You Were Moscow
Nicholas in Three Acts
I.
We found you at a peculiar crossroads — one that fell on the corner of two streets I could not pronounce. The letters on the street signs curved into neat rows of unfamiliar, pointed characters. While we were in Moscow, I simply eased into that illiteracy. We were consistently lost.
The city itself was regal, almost cartoon-like, vastly distinct from the gray angularity of New York that had grown so familiar to me. The buildings were embellished with tiles in varying hues of gold and purple, glowing in the teasing December sun. Everything was awash in a reflective layer of snow that the city persistently rested beneath — the cold under which it stubbornly took cover. The tallest buildings were adorned with enormous domes that extended outward and rounded up into thin, angular points. They looked like gold-plated papier-mâché balloons fixed atop castle towers, and they were spread so widely throughout the city that within the first week they’d already begun to lose their novelty. We found you in this coloring book city, so foreign and unlike my own that it felt vaguely imagined.
The orphanage, however, was nothing like the rest of Moscow. The doorways were arched and plain, weak shadows of the billowing rounded architecture throughout the rest of the city. The walls in the foyer were like old paper, like palimpsest. They were an aged, tired white, yellowed with the back and forth of too many people. Every one who entered the orphanage passed through here. Every one who was lucky enough to leave did, too.
The room where I first saw you was wide and rectangular with ceilings high enough to allow for just enough stale air to linger. The walls in the back left corner were decorated with caricatures I had never seen before — slightly contorted, goofy animals in muted shades of blue and red. They bore an outdated, neglected resemblance to the cartoons with which I had grown so familiar. There were windows that lined the two adjacent walls, each of them square and proportionate, too high up to offer its urban overlook to any of the infants. Slants of the bitter Moscow sunshine danced around the room, whispering in its angry edges.
You were in the third closest crib to that back wall. The cribs were arranged in calculated, seemingly endless rows — far more cribs than I had ever seen collected in one place, each sitting approximately two feet from the next. They were all virtually indistinguishable from one another.
When I saw you for the first time, I could tell that you were my Russia. You made me illiterate, contingently lost. In the corner of this place, so foreign and deeply awash in achy whimpers, I saw you, lying in your uniform. You looked no different from the other infants — cramped, and dark, and rounded — except that you were my Russia and I was your tourist. Someday, I was going to love you like New York. You, at this peculiar crossroads in this cartoon city in this terribly sad room. You, with your strangers’ blood and the flat, dented back to your infantile skull. You had spent the majority of your three months on earth lying down, and that part of your body was soft, impressionable, long cushioned by the bottom of a plain, wooden crib. I didn’t know it yet but I was going to teach you to sit up.
II.
Our home was on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Prospect Park West. This is where we both grew up — where I was very much the navigator, never lost. This is where you grew your hair floppy and long so it would deliberately hang in front of your eyes, where you learned to jerk your neck so the bangs would rest slanted across your forehead before slumping back down over your eyebrows. This is where the freckles on your nose went away and mine stayed — you were much darker than I was. This is where you were always far too small.
“Someday he’ll be tall like his Dad,” people would say when they saw your tiny framework, next to our six feet and five inches of father. The trouble is, you have strangers’ blood and none of Dad’s tall genes. You were too fragile for sports, too frantic for teams. “Someday, he’ll play the piano like his Mom,” the neighbors would grin and assure us, as you folded fortune tellers out of the sheet music Mom discarded while she played. You had no ear for music. But we forgave you for the growth-spurts we knew would never come, the music lessons you wouldn’t take, the soccer teams you would never join. The Russia in you curled into your fingers, it made you a brilliant architect of Lego castles and of paper cranes, but a clunky, ungraceful player of the piano. We forgave you because we loved the Russia that was left inside of you; even in all of the ways it made you distinct from the rest of us.
We used to do our homework together at the dining room table, it was always just the two of us at home in the afternoons. The table itself was large and square, made of dark wood tinted with plenty of stains from not-quite-family-dinners. Everything about it was sturdy, angular. It stood firm and heavy — reliable in a way that you were not. Homework was exceptionally difficult for you — writing out letters across black lines on worksheets, pulling strings of words out of stories and passages. Your math never added up the way it should. Your teachers used to call our home a lot; your hands were always occupied, in motion, distracting the other students. You got in fights, you were angry or you cried too much — you were not assimilating correctly to the tumultuous social scene of middle school.
They tried Ritalin and then Vyvanse and then Aderall, but you were never calm enough. Your math still didn’t add up correctly. I thought ADHD just meant that you were restless — that you were Moscow and you were not cramped and angular enough for New York. But the doctors thought it was treatable, that there was a fundamental flaw in that foreign brain of yours. I didn’t want to watch them shake the overseas out of you. I didn’t want the medication to steal your appetite and quiet your hands. It was meant to make you motionless, reliable, as you pored over your worksheets, as still as the table you arched over, pencil in hand. But still, the work never seemed to get easier for you — you were simply not built to remain stationary.
When we were alone in the evenings, we would eat bowls of cereal cross-legged on the floor of the living room over a bed sheet — nighttime picnics. We didn’t like to eat at the table; that was our homework space. It was marked for you, with the frustration of prescribed insufficiency, with the fury that accompanied the medical claim that your cognitive ability was inferior to the other kids. It was very much tinted with Attention Deficit, and for that reason, I helped you avoid it whenever possible. It was a New Yorker trap, designed to carve the Moscow out from under your fingernails, and I wanted to keep it all tied up inside of you. I wanted to watch you build towers and fold paper airplanes instead.
You used to tell me that you were sick because your veins were not like ours. You blamed your orphanhood, pointed out the places where your genetic makeup made you insufficient — different from the rest of us — as we sat at the table. You cried over vocabulary lists that simply would not imprint themselves in your memory. While we were in Russia, I was your tourist, but at home, you were mine, resting uneasily on the outskirts of “family,” consumed by your restless otherness. I wanted so badly for you to know that I loved the foreign city in your hands, but you were too busy with your 6th grade multiple choice questions to truly understand.
III.
I do not live at home anymore. And I don’t know if you sit on the floor for dinner. I don’t know if you order in, or if you cook food that can’t be made in a microwave or a toaster oven. You tell me about the big things: the girls you like, the boys you hate, the Sunday track meets. But I don’t know if you eat at the table. Maybe you are too tangled up in the social etiquette of middle school to picnic indoors anymore.
On some days, the harder days, you call me for help with averaging number sets, or spelling the longer words. On these days I try to remind you that you are smarter than I am, that you can build castles and origami prisms that I could never picture in the first place, that you are lucky enough to have home and overseas in your palms at the same time.
You gave me a postcard that you wrote me on my birthday when I got home this December. You said you searched the whole house, but you couldn’t find any stamps to send it with. I forgave you. We were never a punctual family, never admired for our skills in organization, somewhat charming in our constant state of disarray.
Nobody can ever say that you are not really my sister, you wrote in shaky disproportionate letters on the back of the shiny photograph of some ice cream shop under the Brooklyn Bridge, and Happy Birthday.
I know now that we are no longer respectively illiterate, no longer each other’s tourists. But you never became New York, and I suppose you grew out of being my Russia a long time ago. Instead, you became a lovely city all your own, a collage of the Brooklyns and the Moscows and the oceans in between. You, with your stranger’s blood, and your coloring book brain, and the overseas in your fingers — you are, above all else, my brother.
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