Spring Before Summer
'I celebrated my 20th birthday in jail.'
I celebrated my 20th birthday in jail.
An actual, metal-bars-and-police-officers jail, with prostitutes and drug addicts and a guy walking around with a rubber stick, poking it inside cells, saying, “Get the fuck away from the door or I’ll mess you up!”
It was in Sheremetyevo Airport (Moscow’s Heathrow), and I was there with my then-girlfriend, Angelina. The offence? She was under 18, a minor, and we were going to Amsterdam for my birthday. We didn’t have money, so the day before, I sold my grandmother’s golden bracelet—I would never wear that, I wanted to say when she handed it to me, but instead said, “Oh my God, thanks so much,” pondering the nearest pawn shops to my apartment—and used the money to buy Angelina and I two tickets to Amsterdam with a pre-booked hotel on the canals.
When we, blissfully happy and naive, approached the border officer in Sheremetyevo—Russia is a country where you have to “check out” and be checked whether you’re worthy enough to leave—we were told to “wait on the side” while the other passengers happily handed in their passports and were let go en route to Egypt or Turkey or some place like that. Then a guy about my age approached us and said, “Follow me,” which is one thing you never want a police officer—especially in Russia—to tell you.
After a series of questions and answers and waiting, waiting, waiting, WAITING, I realized the root of the problem. Because I was 20 and Angelina was 17, they thought I was trying to smuggle Angelina out of the country and sell her off to prostitution in the cheese-growing plains of Holland. No amount of “It’s just a mistake! We didn’t know we were not supposed to go on holiday without her parents’ permission,” helped.
The Russian police officers are notoriously unsmiling, sad, emotionless men, whose clocks—in the words of one French writer, though which one I don’t remember—stopped going when they turned 14. And now all they do is try to go through the day with the least amount of drama to go back to their tiny apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, drink beer, and watch propaganda and shows about gangsters on TV.
We sat on the uncomfortable wooden bench for four and a half hours until Angelina’s stepfather arrived, vicious, and signed some release documents. Then he left—without ever saying hello or goodbye to me, as if this was all somehow my fault. (Which, I guess, it was.)
As we rode back home in the taxi, I felt awkward and as if I played a bad joke on myself. Just that morning, I was packing my suitcase and thinking about all the weed I’d be smoking by the canals.
And now I was heading back to where I started, which somehow seemed wrong, as if a dream that was too real to be true had ended.
That was exactly seven years ago.
One of the perks of having young parents is that sooner or later, the age loop goes full circle. You enter the age in which you actually remember your parents. The earliest I remember my parents was when they were both 27.
In the winter of 2005, my family and I went for a ski trip to France. A little town in the Alps full of wooden cottages and rich Russians called Val-de-Sier. It was my first time skiing, and I spent three days with an instructor who didn’t seem to speak any language—let alone Russian, which was the only one I knew at that time—and taught me how to ride down the slope, practicing making a “pizza” with my skis going down the tiny slope that other people used to walk up to the nearest après-ski bar. On the fourth day, I got the hang of it, as kids do when they learn anything, and joined my parents on the Real Slopes. That was when I got lost.
I remember thinking, “They must have gone without me on the cable car.” So I made my way to one and sat down, alone, hoping to meet them at the top of another slope. The fresh cold air stung my seven-year-old face. The Alps were beautiful from this vantage point. Suddenly, down below, I spotted a silhouette of my mother, who kept looking around, as if searching for something or someone. Me. Blood rushed to my face. I realized the mistake I had made—they didn’t, in fact, go without me. They were behind me. And now I was on a cable car that went up a different slope, from which there was no way of going back to where they were.
“Mom!!!!” I screamed. “Mom!!!!!”
But all my screams probably did was cause a tiny avalanche somewhere nearby. Screaming in the Alps is like trying to drink all of the ocean’s water.
Once I arrived at the top of the slope, I tried explaining to the three French guys who worked there that I got lost. I knew no words in English or French, so I kept miming and gesturing, like a caveman saying something incoherent, pointing to the slope behind me, saying words like “mom” and “dad” and “hotel.”
They quickly realized what was going on—clearly it wasn’t their first rodeo—and one of the guys pointed to a snowmobile and said, “Go. Hotel.” Then he sat in front of the steering wheel and turned on the engine.
We rode through the slopes like in that French movie, Taxi. Fast, snow flying in all directions, the seven-year-old me clutching his torso from behind, while the driver drove expertly around skiers, signalling for them all to stand aside.
Normally, my mother would write down the address of the hotel on the back of my jacket, as anxious mothers in Russia do, but this time, she didn’t. The good thing was that in Val-de-Sier, there is just one main street where all the hotels are located, so once we got there, my visual memory kicked in, and I quickly found the right building.
“Spasibo,” I said to the driver as he arrived at the right hotel.
He didn’t reply, turned around, and rode back into the slopes.
I entered the hotel, which, four days in, I already knew by heart. Asked the reception for the key. Walked up to the third floor, opened the room I shared with my parents, and sat there, waiting.
I began imagining how my parents must be scared, looking for me all over the Alps. I had no way of communicating with them, but perhaps, I thought, one of them would go back to the hotel.
As I was thinking this, I drifted off to sleep—exhausted by the fear and fast ride—and only woke up some time later to a noise of an opening door.
My twenty-seven-year-old dad walked in, wearing his full ski gear.
“Dad!” I yelled, excited, afraid, and overjoyed.
“You little bastard,” he said, and, because he was young and stupid, he slapped me on the head.
On his thirtieth birthday, my father bought himself a brand new iPhone. It had just come out, created by a chap named Steve Jobs two miles away from where we lived in a little town called Palo Alto. It was a weird-looking rectangular thing, grey, with a black spine.
“It’s the future,” my dad said. We photographed him in front of the Apple Store on University Avenue in Palo Alto. He was wearing his green Stanford T-shirt, holding a white bag with a fruit emblem, and looking young, happy, and very American.
At that time in his life, he had already built two successful businesses—a restaurant and an accounting firm—and had two kids and was now studying for his MBA at Stanford. And he was only three years older than I am now.
Unlike many people, I had no goals or ambitions or ideas about what I should achieve by the time I hit a certain age.
Actually, that’s a lie, because at 19, I remember sitting in a posh restaurant in Moscow, smoking shisha, writing down my entire life plan in the Notes app of my phone.
There were entries such as, “Become a millionaire by 30.” And, “Become a billionaire by 40.” And then, “Teach university after 50.”
Talk about narcissism and wishful thinking in youth.
Because my parents were extremely young when they had me, I always imagined 25–26–27 as an “adult.” Which is why, I guess, I always felt older than people my age in the West. In the UK or US, people still call anyone under 30 “a kid”—which is alright with me, as these days, I am in no rush to grow up. If you’re in your mid-twenties in Russia, men are expected to have their life figured out, women to have their first child—to avoid being called an older first-time mother (a scary word in Russian – старородящая).
I want to say this is changing, but then I look at Masha’s father, who is older than my parents by a decade, never married, and says his life “only started booming at the age of 30.” And then I look at my parents, who had me when they were barely 20, and I see: there are no rules. Everyone lives according to their own timetable, in Russia or otherwise.
But the older I get, the less I obsess over goals or the future. When I was in my “early twenties”—and now I can even say my “mid-twenties,” as 27 is that threshold after which you’re officially in your “late twenties”—I worried too much about “making it.” It never meant anything concrete, I just wanted other people to see that I was not wasting my life. And by other people, I mean my father. He always had high expectations of himself and, as a by-product, of me. By the time I hit the age at which he stopped telling me which college I should go to, I was already an expert at pushing myself, so I inherited this role from him, always comparing myself to other people (mostly men), always seeking ways in which I could “excel” and get attention: be it through making a lot of money, writing a lot of words, or generally, making a lot of noise.
But with each passing year, I feel that pressure alleviate and evaporate, like water in the pot where you boil pelmeni. I couldn’t be happier about that. All that pressure to achieve, to perform, to, in the words of my shrink, “bedazzle other people with my achievements,” only made me neurotic and dependent on people’s opinions.
And perhaps that’s what real maturity is: the courage to get the fuck off your own back.
On April 3rd, 2016, we met at a fancy restaurant called Bon App on Nikolskaya Street, near Red Square and GUM, Russia’s largest (and oldest) department store. There were four of us: my grandfather, my father, me, and my uncle Sasha, my grandfather’s son, who had just turned fourteen. Unsurprisingly, women weren’t invited. As my father said when he pitched the idea of meeting, “We’ll meet in male company. Just the boys.”
Our table was next to a wall-sized glass window, overlooking the road. Across from us was Detskiy Mir (literally “children’s world”), a famous kids' department store in the Soviet Union, which had been closed for nearly a decade but had since reopened.
When they brought the menu, my father asked for a shisha menu.
“Sorry, we don’t have shisha in our place,” said the waitress. She looked not much older than me, with her brown hair in a tight bun, and a name tag that said ALISA.
“It’s fine, I can get one,” my father said with a look of someone reprimanding a schoolchild. He handed her the menu back. “Just bring me one from the place upstairs.”
“I’ll ask,” Alisa said, unsure, and glided away.
My father looked at me and laughed, as if he had just told a hilarious joke.
“They say that a man needs to do three things,” my grandfather began, looking me straight in the eye. I nodded and realized I’d never seen him outside his house in Shcherbinka. He rarely came to Moscow, preferring people to visit him.
“Build a house,” he continued. “Raise a son. And plant a tree.”
He exhaled deeply. “Now, I can’t help you do the first two things; you’ll have to figure that out alone. But I can—in fact, I already did—help you do the third one.”
I was about to argue that, at the very least, I wouldn’t be able to figure out the “son” situation on my own, when my father exclaimed “Oh wow!”
His voice cracked and rose three tones on the “wow,” like a schoolgirl from New York. Whenever he spoke like that, I knew he was faking it.
I looked at my grandfather, then at my dad, confused. “What do you mean?”
“I got you a tree. Here,” he said and handed me his phone. On it, there was an image of a tree from Google Images against a white backdrop.
Alisa returned with a bearded man dressed in black. His hands were clasped together, and he looked over at my father. “What would you like, sir?”
“Something fresh and fruity. A little mint.”
“Certainly,” he said. “Strength?”
“Medium.”
The bearded shisha man nodded and disappeared. Alisa took our orders—I got a tea and a salad—and my father ordered vodka. Sasha and my grandfather asked for another minute to study the menu.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said when Alisa left. I really didn’t. Thanks for an image from a search engine?
“Thanks,” I said, handing back the phone to my grandfather.
“You’re welcome,” my grandfather said, placing the phone beside him, burying himself in the menu.
Moments later, he looked up at me without raising his head, as if remembering something crucial. “We’ve already planted it in our backyard. You can visit anytime you like.”
Most people I look up to—writers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, or generally cool people—are what they call “late bloomers.” After a stumble and tumble and a rumble, they have finally arrived at their “calling” or “vocation” in their 30s and 40s and 50s. And that’s okay. Being a late bloomer is fine as long as you don’t miss the flower show.
Rare exceptions aside, people who obsess about “making it” early in life frequently end up stuck in jobs, careers, and lives they wouldn’t have chosen later in life. They, in the words of biologists and Wired founder Kevin Kelly, “optimize prematurely”—and once they’ve climbed that summit, it’s nearly impossible to go down.
These days, I see life through a metaphor I once picked up from a book, Wealthy Gardener. The idea is that your life is like a year and is broken up into seasons: spring, summer, fall. Each season is roughly 30 years—in the spring, you prepare the soil; in the summer, you cultivate the land; in the fall, you reap the fruits of your labour. By this philosophy, I am only nearing the end of my “spring” season. This is sad but exciting—up ahead lie 30 years of pure productivity, when you’re not distracted by hormones and youthful stupidity and generally already know what you want to do with your life.
The older I get, the more I think about other stuff—the stuff I used to think was “less important” but now actually see as “most important,” such as having a good, healthy family, friends, and kids. I realize, in all honesty, that if I don’t achieve much career-wise but have a great family, get to spend lots of time with my kids, and have fun with my friends, I’ll be happy.
To my teenage cousins, I come off as old—27 is a whole decade and change ahead of them—but I feel I’ve only just started living. Everything that happened until 25 doesn’t count—you are like a puppy, gazing around the world with bulging eyes, trying to figure out how to live, while pretending to be an adult. But at my age, late twenties, early thirties, all the drama of your youth starts to fade, and you can finally look at the world like a map and ask yourself, “Given everything I know about myself, the good and the ugly, what is it that I really should be doing?”
They say it about every age, but your life only begins when you’re closer to thirty.
Or maybe it begins whenever you decide it does.
The waitress came with the order.
“Your vodka,” said Alisa, placing a shot before my dad. “Your tea,” she said, putting a pot before me. Then, hands behind her back, eyeing us one by one with a theatrical tilt of the head: “Anything else?”
My grandfather opened his mouth to order, but my father interjected without looking at the waitress, “Yes. Your finest compote. One litre.”
He looked at me and suddenly shouted, startling the nearby guests, “IT’S A CELEBRATION AFTER ALL, ISN’T IT?!”
Then he rubbed his hands together quickly, as if plotting an evil scheme or washing a stained shirt.
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