Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

Anya gave me updates on the rest of the family. She told me that Masha was married and had a five-year-old son, and that she stayed home to take care of him. Both sisters were still living in Chelyabinsk, though apparently Masha had returned from Moscow only reluctantly, when her husband got a job working for Sergei’s company. And Masha’s husband wasn’t the only one in the family business: Anya, too, was employed there. So, the family was wealthy, but not so wealthy that they didn’t have to work. As Anya told me, “Really rich people don’t have to keep track of their money. We’re not that way.”

I asked Anya whether she’d been to the United States, and she said, “Just last month, for the first time!” She’d gone to Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, but when I asked how she liked it there, she wrinkled her nose. “Not so much,” she replied. I asked why.

“My expectations were too high,” she said. “I really thought I was going to love it.” She’d liked the beach in L.A., but the traffic was terrible, and overall it wasn’t as nice as what she’d seen in the movies. In Vegas, she’d stayed at the Wynn and the Venetian, and while she liked the hotels, she’d gotten bored after playing a little roulette. And in Miami Beach, it rained the whole time. All in all, she’d felt disappointed in her U.S. experience.

“Come again, when I’m there,” I told her. “You have to see more than just Vegas and the beach.” I wanted her to like America, and was convinced she would if I got a chance to show her around. But she told me that many of her Russian friends who’d emigrated there didn’t like it, and some had returned to Russia.

“They say it’s hard to make friends with Americans, because they’re not really interested in having Russian friends,” she said. “So, the Russians all end up sticking together.” I’d never thought of this before, but realized it was probably true. Even I, a lifelong Russophile, didn’t have any close Russian friends in Los Angeles. And most of those I’d met—particularly the older women I’d spent time with over the summer, when I was trying to improve my language skills—tended to socialize only with other Russians. In fact, many spoke English quite poorly, even if they’d been there for decades, because they never got any practice.

“I like Europe better,” Anya told me. “It’s more culturally similar to Russia.” She felt most at home in France, though she liked Italy too. “My sister loves it there,” she said. “It’s the only place she ever goes on vacation.” At my look of surprise, she laughed. “Seriously, the only place. It’s a little… monotonous.”

I got the sense that Anya and Masha weren’t close, though they saw each other regularly, often out at Lake Chebarkul, where Sergei had built two more giant dachas—one for each daughter. The family had also constructed a new Russian Orthodox chapel there, so Lyuba would have a place to pray. I desperately wanted to see all this, but it seemed impolite to ask for an invitation, so I just hoped that Anya would suggest going.

We were more than two hours into our lunch when Anya’s boyfriend Max showed up. He was a compact, muscular young man with a big smile, but though he clearly adored Anya, her demeanor changed when he sat down. We’d been having a chatty, intimate, girl-talk lunch, but now Anya emanated a slight chill, though Max didn’t seem to notice. The two of them were going to see an afternoon movie, but she invited me to come to their apartment for dinner that night, and I eagerly accepted.

She and Max were living in the same apartment where her parents had lived in 2005—the big, beautiful one on Plekhanov Street. Sergei and Lyuba had moved permanently to their dacha on Lake Chebarkul, though Sergei still came into the city to work most days, an hour-long drive each way. “He has a full-time driver,” Anya told me, “so it’s not too bad.”

That evening, when Anya showed me into the Plekhanov apartment, I was amazed to see that it was decorated almost exactly as it had been ten years earlier. Lyuba’s souvenir plates were still on the walls. An old tape deck stood in the corner of the dining room. And in the living room, an old doll in a satin dress was propped up underneath an oil painting of a snowy village, just as it had been in 2005. I wouldn’t have remembered this, except that I had a photo of 21-year-old Anya and me posing underneath that painting, and the doll was in the picture. I showed Anya the old photo on my phone, and we both started laughing.

“Why haven’t you changed anything?” I asked. “Surely you have a different style from your mom?”

“I don’t know,” Anya said, blushing again. “It just seems wrong to put away all those plates and paintings. They’re nice.” Even Busya, her mother’s dog, was still living in the apartment, though she was old and rather hairless now. It was as if Anya was maintaining the place as an homage to her parents.

As we ate dinner, a television in the dining room was tuned to an episode of Friends , dubbed into Russian. I asked if the show was popular here, and Anya said it was. I knew American movies were popular—a stroll past any movie theater confirmed that—but I was surprised to see such a quintessentially American sitcom on Russian TV, especially considering the recent wave of anti-Americanism. But Anya and Max had watched numerous such shows; she told me they loved The Big Bang Theory , Breaking Bad , and Mike and Molly most of all.

Both Max and Anya had seen every episode of Friends —all 236 of them. “It’s nice, gentle humor,” Anya said. “Not mean or coarse.” The show aired on Russia’s Paramount Comedy channel, which was Anya’s favorite for that same reason: she didn’t enjoy humor that was snarky or mean. In some ways, she still seemed like that sweet, unassuming 11-year-old girl I’d met in 1995, no matter how glamorous and grown up she looked now.

The next day, Anya, Max, and I went to her grandmother’s house for lunch. I was nervous, which Anya found hilarious. “She’s my grandmother ,” she teased. “She’s not scary!” But I remembered Valentina as one of the few people on that 2005 trip with whom I just couldn’t connect. Fortunately, there was one topic I knew we could talk about today: Anya had told me her grandmother had seen the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Anya and Max picked me up in her black BMW SUV, and we headed out of the city center and into the Leninsky District, a run-down area marked by nondescript multistory housing blocks. She steered into a muddy courtyard, past some ramshackle playground equipment, and parked near a two-story, brown-brick apartment building with security grills on the first-floor windows. The neighborhood felt neglected, but it still had a certain charm, with leafy trees and lace curtains visible in apartment windows.

We rang the buzzer, and when Valentina opened the door my first thought was, She’s so tiny! She was absolutely elfin in her purple housedress, gray floral-patterned cardigan, and plaid slippers, her white hair pulled back with a bobby pin. Anya, wearing a black minidress, black tights, and black thigh-high boots, towered over her. If an alien landed and saw these two creatures, it would not have believed they belonged to the same species.

“Grandmother, do you remember Liza?” Anya asked.

“No,” she said, eyeing me with a dour expression.

“Ten years ago, you stayed together at the apartment near Revolution Square,” Anya continued, speaking loudly and slowly. “Remember? You stayed there while your apartment was being renovated.”

“Ahhh,” her grandmother replied. “Maybe I do remember.” I doubted that, but at least she was making an effort.