Then we separated.  We still lived together, having our usual evening tea with strawberry jam from the dacha, watching figure skating on television, but we had ceased being one.  After walking together on the same path, we parted and went in different directions.  Or was it I who turned away from her because I had found my own road?

When did this happen, this separation?  Was it in first grade, when no one picked me up on the first day of school because of a miscommunication between mama and the teacher, when I walked home alone, surrounded by dangerous streetcars and speeding trucks, basking in my power to be able to cross streets by myself?  Was it when the three of us stood in a phone booth, rain streaking down the glass, my wooden fingers dialing my father’s hospital number, the indifferent voice on the other end of the line saying that he had died?

Or maybe it happened earlier, when at five or six I would roll into mama’s bed because my feet were freezing cold.  I would press into her with my entire body, squeezing my feet under her soft thighs, stealing her warmth.  Was I already separate from her then, knowing that my feet were freezing and hers were not?  “They’re cold like frogs, your little nozhki,” she used to murmur and smile, warming me with her embrace.

When did my daughter separate from me?  I remember looking at her standing in our living room holding on to the side of the coffee table.  She had just learned how to walk, making little steps, wobbly and tentative, yet resolute, because she ambled forward on her own, refusing help.  She was determined to stand straight up and walk without falling, and I had an intense, almost physical sensation at that moment that our paths had begun to part.  A visceral perception that we were estranged now, the umbilical cord severed, that she has started to walk away from me in those small, faltering steps.

The following morning, when I turned on my Blackberry, there was an email from BBC Russian Service.  They’d already called me on my home phone, not knowing it was dead, looking for a first hand account from a Russian hurricane survivor.  I emailed back and got an immediate call on my cell.  The producer wanted to know what hardships we’d been experiencing and how flood insurance worked in the U.S.  We agreed that her show host would call me back an hour later, after I could listen to the media and drive around to assess the damage in my neighborhood.

It turned out the damage wasn’t so easy to assess.  Our two cars were parked in the garage, behind the door that worked on electricity (a small fact we overlooked the night before).  As my husband walked around the block, where a tree sliced through a neighbor’s house, I called my niece in Texas, who provided me with the most detailed update on Sandy’s damage.  When the BBC call came, it promptly failed.  I moved around the house, in search of a spot with the signal, from the second floor to the first, all in vain.  The only place that gave me two bars was outside the house, by the side door to the garage.  I wedged myself inside, between the garbage can and my locked-in car, relaying the post-hurricane experience to the Russian BBC host stationed in London, who was going to play it an hour later to the audience of listeners all over my former Motherland.

The host wanted to know about our hurricane preparations, the U.S. flood insurance, and the food that was going to spoil in my refrigerator.  “Some anti-American voices here say it’s God’s revenge for the American imperialistic war-mongering,” he opted, which made me think of 1980 when the Leningrad University Dean scolded me for marrying a capitalist and thus betraying my Motherland.  I glanced down at my notes spread down on the lid of the garbage can, although I knew there was nothing there about American imperialism or God’s revenge.  “It’s climate change,” I said wearily, looking outside the garage where it began to rain again.  “It’s global warming,” I said, adding something about fossil fuels and people vs. nature, before I realized there was silence on the other end of the line.  The reception was lost.

The next day, crouching by an electric outlet at Starbucks, I listened to the podcast of my interview on the BBC website.  It ended with my words about climate change and global warming aimed at my former country’s God-fearing citizens, and that – despite a long-term prospect of no heat or power or Internet at home – made me smile.

There is nothing to be afraid of, I tell myself.  My Soviet passport says “resides abroad” stamped in official purple ink, and our marriage license is safely packed in my handbag.  I may still be a Soviet citizen, but I am married to an American who is right here, next to me, monitoring my every step.  No border guard would dare keep me on – or off – Soviet soil, I tell myself.  Why then are my palms so clammy?  Why can’t I be as nonchalant as all these Western tourists?

In London it is still morning, and we join a group of British passengers waiting for our flight to Russia.  They leaf through their guidebooks with maps of Leningrad, all except a woman in her fifties, whose face, beneath a layer of Western creams and cosmetics, carries faint marks of her Slavic heritage.  She is talking to a man who may be her English husband as she glances in my direction because from my tensed mouth and slumped back she knows I am Russian.  She probably feels sorry for me, or maybe she recognizes herself in this same airport thirty years earlier, terrified before her first visit back home.

On the plane, we are told to sit where we like since there are no assigned seats on the boarding passes.  A stewardess in a fur hat waves her arm magnanimously as if presenting us with the interior of her plane as a gift – “sit any place you want,” she says.  When we stuff the overhead compartments and claim all window seats, more passengers are allowed on the plane.  It turns out that after stopping in Leningrad, our flight continues on to Sri Lanka.  Where were these people before boarding? I ask Alan.  Did they keep them in a separate room?  They are all dark-skinned and apologetic, and by now it is clear that they have been doomed to middle seats, trying to find space for their carry-ons.  The magnanimous stewardess has vanished, and the passengers bound for their non-European destination are left to figure out by themselves the lack of basic service my national airline has to offer.

“Wow,” Alan says with astonishment and disbelief, watching a man next to us trying to stuff his bag under the front seat.

The engines start without warning, and with the speed of a military jet, the plane roars down the runway and rivets into the low sky.  The sudden thrust of the engine presses my back into the chair; my ears pop.  The stewardess, wearing an orange life vest to demonstrate the emergency procedures, falls into a chair, the fur hat rolling down the aisle.

Alan takes my hand and squeezes his fingers around it.

“Welcome to Russia,” I say, although I don’t know if he can hear me behind the thunder of the engines.

And maybe she did, but knowing that does not make it any easier.

All I can think of is how I resented all the small things I had to do in the last few years – take her to never ending doctors’ appointments, cut her hair, cook buckwheat with onions, a taste from the kitchens of her two earlier lives, and watch her deteriorate before my eyes.  Her legs refused to walk, she would lament, her ears refused to hear.  How I resented that my husband and I couldn’t jump in the car and spend a weekend with friends in Shelter Island, that every trip had to be planned and thought through. Things that seem so small and ludicrously unimportant now seemed so monumental then.

She stoically endured my inattention, my total immersion into my own life, filling her days with reading mysteries, chopping vegetables for salad, and watching figure skating on a television channel from Moscow.  Orderly and determined to survive, she plodded on, just as she did in Ivanovo, just as she did in Leningrad.  She was always a survivor and she kept on living, as she used to say, for her two brothers killed in the war  – the one who died in their Ivanovo house in 1942, the other whose body had been plowed into the warm earth of western Russia when German tanks crossed the Soviet border with Poland in June of 1941.  She survived 98 years – thanks to her tenacity, my grandparents’ genes and good American medicine.  She was fortunate to have lived three lives, the last of which turned out to be my responsibility and my privilege.  I only hope she was happy.

“You can go to graduate school and get a Doctorate,” says Alan, and I think of the Russian Doctoral Degree, which I would never even dream of, which marked the top spot on the Olympus of Russian academia accessible only to the heads of major university departments, those professors whose office doors were never opened to reveal a live human being inside.

“With the amount of credits you took,” Alan adds, “you may already have a Doctorate.”  The other day he pored over the translated copy of my university diploma, five typed pages of the courses I took for six years after work, four times a week, two classes a night.  “I can’t believe the amount of hours you studied English,” he says.  “No wonder you can speak it.”  I’m not always sure I can speak or write it, but Alan’s voice is so tender and sincere, so loving that I decide to believe him.

I tell Alan of walking along the Neva embankment with my university friend Nina when classes ended at ten, of the gold cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the dark facades of the Admiralty and the Hermitage on the other side, grim and unglamorous at that hour of the night.  We walked over the Palace Bridge – the river strapped under the armor of ice for five months – leaning into the wind, talking about banned books, Tarkovsky’s films, and those who’d left the country.  “Anywhere out of here,” Nina said.  “I’d go anywhere.  Even to Patagonia.”  In our tight friendship, she was the one with the Jewish husband and hopes for immigrating to the West.  I had no such far-reaching plans: my biggest wish was to reunite with Boris from Kiev whom I met in the Crimea.  Four times a week, Nina and I walked and talked, trying to glimpse into the future – not the bright future that glared from the front page of Pravda but the real life lurking ahead of us, as impenetrable as a winter night in Leningrad.  So isn’t it ironic, I ask Alan, that she is still in Leningrad, huddling in one room with her husband and her son, and I’m the one molding my past into a job resume on the other side of the Atlantic?

It was the last day of the semester; I had thirty students to advise and register.  When I reached the hospital around 3 in the afternoon, my mother was just being admitted to the cardio unit.  “Congestive heart failure and probably a touch of pneumonia,” said Dr. Sharma, a soft-spoken woman in her 30s, whose badge identified her as a hospitalist.

My mother smiled when she saw me, relieved.  She looked small in the middle of the tangle of tubes, her gnarled fingers over the cover, like a small bird’s claws.  When did this all happen?  Did I miss the obvious signs of illness, the inevitable cues of aging?  Did I ignore her complaints of dizziness, her frequent refrain that her legs refused to walk?  Or was the deterioration so gradual, so insidiously slow that I simply did not notice it, like you don’t notice a rotting tooth until one day the pain stabs through your gum and the dentist tells you she has to pull the tooth because it is too late to save it.

Or maybe it was much more simple and ordinary.  I lived my life – teaching ESL classes, making soups, checking my daughter’s homework, walking the dog – a life where my mother, living downstairs in the basement apartment of my house, was nothing but a parenthesis.  In the morning I heard a vent go on in her bathroom; in the afternoon I heard a knife drumming on the cutting board as she chopped vegetables for salad.  Her Russian TV programs used to boom all the way up to my kitchen, until we bought her a pair of headphones.  Then I barely heard her at all.  As years passed, I talked to her less and less frequently.  Back in Leningrad, I used to have heated arguments with my mother, needing to defend my ground; here, with our roles reversed – with her living with me and not the other way around – I no longer had to assert myself.  In essence, I stopped talking to her about anything but the most trivial things: dinners, television news, birthday cards from our Russian family.

I come back home from the hospital and go down to the basement where a packed suitcase is still sitting on her bed.  What needs to happen to push us out of the rut, to break through our apathy?  What is the final crisis that makes people take to the streets to protest as they recently did in Moscow?  My mother, a mirror image of my far-away Motherland, makes me wonder if it is at all possible to slow down in order to notice important little things, if we are capable of gaining even a shred of insight into the fragility and impermanence of life.

Russians shamed me in their comments. My Motherland gave me a happy childhood and a good education, and now, by writing this essay, I’ve betrayed my country all over again.  This made me think of my Leningrad University Dean, the Communist leader of the University party cell, who used the same words to admonish me for marrying an American back in 1980.  One correspondent offered this explanation: “They are simply writhing at the idea that Russia is rising, and the U.S., in front of the entire world, is turning into shit.”  Another comment suggested that Putin’s lying isn’t really lying.  It is exactly the same as George W. Bush clearing underbrush at his Texas ranch.

As much as I detest watching George W. Bush, I have to say that it is not exactly the same.  U.S. journalists who uncover illegal actions by the government publish articles and books that unravel government officials’ careers.  Russian reporters who expose state corruption and fraud get harassed and murdered.

In their indignation, my former compatriots failed to see that my essay is not about Putin’s staged athletic feats.  It is about the sad state of democracy in Russia.  It is about President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin swapping posts in March in what will be called an election.  It is about soon-to-be-President-all-over-again-Putin’s fundamental lie, which seems to be condoned by many Russians and which is much more dangerous than “finding” an ancient jug in 6 feet of water.

Please check out my essay in the New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/from-russia-with-lies.html

After peering into the windows of several stores on a shopping street near the university, I finally see sneakers displayed on the wall in orderly rows.  The store is small, and a man behind the counter looks bored.  He springs into action when I ask him for sneakers, size seven and a half, vanishing into the back of the store, then reappearing with the pair I’ve selected.  He is cheerful and enthusiastic, his balding head gleaming under the neon light.  I don’t know why I chose sneakers with white and green stripes made of what looks like suede; maybe they reminded me of the shoes I once glimpsed in a magazine called England left open on my boss’s desk at the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace.

The salesman points to a stool for me to sit and kneels, a sneaker in his palm like an offering.  Please, I plead silently, don’t try to put these shoes on my feet.  I’m not ready for this, having just arrived from a land that had no shoes at all.  Twenty-four years of nothing have warped me, and now I’m stupefied by all these choices, all this enthusiasm and kneeling.

The man takes hold of my foot and slides on the shoe.

I walk around the store, supple suede enveloping my feet.

“They look great!” exclaims the man, watching me turn in front of a store mirror.

I think so, too, but how do I ask him about the price?  When do customers ask salespeople here how much a product costs?  Should I have asked before he knelt in front of me, thus possibly preventing all this cheerful prancing around?

As soon as I take off the white and green sneakers, the man scoops them up and puts them back in the box.  “Terrific,” he cries out, another word I don’t know.  “So we’re all set here,” he says and heads toward the cash register.

I can no longer delay the agony.  “How much are they?” I ask.

He looks at the box label.  “Forty-four ninety-five.”

I open my Russian wallet, not big enough for dollar bills, and examine its contents.  One twenty, three fives, and a couple of singles.  I pour the bills onto the counter where the man is already writing out a receipt.  “This is all I have,” I force myself to utter.

The man stops writing and looks at me as if I’ve suddenly turned into Grishka, a drunk with a battered face who used to sleep under my Leningrad courtyard archway.  He picks up the bills and counts them, already knowing that it is eight dollars less than the amount on the box.  There is annoyance in his eyes, but also suspicion.

“Don’t you have a credit card?” he asks curtly.

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“Visa?” he says and peers from above his glasses.

“I have a visa,” I assure him.  “I am a resident alien,” I say and pull out my green card.

The man throws up his hands in frustration, probably lamenting the moment he kneeled before me, his balding head glistening with drops of sweat.  I feel guilty for entering this place, for sauntering before a mirror in sneakers I couldn’t afford.

“Take them,” sputters the man, nodding toward the box.  “And go,” he adds and waves me out of his store.

The Festival has attracted stellar talent, which seems so plentiful in Ireland.  Every reader and workshop leader has so many gifts that anyone born elsewhere feels instantly inferior.  Pauline McLynn, who has appeared in numerous film, television and stage roles, has also written several novels.  Peter Sheridan, a writer and playwright, is also an actor and director, whose short film, The Breakfast, won several European awards.  Conor O’Clery, a reporter for the Irish Times for over 30 years, is the author of several books and was Journalist of the Year in Ireland twice.  They read from Joyce and Beckett and their own many books, their versatile talents making me feel tiny among them.

The Festival’s extraordinary program was put together by Denyse Woods, herself the author of five novels.  For the seven days of the Festival, she rushed and directed and forgot to eat meals, crunching on chips at midnight when entertaining yet another evening speaker at a pub.  Denyse brought together a constellation of names whom we should know better on this side of the pond: Hisham Matar, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Gillian Slovo, President of English PEN and the author of twelve novels and a best-selling memoir; David Mitchell, the recipient of every possible prize, it seems, although he looks way too young for so many awards; Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse; Lynn Truss, who wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves; Michael Holroyd, an outstanding memoirist and biographer who is also president of the Royal Society of Literature, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, “one of the truly mythical heroes of travel writing,” according to the Irish Times – the names that don’t even begin to paint the whole picture of the artistic heft of this festival.  And, of course, there is Jeremy Irons, or rather, his castle, which dominates the southwestern bay coast: a tall tower painted peach (restored to its original color) erected in the Middle Ages, surrounded by a stone wall with a massive gate.

On the day of our departure, the clouds parted and the sun shone through the waters of the bay, making them turquoise, illuminating the seaweed on the bottom several meters deep.  We drove to Cork airport past herds of milk cows and the wooly balls of unfleeced sheep, past tiny towns with row houses painted in red, purple and yellow, dominated by churches and pubs.  It started to drizzle, the typical soft Irish rain that fell several times every day – a good sign for a departure, as if someone above were sad that we were leaving.