September 3, 2004: I arrive home at around 4:00 p.m. The eighth floor apartment is structurally identical to every other apartment in this Soviet building and structurally identical to several other buildings that line the grimy road outside. Each apartment comprises four rooms of equal size, with the kitchen subdivided into three smaller rooms, including one for the shower and one for the toilet. The apartment I share with my host family had a distinct feature-the toilet room has a curiously revealing hole cut from its lower right corner. It's not so pleasant when the dining table is merely five feet away.
I enter the kitchen and immediately notice that something is different from usual, perhaps a bit different from what I might find in the other thousand apartments that line Prospect Kima. There is a ragged sheet of beige cloth draped over the television.
A minute passes, maybe less, and Lidya Borisovna, my host mother, silently enters the room. After greeting her I pause, cycling through my incomplete vocabulary of Russian words, scanning the pages of my textbooks for the word meaning "to turn on." Once I finally find it, I stutter, "Why is the television not on?"
"Broken," she declares.
"That's a pity," I dare to say, hoping it didn't sound naive or sarcastic or anything but sympathetic. "Maybe the radio? Could we listen to the news that way?"
"No. ... No. ... Not broken. I simply don't understand. Why are they shooting-and at children? Altogether cannot understand!"
I sit silently, unsure if I should ask questions and unsure if I understand what she actually said. She is at the sink-I think she is staring down the drain. I wish I could follow her thoughts, perhaps down through the plumbing and out of this terribly awkward situation.
But unexpectedly she moves. Soon the cloth is gone and on the television there is a desolate road lined by two rows of buildings, a car far in the distance to the left and a taller building at the end, maybe a quarter of a mile away. But then there is a pop, and another, another ... little sounds too quiet to convey meaning.
Eventually there are two figures emerging from a building down the road, and then a third. One of the three becomes an older man, maybe thirty-five years old, and the second becomes a very young boy of seven or eight. There are several pops and the little boy slips up for a second. The man turns back and grabs him, carries him, yelling words incomprehensible to me, and they run beyond the cameramen. A girl remains, trailing them, quite tall, but soon she shrinks, slower, now on the street. ... A pop and that is it.
Guttural moans now echo the pops on TV, but these sounds seem closer, more terrifying. They are coming from Lidya Borisovna, now seated and staring out the window. Like something from Dostoevsky, I think at first. She looks as if her soul is being wrenched out of her through her throat. But then I feel sick-no, this is not Dostoevsky. This is not some story. How dare I cheapen this situation like that?
When the road disappears there are several wounded children, some worse off than I could ever describe. Over their cries a reporter speaks at a speed ten times faster than I can follow. I excuse myself from the table.
It is now February 12, 2005, 6:00 p.m. I am back at Amherst and this is the first time I have allowed myself to recall many of these details. In fact, the other Americans in my program never uttered their responses, either-even when we received warning letters from the Consulate, or when we walked down the street past ranks of soldiers, marching in formation, on the lookout for things out of place. Maybe we were afraid of it, afraid of stepping on toes, afraid of saying or thinking anything we did not wholly understand. Or maybe we were afraid of something darker, more personal, and we were afraid to be afraid. So we merely distanced ourselves, spent four months observing a foreign country without ever really immersing ourselves in it, and now we are back.
Can I be sure, that I was ever really there?
Over and over I hear people say, "What if this happened in America?" or "What if these were my children?" and I become angry-how could these Americans pretend to know anything? I was there and I comprehend nothing, not the stories and numbers that were shared on CNN and FOX News, or even half of the half-truths that were broadcast in Russia.
There is just this one afternoon in the kitchen, a letter from the Consulate, and a visible state of alert on the streets.
I worry that the answer to my question is "no." I was somewhere else those four months.