I was three years old when my father handed me a lit match.
“Hold it,” he had said. “Hold it until you learn to stay away from matches.”
He found me playing with a matchbook. I was hiding behind an armchair in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment in Budennovsk, striking the matches against the box, trying to figure out what was the special thing that made them become fire.
I don’t remember if he was angry or loud. I don’t remember what he said. I only remember that his face at some point became cool. He took a match out, made magic out of it, and handed me fire.
I held the match in my clumsy, three-year-old fingers, eyes glittering. Watching as the fire swallowed the matchstick hungrily and singed my fingers.
I cried. But I don’t remember being comforted (I must have been).
“That is what happens when you play with fire,” my father warned.
I was six when my parents brought my brother and me to the United States. My mom’s sister and brother waited for us in Spokane, Washington. We rented an apartment in the same complex as my aunt, with a pool, a patio, a parking lot.
My parents tested out the dishwashing machine, washer and dryer. Not knowing any better, my mom tried to use regular dish soap in the dishwasher and my parents ended up on their hands and knees all night, laughing and mopping up suds.
I’m sure at some point my parents let my brother and me play in the suds a little bit (they must have).
That summer, we used the pool regularly. My parents, aunt and uncle, and older cousins lounging around a puddle of bright blue smelly water- grilling, eating, talking.
I tried to keep up with my older boy-cousins. They chased each other around the pool, jumped into the deep end, yelling “Cannonball!” (a cool, new English word) and did their best to splash as many people as possible.
I wanted to do that too, though they told me that I was just getting in the way. I swam around in my floaties in the shallow end, every so often making my way to my cousins playing roughly, wanting in on the fun. Eventually I’d get hurt or frustrated by their roughhousing, and paddle back, crying and tattling to my mom or dad.
“Mammaaaaa, Artem held my head underwater and I couldn’t breathe,” huff, huff, huff.
“Papaaaaa, Igor pushed me into the deep end of the poooool!”
My cousins’ meanness never stopped me from coming back and trying to keep up with them anyway. It was scary and dangerous. It was possible to die, I thought- a second or two too long under water, Art’s feet standing on my shoulders, and I’d drown. A strategic kick in the head, and I’d be concussed.
But the shallow end was just so boring. So I kept getting in the way, getting hurt, and returning to the shallow end, floating in my floaties, and weeping.
One day at the pool, my father got down on one knee and looked me straight in the eye.
“Mishka,” (that means “little mouse,” a nickname I must have grown out of by that point), “Do you want to learn how to swim?”
“Yes!” I shouted.
“Good,” my father said. He got up, and, before I had a chance to put my floaties on, pushed me into the deep end of the pool.
I splashed and sputtered wildly, my head bobbing up and down in the chlorinated water. I inhaled it through my nose, and I must have thought that my brain would melt. My eyes stung, but I could see my father looming above me, unblinking.
I figured out quickly that I needed to kick my feet and pump my arms at the same time to keep afloat. Once my head bobbed above water, swallowed some more disgusting gulps, and got a few panicked breaths in, I was able to scream out, “How could you?”
When I was six, I thought my father looked blithe and mean looking down at me like that while I nearly drowned. But now, I think he had looked relieved. Relieved and proud.
“You can now swim,” he said and secured my brother’s floaties around his arms.
My father was the first of many lessons in heartbreak. I was born knowing how to trust implicitly, to accept promises without any wariness, to forgive often. What I learned was what it felt like to lose that ease- a despair I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
I used to tell these stories in therapy- supporting evidence of the many things my father had done wrong in raising me.
I can’t tell you what I’d say about these lessons now. I don’t know myself.
Every year, on my birthday, he asked, “Mishka, what do you want for your birthday?”
“Nothing,” I’d say. “Just, papa, just please don’t drink today. Just this one day.”
I never learned to not ask for this.
Every year, on my birthday, my dad would drink anyway. He never could hide it well- the glassy eyes with an angry glint, the tight meanness in his smile.
I could tell without seeing his face. It was in his shoulders, his gait, the way he held his head, moved his hands. It was in his words. In a song that he played.
Every year, I asked for it. And every year he drank anyway.
I wonder now, if he was just punishing me for asking. He must have been.
I celebrated my twenty-first birthday away from my parents, with my friends, brother and a few of his friends at Myrtle Beach. We booked a cheap motel room, drank, played card games. Ran barefoot on the beach even though it was much too cold for it in December.
My parents called to wish me a happy birthday the next morning, when we had packed up the car and were ready to head back from our short-lived beach escapade.
“Happy birthday, Mishka,” my father said. “You’ll be happy to know I didn’t drink yesterday, on your birthday,” he announced proudly. “Not a drop.”
I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably something too kind and undeserving (it must have been).
I’m not sure what lesson I was meant to learn.
But I learned it anyway.
I must have.
lost in xanadu 