Alexei leaned back. He had never known this side of his father. To him, Nikolai had been a silent man who watched snow fall and drank tea without sugar. A man who fled the USSR in '79 and never once looked back. Or so Alexei thought.
"Alexei — the road is not where you are from. It is where you are going. I am sorry I never taught you that. I was too busy running."
The entry was dated December 17, 1994.
"The road to Russia is not a map. It is a wound that heals backward." Doroga V Rossiyu 1 Pdf 161
Then he began to write. Not about escape. About return. About the verb идти — to go on foot, slowly, without a map.
Alexei stared at the screen. Outside his window in Chicago, a grey sleet fell — the kind his father used to call "Russian snow." He opened a new document. He typed:
He clicked it. Page 161 of 162.
Page 1 of ?
Below that, a single checkbox, as if from an exercise:
Nikolai wrote about a woman named Irina. She had been his student in a cramped basement classroom in Brighton Beach. Every Tuesday, she would arrive early, clutching a tattered copy of Pushkin. She was learning Russian not for a job or a visa, but to read her grandmother’s letters—letters she’d found in a shoebox after the old woman died in Minsk. Alexei leaned back
It wasn't a textbook, despite the dry title. It was a diary. His father, Nikolai, had written it in the cramped margins of a Russian language workbook he'd used while teaching immigrants in the 1990s. Page 161 was nearly the end.
He scrolled to page 162. The final page.
☐
"Irina cried today," the entry read. "Not because she couldn't conjugate the verb 'to go' (идти/ехать). She cried because she realized she had been going the wrong direction her whole life. She left Russia at seven. Now, at forty-three, she wants to go back. But the road is gone. The villages have new names. The trains don't stop at the old stations. So she learns the language instead. She builds the road inside her throat."