A Country You Can Leave


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Copyright Notice
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Part I: Lessons in Russian Literature
 
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Part II: Monuments to a Scholarly Error
 
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Part III: БЕДНЫЕ ЛЮДИ, Or Who Can Be Happy and Free in America?
 
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Part IV: Explanatory Dictionary of Night
 
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Acknowledgments
 A Note About the Author
 Newsletter Sign-up
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Start of content
 Acknowledgments
 Contents
 Copyright
 
 
 
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 iv
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Begin Reading
 Table of Contents
 A Note About the Author
 Copyright Page
 
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 The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
 
 
 For
 JAH, EAH, and LAH,
 my lovely disruptors,
 and for
 Lira, who once knew a girl named Lara
 
 
 I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
 —JOSEPH BRODSKY, Conversations
 
 
 This is as much as I ever told you and yet you are not here.
 
 
 
 
 
 PART I
 LESSONS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE
 
 
 
 Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death.
 —DEBORAH LEVY, Things I Don’t Want to Know
 
 
 
 
 1
 
 
 There is no release from life’s turmoil, so put your back into it.
 
 In a gulch somewhere between the San Jacinto and Santa Anas, my mother, Yevgenia, slows the car at the sign welcoming us to the dubiously named Oasis Mobile Estates. She cuts the engine behind the property manager’s battered truck and goes about the task of cleaning herself up. She pulls a rubber band out of her stiff, dyed-black hair. She scrunches it back to life. Tweezers in hand, she yanks the rearview mirror down to brutalize her already emaciated eyebrows. When she smell-checks her armpits, I know there is a man inside.
 “Don’t I get a vote?” I ask, watching Yevgenia resuscitate her breasts by scooping them up in her bra. Our drive from Nevada to California has been nonstop. For miles, nothing but hot dust, windswept trash, and nameless mountains closing in on our resentments.
 My mother ignores me. Instead, she looks through the bug-splattered windshield, her eyes turned to the heaven she doesn’t believe in. She blows hard through her mouth. Traces of old beer and tobacco stir in the narrow space between us.
 “People who cast votes decide nothing. People who count votes decide everything.” Pushing the car door open with her shoulder, she says, “Stalin. Look it up.”
 “Hey,” I call out as she heads to the manager’s trailer, her red tank top plastered to her back with sweat. “Use a condom.”
 There’s a brief pause in her step. Her body tenses. Then I hear it. The source of what I yearned for most in childhood, her husky laugh, etched by decades of chain-smoking.
 Waiting for her to score whatever it is she thinks she’ll get from a place like this, I crane my neck to survey the Oasis Mobile Estates. Nestled in shriveled patches of yellow desert grass wedged between boulders heavily scarred by acid rain, this “oasis” is a decrepit collection of rusted metal boxes lined up along small tributaries of roughly hewed roads. The only sign that I’m in the year 2000 is a flat-roofed Circle K squatting a half mile outside the trailer park. Fiery air blasts through the open