The silence of the apartment is a rare instance. I wait for the usual night noises—glasses of homemade moonshine clinking together, the breathless laughter of my grandmother, vintage Soviet vinyls spinning, music bleeding through the paper-thin walls—but there is no grainy violin washing the flat in pensive reverie tonight. I am accompanied only by the ticking of the cross-eyed cat on the wall, striking each second like a drum.
Night seems darker when you’re halfway across the world. Restless, I move through the black stillness of the apartment, slinking into the narrow hallway. At the end of the corridor, in the kitchen with only enough counter space for a loaf of brown bread and a kettle, sits my uncle: a man covered in tattoos with a hunched back and rumpled hair. The only light in the apartment shines from above my uncle’s head, a flickering yellow bulb swinging above the round table where he sits with a cup of tea. His head is turned towards the small window, where a light glows from an empty room across the snow-covered street. I pause. I had been expecting an empty kitchen.
Uncle Alexei senses my stillness and turns his head towards my dark silhouette. He inspects my quiet eyes, brightened by the kitchen’s light. He gestures towards the wooden stool next to him, and as I sit, he stands to retrieve the kettle from the counter. The cabinet door squeaks as he looks at my grandparents’ large collection of teacups, pulling out a crystal tea glass nestled inside an engraved nickel cup holder. He pours hot black tea from the kettle and places it in front of me.
A glazed china bowl on the middle of the lacy tablecloth is packed with white sugar. I imagine a trail of small footprints dotting the sugar, the way my pink boots make prints in the snow. Alexei pushes the bowl towards me with a sly glint in his eyes.
He had caught me a week before, after the apartment had darkened and my mother, grandparents, and cousins slept, packed in little rooms. Restless from the sound of the cross-eyed cat, I stood in the kitchen and sprinkled a mountain of sugar into my palm. I froze when my uncle walked in and laughed at the sight of me eating sugar at midnight. He laughed, calling me a rascal as I scampered back to bed. I accept the sugar, loading three teaspoons into my cup. Alexei smiles, amused by my affection for sweetness.
The cat clock ticks faintly from the room where I sleep with my sister and mother. Then, it stops. Night drags by in the tiny kitchen, where the humming of the radiator doesn’t make enough noise, and the tea is stirred silently, and no words are exchanged.
I am the niece from overseas, the tired traveler in the back of the truck, the small guest tucked in her grandmother’s bed. I am the mute stranger in the family kitchen.
For the first time tonight, Alexei speaks to me.
“Чай пей.”
Drink your tea.
***
On birthdays, calls come from family members all over Russia: great-aunts in Siberia, uncles in St. Petersburg, and cousins in Buryatia.
The calls come at odd hours. In the American south, I am at the tail end of dusk while my grandparents have their midday tea, eight hours ahead in the Moscow oblast. I see the pair smiling and squinting through their glasses in a little pixelated rectangle as they count wishes over electronic waves.
“Желаю во всём быть первой…”
In Russia, the birthday is greeted with five wishes. Friends and family announce that I will be the first in every competition. I will always have a second half, and never third wheel. I will have my own four corners, and everything in life will be five—the highest grade in the Russian school system. Such is the spiel I listen to every year as tradition rambles through the speaker of my mother’s phone. I didn’t meet my first nephew until he was two, but I watched him eat baby mush over the phone a few times. I saw my cousin’s wedding photos, for the ceremony I could not attend, through social media. I am a slow-functioning cog in the machine that is my family, sputtering and creaking as I struggle to keep up with what happens overseas.
In the summer of 2017, when I was nine, my mother learned the news during one of her frequent WhatsApp calls with my babushka. The doctor had found a clump of cells in Alexei’s brain, cancerous and growing.
***
I was as concerned as a fourth grader could be with what little information I had. I knew that Uncle Alexei had a brain tumor—but wasn’t exactly sure of what a tumor was. I imagined it as a small, hard rock tucked in his brain. I didn’t know that a tumor was an abnormal growth of malignant cells. I didn’t know that malignant cells meant cancer.
My elementary school career was the foreground as my family fell into panic behind me. My mother spent hours tucked away in her office, exchanging the details of Alexei’s health with uncles and cousins. My mother told me no news about her brother, and I was too terrified to ask, too terrified to see her cry.
My great-grandmother had gotten sick two years prior. My mother said that Baba Pana was ill, and nothing more. Then, on a bright schoolday afternoon, as I read a yellowed book at the kitchen counter in my Presbyterian school uniform, she tells me the news.
“My grandmother is dead,” she says as she drops her head down towards the sink she washes dishes in, as if vomiting the words.
I look up from my book, unsure what to say. I slide off the tall barstool and run to hug her. I stroke her hair as her head hangs low and her face becomes red. She sobs into the sink, and cries for a funeral she cannot attend.
***
We go to church across the bay on Sunday. The church is Greek Orthodox, a sister to Russian Orthodoxy. There is no Russian church near our suburb in Alabama.
My mother wears a scarf over her head and spends an extra long time lighting candles in the narthex. She gazes through the glass, past rows of wooden pews, at the large mosaic of Mother Mary, clad in a bright blue robe. On her lap sits a baby Jesus. Red rings circle both of their heads, signifying sanctity. Tears drop into the sandbox where crosses are drawn and candles are planted before we lower our gazes and enter the nave for the Divine Liturgy.
At the end of service, we fold out velvet knee rests from the pews before us and kneel to pray. Our priest, a bearded old man, chants the Prokeimon and swings a gold vigil lamp with burning oil as the congregation stills.
I focus—I have much to pray for. I clasp my hands together, trembling on my knees. I ask that Baba Pana be blessed in heaven. I ask that my mother feel better soon. I ask for closeness with my extended family.
After church ends, we trail behind the congregation making its way to the social hall. My mother exchanges hugs and kisses with her Russian girl friends, who greet her with their condolences. She is quieter than usual, but stops to gossip and sip coffee for a moment before pulling my sister and I away from the rampaging church kids.
The ride home is a silent rush over the causeway. We fly down Battleship Parkway, past the stilted oyster houses with beach volleyball courts, past the rusted old battleship stuffed with relics of American victory, past the fishing boats on the murky Mobile River Delta. Our typical Sunday playlist—a mix of Russian and American pop artists, Nyusha and Avril Lavigne—is on pause.
When living in an American suburb, any important destination requires a commute. As I fly co-pilot with my mother, my sister babbling in the back, I wonder how strange it feels for my mother—a long drive across the river every Sunday, when she grew up walking to church.
In a compact Siberian town, church services were down the block from my mother’s house, and her best friend lived in the house next to her own. Their windows opened into each others’ rooms, and they strung a clever wire up to deliver messages. My mother, Alexei, and their older brother would sneak over to the neighbor’s house to watch cartoons, often when they were supposed to be keeping an eye on the horses. How different those days were from her life now, in pristine suburbia, surrounded by distant white-faced neighbors who peeped through their gates at us, the strange family on the bend.
I only knew a few of my neighbors—a sweet girl close to my age, and a group of scampish brothers. We occasionally played in the backwoods together, or biked through the hills of the neighborhood. Only when I grew older would I notice the scorn in the eyes of my white neighbors’ parents when they looked at me—the mischievous daughter of the neighborhood’s only black man, the un-American child of the abrasive immigrant, the skinny brown flash on the playground.
***
We return to the church on a weekday. In the narthex, I quietly twirl in a navy blue and white dress, the only dress in my wardrobe fit for my grandmother’s makeshift funeral. My toddler sister clings to my leg and steps on my toes.
“Playroom?” She asks, pointing down a dim staircase.
“It’s closed. We’re not in service,” I whisper as I push her leg away from mine.
My mother draws a cross in the raised sandbox with a candle. A thick, bright red wax candle, the kind that she never paid for on a usual day. Typically, we would spend three dollars on three skinny, yellow candles. We’d use the flames of the candles dripping, already planted in the sand, to light our own before saying a quick prayer.
Today, my mother’s prayer seems to last forever. But, we eventually enter the nave and sit in the intimate first few pews, close enough to the sanctuary that I can see Jesus painted on the ceiling above. His hands are raised, and I count every line in his palm, surprised to see that they look just as human as my own. Archangels descend from every corner of the high ceiling, and evening light pours in through stained-glass scenes of disciples and holy men. Our priest comes from behind the iconostasis, through the gilded Royal Door. He greets us, kissing our cheeks and whispering blessings.
The funeral begins. My mother, sister, and I stand in a still row as Greek mourning hymns echo through the empty nave. I look at my mother, expecting to see her cry. Instead, she stares at the ground while psalms are read. Father chants the Trisagion, and she hands a folded slip of paper to him, but keeps a small photograph in her hand. I look out of the corner of my eye, and see that it is a picture of my Baba Pana sitting on a stool, a patterned bandana tied around her head, her bright and gummy smile flashing the camera.
“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us…” Father whispers as he pinches his fingers and traces a cross over his chest. He looks at the name on the slip of paper. “Blessed be Praskovyka.”
***
During my mother’s childhood, her grandmother lived with her, and the pair were spiritual sisters. I yearned for a friendship with a grandmother like the one in my mother’s stories.
I was never particularly close with either of my grandmothers. I grew up hundreds of miles away from both, in the Gulf Coast suburb where my parents met at a dimly lit sushi bar tucked by the bay.
My mother was a foreign exchange student working abroad at Wal-Mart. She lived on the beach, with a few other Russian girls, and biked to and from work every day. This was her first taste of America—the skinny Gulf Shores strip.
My parents moved fast. After two weeks of dating, they were engaged. A year later, they married. My mother wore a plain black dress to the courthouse ceremony, where two of my father’s friends served as witnesses before the judge. She refused to have a proper wedding if her parents couldn’t be present, if her mother could not braid her hair into a flower-dotted crown, if her father could not give her away to mine.
***
Alexei lived with his wife and my three cousins in the Moscow Oblast, near my grandparents. It wasn’t working for them—my uncle believed in Siberia, where he had grown up with my mother. Siberia was his home. Ready to start anew, he moved his family to a small town in western Siberia.
After a week in his new home, Alexei started hallucinating. The hallucinations were accompanied by pounding migraines, which drove him to the point of sluggish incoherence. The small town hospital had no equipment to properly check my uncle’s health, and they labeled him a drunk buffoon before turning him away.
In enough time, with untreated symptoms, my uncle fell into a coma. My grandmother flew in from Moscow to take care of his children. She passed information along to one family member at a time, maybe in sobbing hysterics to a sister, or quiet discussion with my grandfather, or a long phone call with my mother, until the news worked its way throughout my family.
My uncle was set to die in his coma. The hospital wasn’t able to treat him, and the nearest hospital with any hope of saving him was four hours away. If the trip was made, Alexei would have a thirty percent chance of survival. In the hospital, he would surely die in the coma with no life support. My grandmother pushed the hospital administration, commanding firmly that they make the trip.
It was an agonizing drive. The hospital had no stretcher, vital machines, or ventilator in the ambulance. Still, they spent hours blazing through the Siberian green, praying for the safety of Alexei.
I can only imagine how every second ticked by as my unconscious uncle struggled in the back of the ambulance.
***
My grandmother is a betting woman. She took the odds and wrangled them. What was a seventy percent chance of death compared to a hundred? My uncle survived the drive to the hospital, where they scanned his brain and found a tumor, ever-growing and malicious. But, despite knowing what caused the coma, the hospital could not wake him. My grandmother took my oldest cousins back to Moscow, while my uncle’s wife stayed with their young son.
Alexei was in the ICU, hooked up to a life support machine and a ventilator. It was a quiet ward, where cloth curtains between hospital beds muffled the steady beeping of machines. Nobody was allowed in but the doctors and the nurses, who would huddle together after checking his vitals, whispering and wondering whether he would wake up, whether they were wasting space in the hospital.
Despite being forbidden in intensive care, his wife convinced the doctors that she should bring my infant cousin to see his father.
He babbled loudly in his mother’s arms as they approached Alexei’s hospital bed, and she covered his mouth quickly. His small voice echoed into her palm, and he burbled on. The steady monitor’s beeping intensified, and Alexei’s vitals spiked rapidly. His wife shrieked and ran to get the doctors. Alexei had woken.
Sashka was only a few months old when my uncle fell asleep, and will never be able to remember who his father was before the tumor. In any instance of questioning I will remind him that his father was first and foremost a family man—a young boy who fought teenagers for his sister, a man whose greatest affection was for his mother and father, a father who picked a daughter out of the town’s newspaper, an unconscious mind awakened by the sound of his infant son.
***
After he woke up, the doctors brought Alexei into surgery for a craniotomy. His symptoms were far too severe—increasing the likelihood of a worse surgery outcome. Still, they cut a hole in his skull.
The doctors claimed that his brain tumor got worse. My family thinks that they cut a wire wrong and short-circuited his brain. When they screwed his head back together, my uncle was unable to speak or eat, and the left side of his body was completely paralyzed.
***
Eventually, Alexei recovered enough to move back to Moscow with his family. His wife lasted six months. That spring, she divorced him.
She had been claiming to care for him while my grandparents left town to work for weeks at a time. During these weeks, she stayed out partying for days at a time while my teenage cousin was left to watch her two young brothers and her handicapped father, who could not eat, bathe, or use the restroom by himself. She spent time with random men. My uncle was powerless to protest or fight her.
Then, a new boyfriend came, and my uncle was once again under the care of his parents, abandoned by his wife.
***
My grandfather depresses the clutch and lets the car come to a stop on the dirt road. Before he can switch the engine off, my mother, sobbing, jumps out of the passenger seat and lunges for two shaking figures that emerge from beyond the short fence of the dacha.
My sister’s head bores into my shoulder as she snores, exhausted from our sleepless flights and long overlays. I peer from behind the driver’s seat, looking past the back of my grandfather’s neck to watch my mother.
The first figure, standing short and straight, is my grandmother. Her short hair has turned bright grey, her skin weary and marked. She wears a cotton house dress with large blue flowers printed on the skirt. A few of the flowers are stained with tea and dirt, and droop wearily.
Leaning on my grandmother, tall and crooked, is a man wearing a henley shirt and food-stained pajama pants. He and my mother approach each other in wonder as she reaches a hand towards him delicately, as if he were trapped in a looking glass. I can hear my mother’s cries through the windshield as she throws her arms around him.
My mother and grandmother are pale women whose faces flush when angered or upset. Now, their faces are as red as can be, and they cry sticky tears as they embrace each other and my uncle.
***
In the summers, my grandparents live in a small dacha village with a singular dirt road, where a walk to the pond is a tread through reeds and high grasses, and grandmother tends to a garden of vegetables and rows upon rows of potatoes while my grandfather builds in his shed. The newest additions of their dacha house are ready when we get there—a wooden bathhouse and outhouse, built from the ground by my grandfather’s hands. We lug our suitcases out of my grandfather’s truck, and I tuck my sister into my grandparents’ bed, a king sized mattress on the floor of a small room, before joining the rest of my family for dinner.
We celebrate our safe arrival over a feast prepared by my grandmother: olivier salad, potato soup, a fresh garden medley, brown bread, and tea. I watch my grandmother feed spoons of mush to Alexei across the table. His facial expression has not changed since our arrival. He is permanently disgruntled and drooling, a far-off look in his murky black eyes. He holds his left hand permanently curled against his chest, over his heart, as he points towards my mother with the other. I see a tear fall into her soup as she smiles, nods, and takes his hand.
I fold two teaspoons of sugar into my steaming tea, looking across the table at Alexei. He looks back at me. I wonder if he recognizes me—the niece from overseas, the disgruntled, jet-lagged American, the little girl pilfering sugar, the mute stranger in the kitchen.
After 2018, we stopped visiting my mother’s family. A trip through pandemic and war was unlikely. It would be five years until I saw my family again, but I would not see my uncle.
I stopped going to church. My avoidance was partially out of spite—as I grew older and more distant from my mother, I grew to hate everything the church represented. I thought myself a wicked, profane pagan who would be persecuted upon entry—a cloaked figure in the corner, a hunched back in the social hall, an evil terror to the church kids.
At that time, we moved to New Orleans. My mom had fallen out of the churchgoing habit during COVID, but occasionally attended a small Greek Orthodox Church overlooking the lakeside canal. I didn’t return to church until my mother pulled me out of school one day in the ninth grade.
My mother had told me that morning that her brother’s health was in the gutter. She had a flight booked to Russia, and she was leaving that day. After she checked me out of class, we ended up not at the Kenner airport tens of miles away, but the small church on the canal.
I skulk sheepishly on the steps of the church as my mother and sister enter through the large wooden door. I am wracked with guilt: guilty of my lazy Sundays avoiding service, guilty of not calling my grandmother, guilty of my American leisure and ignorant to the turmoil cutting through my family. I peer inside the church as my mother floats past the wooden pews to the sanctuary.
The church opens not into a candled antechamber, but into the nave itself, almost identical to the one in Alabama. The altar is closed off by the gold iconostasis, which bears icons on each door-shaped panel. Angels and disciples adorn the walls, each looking towards the image of Jesus and Mother Mary on the ceiling. The lights are off and light from the canal glitters through stained-glass portraits.
The church has the same blood-red runner as the one in Alabama, running down the center aisle between the pews. I fall into an old habit—walking through the nave in a straight line, watching my shoes make soft, disappearing dents in the rug. I walk slowly, one foot in front of the other, until I make it to the end, where my mother stands with a robed priest and my younger sister sits, uninterested, in the second row of pews.
“Good morning, Father,” I say as I approach with my right hand over my left. He extends his arm towards my forehead and makes the sign of the cross, blessing me.
“This is my oldest. She’s in high school,” explains my mother.
“Why don’t you come to church?” the priest furrows his brow.
“I don’t know,” I sigh. What else is there to say? That I’m too busy for God?
He shakes his head, and I know that the conversation isn’t over. I know that I will be summoned to spend my Sunday mornings in service, my back aching from the hard wooden pew, my head lolling from sleep deprivation.
“I’ve come to ask for your blessing,” says my mother. “I have a flight to Russia this afternoon.” The priest nods at my mother, beckoning her to come closer. She pauses. Her face is matter-of-fact, but her eyes gleam as she says, “My brother died today.”
Now it is my turn to pause. I stand silently, my eyes locked on her face as the priest begins to recite a prayer. Father’s sacred words are drowned out by my self-talk as I repeat in my head, “Alexei is dead.” The priest pulls a long metal rod from his robe—the aspergillum. He chants and knocks it against the air like a drum stick, sprinkling my mother with holy water, who is motionless as she is blessed. She does not weep or cry. She looks straight ahead, past Father, through the iconostasis, over the glimmering canal, towards the east.
