You Must Go and Win: Essays Read Online Free

parents’ friends one Thanksgiving with the exclamation “But you are so much greasier than last year!”
    “How old are you anyway?” Lyonya continued. “You must be at least thirty by now.”
    “We’re planning on having kids,” I said, feeling like Jennifer Aniston. “We just haven’t gotten around to it yet.” I looked nervously at Josh, who was enjoying the view of the park.
    “Because a woman should have children while she is still young and healthy. Like here in Kharkov. Our women give birth when they are twenty or twenty-two years old. This is considered normal.” He shot me a look from the corner of his eye as if to underscore what was not considered normal.
    “But maybe that is because our women are so irresistible,” Lyonya went on. “Like that one there, eh, Joshua?” He raised his eyebrows at a passing blonde. “Wouldn’t you say she is very luscious?”
    “What’s he saying?” Josh asked, suddenly with us again.
    “Oh, you know.” I shrugged, taking his hand. “Just Welcome-to-Kharkov stuff.”
     
     
    For the rest of our walk, our attention was focused on the various landmarks. “Here, on the left, you will notice the Monument to a Soldier-Defender of the City of Kharkov, built to commemorate Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War,” Cousin Lyonya would say. And I would lamely circle the statue with a camera while Lyonya called after me, “Try it from the other side. Get the sun behind you. Don’t forget the inscription!” Nothing, I soon discovered, sucked the fun out of history like a ginormous statue of a guy pointing a gun at the sky. It was a relief when we finally crossed the Lopan River and stopped before a nondescript brick building partly obscured by a billboard for Zlatagor Vodka.
    “Here it is,” Lyonya announced. “Your old home.”
    Most people, when taken to the doorway of a typical Soviet-era apartment building, think they’ve mistakenly arrived at the service entrance. They find a series of crumbling steps, a pair of doors that form a kind of sheet-metal sandwich, and a grim facade of concrete or dirty brick punctuated by the occasional disintegrating balcony. Our apartment building was no different from the rest. The only strange thing was that throughout my
life, everyone in my family had always insisted that the flat in Kharkov had been a primo piece of real estate. “Your grandparents had a splendid apartment, right in the heart of the city,” Babushka always told me. Even Mama herself, who could scarcely bear to hold the word Kharkov in her mouth, admitted as much. Of course I couldn’t see inside the place, but architecture doesn’t lie: the windows were small, the ceilings low, and the balcony held in place with what appeared to be a giant dollop of sticky-tack. It was a squat and ordinary Brezhnev-era flat.
    We stood awkwardly in the dirt—the grass having long ago been trampled away—and Cousin Lyonya began counting the windows up from the bottom. He pointed vaguely in the direction of the building’s upper right-hand corner.
    “See that window? That is where you lived.” And then, to fill in the silence a bit, he coughed and added, “I used to visit your father here.” Pause. “On many different occasions.”
    I looked up at a sea of darkened windows and pretended I could see wherever he was pointing.
    “Oh right, up there. So that was the apartment, huh?” It was easy now to imagine Mama stuck in this place, hating her in laws and being hated back, waiting for Papa to come home from guarding the zoo, staring out the window at the stinky Lopan winding its way to someplace even stinkier, and plotting our escape. I made a show of looking around, taking pictures of the only things in sight—a dumpster; a sad, pokey jungle gym; and Cousin Lyonya standing on his patch of dirt, looking for all the world like he wished he were someplace else.
     
     
    On our way back to the hotel, we decided to cut through Sad Shevchenko, passing the statue