I learned fear at the age of 4. When we, as a family of a Soviet diplomat, moved from Norway to Moscow.

The chaotic and intense Moscow frightened me. What a contrast with the orderly, hospitable, and much smaller Oslo! Apprehensive and gloomy people, just five years after the end of World War II. The scarcity of the most common necessities—bread, milk, sugar, salt, potatoes, rice, fruits, and vegetables. I could not any longer walk freely on the streets—my parents never let my hand go. I could not leave anything outside our room—it would be stolen.

I demanded we go home. My parents never managed to legitimately prove to me that we had come home. I started to stutter and then stopped talking altogether. In six months when I did begin to talk again, I could speak only Russian, but not my native Norwegian.

I began the learning process of an elaborate system by which the Soviet totalitarian regime installed fear into the souls and bodies of its vassals.

Our communal apartment felt like a prison, where my younger brother and I could not talk in full voice, or play in full view. Our parents were afraid that we would say or do something that could be construed as the reflection of their critical opinion of the communist order. I felt restrained and suffocated, as if I was wearing clothes several sizes smaller than I needed.

The same feeling I had in a day care center, where I was exposed for the first time to all those rules and regulations that limited my freedom in any possible way. It also was my first initiation into conformism and propaganda, although I did not know those terms at that time.

But it was the hidden, subtle ways that truly injected fear into my displaced and wounded emotional and mental bodies. My sensitive inner self immediately picked up on my parents’ fear and discomfort. They abruptly stopped speaking Norwegian, German, or English in fear of being misinterpreted and informed on by their neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens. During a May Day parade and demonstration that we all watched from a sidewalk, I exclaimed, “Hip hip hurrah!,” as I had in Oslo, instead of the Russian “Ura(h).” My mother shushed me so forcefully that I could not make myself talk the entire day. I remember she cried that evening while talking to my father.

Government-imposed bans and limitations permeated even the most trivial aspects of life. If your life’s purpose was some kind of progress, you could not help but violate those rules. You would always feel guilty and fearful of the retribution of an omnipresent and omnipotent authority. This fear kills your personal willpower and bravery and wastes away your critical mind and sense of self-worth. Only collective bravery and group dependence are left. As a child, you first resist and then adapt. I adapted, but I never resigned to that fear, anxiety, and panic. I never lost my critical mind. A stranger, I never fitted in. As a thinking adult, I began to question the established order and eventually resist it again. I went beyond that order by turning my sight into my inner world, investigating all available spiritual practices.

People’s response to the strict system of group dependence was the creation of a parallel system of personal interdependency—the network of like-minded friends and friends of friends. That was how one would survive the oppressive regime and go around the rules and limitations. The negative side of that network was that it could burn you. I remember a Soviet-time joke about two men talking to each other while riding on a Moscow bus. One says, “Do you know the difference between our government and our bus driver? Our driver knows the point of destination, but our government has no idea.” Another man comes up to them, shows his KGB badge and says to the man who just talked about the difference, “Do you know the difference between you and your friend? Your friend will continue riding, but you’ll go with me.” The man replies, “Do you know the difference between you and me?” Then he shows his KGB badge and says, “No difference.”

We all there lived with a constant risk of inevitable exposure. The risk that created both fear and courage. A very specific type of courage—the courage of an inner dissident.

It is not easy for those who have never experienced life under a totalitarian regime to understand that people can be cowardly and courageous at the same time, and that many courageous actions took place in private. This dichotomy was the way of life and survival.

Nobody was an open dissident during the Kafkaesque time of Stalinism. If they say otherwise, they are either lying or dead. Very few were during the Brezhnev era. Yet, practically anyone who had retained their power of observation and critical mind was an inner dissident to a larger or smaller degree. Most of them were “invisible” people, whose courage was simply knowing and dreaming about the eventual end of the dictatorship’s nightmare, or just keeping alive that power of critical mind. Even if they had done actually nothing to destroy the regime, they would consider themselves inner dissidents.

Only some of those inner dissidents were disturbing for the government. They usually were great thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists of the era, such as Pasternak and Shostakovich. Neither was an open dissident. But they both projected a humanistic philosophy and recurrent faith in the creative miracle of life itself, reaching beyond political matters to universal human values in their works. And both survived Stalin’s repressions by accident.

But an inner dissident is, by definition, a hypocrite. He has an army of external lies and deceptions at his disposal. He has to be a sycophant, a briber, a flatterer.

He has to ingratiate himself to all those who are above him on the pecking order and who use their power for material enrichment or emotional satisfaction of feeling their superiority. The more fraudulent that superiority is, the more sycophantic proof its holders demand from their subordinates. For them, it is both a survival technique and entertainment. For the rest, it is a balancing act between fear and bravery—the act that can destroy your psyche and body.

Contrary to a popular belief, constant exposure to fear does not immunize you against it. No matter how much you progressed in a spiritual direction, you still have to live and work in your physical manifestation of that moment. In this aspect, I had never managed to get rid of the feelings of fear, dis-liberty, dis-independence, dis-comfort and dis-ease.

I just did not want to waste my life on fighting that system of fear any more. I had to get out. I had to be born to freedom again.

“To Freedom” is an excerpt from “Between Two Halves of a Journey,” Prokhorov’s unpublished memoir.

—

Vadim Prokhorov

Vadim Prokhorov is a writer, artist, and composer as well as a concert pianist and choral director. He is an author of Russian Folk Songs: Musical Genres and History (Scarecrow Press, 2001) and author and illustrator of Little Red Riding Hood (to be published next year). He has written numerous articles on classical music for the Encyclopedia Americana, for which he served as associate editor. He has contributed cover and feature articles to The Guardian (London), Parade Magazine, Air&Space/Smithsonian, The Moscow Times, and Gramophone Online Magazine, among others. He was a features writer and classical music critic for various daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut, where he lived before moving to New York. As an artist, he had numerous solo and group exhibitions. He recent solo exhibition, “Visual Music,” was in November 2008 at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. His paintings sold to private collectors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. His choral compositions and arrangements of Russian vocal compositions and folk songs have been published by Oxford University Press, Hal Leonard, EC Schirmer, and Musica Russica. He is a member of the Authors Guild and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

He has given lectures on Russian music at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Wesleyan, and Boston Universities, among others.

“Are you still living in New York?” Noboru asked me.  I told him yes.  “I’ll never go back there,” he said.   Before Noboru lived alone in Maine, he was in New York.  He worked as an architectural designer, subject to a fast-pace, stressful life.  He developed cancer.  Attributing the disease to his lifestyle, he moved to Maine, and recovered.  Morning walks, a macrobiotic diet, and making birdhouses were part of that process.

Noboru told my father and me he hadn’t been making birdhouses lately because not enough people were buying them.  But he agreed to show them to us anyway.  Gingerly he turned the door handle of the bright red shed, giving it a gentle push.  The door made a high-pitched squeaking noise, as if caught by surprise.  The birdhouses had a layer of dust over them, and cobwebs had begun to envelope them like fishnets.

Noboru makes his birdhouses with all “found” materials— door hinges and tiny pieces of tin roofs and driftwood.  Many of his birdhouses have branches extending from, or even enshrouding them like vines.  One birdhouse is a triptych—a red house, a blue house and a white house, stacked one on top of the other, and secured by thin iron rods.  Another is made from layers of birch bark.  The word “peace” is inscribed on a number of the houses, written sideways in white paint, and engraved on a square of bronze hidden behind a tiny wooden door that opens like a mailbox.

As we admired the birdhouses, a van pulled up into the driveway.  No one ever comes to visit Noboru.  The van door slid open and a woman in her late fifties emerged.  She wore glasses, a black shirt, and a long skirt with streaks of blue and pink across it.  Her light brown hair moved buoyantly around her head.  She walked towards the house, carrying a blue pocket-sized Bible and a folder that said “The Watchtower” on the front.

“Good morning,” the woman said cheerfully, like a neighbor delivering banana bread.  “Do you live here?” she asked Noboru.

“Yes.”

“I’m visiting folks around these parts this morning, and thought I’d stop by.”  She paused.  Noboru made no reaction.  “May I ask if you belong to any religion?”

“Yes I do.”

“Which one?”

“Buddhism.”

The woman smiled.  Noboru’s face was motionless, as if he were wearing a Japanese mask.

“Do you believe in God?” asked the woman.

“I’d rather not talk about that.”  Now, he looked a bit disturbed.

“And how about you?” she turned to my father, whose forehead was covered in small beads of sweat from our earlier jog.

“I am an atheist,” he said, with an audible leftover accent from his Southern upbringing.

“Oh, right…what is that, that you don’t believe in God? Or that you’re not sure?”

“I’m 90% sure that God doesn’t exist, and 10% unsure.”

The woman nodded her head up and down, up and down, curls bouncing.

“Have you felt that way since you were a little boy or did something happen to make you feel this way? Or is it the wickedness argument?”

“I am a scientist.” The room was still.  “I believe that all natural phenomena can be explained by science.  And yes, I do also believe that if there were a God, he or she would not allow all the wicked things that happen in our world to take place.”

“Uh huh. Well I tell people the God we believe in is one who is working to make things better real soon.”

The room breathed out a musty, damp wood smell.  I studied the intricate patterns on the floorboards.   Noboru looked out the screened window, towards the street.  The woman looked at Noboru, and my father looked at the birdhouses, which suddenly felt like human presences that had been intruded upon.

“I think that if God were to exist, he or she would live in these birdhouses,” said my father, gesturing in their direction.

“Yes, I think God encourages everyone to find his or her own creativity.”  The woman looked at Noboru.  “He doesn’t want to talk about what he believes in, does he,” she said, with a smile that bordered on sadness.

“Thank you for coming this morning,” said my father.  “I know you are committed to what you do.”

“Thank you,” she said, still smiling.  “Enjoy the day.”  She turned from her spot in the doorway and got back into her car, joining the group waiting for her.  The door slid closed, clicking with a certain finality.

Noboru absentmindedly ran his hand across the roof of a birdhouse.  We all faced the birdhouses now, which stood silently like upright monks.

—

Photo: Anthony Rhoades

Elyse Lightman holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the School of the Arts at Columbia. When she is not writing about Maine she writes about Cambodia, which is where she helps run a non-profit to empower a new generation of women leaders. She lives in Brooklyn.

Illustrations by John Dermot Woods

That’s why we talked legacies. Mine, hers. For me, literary prowess or fame? For her, a husband and child? I was in love with her brother; she had just moved back into her parents’ house in Pennsylvania, and had decided to stay. It takes an editor to bind us back together—stop and start, when what happened, happened, there was the first, and then only the last.

It wasn’t like before, in the summers, when I would visit, and we’d cut thick tomato slices and fry bacon, layering the new lettuces between nutty breads and French mayonnaise. We’d put our toes in the grass, and we’d eat, me finishing her sandwich. When her parents left, we’d break out the wine, the firecrackers. We lit them, and they exploded all over the brick patio, and we screamed in delight before elbowing each other, arguing about whose fault it was because they had permanently scarred the walkway. That was a long time ago by now.

So long I can’t remember what I looked like, so long that I look at pictures from that time and can’t recall the voice of the person whose arm mine is slung around; I know it’s her but I don’t see her face that way—shiny, blonde, smiling. Khaki shorts, stupid-looking hats. We were in Nice, she had a French boyfriend, and we stood on the rocks as the bathtub-colored water rushed over us, over our feet, and we wore scarves because the wind was strong though the day was hot.

After vacation, back to our separate corners, we had a discussion about our plights. I posted an open letter online to myself and to her, a girl who, by now, always had time enough to read. My letter was about fame, about writing, two things I knew nothing about but lusted after. I asked. I pointed to the sky with an alias. If I wrote something wonderful, and nobody saw it, would it truly exist? Would it mean anything if it did not change anyone else but me? Would I be doing a service, the way I really wanted to?

“It’s the fame motive,” Alexis wrote in the comment section. “You want to be famous.”

“No,” I retorted. “I want to be good.”

“Same thing,” she wrote. I didn’t have time enough to fight. The window closed and she went offline. I deleted her comment, not because it wasn’t absolutely true, but because she had used my name, my real life name, and I was scared my boss would see what I had been doing on my lunch hour—perpetual navel gazing and social networking. I deleted her answer because it might outlive my question.

“I think that as writers, we say we want truth in return, but really we want our egos massaged,” I said explaining why I took it down, the last time I visited. We laughed in her parents’ kitchen as we dried off on a Sunday afternoon. “I feel like one of those masked magicians on cable, revealing the secrets behind the world’s greatest illusions.”

She looked at me like she was waiting for me to tear off the mask, to show my face along with my bad intentions. I was wicked. I threw a wet towel and she ducked, and it slopped to the floor.

“I know you’ll be famous, simply because of that instinct. To show us the truth.” She sounded so sure, so matter-of-fact. “You’re brilliant.”

But I am not capable of being brilliant. Only of pretending. Afterward, I shied from exposing myself more, I sent her book recommendations from afar to thumb through. I imagined her floating in the navy-bottomed pool at the edge of her parents’ vegetable patch, her small dog chasing the groundhogs terrorizing the tomato stalks.

So much had happened by the time it happened. All those clichés come from something, don’t they? We nod. Burn brightly and leave in an engulfing flame, fade out and those who know you now have forgotten who you were then. Let’s all join in, this is high school and we’ve got some angst to sell. Was that when we talked about when we talked?

Wait no, this.

Is after that.

Silly how I forgot. This is not that any more. We don’t hide on the mountain, sneaking cigarettes while the prep school police in the form of Mrs. P—old maid, adviser, science teacher, who made the same lame joke about a flux capacitor every freaking year (it’s famous in its clunky delivery) when instructing a class on electricity—looks for a flame in the dark, to nail us to the headmaster’s wall. That was a detention offense, and that was a long time ago by now.

Longer even than the pool of that house, the trading of magazines, the look in everyone’s eyes when we talked about books. Small dogs and summer cocktails, lame jokes and Christmas plans. The walk around the lake. That first day we met, as I walked with her brother, trying to win them both over. The last few e-mails that ever transpired. The scar faded faster; it can barely be seen on the bricks. That was a long time ago, by now. I’m mixed up, I spread my fingers to radiate what’s left inside me and I try, I try. Alexis was older, always older: I had nothing to teach her then, only her favor to curry, only her laugh to provoke. To win her was the ultimate prize. The things we didn’t talk about, what we knew. Alexis could teach me; I could never teach her.

I can’t remember feeling so small, but I was. I had dreams and habits that made me someone else, and I can’t recall them. It was so long ago that I say to myself now, I was a kid. And I knew nothing. Now I am not. And yet. We fell away on my watch. I look out the window. When we come together for the reunion, what will I say? Who will I have become?

No, this is not that time.

This is not the time to talk of my fame motive. That’s slipped away into another portal; how funny, how fast. The time, Alexis’s time, her wants, and now mine. I’ve caught up to Alexis in age, motives, and motivation. Now for me, this is the marrying time, this is the making-a-family time, this is the passing it on to the next generation because we forgot to do something with our own time. The What Would We Do With Our Twenties If Only We Stopped Time. I still had my twenties left, I said. Alexis’s were long gone. I spread my fingers a little more, as if that would share our cup, as if that would build a bridge, a swing, where we could meet in the middle. No, not that. Love is fickle and destructive before it’s everlasting, small talk is the only talk I know, and flowers are sent as contrition. Memories are null and void.

The last few years were spent in a basement party in another state; I stopped going to the house in summer, the fall. The rift between her brother and me was explosive, we broke up never wanting to remember what we had, and an ocean rushed between us all. He had brought us together, and now it seemed inappropriate to continue our friendship, our reading lists, our discussions, our glasses of wine. When you love two siblings, one through the other, one more than the other, you lose one and you lose them both.

I woke up one day feeling tricked. It’s not fair that I’ve been tricked, I hissed. Where was I—Vegas? No clocks on the walls, no windows? I didn’t even see it pass, didn’t remember to call. I know. I know. I could have stepped outside, I could have checked, but my eyes were fixed, flickering on the monitor, my fingertips couldn’t find a notebook, I was feeling sorry for myself because I had lost, and I had nothing to make it go away.

This is not that time, I said. I’ll say it again. Years from now. When more of us are gone. But today, it’s just you. You are gone and I remember, the time we had and now, more than ever, the time we had not enough of. The faded paper on which you exist—the only good deed that I do for you, before I delete your comment, I print it out. How I folded it up and put it away, because I didn’t think this time would come. Not really.

I will be in the backseat, because when you return home, you return to your place and position, and I will be moving away from the drive, closing my eyes, furious, running away from that moment, our first, our last, and now this. You’ve taught me, sure. Too bad I don’t want to learn.

Rest in peace, Alexis. I am sorry I took down your comment for the world to see. I am sorry for many, many things.

—–

Photo: Anthony Rhoades

Hillary Kaylor’s work has appeared in Food & Wine, New York magazine, Fader, Travel + Leisure and online at Gawker and RCRD LBL. She is working on her first novel.