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Authors: Alina Simone

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“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 of the Ukrainian poet that Papa had so movingly described as “kind of OK” along the way. It was
a Sunday afternoon and the park was full of families pushing strollers; packs of young guys sporting crew cuts, acid-washed jeans, and collared t-shirts; and dazzling young women. The women mostly walked in pairs, linked at the elbows or holding hands, their dresses glittering fiercely in the sun. I looked down at myself, feeling like I’d somehow surreptitiously slipped past the park’s face-control unit. Cousin Lyonya noticed me staring and snorted.
“Eckh, these people. They come to the park looking for attention. They have absolutely nowhere else to go and nothing to do with themselves.”
And I thought: Had my family never left, this would have been my Sunday afternoon. I would have woken up, slipped on something scratchy and sequin-covered, then styled my hair for two leisurely hours before hitting the park. There, my friends and I would patrol the trees like a squadron of mismatched bridesmaids, eyeing the bullet-headed men in ball-hugging jeans, hoping that one of them might impregnate us by age twenty-two …
We stopped at a bench not far from Freedom Square where we were supposed to meet Volodya, Papa’s best friend from college, and his wife, Inna. Lyonya pulled a packet of photographs and some papers wrapped in a plastic bag from his man purse.
“These are for your father. Some old family artifacts I think he’ll find interesting.”
I thanked Lyonya and handed him an envelope with the money Papa had asked me to pass along. In the midst of this exchange, Volodya and Inna appeared. A round of handshakes, and a struggle to arrive at a common topic of conversation, ensued. Time, we decided, for some awkward photos together. Then Lyonya told us to come back to Kharkhov again soon, promising to cook us dinner next time. A quick hug and a kiss and he was gone—the Cousin Who No Longer Drinks Water.
 
 
Volodya had apparently also gotten a copy of Papa’s dismal list of things to do, because as soon as the niceties were over, he turned to me and said, “Okay then, off to the zoo?”
We set off across the square, passing beneath the lengthening shadow of Lenin before cutting through the grounds of the university where Volodya and Inna had studied together with Papa.
“I remember once,” Volodya began, “your father and I lucked into finding some money just lying on the sidewalk. A small fortune, something like twenty dollars. So we decided to realize a long-held dream of ours …”
Volodya laughed, a bit overcome by the memory, and I imagined a debauched binge of black-market purchases, Papa sitting, pasha-like, atop an illicit blue-jean-and-caviar mountain.
“We set for ourselves,” Volodya continued, “the goal of visiting every shashlik stand in Kharkov!”
To me this sounded suspiciously like a quest to visit every Dunkin’ Donuts in Worcester, but I did my best to radiate enthusiasm.
“Ambitious!” I chirped.
Volodya was still deep into enumerating the shashlik stands of Kharkov when we reached the iron gates of the Kharkov State Zoo. The zoo’s paths were lined with colorful, campy signs that could have been lifted straight from the set of a John Waters movie, but did nothing to hide the state of the animals themselves, who had gone from sad to miserable in Papa’s absence. I took off down the darkening, overgrown lane alone, past some dull-eyed bears and a collapsed ostrich, stopping to take a picture of a baboon who looked up at me like he hoped I had some Lexapro.
“I used to talk to them,” Papa had told me. “Not the lions, though. They never seemed interested. Also, all of the expensive
animals were locked up in a different part of the zoo, so I didn’t talk to them either.”
I was sorry Papa had to talk to cheap animals.
“That’s what you did? All night?”
“No. Just until the other guards came around to see if I had a ruble.”
“Did you give it to them?”
“I’d better. One of them was just a drunk, but the other was a man with a past—a former chauffeur in the KGB. He used to drive agents to make their arrests. Sometimes big shots. These kinds of visits … well, a lot of people were never heard from again. Anyway, they’d come by on their rounds and we’d pool our money, go drinking.”
“What would you say to them?” I’d asked. “I mean the animals.”
“I don’t know. I just … commiserated.”
By the time Papa began working at the zoo, he’d been on the blacklist for years. The Ministry of Higher Education had long ago eliminated the graduate position he’d received in physics, a signal that he’d never be allowed to pursue his PhD. He had also quit the Komsomol, a dangerous move for anyone save those who had already given up all hope of a career in the Soviet Union. As the last light faded, I imagined my father there, a young man in a uniform with a gun, staring through the bars, seeking out dark, wet eyes for a few quiet moments of communion. Before the KGB chauffeur came to take him away.
 
 
We went back to Volodya’s place for dinner—a three-bedroom apartment extravagant by Soviet standards, but which could now merely be considered cozy—to drink vodka and enjoy a lavish feast of mayonnaise-based salads. By the time Volodya and Inna led us back to the hotel it was well past midnight and the windows
of the concrete boxes surrounding Freedom Square were lit up like giant grids in an epic game of Battleship.
“I have a present for your father that I’ve been waiting to give to you,” Volodya said. Then he reached into his bag and handed me a book.
One Hundred Famous Kharkovchiani
, it read. Now here was something approximately zero people in my family would have any interest in reading.
“Thanks,” I said, but Volodya stopped me before I could put it away.
“First turn to page eighty-four.”
I opened the book, and Josh came to look over my shoulder. There, to my amazement, was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Papa and an entry that began:
VILENKIN ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH
(Born 1900–Died 1900)
I looked up at Volodya, whose smile only grew wider as he noted my wonder and confusion.
“The text, of course, is not without some errors.”
 
 
In late September, I received another note from Kiril: “Hello, Alina it is a journalist of Kiril from Kharkov. Thank you very much for an interview. I wrote about Your desire to come forward in Ukraine and, hope, my words will notice. Here that turned out from our correspondence. In my person in Ukraine another admirer appeared for you.”At the bottom of the message, there was a link leading to the
Komsomolskaya Pravda
website. When I clicked on it I found an old photograph of myself in our backyard in North Carolina hovering above Kiril’s byline. The article began:
Our countrywoman, daughter of the famous
physicist Alexander Vilenkin, tells “Komsomol” about how she became a rock star in the United States.
It was an absurd exaggeration. I had released two albums on obscure indie labels and would have been surprised to learn that sales of either had reached into the high three digits. But it only got worse. Whereas Kiril hadn’t known who my father was when he’d first contacted me, it was clear he’d done some research since then. Now the article was mostly about Papa. And he sounded like a dissident freedom fighter.
I read on, with growing horror, as weird conjectures flew around like zoons.
Despite the famous father
, the article continued,
Alina has always opened all the doors of life herself. She has never positioned herself as the daughter of the famous scientist, and even appears on stage under the pseudonym Simone.
What was stranger, I wondered, the idea that I would create a pseudonym to outrun undeserved glory should anyone discover my association with the creator of the Theory of Eternal Inflation, or the fact that Kiril, during the course of his extensive research, hadn’t managed to discern that Simone was my real last name? But the final straw came when I learned that adopting my alleged pseudonym was also part of a clever ploy to exploit the popularity of Paul
Simon
.
Kiril, I thought to myself. I hate you. I stopped reading and called Papa.
“This is totally embarrassing!” I said. “What if anyone I actually know ever sees this?”
“Well
…
” Papa sighed. “That’s what they’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Make things interesting.”
“I would never go around calling myself a rock star.”
“And I am a dissident freedom fighter? It doesn’t mean anything.”
I hung up the phone. Papa was right, it didn’t mean anything. Maybe in some parallel universe the Kharkov-shaped hole
in my heart could be filled, puzzlelike, by Kharkov itself. Here on planet Earth, I would have to settle for filling it with heat and proper water pressure.
Still, I figured Mama would want to know how the story ended, to see the final result of my “collaboration” with Kiril, so I forwarded the link along. A few hours later, I had my response. I thought she was writing to tell me how pleased she’d been to discover the article included her account of my early childhood, unedited and in its entirety. But all I got was this:
Alina,
Just to let you know, I want an electric tea kettle for
Christmas. Mine is leaking.
m.
T
here were no misspellings. No horrible questions.
Are you the “complete” package? Do you have unique, cutting-edge talent and the follow-through it takes to succeed?
No inscrutable requirements.
Must have full head of hair OR no hair AT ALL.
No pent-up rage.
Fuck whiners, egomaniacs, and slackers. If you aren’t 150% serious about making this band a full-time gig then go sit on your fucking finger and ROTATE!!!
No scamming.
Raw, slick, fast, slow, lo-fi, no-fi, hipster, retro, old-school, post-punk, neo-soul … I will fill in your blank, rawk star :-))))
After months of looking for bandmates on Craigslist, it was a relief to find the Producer, a professional who also happened to meet my minimal standard of being sane, polite, and competent. His ad was vague, mentioning only that he was looking for a female singer to collaborate on a new album, but I noticed that he hadn’t used the word
collab
, nor did he make any wild, flag-raising claims. Still, I had to admit, the thing that appealed to me most here was that a producer, as opposed to a mere bandmate, had
power
. Something I lacked; something no one else I knew had any of either. True, I had never worked with one, or even met one, but I imagined
a producer to be something like the Thomas Cooke of the rock world, riding the rough seas of Craigslist to unearth raw talent, returning to lay treasure at the feet of Tommy Mottola and David Geffen. At the very least, his SoHo address inspired confidence.
It felt like cheating, but I craved a shortcut. Casual encounters of the musical kind had come to dominate my nights and weekends, trapping me in a surreal game of speed dating with a cast of similarly damaged and desperate people. Why were the people I met through Craigslist in New York so different from the easygoing musicians I’d played with when I lived in Austin, the ones I’d found by going to record stores and putting up flyers, just like a medieval person? The people answering my ads now were always the lifers, the ones who used Craigslist as a verb.
“I’ve been Craigslisting for over a year now,” one potential bassist exhaled down into his coffee. “How about you?” And I realized that our meet-up had suddenly transformed into an AA meeting minus the hard chairs. Then there was the rockabilly guitar player who dressed like Elvis and left a trail of cologne in his wake strong enough to disinfect my bathroom. And the girl whose musical taste never pre-dated whatever band had played the Bowery Ballroom the previous night. There was the pale, slumpy guy who hated his tech job working for a financial services firm and doomed every sentence with the preface “As soon as I get my shit together …” Not to mention the series of dismal encounters that led to the discovery that New Jersey is home to a cult of male lawyers obsessed with Jeff Buckley. I was ready for all this to end, so when I heard back from the Producer, I felt more than the usual cheap pick-me-up of knowing my credentials had checked out. We agreed to meet up at his space the following Tuesday, and I spent the rest of the week deleting people from my inbox and feeling happy about it.
The studio was in one of those expensive and painfully maintained Manhattan buildings that always look wholly deserted. It
was raining the morning of my audition and I’d made the unfortunate decision to eat a croissant along the way, only to notice once I reached the door that it had flaked down the front of my black jacket. I pawed at myself uselessly for a moment, realized it was hopeless, then rang the buzzer for the second floor. Within a moment, the speaker crackled and a clipped male voice came at me.
“Is this my eleven o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the Ricky Lee Jones one or the Annie Lennox one?”
“I … sorry?”
“Second flo—” Then the door sang its flat note and there was nothing left to do but open it.
As I stood inside the doorway, wondering what to make of this exchange, a familiar sensation began to creep over me. Let’s call it
hope slippage
—the quick drop of pressure when oversized expectations are ratcheted down, violently and without warning. This is going to be bad, a voice inside my head whispered. Run away, while you still can! But I didn’t run. I went upstairs, feeling grateful that at least the hallway wasn’t mirrored.
The Producer was sitting in an Aeron chair, backlit by an enormous Mac screen. When he got up to greet me I noticed that he was strikingly good-looking: John Edwardsy haircut, belted black pants, and a long-sleeved shirt whose color could best be described as expensive. Everything in the studio looked very modern and new. A 24-channel mixing board without a spot of dust among its matrix of knobs, a sleek desk made of dark wood, a side table with a neat stack of
Tape Op
back issues.
“Helena?” he said, looking down at the list in his hand.
“Alina.”
“Well,
Alina
, it must really be throwing it down out there!” he said with a nod at my dripping guitar case. “I forget, did you ever email me that list of influences?”
“I think I mentioned Sinéad O’Connor—”
“Roight!”
he said, making some notes on his list. “So then
you
must be the Sinéad O’Connor one?”
“Um—” I said, finding it surprisingly difficult to push the words “I am the Sinéad O’Connor one” out of my mouth.
“Why don’t you go ahead and set up over there while I finish some things.” The Producer pointed to the back wall, where a Marshall stack waited on a square of lintless carpet.
“No problem,” I said, and felt it again, that small drowning sensation. I knelt down to thread a daisy chain into my pedals and took the opportunity to give myself a little talk. So what, I said to myself, if this guy doesn’t have a very personalized approach to things? I was living in New York City now and would have to accept the fact that not everyone was going to recognize my unique qualities until I actually proved myself. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Remember what the inscription said? I had found it a few weeks ago while running errands in the Fashion District: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” These were words carved into the stone face of the landmark Farley post office, high above the doors. Channel their strength, I thought, the strength of gloom-deflecting mailman warrior gods, pounding the streets of New Amsterdam, carrying out their noble mission without complaint!
“Are we all set here?” The Producer swiveled around to face me, Moleskine open on his lap. He managed to look both bored and expectant at the same time.
“Totally!” I found myself saying, in a false, bright voice that came from nowhere.
And then it all went as shitty as I thought it would.
 
 
I don’t know if it was the cut of the blinds or the recessed lighting or the pristine desk, but as I strummed through the intro I wondered whether the studio had been purposely designed to repel any kind of emotion. It held all the passion and warmth of the toner aisle at Staples. And when I began to sing, I noticed that my voice sounded weirdly thin, as though this were a concert being broadcast, live, from inside a Dixie cup. The Producer watched me while doing tight, controlled half-turns in his Aeron chair. He looked very much as though he was trying hard not to grow a third eye in the back of his head so that he could check his email. Time seemed to move in jagged, stop-gap animation. One second I was fully present, the next my brain had run off in search of someplace less sinister. Now the Producer was writing something down on his notepad. Was that good or bad? I hit the chorus and the heavy bass notes balked at the edge of the carpet, dying an ungraceful death between us. The Producer tapped his pen against his desk. Was he trying to tell me something? Was my timing off? The reasons for going through all of this suddenly seemed very far away. I was in a horror movie and this was a fake office, painted mauve and filled with product placements. The slick, handsome producer was actually an alien tapeworm in nice pants. When he reached over slowly to open a desk drawer, his face would slough off, and then cockroaches would start falling out of the light fixtures. I would think maybe they were just raisins at first until I felt them moving over my bare arms—
Then it was over. The hum of the hard drive and the rattle of the air-conditioner vent were the only sounds. And there was I, a patient lying on the metal table in my paper dress, awaiting diagnosis.
The Producer cleared his throat and clicked the base of a ballpoint pen against his desk. He took a last, wistful glance at the computer screen and then turned back around to face me.
“How many albums,” he began, “do you suppose PJ Harvey sold in the U.S. last year?” Click, unclick, click.
I stood there for a moment, blinking and wondering what this was all about.
“Lots?” I offered lamely.
The Producer shook his head, a bit sadly.
“Not lots. Not lots at all. Maybe a load for New York or L.A., but forget about the rest of the country.” He paused to consider his cell phone, which had started blinking. “You like PJ Harvey, I gather?”
“I do, but—”
“Roight,”
he interjected. “Well, I’m afraid that’s not what this project is all about.”
“Can I ask,” I said softly, “what exactly
is
this project about?”
He smiled and leaned back in his chair.
“This,” he said, sweeping an arm over the mixing board, the city, the world, “is about a second house in the Hamptons. For me.”
Then the Producer opened a desk drawer, pulled out a CD, and offered it to me. On the cover was a picture of a girl in a flowy dress, slightly blurred, running across a field. It looked like a still from a tampon commercial. The Producer waited impatiently for me to say something, as though he’d just handed me the clue that would clear up our little misunderstanding.
“Something you produced?” I managed.
“Back in England. I found this Scottish girl and we cut the album in a week. Know how much I cleared on that one?”
I shook my head mutely.
“Fifty. Bloody. Grand. Licensed some of those songs for commercials and never even had to leave the studio.”
At this the Producer leaned back in his chair and laughed softly. Not sure what exactly to do with myself, I decided to laugh
along with him, like we were in this together, just two people answering the clarion call of second-home ownership.
“Fifty grand is nice, but the only thing it buys you in this town is a parking spot,
roight
?”
I nodded. It was true that you couldn’t build a house on a parking spot.
“So this next project has to be bigger, something worth millions. I see blokes with half the smarts pulling it off all the time.”
Then there was a soft knock at the door and an older woman with straight blond hair and a posh overcoat stepped into the room.
“Jill!” said the Producer. “Is it that time already? Jill, this is Helena.” He waved a hand in my direction and continued, “Jill and I are working on some jingles and were about to step out for tea. Shall we see you downstairs?” It wasn’t a question.
As soon as we were outside the building, the Producer held out his hand in parting. “Well, thanks for stopping by,” he said. “Cheers!”
“Cheers,” I echoed, cheerlessly, turning back toward the subway. With a sinking heart, I considered the picture of myself in an hour, face bathed in laptop glow, scanning Craigslist for posts ending “only serious inquiries please.” If my father, the scientist, were here, I thought as I walked, he would remind me that success is only a matter of statistics and that pessimism is an illogical response to failure. Failure only means that you haven’t thrown yourself, face-first, against the brick wall of probability enough times. And to quit after only one try? That would be committing statistical suicide.
Take the story of Papa’s good friend Zhenya Chudnovsky. Chudnovsky was a fellow physicist from Kharkov, a refusenik who had spent more than eleven years trying to convince the Soviet
government to let him leave. In 1987, Papa wrote a letter to Gorbachev, asking that Chudnovsky be allowed to emigrate, and started gathering the signatures of prominent American physicists. After he had collected more than a hundred signatures, Papa called Senator Ted Kennedy to see whether he might present the letter to Gorbachev on his upcoming visit to the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s staff agreed to have the letter delivered, so Papa went ahead and mailed it to the senator’s office in Boston. After Kennedy returned from his trip, Papa called to find out whether he had in fact given the letter to Gorbachev but couldn’t get any response from Kennedy’s office. He began to leave increasingly shrill messages until finally, months later, someone on Kennedy’s staff admitted that the senator had never presented the letter to Gorbachev, because the letter had been lost—the original copy with all of the signatures. So Papa started over again with a photocopy of the letter, this time turning north to New Hampshire for help. Governor John Sununu agreed to present the letter to Gorbachev, and it worked; Chudnovsky and his family were released. When my parents went to visit him a few days after his arrival in the United States, they found Chudnovsky standing in the middle of an apartment that was totally empty save for a New Hampshire flag the size of a parachute tacked to the wall. A gift from John Sununu.
BOOK: You Must Go and Win: Essays
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