To Be Loved

To Be Loved.
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did. And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. ( Raymond Carver,122)

Natalia O. Lebed was born in the Kuban city of Krasnodar, (formerly Yekaterinburg: gift of Catherine, in this case, Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias). As Krasnodar was a gift to Catherine, Natalia, or Natasha as she would be known in the diminutive form, was a gift to her twenty –two year old mother, Yelena Vassilivna Lebed. Natasha was 56 centimeters long; she had black, curly hair like a little lamb, or in the Russian “yagnyonok.” Her mother in Russian to me, “All I could see were two blue sapphires, like two streams of light, after twenty hours of labor, one hour of labor for every year of my life, sparkling.” She was very happy to see the eyes, she said. Last week, Natasha and I had a conversation, I asked her to speak about her life before meeting me, this is what she told me:

The first trip my mother took me on was when I was sixteen months, to Riga, Latvia. My first steps were taken in Tajikistan, in a small village or aul. When I was two, I drank the crystal clear water of Baikal. When I was three or four, I spent a winter in Krasnoyarsk. I remember the pine nuts in the summer. We would buy pine nuts from babushkee (old women).” (When I ask Natasha why her mother travelled around so much, she tells me---in between coughs ---“she was looking for a man.”) One day she was passing through Moscow and could not find a room in any hotel. There, in the Moscow of 1983, she met a taxi driver from the Urals named Alexei Ignativich Konyshev, 8 and a half years older than Lena, 36 years old, handsome and tall. His distinguishing features: deep-set blue eyes and an aquiline nose.
Many, if not most, people commented on his similarity to Vyacheslav Tikhonov, the famous Russian actor who portrayed “Stirlitz,” in the film Seventeen Moments of Spring, a cult classic that spawned hundreds of anecdotes, mimicking the melodrama of the film and the over –the-top seriousness of Stirlitz. Example: Stirlitz thinks. He thinks again. He likes it. I admit that until I saw the film, these anecdotes made no sense.
From the time I was five until I moved to America I was a normal Russian girl, er, Soviet, then Russian girl. I liked animals. My father was an alcoholic. I recall the smell of blood and his violence. He and my mother would break furniture across each other’s backs. I became immune to the domestic chaos. It seemed as if all the adults were cracking up, as the nation got closer to its own crack up. He did quit drinking when I was nine and twenty-two years later, he has remained alcohol-free. He is a different man. Less blood, less bruises, no more bellowing, he loves his dacha, my mother and me. Whatever the case, I did well in school. I was first an Octobyonik, a child of October---October, of course referring to the October Revolution---then, I became a Young Pioneer, from age eleven to fourteen. At fourteen the country I knew collapsed, imploded. The next step after Pioneer is Komsomol member. With the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I never had a chance to become a Komsomol member. I wasn’t too sad, though. I was actually happy. With the end of Bolshevism, we no longer had to wear those hideous school uniforms. It was now all about jeans, boots and letting our hair down. And, learning the language of commerce, Shakespeare, Jim Morrison and Madonna. Poka Lenin, dasveedanya Stalin. I let my Soviet hair down and it became Russian. I entered university to get a Masters in Philosophy. I liked Schopenhauer, he was dark and weird. I liked Herr Kant…when I understood him.
When I was nineteen, I had, uh, sex for the first time. I will not go into detail. I will just say that it created a curiosity in me. I experimented, as young women are wont to do. I had lovers. I married one. Dmitry, or Dima, as I called him. He was simple but he had a nice ass. We lasted a year. I refer to him as my “fake” husband. The pretender to my throne. Meanwhile, during our separation, my graduation, my experiments with other men and drinking and carousing, I applied for an American work visa. I was so-so about it. No, I didn’t really care. No, I didn’t want to go. I was having fun. Unexpectedly, the news came that I was accepted. By this time, I had begun to think that there must be a purpose for me in America. I was moving to America. Now what?
So, I think I know now why I came to America. It was not to be with the cross-dressing high-school teacher, James. Sure, we had fun. He introduced me to the fetish world. However, three years of NYC nightlife was enough. Besides, I never loved him. He was a clown. He was clownish. He was not manly enough. He was a silly goose. My psychologist did not help. Drinking did not help. Sex did not help. Not even dancing helped. Dancing! After repeated assaults to my self-esteem due to alcohol influenced mistakes, I quit drinking and prayed to St. Xenia of Petersburg to help me find “the one,” to find “love, true love.”
I remember feeling glutted. I remember browsing MySpace and seeing nothing. I became celibate and sober. Then, one day after weeks of not thinking of my life, I received an email on my MySpace page, the title of it was, “Vysotsky said knock you out.” It was from a man in Northern California. A man who questioned my sincerity, but knew Russian culture. And, he was handsome. Very, very handsome. And, witty. (From a conversation last week, December 13, 2008)
Here the story of Richard begins.
“SSN: 551-17-8652.Where the grapes of wrath were stored, and then drank.”
Rather than bore you, dear reader, to actual tears with my barrage of pain, pain, pain, in chronological order. I will attempt to amuse, to entertain, to become a raconteur, a storyteller as good as I am in real life. All good stories begin with “Once Upon a Time;” all bad stories end with “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” But, life being a mix of good and bad should be told the only way I know how to tell it. With vim. With truth stretched on the rack, and then tickled. And, so I have a tale to tell…my tale. May truth laugh more than she shrieks.

“Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” My childhood was not the typical American childhood. My sisters and I used to play a game where we would make a list, verbally, of bad and good(funny) moments in our life. The lists would have looked like this:
1.) The time Mom was so drunk you fell out of the car.
2.) The time dad and Uncle Sonny fought in Grandmas kitchen, Grandma kept telling them to stop, and she poured boiling water on both of them.
3.) The three months we were in that cabin with no electricity and no food except biscuits.
4.) The day Richard was running down the mountain and ran into a black bear.
5.) The day dad brought no presents home because he drank all the money.
6.) Then, Richard went and stole toys and books from the store. He was seven.
7.) The sound of dads Harley, like so much thunder.
8.) When we all put sugar in his gas tank.
9.) When he showed up outside the Paiute Reservation for three days of hell.
10.) The night Big Sonny and Little Sonny shot a Hereford bull thinking it was a deer.
We all ate it anyway.
11.) The time Uncle Johnny found a baby bobcat kept it and left for a week to drink
with the Pit River Indians and came back to his entire house cut up, as if with a razor blade.
12,) The night Mom tried to commit suicide with vodka and pills. The blood. The
ambulance.
13.) The times she’d make fun of our stepfather, Ron, the half Fox Indian. He looked
like a hippo.
14.) His molesting us.
15.) Moms apocalyptic ramblings about Communism and Armageddon.
16.) The winter days spent pretending we were on a Greyhound to Disneyland and
Burger King.
17.) Uncle Albert who held up a McDonalds with a screwdriver and spent 3 years in
prison for it.
18.) The days wondering about food. Dreaming, salivating.
19.) Discovering John Barleycorn and forgetting everything.
20.) My first arrest at fifteen for arsoning the high school football field.
21.) Sniffing gas with the boys from Hupa Reservation.
22.) Stealing salmon in Battle creek –because we deserved it as Natives---and selling
them to restaurants to buy alcohol and crystal meth.
My mother’s grandfathers came from Ireland, both married Cherokee women. My father’s grandfather came from Northern Ireland and married a Cherokee woman. As my grandfather Ervan would say, “We’re half alcoholic and half drunk.” In fact, all of my relatives drank like thirst-suffering turtles. Created from vodka sperm and whiskey eggs.
My extended family was always around us wherever we went, and we moved everywhere: thirty-three places before the age of fifteen. Mostly, we lived in the West, but we had our occasional forays into the Midwest and South. My immediate family, my mother Virginia, born in Safford , Arizona, a few miles from the Apache reservation in 1949, myself born in Portland, Oregon in 1968 and my three younger sisters, Christine, Teresa and Misty. Portland, the “City of Roses.” We are all two years apart. All born in Portland, except Misty who was born in a small (population 2,000) Northeastern California town called Fall River Mills. Logging and ranching. Tourists do not visit.
At seven, my mother quit drinking and doing drugs, and became “saved”, a member of the Assemblies of God Church. She forced her religion on us and, at first, we liked it. Because, frankly it was better to see one’s mother engaging in glossolalia than “drunkenese;” twas much better to see her “slain in the spirit,” than to be unconscious, foaming at her slack mouth due to a Hunter S. Thompson cocktail –of-death.
But, later her religion became something we detested, something that ate at us. I grew to enjoy hating her God, her religion, and especially our connection –, which was shared blood, but also a bloody, shared past. I hated being related to her, no matter what guise she came in, appeared in. I hated my genetic material.
After reading Jack London, I fantasized about living far from civilization, far from humanity, far from my panoptic, fanatic mother and oleaginous, always horny, stepfather. One was loud and like a piece of artillery made of the Ark of the Covenant, the other was quiet and like an unknown plague, created by NAMBLA: instead of bubules and blood from pores, he gave me guilt, shame and a lifetime of anger. I felt dirty and nothing, not even the blood of the Lamb could cleanse me. Where my heart should be was a hole dug into a latrine. Sloshing with effluvia and waste; reeking of fear.
Along with religion, our lives were saturated by poverty, even after Jesus came into my mom’s heart and soul. Jesus seemed to answer none of her prayers. For me, books were an escape. Hackneyed, but true. Stevenson, London, Twain, Chekhov, and many more authors were my friends. Between one act of molestation and another, I would read of the Klondike, of pirates, of Russians, of Arctic explorers, of suicide. The thought of ending my young life was a Goshen, a Promised Land, my ace in the hole. But, eventually, she divorced our sick step-dad and immediately married…our father, who we hadn’t seen for eight or nine years. Oh, joy!
They stayed married exactly one year; once he began drinking again, our lives were thrown into the chaos of our childhood –only this time his bark was much worse than his bite, as the saying goes. And, he did remind us of an animal, a canine. Of a were-wolf. A were-human. Like all of our uncles and aunts: great, amicable people, functional even, yet, one drink and they transmogrified into creatures from Hell, from myth, from my books. We expected the beatings and they never came. He was like a feeble ghost of his once Hitlerian self.
When dear old Dad left, I never heard from him again. Instead of mending myself, I began to mimic everyone around me. But, I wanted to be worse than those around me. If they drank, I would drink, too; and, I would take pills, smoke pot, and huff gasoline to add to the beer or vodka. They would have brushes with the law –and I was on a first name basis with all of our town’s police force, our county Sheriff’s department and judicial system. They would miss a day of school and I just quit completely.
From eighteen to nineteen I was arrested eighteen times. Mostly for alcohol related offences, but also drugs, guns, assault, arson. I liked to attack anyone who reminded me of my real father and my stepfather. At nineteen, I was given a three year suspended prison sentence and three years probation. The judge told me that if I fought, drank in public or did drugs I would go to San Quentin. I had to go to A.A. Life had suddenly changed. And not to my liking. First, I had to spend six months in jail. I was the only guilty prisoner. Every single person swore they were innocent. Not me –I knew.
From nineteen to twenty-five: I had sex with enough people to fill up an Icelandic village. Women, men, old men, middle aged women –anyone. That hole in my chest needed to be filled, covered up. Yet, I felt dirtier. I began to write and read obsessively. I found solace in Russian writers, in her history and culture. I read Asian history and literature, Jewish, Irish, American Indian, English, literally everything I could get my hands on. I sang in punk bands after probation ended and began drinking again, fighting nearly every night. For work, I cut down redwoods, did construction, was a commercial fisherman, cared for horses, farms, ranches, grew marijuana, and washed dishes. I wanted to do everything I had read about; I needed change and variety. When I met my first wife, I had two bands, three jobs and seven girlfriends. Amazingly, I was never arrested again in my life.
I married Lauren at twenty-five and we had two sons, Finnegan and Cormac. I joined the Communist Party. I inculcated my Marxist beliefs into my children. At 30, I was kicked out of the CPUSA and my marriage. From twenty-five to thirty, I had quit drinking. Completely. 100%. No drugs, either. Nothing. I didn’t cheat. I worked full time and went to community college at night. I began to act in local theatre. I jogged and jumped rope. I dabbled in spirituality.
After the divorce, my life-blood was literature: Kundera, Hrabal, and Jan Neruda, Polish authors, Russians, Irish, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Eventually, reading enough of the dour Dane, and Dostoyevsky led me to the Orthodox Church. I converted. I was now an Orthodox Christian. I was still overly sexed. I drank again.
Still, there were women and men, men and women. Still, I ached for something “real,” something “authentic.” Love. I drank, I did mushrooms, I did sweathouses, I travelled to Alaska, and I worked, quit school, broke my back and ended up in Northern California, ready to either commit suicide or become a monk. I went to the local Orthodox Church and prayed to St. Xenia of Petersburg to help me. I lit a candle and dropped a dollar bill into the collection plate.
A friend turned me onto MySpace. I was wary, at first. Scared and doubtful. I met a few women who turned out to be moral lepers, spiritual John Merricks, or just not my type. I planned to return to Alaska, to work in a lead mine, buy property and never return. Then, one day, after surfing MySpace, I found a profile of a Russian woman, in NYC. A model. “Russian Diva” was her name. Red hair, Asian eyes, pale skin. Fur coat and fishnets. I had been with many models and knew them to be shallow. I decided to write this one. But, I wanted her to know that I was suspicious. And, also to know that I was very knowledgeable about Russian culture. “Vysotsky said knock you out”, was the title of my email. The rest, as we are told, is history…
MySpace turns out to be a Golconda, and not a Gehenna.
Their souls, among the flowers, will run
And their voices will blend and sound as one.
They will inhale eternity together.
And somewhere, on a fragile river cross,
A narrow bridge across the universe
Holding their breath, they will meet each other.—Vladimir Vysotsky, “The Ballad of Love” (http://www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/shambat.html#ballad_about_love)

According to Hasidic myth, when a man and a woman fall in love an angel is born. This is reality, whether one is Hasidic, Jewish, Christian, pagan, Buddhist or atheist---we angels exist. I know, I am Richard and Natasha’s angel. I am the product of their love. Or, I could be a product of Richard’s overly active imagination. Whatever the case, just go along with me, pretend I exist, because whether or not I do or do not, the story of their coming together is very true. At the beginning of their meeting, their old selves and lives sloughed off like snake skins, blew with the wind, like an elongated collection of dust.
Quoting Vysotsky, Richard attempted to impress Natasha. It worked. She wrote back. Back and forth the emails went, becoming longer and soon she divulged her phone number. He called that very night. It was on Maslenitsa (A Russian holiday of eating Russian pancakes, blini with butter or maslo, thus the name ), in early March 2006.
They spoke for only a few minutes, she could not quite hear: “Please, call me later tonight at 10pm.” He waited one minute, till 10:01, and called her, nervous. Questions were asked and parts of their lives were shared, stories sent over 3,000 miles of telephone wire. They talked for a little over an hour. The next time they spoke for two hours. Then three. Eventually, they spoke for seven hours on the phone. Emails were written daily, calls were made in the morning and at night. Drinks were quaffed, cigarettes smoked, one after another.
After two months, he could think of nothing but her, and Natasha thought only of him. He was tired of lies and half-truths, so he told her everything: the gritty, the foul, the illegal, the tearful and regrettable. She did the same. Poems were written. An example of their emails, which mirrored their conversations, is provided here. First, one of Natasha’s emails:
Richard... you are so wonderful, no, seriously, I did not expect from you what you did... Thank you :) Yes, honesty is such a great feeling. Apparently, not everyone can afford to be honest. I want to be honest with you. I am sick of even putting my mind in a position of possible lies...
I guess people get used to lies and they don't expect good nature of someone shown... Im really touched by your email. And you called me your....hmmm... girlfriend.. it is so nice to hear...
Oh, I am so ....mmmm :)) I find it so charming: the way we communicate with each other -- I am purely getting more and more fascinated by you, us together, our "encounter", and I know as you said, people of course say that you are different, but I'd say that you are very special... and real to me... That's why we get along so well I think ---- because we don't make any efforts to look into each others souls, we simply look into them, drink them, eager to learn with no fear. Yes, by talking we, I think, opened up and discovered so much about one another, that it feels that we've been talking all our life drinking the spring of the endless story called "Richard&Natasha":)))
And as you know, the real springs are never to dry out, if they are filled with fresh water sources...Neither would we....I think... I have a feeling... But being realistic, our soon encounter will become the one moment of our relationship.... I really really want that to happen....
Call me, Richard, I want to hear your voice ;)
~ Kitten...
Oh, god, I am nervous....! And so excited!!!(4/16/06)

And, one of Richards emails:

ok, natusik...listen closely.....all day, nearly every minute, i thought of you......constantly, of what we would do when you come, where id take you......maybe we should rent a car, only i dont have a credit card...do you...i could give you the money beforehand, cause i dont want you to pay for it.....we could drive into the woods or go see me mom?and sisters......in redding......im so crazy about you, i have never been like this ever...with anyone........i connect with you like no other human being......i looked again at your pics......and your friends and i thot of my friends here, the people here....its so provincial here, a backwater.....nobody like your friends....this really is siberia, american style.....my heart was racing all day long.......if i didnt know better id say i was falling madly in love.....cant wait to talk.......xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,Richard(4/20/06)


Natasha decided to visit Northern California. She would arrive on the fourth of May. Their conversations became more fevered, more romantic, eager. The day arrived. Her plane landed, and Richard saw her walk across the tarmac, a black and red dress, and black heels. He wore black Carhartts and a black, long sleeved shirt. His head was shaved. On top of his head were tattoos: an anarchy symbol, a banner reading, “Made in Portland”. There were flames above his right ear, with three dots in a triangle, a holy symbol of Irish brotherhood. He had eighteen in all. His arms were covered. Four on his back. Two on his legs.
As Natasha from Moscow/Krasnodar waltzed across the tarmac, every one of Richards tattoos felt alive and wanted to run off his skin and into the redwoods. He was shaking. No woman had ever made him nervous. Natasha was trembling. No man had ever made her tremble. Here was the woman of his dreams, the woman he had spoken with, literally, for hundreds of hours, had cinematic fantasies of on an almost hourly basis for months, here she was walking confidentially towards him, her black dress worshipping every curve and dip of her body, her crimson lips set in a coy smile. Thru the turnstile----a body’s length away!—and they speak each other’s name in unison and, as both hearts were galloping, gallivanting, dervishing, they embraced. He inhaled her skin, her hair. She felt his large body, smelled his manliness. They held each other as they moved faces to look, eyes dug into eyes, eyes moved over the others mouth,teeth,cheekbones,body and mouths and heads and brains and souls moved closer, mouths touching, daringly, tongue tip to tongue tip. Kissing each other, mouths open, clutching tight to each other, moving back and looking, laughing, kissing with greater confidence. Both had tears, hot tears, moistening their eyes.
And, for the six days Natasha spent in the foggy coastal hippy-hamlet of Arcata, she and her amour made love thirty-six times. Or, was it forty-six? They counted , but lost track after thirty-five: They’d speak and make love. Sleep, wake, make love. Eat, make love. Walk, make love. Everything they did was punctuated with the sexual act. Everything they did had the infinite beauty of the ellipsis. Sometimes, they would laugh during it; other times they would cry. The day after she left? Richard called her and proposed marriage, Natasha accepted. The date was set for June 3rd, the place was the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Holy to the Wiyot tribe.
They married high above the blue Pacific and below the hypnotic, azure sky. A breeze. Redwoods and rhododendrons. Wildflowers. A Raymond Carver story. Minimalist. Once again, they rushed home. And, again their love makings were rabid, legion, drenched in emotion, and, as their love grew, I grew, for angels are nothing but created energy, yes? I mean, we don’t have social security numbers.
Three years later…
Natasha and I live happily ever after in each day. It is a very sappy statement, that. But, true. We have become closer. She is my best friend. Sometimes we pinch each other--- just in case we’re dreaming. Sometimes we pinch, just because. We have had our tiffs, our disagreements--- as any couple will .But, the difference is that we got to meet each other before the physical part began. Something unique in the West these days. Had we met first, knowing our libidos, we would have ceased talking very quick. We are glad it worked this way. Our friends are jealous.
At this very moment Billie Holiday plays, Natasha makes Russian pancakes, I write my final paper for Creative Nonfiction, we have spent the entire week trying to make a baby. She likes the name Alexei, after her father. Boy, girl, whatever: I just want our Russian/Cherokee/Irish baby to have Natasha’s blue eyes.
I think, I hope, I feel, that in thirty years my soul mate, Natasha, and I , and our children, and my children, we will say that not only did we survive, but that we flourished. That, after all that has happened to us, our painful pasts, our cacophonies and chaoses, our dins and pandemoniums, we can now enjoy our ecstasies, our silences, our placidities, our life together.
Natasha calls me “volk,” which is Russian for wolf. She says I remind her of an animal. I call her koshka (kitten), krasavitsa (beautiful woman) and yozhik (little hedgehog). She reminds me of so many things. My sons love her. My daughter likes to tell her stories. Last summer, Natasha and I visited far Northern California. We visited my sons and daughter for six days. There was a lot of laughter. The sun was out, playing hide and seek behind the ever-present Northcoast clouds; it filtered down between the giant redwoods like a mist of bees. They circled us, natures cathedral, as my children and wife frolicked like little goats on the cool, green grass. I felt content then…and, six months later, I feel even more content. I feel part of something miraculous. I feel beloved.