My Family Estrangement on Opposite Sides of the War.
War builds a wall
Bo looks at me with great sadness. So you don’t talk to your parents? I don’t, I say, almost not at all. But I thought you were close. We were, but the world changed. But not you or them? I don’t know, we discuss nothing of substance, well, nothing at all. Is it the war? Yes.
Bo drops his head, his gaze burrowing through the table. His thick salt and pepper hair are spiking at me. I notice no sign of a thinning spot, impressive for a man his age. He springs up and leans into me.
Why did you make this choice? he asks. I did not; I just cannot. My hand refuses to dial the number.
You must always talk to your parents, he speaks with force. Forgive. Forgive! His eyes burn through me, but his voice is kind.
Bo, I know. But…
Stop. Stop. He soothes. When the Yugoslavian war broke out in the nineties, around the time I left for the US, I had this thing with my father — the thing you have with yours, he says. He was with Milosevic, the murderer Milosevic… We did not say many words to each other after I left… Bo shakes his head. You may, no, you will regret it. I only knew to forgive after he died.
The war was in its second month. Now, an accepted reality that no one wanted to believe before the Russian army marched into Ukraine in February of 2022. Could not happen — Putin is a calculating Machiavellian to make a move so irrational and self-defeating, my American neighbors said, and I said. But Putin used a different algebra to solve his equations of power. He invaded. In retrospect, it was obvious that he would.
I think of Bo’s words. He is wise; he lived more than I had, but I seem to be catching up. I don’t want to. His wisdom is earned through hard choices, and similar choices, I see, are befalling me. I’d rather borrow his wisdom, but the universe insists I learn by carrying my own burdens.
He is right, of course. I should talk to my parents.
I call in a week. My mother answers on WhatsApp. I watch her walk on a footpath beaten through the April snow, blackened by the winter boots of citizens trudging from bus stations to their nine-story apartment boxes. I can see the grey Soviet-era buildings in the shaky frame of her video. She is almost home, and we talk of inanities, both thankful for the reprieve. We know what must come.
She is in the apartment, and all my excuses are gone. I know my dad is nearby. I ask her, but I ask them both. Do you condemn the invasion? There is no pause in her answer.
No. It is the fault of the West; she insists in her absolutist tone of stubborn commitment to defend a position no matter the reason. No one likes the Russians, she insists. Well, Mom, maybe true now, untrue before the invasion. Not an invasion, she corrects me; we had to defend the children; Nazis are killing them in Donbas. Mom, they are lying to you.
Or, Mom is emphatic, maybe they are lying to you! Mom, you taught me to read between the lines of the government speak — your government. Yes, she says, those were Soviet times, and not every white space needs filling with your own meaning.
I hang up in anger, then curse myself for slamming the door. Mother knows what buttons to push, and her tone turns me into an immature teenager. Next are weeks of stubborn silence, which neither of us moves to break.
I wonder if she believes what she says. Or is it fear of saying a wrong thing if the government were to listen? But WhatsApp is encrypted. She knows that, doesn’t she? I hope it is fear or caution. I don’t believe it. I search for ways to convince myself, but it is an unrewarding try.
I make Instagram posts of stories from BBC Russian service about the reality of the invasion. It is for them, for the Russians I still know over there, a link to other news sources outside of the Kremlin’s control.
My dad texts me on Instagram, implores me to stay out of global politics, focus on my business, keep my head down. Fear is in his message — for me or them? I must take a stand, Dad, I tell him. I want to say he should too, but I stop. My impotent posts of condemnation cost me keystrokes. His act of defiance would pit him against the law and society and mark him for trouble. People fall out of hospital windows over there for saying the wrong thing. I have no right to demand a stand; our consequences are utterly unlike.
Then, I concede the truth. I don’t push him because I am afraid of what he thinks, because I know.
I post the invasion maps, include BBC stories, and editorialize over content. I do it with a faint hope that someone on the other end reads, and when the time comes to make a choice, maybe the information changes a mind; even one mind would be a small victory.
Instead, my number of Russian followers on Instagram drops. I stop receiving group notifications from my primary school classmates on WhatsApp. I check — I have been ejected. Fuck them.
I post for months and then stop. My posts give me a cheap illusion of action, but are worthless — a search for absolution from complicity. I am exhausted.
A year passes, and it is my sister’s birthday. I call to wish her the best. She is beaming. She is at the in-law’s dacha, a simple three-season, two-room house in the country. Everyone is there. My parents are there too. They are grilling.
I say hello, joke, and they joke back. My father is silent. The corners of his mouth are downcast. I imagine his gaze is steely, but it is hard to know from the small picture on a smartphone. Does he think I am a traitor?
The thought chills me. He was in the military until the late 1980s when the profession was held in esteem, when there was an adversary. What drives him now? Is it about “national pride”? I consider. That might be, but no, it is about Putin. “He restored the country from chaos,” I remember Dad explaining six years ago. Dad likes a strong leader. He is very Russian in that way, in the way I am not.
In a month, I call my sister again. What does she really believe? She does not have the contrarian stubbornness of my mother. She travels widely. She reads English. Maybe I can sway her and I broach with caution. But she says there are many truths. She would consider what I said if I considered her information. She sends propaganda.
I try to think like her but fail — her news is blatant lies, but that’s all she sees. I say it. She does not respond.
We talk twice over the next eight months. Inanities, a simple recount of events. I say hello to my parents when they are near her. We are growing quickly apart, and I wonder if irreparably.
It happened before. We hardly talked for years. Then, geography, unbridged by technology, carved the chasm between us. We wanted to talk, but expensive long-distance calls and slow Internet access in the late 1990s and early 2000s forced an unwelcome silence that turned us into strangers. It took years of Facetime and visits to repair the damage of the estrangement.
The current chasm is chiseled by philosophy. Will we want to repair?
Bo’s words are echoing in my mind. I may regret this. My father stays fit, but his health fails often. Three months in Chernobyl, moving radioactive dirt crumbled his immunity. When Covid sent him to the hospital, he clung to life but came home forty pounds lighter, barely able to walk. A minor running hip injury developed into a secondary problem that debilitated him for months. He recovered and is back to skiing easy marathons. But what is next? I may not have the time to rebuild.
Forgive and accept, Bo said. Yes, after two years of this war, of silence, distance, resentment, stubbornness, refusal to forgive, and refusal to accept, I now hear his words.
I will call my parents tomorrow, and we will talk about kind human things. How are they feeling? What thoughts do they have on their latest reads? How are their friends?
But I don’t call. I don’t call the next week and the next. Each time I hover my thumb over the call button, I pause, then swap my apps and read of artillery barrages, rocket attacks, and death tolls around another obliterated Ukrainian village. So I postpone till tomorrow.
My sister calls. She talks me through her life, tells me about her vacation in Thailand, and asks where I may be soon. Maine soon, I tell her, and Mexico next year. She smiles—we can fly to Mexico through Istanbul; that flight is still open. Let’s meet there, I say, bring everyone. She nods.