On
Monday morning – December 26th – my sister and I took the train from Gothenburg
to Stockholm to visit our father. [This is my improvised ‘really I live in
California, now I’m only visiting’ outfit; I bought the boots last winter in
Sweden – which required something to resist 20 below – and the coat my mother
borrowed me.]
This absolutely
lovely dog is one of the splendid people with whom my father cohabitates in the
capital.
Our
king was also home.
“Remember, everything you do,
you do for God.
Everything God does, He does
for you.”
[Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love]
Late last night – December 28th – my
sister and I returned to Gothenburg after visiting our father in Stockholm.
Today – December 29th – I woke up with a severe sensation of being
geniuinely tired of myself. Tonight I sit with my packed bag for Budapest listening
to the last song that the Hungarian musician A. recorded for me [“Heart of
Stone”] the day before Christmas two years ago; three weeks after he said he
loved me and two weeks after he took it back. It’s a good song. He’s got
talent. One time this past summer, I accidentially bumped into this Australian
man who lived in the same building where I lived at the time and when I
explained my accent as being due to me being Swedish, he looked disgusted – as if
this piece of innocent information made him physically ill. I wondered why. “I
had a bad experience with a Swedish girl,” he said and soon removed himself
from my pleasant company. I saw him a couple of more times and each time he turned
away and frowned as if Swedish women carried some kind of terrible infectious disease
on their bodies for which he had not yet found any cure. I don’t know. All I
know is what I tried to tell him that same night and what I’m still saying to
everyone who asks [but nobody does]: “I had a bad experience with a Hungarian
man once and I would still like to visit Budapest one day.” That proverbial
‘one day’ will be tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’ll fly there to visit an exquisite
comrade in arms, my fellow Inconvenient Woman, the great scholar and even
greater friend [though that’s a matter of from where you’re looking and what
you’re looking for] who made my nickname Жоня stick – the girl with the initial K. who entered
my life as one of my first students of Swedish at Ural State University in the
fall of 2007. Back then I was twenty-two and she was eighteen and I think that
if anyone would’ve told us four years ago: “You two will become the best of
friends and talk for hours and days and months and years but never come to any concrete
or coherent conclusion but constantly feel that the creative dialogue must go
on across continents and through various time zones because one of you will get
into grad school in California and the other do her Master’s in gender studies
in Budapest”; if someone would’ve have told us that back when, I think we both
would’ve laughed. I would’ve thought that was crazy talk because at the time I
was thinking that all I was going to do was to marry my more handsome half M.,
have his babies, and live the rest of my life standing barefoot with a kid on
my hip somewhere in a kitchen in provincial Russia… Thankfully, a fateful
invitation to be a bridesmaid at another friend’s wedding in California the
next year opened up new, broader and wider horizons and as a result I didn’t become
someone’s wife.
To have friends is a curious thing; you don’t
really know who mean something in your life until you meet another friend whom you
haven’t seen in a while and you want to tell this person something about your
life as of late and you catch yourself constantly bringing all these other
fascinating people into your stories… While I was visiting my father in
Stockholm, I met up with my undergraduate advisor M. [also known on the blog as
‘my Swedish professor’] for lunch. After everything that I’ve been through
since the last time I saw him – he invited me for dinner on his balcony when I
came back from Russia in July – it was a familiar experience of pure comfort to
sit down and talk to him for a couple of hours. We discussed everything. He
listened to all of my wondering thoughts, considered all of my different plans
– one of my ‘three options’ was to apply to the diplomacy trainee program with
the Swedish government – but shook his head in disapproval and concluded
sternly: “But you need to be a scholar.” Of all the people who have known me before
and who know me now, he has always been the best at knowing what is best for me. He never tells me what to do; instead, he listens to all
of my chaotic thoughts and unconventional ideas and extraordinary plans until I
hear my own words and realize what I want to do myself. While recounting to him my latest struggles in Berkeley,
all of these names of people kept popping up among my words – Critical
Companion, Mrs S, and Boy-C – and when he asked me what kind of exciting research
these distinguished graduate students do, I found I couldn’t really tell him
exactly even though I have read their work and talked to them for hours for
months about everything... But I could tell him what kind of wonderful people
they are at heart and why I appreciate their friendship and all the ways in
which they’ve showed me how to be a better human being since I met them – and
perhaps also a better scholar. While I told him about the delightful friends I’ve
made in California, I discovered that they
are my life there, and nothing else. The rest isn’t my life; the rest is my
job. Then I came upon another discovery – it occured to me that also M. numbers
among my best friends.
Perhaps I woke up tired of myself today because
I realized in my conversation with M. yesterday that I would’ve wanted to take
this rare opportunity of time spent with him to talk about bigger things, more
important thoughts – but I found myself unable to do so because for the past months
I haven’t really thought too much about things that aren’t immediately concerned
with my life… Instead we talked about me. In a way we needed to talk about me considering
what has been going on and what is going on but in another way it made me miss
how it was before when he was my professor and I was his student and we weren’t
friends yet and we would talk for hours and hours about Russian literature and
he would tell me everything he knew in several sittings and I would walk home
afterward in the dark evenings trying to memorize every word he had said. I
made such a habit of memorizing all of his words that I instantly know now if
he’s about to repeat a factoid; but like me he is not much for repetition and
has enough stories to keep me listening and memorizing for many years to come. But
yesterday we talked about me; he talked about my folklore paper and about my
articles in Göteborgs-Posten and because he has always been my biggest fan he
didn’t have anything negative to say about any of them. I wish I could have had
something new, something fresh to tell him not from my life but from my brain.
But for the past months there hasn’t been enough calm space to move around with
new and fresh ideas. There haven’t been any margins in my intellectual life for
a long time now.
M. rejected all of my ‘three options’ by elucidating
how each of them would unfold in my real life – and now I’m relieved that I can
count on him for such a reality check. That’s what friends are for: that
crucial occasional reality check. I’m not going to leave Berkeley during 2012,
unless specifically told by someone else to do so.
2012 already holds a great change in my life. I
don’t know when that proverbial ‘one day’ will come to be; all I know is that
there is no alternative. I do believe in God, but right now I can’t believe in
a miracle. Right now, the world needs to be a world without miracle – for the
process of mourning has already begun. In Russia, celebrating New Year’s Eve is
a big thing. It is much bigger than in most other countries and cultures I have
come across. In Russia, I was told that you have to be very careful with how
you welcome the New Year because this will come to be reflected in the rest of
the year. Russians would therefore never be alone on New Year’s Eve. My last
year in Russia, I didn’t celebrate New Year in Russia and that’s how I knew I
wasn’t going to live the rest of the year there [until that time, I used to
always be in Russia for New Year]. For the past two years, I’ve celebrated with
my cousins and my sister. This year, I will be with a close friend when 2012
arrives. I think that will be good. Family is priceless, but what’s nice about
friends is that you get to pick them yourself.
But true friendship happens only when they pick
you too.
…writes the girl who will wear one half of a
friendship heart that she got from another friend for Christmas all through
2012. When I was a kid I used to dream of sharing such a friendship heart with a
close friend but nobody liked me enough to do that. Thus, when I opened that
gift on Christmas morning in church, I understood that old dreams come true
when you least expect it.
