How I Stayed in America (Part 3)

We started dating… It was a freezing February outside. We dated in secret…

Why in secret? Because I was already in a relationship with someone else and therefore… cheated. Why did I do this? Because I was ready to end my relationship, although I did not count on developing anything serious with a nineteen-year-old boy. I was 27, and our age difference didn’t help at all. However, our relationship with Andrei did not evolve according to the laws of “Morality and Ethics in the Soviet Union” textbook. Even though I thought my adultery would end in failure in a couple of months, it instead resulted in two unexpected events for me – pregnancy and marriage at the Khamovniki registry office in Moscow.

About halfway through our romance, my young lover announced that in four months he would have to move to America to play there for the Utah Jazz club. This fact fully confirmed the failure of our joint venture – I was definitely not planning to go to America.

The thing is, back then, America seemed to me, as it did for most Russians, a terrible location. I hated America with every fiber of my soul. I didn’t like their food, their buildings, their fashion (or rather the lack of it) and even their people. Prior, I had been to America three or four times, and it made a disgusting impression on me. Now I contemplate, why? It’s kind of interesting to me why I thought that. Why did something that was once disgusting to  me  suddenly  become  a favorite? This is a question for a whole philosophical “acceleration” with elements of psychoanalysis. I will devote a separate article to this someday.

In the meantime, we were sitting in Starlight on Mayakovskaya, and my beloved drew for me on a napkin a diagram of his house in case he became a dollar millionaire. It was funny. In the center of the bedroom, he decided to place a huge round bed. Also there was a panther on a leash….. I looked into his eyes and could not believe that all this was happening to me. It was surreal. My life has always evolved this way. Any freak show became my reality. I asked, “but why a panther?” He said he liked cats. Looking ahead, I would say that during our seventeen-year    life together, we have never had a round bed. In fact, we didn’t even have a cat. Or a panther. Apparently I won here. Common sense prevailed. But about this, let’s talk a little later.

At the beginning of summer, I went on vacation to Cote d’Azur without my boyfriend. My friends and parents were with me. We were celebrating someone’s birthday. I can’t say that I partied a lot, but the next morning I woke up with severe nausea. I did not leave the bedroom until the evening, and I slept nonstop for the next few days. I slept both day and night, only waking up for a couple of hours to eat. I also watched movies all the time. On the fourth day of this regime, I decided to get up and get a pregnancy test. The two stripes in the round were dim. “I have to fly back to Moscow,” I thought.

My doctor Seryozha Shtyrov, who had saved my life two years earlier, welcomed me with open arms. Before, he performed an operation on me “in an ambulance” due to the rupture of the fallopian tube as a result of an ectopic pregnancy. Serezha, discharging me from the 31st hospital, stated: “You will not be able to have children naturally. If you ever make up your mind, a second operation would be necessary. The second pipe is inoperative. Another ectopic is guaranteed.” With such a diagnosis, I existed for some time, and then began to live. In fact, I  began to lead an active life. So I had absolutely nothing to lose. When starting my adultery, I told my beloved: “There is nothing to fear, we don’t need to use protection.” He obeyed, and was not afraid at all, but simply made love to me in any convenient and inconvenient place.

Let me remind you that he was 19 years old. Our passion was on top of the universe. Amazingly enough, after 17 years, nothing has changed. Andrei has become my reality. To the extent that I can even agree to get  a panther…