Someone I hadn’t seen in forty years recognized me the other afternoon at the Strand Book Store. In middle and high school back in Leningrad, he had been one of my closest friends. He was buying a coffee-table album of New York pictures (something along the lines of “To See New York and Die”; for his mother-in-law, he told me, winking), and I’d stopped by on my way to a friend’s house in the neighborhood.
A burly, broad-shouldered, handsome man of vaguely Levantine aspect—a cross, of sorts, between Hitchcock and … oh well, those crosses and parallels tend to make nothing more vivid; a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Angelina Jolie: how’s that?—he hailed me good-naturedly, in Russian, as I was passing by the cash register: “M! M! Is that you? … Is Mishka already up north?”
That was an old running high-school joke between us. “Mishka up north” had been one of the most popular brands of chocolate bar in the Soviet Union. Its wrapper pictured a dignified-looking polar bear strolling along a massive floe of Arctic ice. Mishka is the common loving diminutive for any kind of bear, in Russian—be it black or polar. Mishka, of course, is also the diminutive, highly irreverent, and child-like form of Misha, which itself is the diminutive of Mikhail, which is my name. For someone to be “up north,” in the general Soviet parlance, meant his having been arrested and sent off to one of the gulag destinations for his political activities—or, more likely and pertinently, the looseness of his lips, the pointless frivolity of his speeches.
“D.D.!” I exclaimed back (not his real initials, but close enough), already quite certain it was indeed him; recognizing him even despite my general propensity for recognizing those from my distant past whom I’d never met before. “Is that you? What a strange meeting! But how did you know it was me? I cannot believe… Don’t tell me I haven’t changed beyond any, you know, possibility of recognition since high school!”
“Oh, you most definitely have,” he assured me with a smile. “It’s just that I saw a picture of you in a newspaper back home, maybe five or six years ago. Plus, I’m on Facebook, technically speaking, although I hardly ever am there…. It’s true, though: there’s very little in the face you have today from the one you used to have back then…. Sorry if that sounds upsetting to you, maybe…”
“Oh no,” I said, waving. “That’s how I tend to think of myself, in any event, at present: being on my second, wholly separate life. You know, it’s like that old joke about the historical museum in Genoa having on exhibit two skulls that used to belong to Christopher Colombus: one as a child, the other as a grown man. In every joke … there’s a kernel of joke, as the saying has it.”
He paid for the book for his mother-in-law, and we moved away from the cash register and started talking animatedly, though he only had a few minutes (he was running back to his hotel to collect his wife and elder daughter to head to the airport and home).
He told me the abbreviated story of his life. After twenty years of being a merchant marine and having circumnavigated the world many times over, he was now living in Yekaterinburg. “It’s a long story,” he said in response to the puzzled look I gave him. “My wife’s from there, her father—a mini-oligarch of sorts, locally, and he offered to invest in the tour agency I was starting then, fifteen years ago, if I relocated there, and so on. So I thought, Why not? St. Petersburg of course is great, but Yekaterinburg has its certain advantages. It’s a nice enough city. Just very far away from everything, to be sure. But—them’s the breaks. You can’t always want what you get, you know.”
We reminisced. Some of the key episodes from our shared childhood and adolescence neither of us could recall, as though they’d never happened—or rather, as though we’d never lived through those moments of our own lives. Memory either confirms or refutes the very fact of our own existence.
He couldn’t recall, for instance, that I once hurled an ethnic slur at him—his family has North Caucuses origins—during one of the heated moments in an intramural soccer game, after he’d mowed me down brutally from behind. (Both of us were the stars of our school soccer team, which admittedly is not saying much.) This was one of the most shameful episodes of my youth, and I had been rehashing it in my mind for a long time. But he didn’t seem to remember it—and not the vehemence, either, with which he’d rushed at me, with a piece of stone in his hand, blind rage distorting his genial features. He seemed to have blocked it out.
I, in turn, could not remember having on another occasion burned my lips almost clear off my face after biting off a chunk of small red pepper laying around the kitchen in his apartment, despite his jocose earlier warning not to touch it—that their native cuisine was way too hot for the uninitiated. Subsequently I’d spent, according to him, a good half-hour in a delirious state, with my face stuck under the stream of cold tap water in his kitchen, and my lips were swollen something awful, to the point of my not being able to say a single word for hours afterwards.
Well, but some things we did remember jointly, of course. The girls we had crushes on, the soccer games of special import, the pranks we pulled on the teachers…
We looked at each other with a mix of tenderness and befuddlement, moist-eyed. It was clear to both of us, after the five or ten minutes of our hasty conversation, that this chance meeting was the last time we ever were going to see each other. I would never find myself in Yekaterinburg, and he wouldn’t be returning to New York or coming to Montreal. We wouldn’t have seen each other, either, had he not recognized me a few minutes ago in this unlikely locale, in the middle of a bustling New York bookstore.
But that was O.K. Knowing we would never see each other again—it was O.K. When you’re young, you think there’ll be plenty of time for everything in your life: counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world, becoming greater than Jesus and Lenin and Lomonosov and Pushkin and Einstein all rolled into one, reuniting at some point with everyone you’ve met once in your life, befriending every man, falling in love with every woman… Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness. Never—well, so be it. Quoth the raven: oh well, them’s the breaks. Get used to it. Get over it. Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere; but that didn’t happen—and well, so be it. There won’t be, in the end of your life, a joyous, transcendentally meaningful regathering of everyone you’ve ever met on your path, with stories shared and wine flowing and laughter lilting and happiness abounding and life never-ending—well, so be it.
“Well, so—how was it, in all?” I asked him, just as we were about to part ways and give one another an awkward farewell hug.
He understood me. “Life, you mean?”
“Yeah, you know… life,” I said, with embarrassed chuckling. “What did you think of it?”
“It was O.K. Good. Better than one might have expected,” he said, pensively. “I can’t complain. How was it for you?”
“Interesting,” I said. “Yeah, definitely. Pretty interesting. I wouldn’t know what else to say about it. I, too, can’t complain—and it would be pointless to complain, too, because … well, who or what would one complain to? It was interesting.”
Mikhail Iossel, the founder and executive director of the Summer Literary Seminars International programs and a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of “Every Hunter Wants to Know,” a collection of stories.
Illustration by Jing Wei.
