The Russian Man Lights His Pipe

 War and Peace 

for Max

I am not interested in War and Peace, the epic sweeping drama, my attention is directed toward the Russian man lighting his pipe, his back against the grey exterior wall of the building, as he takes a pull on the pipe the embers ignite, his whiskered cheeks sink in and out like a concertina playing a lively mazurka where 

the great bear dances.

Tolstoy said War and Peace is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” I am not writing a novel or a poem nor history, it is about these people, the Russian man who, after smoking knocks his pipe against the outer wall, the sooty tobacco, dregs from the bowl onto the ground, takes a stroll down the city sidewalk and suddenly greets a stranger at a bus stop. He would never do this in his country, in St. Petersburg, where there people on the street do not greet one another, they go along with eyes on the ground, downcast, absorbed in their own thoughts of bread, rent money, the dire politics, getting into university, getting a job, getting a wife. Life,

I suppose.

The Russian man has a wife, a painter whose whimsical-puckish characters come alive on paper, How do you do it? We gather around as she shows us how she starts with the abstract, a balloon dipped into watercolors and then with her brush, graphite goes from there, to create. She does all this in her own language, there are no shared words, only experience. She is a mom, a wife, yes, of course, a daughter-in-law who spends the winter months in a quiet Russian village taking care of her elderly father-in-law. One time driving out to the road she passes in the early dusky dawn where the mist hangs purple and lavender on the hills, a wolf, a relic of fear, and an anxiety enters her body, that the past is not so long ago, where those fleeing danger only run into another kind of tragedy, that life is a series of hardships, of interminable winters, of

wolves at the door.

Both she and her Russian husband forage for mushrooms in the forest, later they will dry them over the wood-burning stove in the small farmhouse kitchen they share with his old father and their teenage son.

Kuzya, the son, is a string bean of a boy. His blue eyes gazing out upon the landscape. Pinterest or the Russian equivalent, pictures of possibilities, populate his horizon. He may go to the university for shipbuilding, become an engineer, but in the back of his mind is more. He will go to America, and if he learns English, enough, pursue his studies there. It is a pipe dream, much like his father’s pipe, alive and on fire until the flames die out, and it is gone, smoke dispelled into the

thin cold air.

One summer, the summer Kuzya came to Chicago by himself, dropped off by Aleksander, a family acquaintance, after arriving at O’Hare, you wonder: How will this work? He barely speaks at all let alone English or Russian. He is so shy. He dwells in a border land in between language and country between Putin and Trump, and you worry: 

Will he make friends?

On the way back from a walk by the lakefront where at twilight around 9 or 10 o’clock you spy a coyote in the parking lot outside the bait shop, you meet a group walking to the lake to jump off the rocks. Kolya whispers to Kuzya, come with us and takes his hand. His blue eyes light up, much like his father’s pipe, and you say: 

Go along.

The young people stay out most of the night jumping into the icy water, still cold from the harsh winter, and lounge on the cement rocks, uneven boulders, warm from the day’s sun. Perhaps smoking or drinking, a bit of both, doing what youth do in the middle of the night. Until the police or park service patrol and shine a bright light and the kids scatter into bushes, their hearts racing, they and the raccoons disturbed from their serendipity, nocturnal activities, and later they will wander home, to bed,

to sleep for a few hours.

All of us are part of this story, full of War and Peace, caught up in time and circumstances, sagas, and fairy tales. Away from the turmoil of missiles and bombs, buildings on fire, apartment blocks, theaters, the Donbass region, Mariupol, Ukraine of the former the Ukraine of the former Soviet Union, called the USSR, someday to be renamed/redefined once again. These interwoven overlapping stories, our own and together are not a novel or a poem or even history, they represent people seeking asylum, desperate to find peace in the midst of

an unbidden war.