The Cost of Anything
''You saved my life,' she would tell me later.'
Lena was a friend of Dad’s. That’s all I knew at eight.
Then, one day, she came home to visit, had a drink or two, and said, “The next time we see each other, we should go shopping.”
“Alright,” I must have said.
“No, seriously. I mean it. I want to buy you something nice,” she kept insisting. “Anything you want. ANY-THING.”
I checked in with my parents, who were sitting at the same table and had flushed cheeks from the wine. My mother nodded with a drunken smile, saying, “It’s okay. You have my permission.”
My father just stared at his glass, swirling its red liquid like a connoisseur.
Anything.
At eight, that word seemed too large to comprehend. I remember walking to the grocery palatkas stretched near our apartment building in northern Moscow. Those were tiny box-shaped kiosks where you could buy anything from condoms to cigarettes to gum and magazines with collectible rocks. I would walk past ugly old women and bulky men in leather jackets, checking the prices of Cheetos and Mentos, a crispy 100-ruble bill that my mother had given me burning the pocket of my jeans, feeling I could buy the palatka and the Central Asian woman working there. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful.
I stopped and squeaked at once, “A packet of Cheetos and Mentos, please.”
“Here,” the woman croaked, violently throwing both items on the counter, as if disgusted by my existence. “Twenty-five rubles.”
Quickly collecting my change and purchases, I’d hurry back to the apartment to munch both in pure solitude before I’d spend the day playing games I’d invented in my head. These usually involved the same characters – one of which was a half-man, half-God named Kendara, played by me. And his sidekick, Jack, played by (you’ve guessed it) my sister Kate.
And now that word, anything.
At eight, I didn’t need money because I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with it. Seriously, besides the occasional Cheetos and Mentos, which my parents didn’t allow me to eat, and perhaps a new Bionicle figure, what more could I want?
Two packets of Cheetos? Two Bionicles?
Still, even at eight, I knew that adults say things they don’t mean and mean what they don’t say. For all I knew, when she said “anything,” Lena probably meant a better pencil sharpener or a new drawing compass for my geometry classes.
So that night, sitting at the dinner table with my drunk parents and even drunker Lena, I didn’t give it much thought except that I didn’t want to be rude.
“Okay,” I said.
The entire exchange was completely forgotten until a few months later.
Two things happened almost simultaneously: our family left Moscow for the US, and social media was invented.
Nowadays, the Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki (OK.ru) — literally, “Classmates” — is an anachronism, like golden watches or chest hair, reserved specifically for sixty-something provincial women who used to pass for “beautiful,” or at the very least, “pretty” and “cute,” but now, for some bizarre reason, all have short hair dyed blue or orange and wear flower-patterned dresses.
But in late 2006 and early 2007, it was a revelation, much like ChatGPT is today. Everyone wanted to find their old classmates, give each other’s photos “five stars”—which was how you gave a “like” to your friends on OK—and then meet in person and say, “Did you see how fat Natasha has become?”
“No, where?”
“I found her on OK.ru! It’s this new great website you should check it out!”
Needless to say, when I first heard about it from eavesdropping on my parents, I immediately wanted to be on it.
“No, you won’t,” my dad said coldly when I told him I planned on making an account.
When I demanded to know why, my mother responded with an ultimate argument I grew up with, one I swore never to use on my future kids because it’s condescending and lame. That argument was simply, “Because.”
Or its close cousin, “You’ll grow up, you’ll understand.”
And the best friend of, “Because I said so.”
Thankfully, at that time in my life, I already had a computer of my own. So instead of arguing and demanding that either nobody gets an account or we all do — like in Russia as a whole, democracy never seemed to work in my family — I simply made my way up the stairs to my room, locked the door, and did what any young boy does when he locks himself in a room.
I made an account on OK.ru.
The age limit said I had to be 14, but a quick mental calculation told me I had to be born in 1993 to qualify, so that’s what I put. This was before people invented two-factor authentication and other forms of identity verification.
The thinking back then was: people won’t lie on social media.
How nearsighted they were.
This makes me think of a time when forging a passport was as easy as erasing the name and writing a different one. Or by replacing a photo by gluing a new one on top of the old one. I’ve seen people do it in movies about WWII spies and thought, Gosh, they had it easy. If only I’d lived then! Then I think that perhaps 100 years from now, in the technological police state the world would become, someone is looking back to today, 2025, and says, Gosh, they had it easy. They didn’t even have robots with built-in lie detectors!
In the early days of social media, there weren’t many accounts — fake or otherwise — and people were trying to use it for the intended purpose. So almost instantly, I found my godmother, Tanya — my grandmother’s dacha neighbour, best friend, and namesake, who gave me 1,000 rubles every time I came to spend the summer at the dacha, which was a large sum in my childhood but, over the years, because of the depreciating ruble and my growing greed, became pretty much worthless.
I found my childhood swimming coach who, when I was six, taught me and other six-year-olds how to swim and then kept calling my family’s landline for the next two decades, demanding to know whether I planned to resume my swimming lessons, as if, like a perverted Benjamin Button, I had stopped growing.
I found my old teachers from Russian elementary school and even several classmates.
When I found my parents, I deliberately avoided “friending” them so that I would not have to answer questions about why I had an account on OK.ru without their permission. But through their contacts, I found Lena Kozlova, my father’s friend — the one who once made the mistake of promising I could have anything I wanted.
And because my birthday was coming up, I messaged her, “Hi Lena!”
Then, after a moment of hesitation, I added, “Just so you know, my birthday is coming up.”
Then, “And I know what I want.”
And I waited for a response.
Lena responded in a few weeks. It was that long-forgotten era in which a message online had the same hold as a handwritten letter sent from another island in a bottle. That is to say, it wasn’t rude to take eons to draft a response.
Her response consisted of two lines: “I remember!” — just like that, with an exclamation mark. And then, “So what gift do you want? Tell me and I’ll buy it!”
Memories of my father coming home with a new Sony camera surfaced. It was a gift for him from Lena, on his thirtieth birthday. He opened the camera on the dining table in our house in Palo Alto. He unpacked a professional portrait lens from a separate box, allowing us to create photos I’d only before seen in airplane magazines. These would be images of our family — with half-naked me and Kate grimacing into the camera, half-drunken members of my family hugging each other in front of a Russian Orthodox church, and other innocent intimacies.
One day, in mid-2024, I’d Google my name (don’t ask me why) and, to my shock, discover that this entire family album was automatically imported to a site called Flickr and had been on public display for roughly 13 years.
One image in particular would catch my eye. It was a photo of Kate, aged six, wearing her bathing suit, on the beach in Hawaii. That photo was taken a second before the strong tide pulled her in, and she didn’t surface. At first, I thought she was just playing, pretending to drown. But when seconds passed and her tiny blonde head didn’t show up above the water, I started screaming and called for help. Two men who seemed old at the time — but must have been younger than I am now — dragged my sister out of the water and breathed into her mouth. She coughed up a glassful of Pacific Ocean from her lungs and, thankfully, was alive.
“You saved my life,” she would tell me later.
And even though I didn’t do much, I’d say, “Yes. And now you owe me. Forever.”
Then, any time we’d get into an argument or I’d want the last chocolate chip cookie, I’d say, “Not that it means anything, but… you remember that I saved your life, right?” And Kate, with her enormous heart and a penchant for helping the broken, sad, old, and one-legged, would give me one without a fight.
But all of that would be in the future.
Right then, staring at Lena’s message on OK.ru, this Russian answer to MySpace, I felt a new feeling rise inside of me. A feeling of excitement and infinite possibility, as if standing in front of a strip mall with a handbag full of $100 bills.
Just a few days before, my father had shown me a new Thing that had just come out. One of his classmate’s friends had been working on the team responsible for its distribution, and we were attending a house party where they showed us The Thing.
It was bulky and white, with two remotes that let you play tennis and other sports on the TV, controlling characters that made strange high-pitched noises and looked like they’d stepped out of a Hayao Miyazaki film.
Surely, if Lena could gift my father a new Sony camera with a portrait lens, she could get me The Thing?
“I actually wanted a new Wii,” I texted Lena back. “It’s this new TV console that has just come out.”
Then I shut the laptop and called my sister from upstairs because Drake & Josh was starting on Nickelodeon.
The Wii came a few weeks later, and I texted “Thanks.”
Then Lena and I eventually saw each other maybe once or twice more. And every time, she’d buy me a gift. There would be expensive toys my parents were too cheap to get me, expensive restaurant lunches, tickets to concerts for me and my friends.
If it were me now, I’d probably hug her or say that I was grateful beyond words or some beautiful crap like that — or, better yet, not have taken her gifts at all — but back then, my vocabulary in any human language was limited, as were my thoughts and understanding of people, so all I said every time I was showered with gifts for no apparent reason was:
“Thanks. Thanks so much. Thank you.”
She replied, invariably, “It’s fine. I am your magical fairy. That’s how I want you to think of me.”
Years later, I’d learn that Lena was more than just a friend of my father’s — she was his colleague. She was one of the shareholders of a bar-restaurant they opened together, after firing a group of older women who worked at a place called Muse. As my father liked to joke, “The youngest was fifty!”
In fact, she wasn’t even my father’s friend. She was a friend of his mother, my babushka, to whom she was closer in age. Because of her money and connections, she was heavily involved in various business ventures my family had built.
I’d learn I wasn’t the only one Lena was so generous with. Besides me and my father, my uncle, my grandfather, my mother, my sister Kate, and most of the people in her address book were, at one point, recipients of generous donations or gifts from Lena Kozlova. She bought fully paid travel vacations for my father’s friends, golden earrings for my mother, always reached for the check at restaurants.
Being Lena’s friend was like having Christmas every day. She seemed to use her access to money to solve all her intimacy issues — especially with men.
Rumors went that after love-bombing men with gifts, she slept with them, especially if they were younger than her.
“I don’t know whether she had anything with your father,” my mom told me once, after my parents got divorced. “I don’t want to fantasize about it.”
I’d also learn that her wealth came from her husband — a corrupt customs official — which explained how she always seemed to have money to burn. And when she divorced that husband, in the early 2010s, her money dried up, and so did her friends. Which is what happens when you win your friendships with money or anything beyond your beautiful personality. (Which would be a great way to explain why I am so cheap with my friends. I just want you to love me for who I am!!)
But what stayed with me most was this: despite a life spent trying to win other people’s love, Lena died tragically young and alone from a broken heart.
My mother met her a few months before her death to sign some documents.
“And let me just say,” she later recalled, “I don’t know what was going on with her. But that’s not what a happy woman looks like.”
My father was more direct, as he usually is. “She never exercised. She ate a lot. Drank. What more do you want?!”
What I wanted was to understand—
— how, in the age of proclamations that generosity cures everything, that giving is the key to happiness — is it still possible to give and give and give all your life…
…and then still go unnoticed and broken inside?
Thanks for reading. If you found this cool, why not share it with someone who might as well? Also, you can always support me by becoming a paid subscriber. It’s cheaper than one cup of coffee per month.
P.S. If you still haven’t gotten your free copy of Friends Among Strangers – a printed collection of the best essays from 2024 – email me at faldin.sergey@gmail.com