Megan Buskey The Distance Between Then and Now
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s a child in the 1980s, I was dimly aware that I had family in the Soviet Union. My mother was foreign, I knew — there was her name, Nazha; her accent, which warmed and rounded her speech; her prominent eyes, nose, and lips, which I saw echoed in the Slavic figure skaters I watched on TV. As we lounged around my grandmother’s living room in a Ukrainian neighbourhood in Cleveland, waiting for her to finish frying pierogies, I sometimes studied her framed photos of this family, noting with puzzlement my relatives’ stern, unsmiling faces and the drapes that hung behind them, the colours too dark. From these relatives, we got only photos and the occasional letter, read by a censor; no one in Ukraine had phones, my mother said. She meant this as an explanation but it only befuddled me further, for what kind of place didn’t have phones? As I grew older, I turned into a person who was drawn to mystery for its possibility of novelty, for its promise of a test. To the surprise of my family, as a college student, I made plans to enrol in a Ukrainian language course in Lviv, a city close to the village where my grandparents had met and married. I got tests in droves. Ukraine in 2003 had a nightmarish quality. Lviv’s centre was the epitome of genteel Eastern Europe, with its wrought-iron railings and cobblestone streets, but its outskirts were dominated by Soviet prefab apartment buildings. After the sun set, the roads were dark because there was no money to turn the street lamps on at night. Water was only available for three hours in the morning and three in the evening, and everyone kept gigantic tubs in reserve in their apartments in the likely event that the utilities failed
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