was meeting my friend Steven, the CIO at Ellen Tracy. We were talking when I suddenly realized I had a favor to ask.

I said, “Do you remember Yuka? We stopped by your place with her a few times.”

He said, “Yes, of course I remember her.”

I said, “Can you hire her? She’s in Japan now. Her last company collapsed, and she needs a work visa.”

He said, “Sure.”

I was surprised. I had not expected him to say yes immediately.

Two months later, Yuka was working for my former client, sitting in the same place where I had worked when I was on site.

I was spending more and more time with her. I introduced her to Kat and to my Russian friends. Her office was across Times Square, so we started meeting for lunch, often with someone from my former client.

Very gradually, we became more than just friends.

Because I was spending most of my time at her place, it stopped making sense to keep paying for my tiny studio. So I officially moved into her slightly larger studio on St. Marks Place.

I had always been curious about Japan. I kept asking her to show me her country. Eventually, she did.

I met Yuka’s mother in Tokyo. At first, she did not accept me. But after I helped her set up a printer and fixed a few computer problems, I gained her respect.

We also traveled to the expected places. They were all nice. But what stayed with me were smaller things.

I felt something immediately when I saw the vegetable fields with their small plastic greenhouses. They looked very much like what we had in the Soviet Union, and nothing like the giant American ones.

The deeper moment came later, when she took me to her aunt’s small apartment in Aizu-Wakamatsu, in Fukushima.

It had three rooms with tatami floors. A low Japanese table. Pictures of dead relatives on the wall above a small Buddhist altar. And a glass-fronted shelf filled with small ceramic figures.

The figures, and the way they were arranged, felt familiar with a force I did not expect. For a moment, I was back in my late grandmother’s apartment, looking at her shelf.

At that moment, I knew I wanted to live in that country.

Scene 44. Severed Signal

Years later, during a phone call, my son suddenly said, completely out of context, “Can I ask you something personal?”

I said, “Of course.”

He was obviously nervous. His voice changed.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that you raped my mom with your friend?”

I was shocked.

I told him that it was completely untrue.

“I had to ask,” he said, and his voice returned almost immediately to its normal tone. “My mom told me that.”

Then he told me about the stories Alex had told him and his sister when they were teenagers. Not all of them were as extreme as that one. Some may have started from something real. But they had been reshaped until I appeared monstrous.

That, he said, was the reason for the long gap in our conversations.

He also said they had believed her because they were young, and because they had no way to contact me and hear another version.

Much later, when he was older, he started questioning those stories. They described behavior so far outside anything human that even he could no longer reconcile them with reality. What he needed from me was not an explanation, only confirmation of what he had already begun to suspect.

During that same conversation, he told me what life had been like after they returned to Russia.

I am leaving the details for his book. It is more his story than mine.

What I can say is that hearing it was painful.

When I told him I was sorry — that I had not been there — he said something that stayed with me.

He said there was nothing I could have done anyway.

That did not make it easier.

I am glad he opened up that day. We speak more often now, and for much longer.

Scene 45. Breakfast Vocabulary

I loved living in New York.

At the same time, I had started to realize that there were probably better places to build a family. Especially if we wanted children.

After two visits to Tokyo, we began to think of it as a real alternative.

For Yuka, at first, it was still mostly hypothetical. She wanted to stay in New York. So I decided to test whether the idea had any practical future.

I asked Morgan Stanley about a transfer to Tokyo.

Through luck and timing, they offered one.

Yuka and I talked for a long time. We decided to go.

On my first day in Tokyo, Yuka had to go renew her U.S. visa, so I was on my own in Akasaka.

Then it started raining.

I walked into a Starbucks.

It was my first time alone in Tokyo, and what struck me most was how kind the staff were. In New York, I had learned to assume that when someone was especially nice, they usually wanted something from you. In Tokyo, I felt welcomed without any conditions attached.

I still remember my reaction. At first, confusion. Then simple happiness, standing there in the rain, looking at the smiles on the faces of the Starbucks baristas.

Yuka’s mother had rented a three-bedroom house not far from Shinjuku for all of us: Yuka, me, her mother, and her uncle.

It was a comfortable house in a convenient location.

I began commuting to the office and tried to settle in. A week later, Yuka had to return to New York to finish her projects.

So I stayed behind with her family.

Her mother and uncle did not speak English. I could not understand Japanese. Communication was minimal. Maybe that was why there were no conflicts. The language barrier prevented conversation, including the heated kind.

I picked up a few Japanese words. Almost all of them were related to food, because that was what we communicated about most.

Every morning, Yuka’s mother made a very traditional, old-style Japanese breakfast: rice, miso soup, salmon, pickled fish, vegetables.

I sat at the table understanding almost nothing.

The situation felt strangely familiar. It reminded me of my first days in New York, when I had arrived without English and had to learn the world by tone, gesture, and repetition.

A few weeks later, Yuka came back. Then she left again, this time for India, for three months. After that, she was assigned to a project in Nagoya. For about a year, I saw her only briefly.

I can speak Japanese now.

But even now, a suspicious amount of my vocabulary is still related to food.

Epilogue

I am finishing this book many months after I began it, on another trip to Hong Kong.

My home is in Tokyo, but I cannot fully descend into these memories when I am with Yuka or our daughter.

The last scene in this book took place twenty years ago.

I have to stop there.

Not because life stopped. Not because nothing followed. But because I am not ready.

Those memories have not settled yet.

Until they do.