IRINA
I don’t know Irina well. She was a student of mine at Warren Wilson College, I forget in which class, maybe 30 years ago, and I recently reconnected with her.
Irina grew up in Russia where both of her parents were doctors, now retired, who live in Moscow. I think as a high school exchange student she came to North Carolina and that led to her being told about Warren Wilson College here in Western North Carolina. At the end of her time here I remember having a discussion with her about what she would do after college and she indicated that she would like to stay in the United States a little longer, but that the only way she could do this legally was to marry an American. There seemed little prospect of her doing that at that time. So she went back to Russia and taught English in a language school. She also managed to travel during vacations to India and other places. She once wrote to me asking me about why I felt so alive in India while she felt depressed at the poverty.
I guess that I reconnected with her as everyone does through Facebook. When the war in Ukraine began I wrote to ask her if her parents were all right. She wrote back that she had an aunt in Ukraine and had often gone to Ukraine during summer vacations to stay with her grandparents who lived there. Her aunt was not affected by the fighting and her parents were all right.
After visiting Riga, Latvia and Tallin, Estonia this spring I thought of her again because I was guessing that the beautiful cities and the countryside of these two countries were very similar to the landscape of Ukraine that was now being devastated. She wrote back and said that her aunt and parents were all right but that the war was “soul crushing” for her and that no one she knows in Russia supports the war. But she also pointed out that the EU and USA were in some ways complicit to causing the war and asked what the USA would do if Mexico were to base Russian troops on our southern border. Little Cuba seems to be enough of a threat to us.
But at this point I realized that I was caught in this complicity right now, since I support Ukraine and think that Russia is at fault (which it is) and the USA is blameless (which I realize it isn’t). What I realize is that when Ukrainian soldiers are killed, I think of them as being hero’s, but when there are reports of bodies of Russian soldiers, I think they deserve it. Ukrainians are the good guys and Russians the bad guys.
And then I realize that many of the Russians fighting in Ukraine have little idea what the war is about, that many of them have vague ideas that they are being patriotic but not sure how.
For two years I was in the US Army on the border of the USSR in Germany. If some accident had triggered a war we would have been trying to kill Russians and they us. We GI’s were clueless and so were the Russians facing us. Most of my medical battalion even despised the Germans, the Krauts, whom we were defending. We had families that loved us and so did all the Russian soldiers on the other side.
And of course I met my German wife, Kathe, while in Germany. I had been a child in Hartford, Connecticut, during WW2. As kids we sang a WW1 song, “Kaiser Bill went up the hill to take a look at France, Kaiser Bill came down the hill with bullets in his pants.” As kids we stole tomatoes from victory gardens and were sent to the grocery store with ration stamps to buy meat. We hated the Germans but were just clueless kids.
And then when my troopship first arrived in Bremerhaven years later and I saw the beautiful German orange roofed villages from the train and when I was able to walk around Aschaffenburg where I spent two years in a medical battalion, I discovered how civilized the Germans were compared to the men in my battalion. I came to delight in Germany and then when I met Kathe and her wonderful family and came to know her friends and relatives it slowly dawned on me that these were the people I had blindly hated so much as a child. These were people who had had no choice but to join the German army and become our enemies.
After the war American distrust and hatred shifted from the Germans and the Japanese to the Russians. I got to know Irina after the Cold War ended in 1989, but the old prejudice was still there until I got to know her. Later when American hatred shifted to the Vietnamese I wasn’t quite so naive and realized that the Vietnamese were patriots fighting for their own freedom from colonialism, while we Americans were caught in the domino theory of a communist threat.
So now, when reminded by Irina that America is also complicit, I am also reminded of how the shifting tides of nationalism made the Russians our enemies, then our friends, then our enemies again. But this blind prejudice avoids facing the very personal quandary that Irena is caught in. She married Jason Keller, an American, and is an American living with two children in North Carolina. Her parents are in Moscow unable to renew an American visa to visit their grandchildren, her aunt is in Ukraine where Irena visited her grandparents as a child.
Almost everyone in this story, caught in the tides of nationalism, is a good person with a loving and supporting family. The pain really is as Irina says, “soul crushing,” with seemingly no way out. But that doesn’t excuse us from seeing both the complexity and the madness of what is going on from all sides.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 