By Kseniya Sovenko
Fall 2015 Kaplan Award Winner
I never pick up the phone on the first ring. Or the second. Or the third.
My mom can spend hours romancing the phone, but I hate phone calls. The idea of allowing a device to carry my voice into the crevices of far-away ears inspires nothing but cautious hesitation. Taking after my grandfather’s shyness was the price I paid for inheriting his striking, light-colored eyes, I tell some. English is my third language, so phone conversations make me uncomfortable, I tell others. Excuses—tried and true.
The corner of my brain dedicated to storage of childhood memories has long been vacated, wiped clean against my conscious will. The few memories of my early life that survived this exodus dwell beneath webs of tangled neurons, triggered only by familiar sights, tastes, smells or sounds. “What’s the first thing you remember?” Nothing. Even make-shift, pseudo recollections can’t fill that darkness.
But I still remember why I hate talking on the phone.
Shortly before my ninth birthday, my father called. He was in Ukraine, and I was in America. After nearly two years and 5,600 miles of separation, he finally understood that my mom and I were gone for good. I had yet to understand why we left him in the first place, but still accepted calling a new man my dad.
When my mom called me to her bedroom and handed me the phone, I noticed traces of wiped, secret tears staining her cheeks. This wasn’t a typical phone call.
His exact words have been lost to the years separating me from my 8-year-old self, but, in that moment, I suddenly realized that my father was trying to kill himself. He was drunk, his gut stuffed with pills, though my mom didn’t know until after the fact. He was in the middle of another episode, one that my mother was unable to contain because of the distance. She handed me the phone because pulling me out of childhood innocence was a smaller risk than weighing down an 8-year-old with a story about her father’s corpse. Raymond Chandler said dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
After the line disconnected, my mom entered my bedroom, closed the door, and slowly slid down the wall, burrowing her head into her hands. Her body quivered, helplessly and softly. When you’re a kid, nobody tells you how to stop your mom from crying.
My father didn’t succeed, but not for a lack of trying. The hospital had cleared his gut of pills before, though he was younger then—fatherless and wifeless, aching for my mother to love him instead of her fiancé.
Then there are the memories I’ve inherited from my mother. They exist somewhere, but not in my mind.
When I was seven months old, sleeping in a crib beside my parents’ bed, my father started a fire in the kitchen, fueled by towels, bedding and linens. He had come home that night with alcohol on his breath, the whites of his eyes turned red and his mind full of suffocating phobia. As my 24-year-old mother stood in disbelief, my father bulged out his eyes and told her that the fire was the only thing that could fend the pharaohs off. Ancient Egyptian rulers were after him, he said.
My father wasn’t allowed to drink. Even a drop of alcohol lured out a man no one recognized. In the dead of winter he sprawled out on the glistening snow in Molamovka, the village where my grandparents lived, and called himself Jesus Christ. After drinking, he would threaten to drive to my grandparents’ apartment in Kremenchug, my hometown, to slaughter them like pigs.
Sober, he had a genius mind and a kind spirit. He spoiled me with Sprite and Milky Ways, wrote poetry and helped me soar on swing sets—that’s all I vividly remember.
One night when I was four, my father came home to laugh at my mom. She had been married to a maniac for eight years, he said, blissfully unaware that her husband spent all their time apart cutting open little children. Terrified, she ran out to the balcony to plead to the sky, asking God to prove his existence. Seconds later, my father fell to the floor, jolted into deep sleep. I’ve never seen my mom without a silver cross around her neck.
During this late-night confession, I was in the bedroom. My mom didn’t know if I was asleep, but told herself I was. A year later, riding on a bus with my mom braiding my hair next to me, two strangers, middle-aged women with kids of their own, inquired about my father.
“I think he’s going to start drinking again,” I began, a cold and emotionless tone discoloring my childish voice. “He kills little kids and I think he’ll kill me too.”
My mom remembers the words, but I remember the way my voice sounded when I said them. Slumber had not saved my four-year-old self from my fathers’ proclamations, but time has sheltered me from that memory.
A voice plagued the inside of my father’s head. Sometimes, that voice came out, like the time when he contemplated murdering my mother. She came home to hear my father talking with another man, though the two of them were home alone. He was in the corridor, unseen, one voice his own—scared, helpless, lost–the other deep and brooding. When he was 17 years old, my father thought he sold his soul to the devil; that day, the devil convinced him to strangle the wife he loved.
He didn’t succeed, but not for a lack of trying. My mother didn’t know the word for it then, but I know the word for it now. It’s ‘schizophrenia.’ I suspect my father still doesn’t know what plagues his mind—I’m not there to tell him.
* * *
Twelve years passed and I became myself, at times forgetting my father’s name, at others remembering falling asleep on his lap in the middle of ‘Tom & Jerry.’ I didn’t talk to him on the phone anymore, but he sent me annual birthday emails with photos of red roses attached beneath the sentences wishing me happiness and good health.
I was 7 years old when I left Ukraine, and I was 19 years old when I came back to visit. I wanted to taste my grandmother’s piroshky, smell the pines lining the trails to the rocky shore of the Black Sea, see the sunlight reflect off of St. Michael’s gold dome in Kiev, and hear the train rattle on its tracks as I flirted with sleep and traced the Milky Way from my window. I didn’t want to see my father, though. Everyone told me that he loved me, that I needed to see him. I couldn’t remember if he did.
Early one morning, I found myself picking succulent concord grapes off the vines draping over my grandmother’s garden in Molamovka. Though her home was smaller than I remembered, her garden had grown. My grandfather, with his laughing eyes and wrinkled face, stood beside me and used his knife to help me harvest. Once our buckets were spilling over with the bounty of my grandmother’s home-grown grapes, we began to make our way back to the house.
There, walking through a patch of young sunflowers, heads turned up to drink the sun, I saw the unfamiliar figure coming at me with awkward speed and footing. When you’re an adult, nobody tells you where to look when you see your father for the first time in 12 years. Targeting the eyes seemed dishonest.
Though I knew it was him, I didn’t really know who I was looking at. I thought I took after him, but I recognized nothing of me in him. He was bigger and wider than I remembered, his nose more crooked, eyes more shifty—darting from place to place. I can’t remember who said hello first, only that the latent, defiant girl inside of me leaped out of my adult body to hug a stranger with smiling, affectionate arms. In response, his body shook and trembled, aborting the hug too early to label it as such.
To both our disbelief, I called him papa—dad.
For lunch, we sat beneath the shade of another patch of grapes, my grandmother’s cooking steaming into the airspace, mixing with the autumn air. My father brought his new wife; it was the first time I learned of her existence, the first time we’d ever met. While she kissed my cheeks, inquired about my dance career and told me how much my father adored me, he sank deeper into his small, wooden chair, handicapped by a voice that trembled as deeply as his hands did.
I can’t remember my step-mothers name, but I do remember my father’s uncomfortable attempts at conversation. He was impatient, legs restless, constantly reminding everyone that he soon had to leave. His daughter had traveled miles and crossed an ocean, but he couldn’t tolerate an hour of meeting her studying gaze under the September sun. “Does she know about me?” he must have thought.
Before he left to hide himself in the passenger seat of his car, he gave me a present, the first one since my seventh birthday. Two towels for my trip to the sea, a candy pizza and a hundred dollar bill. His new wife lingered longer, apologized for his coldness and squeezed me in a way that told me she cared.
With a cluster of thoughts and memories swimming in and out of my brain, I watched them drive off with confusion. Did the last hour really happen? Was that really my father? Is this even my life? There was no sadness in my heart, no nostalgia intoxicating my consciousness, no rose-colored glasses framing my eyes. I knew only that the strange man who had met me in a patch of sunflowers was not my father, but a paranoid creature with an unsettled mind—scared and alone, but undeniably human.