Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“THERE ARE GANGSTERS IN MOSCOW,” my mother said when I told her I wanted to go to Russia.

It was 1995, six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I had just graduated from college. My classmates set off for New York and San Francisco—several of them went on to make millions at Internet start-ups—but now that the Cold War was finally over, I wanted to see the former Soviet Union. I’d also begun to harbor romantic notions of journalism, and I’d heard that it would be easier to break into a newspaper there. A new English-language daily was hiring expats. I even argued that my trip would help my mom’s foundation—it had been exactly ten years since Jenny’s death, and a commemorative journey to Russia would be good PR.

What I didn’t tell her is that I had another reason for wanting to visit Moscow. A month before graduation, I’d received a strange letter. It arrived inside a manila envelope from my mother, who periodically forwarded mail that came to Washington. It drove me crazy that my mom never added a note of her own. She had never been the kind of parent who sent letters or care packages, but I would have settled for scribble on a Post-it: “See you at graduation!” This package, though, contained only a white envelope addressed to me in a broad sweeping hand:

Sarah Zuckerman

c/o Jennifer Jones Foundation

P.O. Box 408

Washington, D.C. 20008

USA

The envelope had a corporate logo, but it was not one I recognized. DDBD in orange block letters and beneath it, in gray, MOCKBA. I’d fulfilled my foreign-language requirement with two years of Russian, so I knew that MOCKBA (pronounced “Moskva”) is “Moscow” in the Cyrillic alphabet. I turned the envelope over. The return address was printed in the same corporate orange: Petrovka Ulitsa 26, Moscow, Russia.

Dear Sarah, the letter said,

You are Sarah which is friend of Jennifer Jones? You organize Jennifer Jones Festival? I am Svetlana which is friend of Jennifer in Russia. We with Jennifer spend much time together when she came to USSR. We were on the pioneer camp. She often talked about you. I always want to meet with you.

I know that you lives in Washington, in USA. Many people thing that “grass is always greener on the other side of the fense” but I am not agree. Moscovites really love their city. This is why I invite you to Moscow. It is capital city like Washington. Since perestroika, it is easy for traveling here. I can organize for you special tour. I can tell you many thing about Jennifer.

Please to write to me. My address in web: Svetlana.Roma

nova@ddbd.ru

Sincerely yours,

Svetlana

Officially, my mother organized the annual Jennifer Jones Festival, but she always forced me to say a few words at the opening ceremony—a ceremony that had seen increasingly lower attendance over the years. The year before, my remarks were addressed to sixteen people, and most of them had wandered into the room by accident. But the writer obviously had a problem with her verb tenses in English. I was Jennifer Jones’s friend. My mom started the foundation right after Jenny’s death, and now she was already hard at work on plans for the tenth annual Jennifer Jones Festival. In fact, I had already ignored several frantic calls requesting my input. My mother’s voice-mail messages were delivered as if through a bullhorn: “JENNY’S LEGACY IS IN YOUR HANDS!” she said in one. She did not seem to understand that most people had stopped worrying about nuclear war. The Cold War was over, and anxiety about a hot war ended with it.

I looked at the letter again. How bizarre, I thought, that someone all the way in Moscow could be reached instantly by electronic mail. E-mail was still a novelty in 1995. My high-school friends and I used it to correspond from our various college campuses, but our messages retained the formal conventions of letters. They were long, began with proper salutations and closed with “Yours truly,” and betrayed our collective uncertainty about this new technology. “Did you get my last message?” we wrote, or “Write back to let me know you received this.” We often telephoned each other to verify that e-mail had arrived. Cyberspace was so mysterious. This was pre-Google, so we weren’t yet relying on the Internet to answer our every question; in fact, we weren’t consciously using the Internet at all, just our various college e-mail servers. I had never heard the term “Web site,” let alone seen one. One of my friends tried to tell me about the seemingly mythical “Internet,” and I nodded indulgently, certain it was something that would only capture the imagination of Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts. Most e-mails I received were from on campus, many of them completely inane. You could target the whole student body by addressing an e-mail to ALL:STU and these “all-stus” ranged from announcements about various a cappella performances (“Tonight in Kirkland Hall: Scott Hardy solos on ‘Africa’ by Toto for the last time before he graduates!”) to drunken nocturnal confessions (“Yes, I’m gay. Are you happy now?”) to prank messages sent from the accounts of those who had failed to log out of public computers. ( “I’m proud to be a Psi-Uterus!” was a message that came from the account of a woman who spent a lot of time at Psi U frat parties.) I still felt a shiver of surprise when messages appeared in my in-box, especially when they had been sent from another city or state. And now it was possible to write an e-mail to another country. Not just any country either, but to our former Cold War nemesis. When Sting wondered if the Russians loved their children, too, he could not have imagined that we’d be e-mailing those Russian children.

I don’t know how Svetlana found me, but I recognized her name from Jenny’s book. She was the girl plucked by the Kremlin to travel around with Jenny and her parents.

After Jenny returned from the Soviet Union, a New York publishing house gave the Joneses a lot of money for a book detailing her travels. My Trip to the Soviet Union consisted mostly of photographs of Jenny smiling outside various Soviet monuments and tombs of unknown soldiers. A ghostwriter was hired to tell Jenny’s story. It began with this sentence: “It all started when I decided to write a letter to Yuri Andropov.” There is no mention of the fact that it actually started when I decided to write a letter to Andropov. There is no mention of me in the book at all. The book was rushed into production for holiday sales in 1983. Jenny gave me a copy for Christmas. It had a giant picture of her smiling on the cover. Inside, she’d written, “I wish you could have come with me!”

Look at the cover photo and you’ll see the Jenny I remember. She was pretty in a wholesome, unthreatening way. Her cheeks dimpled. Her glossy brown hair was always parted in the middle and pinned back with tortoiseshell barrettes. Her eyes were blue. She had a light dusting of freckles on her dainty nose. Her expression tended to be open and warm. She had long, graceful arms and legs. She was unfailingly polite. She wore classic American clothes: polo shirts and crewneck sweaters in primary colors. Central casting could not have found a more ideal candidate to represent American childhood.

Pictures of me at the same age—we were ten when she was invited to the USSR—reveal a wan, wary child. Jenny and I were always about the same height (her mother measured us every six months against a wall in their kitchen, and our pencil marks climbed in tandem, never more than a few centimeters apart), but while she was thin, I was so bony that I looked emaciated. If I had been born just a few years later, I could have capitalized on the heroin-chic trend. Even in photos of supposedly happy occasions—Christmas morning, my birthday—I am not smiling. This is partly because I had braces at the time and was reluctant to open my mouth in front of the camera, but mostly because I was a serious child. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t the one who went on the tour of the Soviet Union. My sullen face wouldn’t have won over the media or the Russians. Jenny was a natural diplomat. And she was so photogenic that when she returned to the States, she was offered roles in several films. She might have grown up to be a movie star, like the other Jennifer Jones. The one who married Selznick.