The Flaming Hair of Fate
“MAYBE IT’S YOUR CHOICE; MAYBE IT’S YOUR FATE.”
My clock radio alarm went off, blaring the conclusion to an advertisement. A gray glow radiated through the bedroom curtain. Half-awake but still dizzy from insomnia’s fatigue, I punched the radio off, pawed for my glasses on the bedside table, and hooked them over my ears.
Beyond the bedroom curtain was a wall of snow.
The snow was thick even in the upper branches of the trees, and it seemed as if those trees were in a forest, not in a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings. Until now, my third-floor apartment had been an oasis from the hugger-mugger passive-aggressive tussles of Moscow’s streets and subways. I would come back from doing the simplest things—buying a train ticket or finding a place to translate some poems at Pushkin Square—feeling like I’d been carrying a corpse on my back and stones in my mouth but hadn’t known it until taking off my shoes at the door, slipping on the tapochki, and shuffling into the kitchen, still woozy, but cozy at last.
Yet, looking out at the snowfall, I suddenly felt as if I were drowning at the bottom of a well.
There were so many reasons to feel weighed down by unseen forces in Russia. I was 22. It was 1993, and Russia was writhing under hyperinflation and the transition to post-Soviet reality. New Year’s Day had just passed, but it felt very much like the old year, and I felt no stronger for having survived my first Christmas holiday away from home, away from America. Instead, I felt more confused than ever. It didn’t help that I was being strong-armed again by my teacher, a thin-limbed, mustached Russian poet eleven years my senior.
The day before, Dima, whose poems counseled readers on the virtues of humility and weakness in the face of God and fate, had been two hours late to our meeting at the empty apartment we’d come to call the Den of the Voice. I took his lateness like a Russian. Which is to say, I leaned against the wall of the dimly lit stairwell and
