Svetlana Turetskaya

First Love

It was rumored that Misha was in the USSR-Afghan war, and came back in 1989, bringing home a coffin full of fur coats that his mother later sold at a black market. This must have been late fall of 1990 in Leningrad, for I was in my last year of high school and remember that one night my classmate, neighbor, best friend Polina called to say that two people had just moved into the Kuznetzov family’s old flat on the seventh floor: a mother and her son. She said, “His name is Misha. He was in Afghanistan. He is 22 years old and hot hot hot.”

I noticed him the next day, and would see him in the same spot for many days, months afterwards, smoking by the entrance to our apartment building, always in his pale blue jean jacket with a collar turned up. The way he planted his feet made him seem rooted to the spot in an imperious way, and the skin on his face was rough from acne scars, inexplicably adding to his beauty. Except for his hand bending at the elbow once every few seconds, delivering the cigarette to his lips, his body was completely still, a stillness of a panther. And when I smoked, as I sometimes did all that year, on the roof with Polina, I always held my cigarette the way he did, keeping my body as still as possible, moving only my eyes. To my mind Misha was a “man” with a “past,” meaning that he had slept with many women and probably killed men in that war he just returned from.

Later that week Polina said that some friend’s friend had been to Misha’s flat and got to see the treasures he had smuggled from Afghanistan inside a coffin: a Sony player, a VCR and VHS tapes with all of Schwarzenegger films, Playboy magazines, Adidas sneakers and—“he swears he saw it!”—seven dried human ears hanging on a rope. I laughed at Polina’s story because I thought it was the kind of outlandish, but possibly true thing someone would say about Misha and because I derived intense pleasure knowing that the neighborhood kids were fascinated by and afraid of Misha in equal measure.

During that time, whenever I heard the word “Afghanistan” coming through our TV, I dropped whatever I was doing to watch the news report because any information about Afghanistan was information about Misha. If I heard a soldier tell a story about killing people in an ambush, I imagined Misha aiming his rifle. I inserted him into a yellow Afghan desert on TV, riding a tank or talking to other soldiers. And when the TV showed me little Afghan kids and women, always wearing rags, my heart did not shrink one bit from pity and horror. If anything, my heart expanded because I thought of Afghanistan as Misha’s territory and everything in that world was there for a reason, even crying children that sometimes were shown lining the dusty roads. I even began to hope that Misha had killed many Afghans, the “enemy,” or at least, a lot more than other soldiers.

One day, as I fluttered past him on the way home from school, he looked me in the eye with sudden directness. I held his stare for a few seconds, my heart jumping out of my chest so loud I swear he could hear it too. From this point on, for many months, he did this every time he saw me entering the building. But he never said anything. He never  

went anywhere. He didn’t seem to have a job and I never saw him with anybody else, never saw him not smoking, or wearing something other than denim jacket. Polina didn’t know anything too, and after a while had lost interest in wanting to know, which was a relief because Misha stopped coming up as a topic.

I noticed his mother for the first time a week or two after Misha started locking eyes with me. I did know that he lived with his mother on the seventh floor and that her name was Anna Sergeevna, but because I thought him an adult, in my imagination his mother was elderly, preoccupied with cooking and irrelevant. Then, one day, I saw her by the mailboxes. I stood near my mailbox pretending that I was struggling with the key. The resemblance to Misha was unmistakable, and I had to muster all of my will not to turn my head to examine every part of her, from her delicate face to soft black mink fur coat to tall leather black boots with thin, metallic spiky heels. When she looked at me—for a split second—I was surprised that her face, so similar to Misha’s, and framed by short blond hair, was as if rearranged in a way that was fairy-like, vulnerable and unavailable. Her beauty was ephemeral, and reminded me of a popular 1940s actress Valentina Serova. All of that year I looked at a weekly TV program hoping to see any film with Valentina Serova listed there. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror I tried to imitate Anna Sergeevna’s mouth: the upper lip curling over the lower in a way that suggested a kind of hunger, followed by self-control.

Did her son really bring all that Western stuff for her from Afghanistan inside a coffin? If ever a woman was worthy of beautiful things smuggled for her in a coffin, Anna Sergeevna was that woman.

It was Perestroika, my parents were now divorced, mom stood in long lines after work to buy the most basic food, mom cried at night, cried often, my grades were terrible, and yet I could spend a whole day thinking about that spot to the right of the bench, near the entrance into our building, and the moment I would lock eyes with Misha or see Anna Sergeevna opening their mailbox in the foyer.

I looked for them everywhere I went, in every crowded subway station I visited, searched for Misha’s slightly slouched shoulders clothed in his jean jacket, with that sharp collar always turned up, searched for Anna Sergeevna’s short curly blond hair. But I never saw them outside of our apartment building, and if I saw her more frequently than him, it was always for a painfully brief moment, either entering the elevator or stopping by the mailboxes. Sometimes, returning from school, I caught a whiff of her perfume, which signaled to me that she was here just a tiny while ago. At such moments I would freeze to the spot inhaling her perfume, filling my lungs with that exquisite air that was Anna Sergeevna. This perfume must have been imported, must have been French, I always thought. Only years later I realized that her perfume was Trezor by Lancome.

I rang Misha’s apartment doorbell at 11 a.m. on a Friday morning. I was at home recovering from the flu, my mother was at work, but around mid-morning I put on my coat and went for a walk around the block. When I reached the kids playground I noticed Misha’s denim jacket going back into our building. So, I said to myself, “Now or never.” It was not a decision, but an impulse, an accident, fate. I rang the doorbell twice and I stood in front of the door waiting for Misha to open it. As I waited, rooted to the spot by fear, it didn’t occur to me to think of what I would say to him, or maybe that question didn’t occur because I already knew that I would not have to speak.

Sometimes we have an inexplicably vivid intuition about another person’s state of mind, concrete as a photograph, like something paused, allowing to be looked at, to be read. Behind that door I distinctly felt Misha’s presence, some essence of him that I was meeting for the first time. I felt in my gut that this core of him asked me to leave, wanted more than anything: for me to leave. I stood there for a little while longer, then left. When I thought of this episode later that day I persuaded myself that he was probably listening to the German band Modern Talking on his fancy Sony player, which I badly coveted and imagined he possessed, and simply didn’t hear my ring.

Two days later, when I returned home from Polina’s birthday party, I found my mother sitting on our bed, the bed we shared, for we lived in a one-room flat. Her back was against the wall and her wool skirt spread out over our red plaid covers. My first thought was that something terrible must have happened to my grandma because her heart was a constant source of worry, but my mother said, “Anna Sergeevna stopped by.”  

I couldn’t breathe.

“She asked me to tell you to stop doing it, whatever it is you are doing.”

She said all of this without looking at me.

My first thought was that Misha must have told her that I rang their doorbell and possibly asked her to speak with my mom, which felt like a betrayal, a back stab because he could have said this to me quite easily, looking me in the eye. Although it was a betrayal, it was also an acknowledgement of my existence, for they had evidently talked about me, pictured my face, had thoughts about my intentions. This realization was painful and intoxicating at the same time, like a collision of two billiard balls, causing contact and separation in one and the same instant.

“Mom, I never even spoke with Misha. I’m not doing anything. Nothing is happening,” I said truthfully.

“Misha has nothing to do with it,” she said.

I could tell she was nervous. No, it was worse. It was so bad she couldn’t compose herself to say what she didn’t want to say. Her words arrived eventually, slowly.  

“Anna Sergeevna said that you are spying on her and writing her love notes. She says you place them in her mailbox. She showed me one. What is wrong with you?”

In that moment, and in future moments when I returned to this moment, I felt that something I’d feared for a long time did in fact come to pass. I always wrote to her anonymously and it was always something silly and clichéd, not revealing me personally in any way: a drawing of a heart next to “Anna” or lubov, love. Through some kind of fog, I asked my mom whether Anna Sergeevna came into our apartment because I wanted to know if she noticed our stained, old bed sheets drying on the rope in the kitchen, wet and heavy like pig’s skin. But my mother said, “Let’s never talk about this again.” This phrase—I knew it with dead certainty—would now hang over everything we said to each other.

Indrani Sengupta