In the same water

Those who refuse to leave experience the “absence effect.” Monologue of a Moscow journalist

Tatyana Malkina

Russian journalist, columnist, editor, worked for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the newspapers Segodnya, Vremya, Vremya Novostey, Moscow News, and the magazine Otechestvennye Zapiski. Lives in Moscow.

After the start of the great Exodus-22, at some point, for some reason, I allowed myself to get drawn into, if not the debate about “those who left” and “the ones who stayed,” then certainly into upsetting thoughts on this topic. But the hotter the discussions and battles became, the easier it was for me not to participate in them, and then to stop noticing them.

• Firstly, I already have no strength to think or cry tears about something much more important and terrible.

• Secondly, even after half-mature reflection, it quickly became clear: no, people are not divided into those who left and those who stayed. They are divided into smart and stupid, kind and evil, petty and generous, generous and malicious, shallow and deep, pinched and loved ones. The position of their bodies in space cannot endow them with characteristics that are not inherent to them; sometimes only the circumstances in which the bodies find themselves can exacerbate certain features, which, I repeat, are always with people.

Not a single person who had a decent understanding of, for example, the political situation in Russia, began to talk nonsense about it just because he moved. If your new specialist suddenly starts talking nonsense about his specialty, you just need to take a closer look at what he was talking about before leaving. With the highest degree of probability, it will turn out that in his homeland he was actually talking completely nonsense, just for a number of reasons it was not so visible and noticeable.

If a thoughtful person suddenly begins to speak in newspaper editorials (no matter which ones), this most likely means that before he did not fully possess the skills of critical thinking and independent analysis, which means that he was always a package, it’s just that until now there was only one package everyone.

If your recent neighbor writes from Spain “and in Sheremetyevo they put shackles on everyone,” this means that connection with reality has never been his strong point. Just

emigration - as one of the acute, existential crises - apparently aggravates all the sores, ailments, and symptoms inherent in the subject.

If in a calm state they were weakly expressed and not visible, now they are bright.

However, everything that has been said applies, of course, to those who remained, of which I belong. Stress reveals all the scars and flaws, yes. But again, it is the fool who will shout that the grapes are green (on the other side of the border), it is the professionally unfortunate who will reproach emigrants with their privilege, the poor fellow will fall into Wothebautism and Putinfersteinerzim, the wretched one will begin to count other people’s eurocents, the envious person will rejoice at someone’s failures.

It all came to the surface out of grief, in fact. Because grief is now everywhere, not only on the fields of bloody battles, but also around and inside everyone. Grief, desert, black wind, fear, uncertainty. All of us - those who left and those who remained - are actually the wreckage of one giant shipwreck in a completely wild ocean. Some have been crushed by the elements beyond recognition, into splinters, while in others you can still see the former form, the functionality has been preserved. Some are persistently trying to row towards a hypothetical shore, others have surrendered to the will of the waves and are only making sure to minimize the damage. And we are all in the same hostile water.

I wrote about myself as the remaining one. In fact, I'm more likely to stay, that's more accurate. To begin with, because I belong to the category of super-privileged people - I have the technical opportunity to leave, but I also have the opportunity to stay (ugh, so as not to jinx it). The opportunity not to leave, as it turns out, is the most precious privilege today, truly. All my friends, whom I miss terribly, were forced to leave Russia. They were forced by ghouls, squeezed out, driven out. They most often cannot come even for a day on business of any importance without the risk of ending up in the predatory jaws of their brutal homeland.

Left behind, my friends would sooner or later end up on bunks or in trenches (which in their case again means on bunks). I remain here as a quiet housewife who is very capable and, obviously, really doesn’t want to leave anywhere and every day she prays to someone unknown so that one day she will not have to make a forced decision to leave. But I'm an atheist. And I understand that I have virtually no control over my own fate. More precisely, it is very limited.

For example, I understand the need not to go out on the street with a single picket, I understand that you shouldn’t grab random transport z-fellow travelers in the face (this is more difficult than not going to the picket, picket is generally not my favorite genre). I even understand that it’s probably not worth wearing a black T-shirt in Moscow from the Yeltsin Center, on which the key articles of the Russian Constitution are printed in white on black. I understand that it was quite wise to leave teaching at a university last year - I am not able to pronounce the abbreviation “SVO” with my mouth and am not able to pretend to be an idiot (and I really miss the students, they really helped me survive, I had a couple with them, By the way, right on February 25, 2022, I cried and asked them for forgiveness, they were frightened and consoled me, we then spent a semester together, they made me feel a lot of happiness, they alive, curious and safe).

What else can I do to protect myself from expulsion? Nothing significant. I cannot pretend that I approve of what is happening, I cannot hide my hatred and contempt. Fortunately, I haven’t worked as a journalist for a long time, so I simply don’t have a platform for dangerous thematic expression. But I can afford not to work, this is another damn valuable privilege, to say the least. True, I could be interned for having a second citizenship, the most unfriendly of all possible. But you certainly can’t guess here.

Am I disgusted by all this? Wrong word. Do I experience hatred and sadness that is incompatible with life? I'm testing it. Am I sick every day, reading news from the fronts and from courts and prisons? Sick. Am I destroyed by helplessness? Destroyed. Am I sleeping at night? No. Have I found a way to breathe? Not really, but for now there are inhalers. Is there meaning in my life? It seems not. Will it be easier for me if I experience all this in Paris? Don't think.

I could give a list of reasons that motivate me to value the opportunity to stay - from simple and understandable to everyone (mother) to completely difficult to explain (evil stubbornness) - and in between there will be many points, practical and idealistic. But it was precisely the discussions about the false problem of those who left and those who stayed that convinced me of the futility of explanations.

• Firstly, those who are with you already understand.

• Secondly, anyone who doesn’t understand and really wants to understand exactly what has the opportunity to simply ask, but for some reason this happens extremely rarely. However, answering a very difficult question for you about the reasons for not leaving, often idle or even unfriendly, you almost automatically begin to make excuses, because you yourself are not sure of anything. In general, there is clearly more futility in such explanations than meaning.

I remember, for example, how one popular, in particular among my friends, perspicaciously left a long time ago political scientist, almost a couple of months after the start of the disaster, wrote a large analytical post about everything at once and named me among some “Ostavanites”, placing me in a very eclectic the list includes prominent opposition figures, some obscurantists and people unfamiliar to me. What amazed me was not so much the crazy list and the nickname “Ostavantsy”, but the fact that he and I were on friendly terms and nothing stopped him from asking me at least one question, even in the messenger, before stuffing me into some dream he had cell. “Mmmm, buddy,” I thought, “I wonder if all your tests are about as well-founded?” It turned out on closer examination that it is the same, which, however, does not interfere with its popularity. By the way, I don’t know whether the “Ostavantsy” slogan has caught on.

In any case, as a stayer or as a stayer, it always seems to me that it is much more difficult for those who left than for those who did not leave. I really can’t imagine how I would cope, I think not at all. Still, the overwhelming majority of my friends by occupation did not move bags, they were the core of cultural, intellectual and social life here, and now they have to be found and be found there. There are unique cases when my friends who left (but still more likely those who left a long time ago, and not as a result of February) managed to stop living the life of their ugly homeland, stopped following the news, stopped understanding the difference between Belousov and Oreshkin, between Peskov and Zakharova, between Vaino and Kiriyenko, stop choosing between Scylla and Charybdis. And some friends, fortunately, either immediately possessed or managed to master professions that had nothing to do with the Russian language or with the damned great Russian culture and its damned issues. There are few of them, I am proud of them and do not worry about them. And for others, I’m very, very worried. I'm afraid that no one will understand their handwriting, I'm afraid that they may have to painfully avoid compromises that differ in content from those offered in Mordor, but not in quality. I'm scared that they will have nothing to live on, that they will be sad and lonely and meaningless. I'm scared that some of them will be killed by Arab missiles. This is generally a separate type of excitement.

The only thing more powerful than the effect of presence is the effect of absence - thanks to the satanic role of the media of all countries and continents for driving us crazy.

Only by a titanic effort of will do I force myself not to constantly call everyone in Israel, just as I forced myself not to bother my friends in Florida every hour, although for some reason I was following Hurricane Milton on the tracker all night. And I understand, of course, that in principle the issue of mass attacks by bears on Russians right on the streets, sooner or later, like an acute viral infection, can strike almost anyone who is outside these streets. My American relatives not long ago seriously asked whether craters drive by at night in Moscow. I didn’t even know what to answer them: in general, all sorts of funnel-like creatures travel around all the time, but not in this sense yet.

Perhaps the key word is “yet.” In the area of ​​this damned uncertainty (without irony) lie, it seems to me, all the wounds and insults that we inadvertently (more often than intentionally) inflict on each other, finding ourselves on different sides of the not yet quite Iron Curtain. Uncertainty and fear, hope and rejection of it, attempts to adapt to a new or old place in a catastrophe, loss and bereavement - in this zone of horror we lose ourselves to some extent, and concern for another and the desire to protect him often becomes cruel and even ugly forms.

I was terribly lucky: among my friends there is almost no one who would do all this - would shout “you fool, get out while you have the opportunity, before they close the borders!”, would explain to me that funnels are only a matter of months, would challenge me popular as arbidol, the diagnosis of “Stockholm syndrome” or - after all, this happens - he was reproached by the philistine clinging to geraniums or accused of co-financing ***. I just have smart and good friends. True, I was lucky. Because, for example, for “Stockholm syndrome” I immediately ban you. Not to mention anything else. But God was merciful. Bye.

How do I feel when they, important and beloved people, leave? Endless relief that the danger for them had passed, that they would not be tormented, that they were elusive. Endless sadness that develops into melancholy, and not vice versa, as it should.

Although it is a widely known fact that we often see and communicate more and better with those from whom we live very far away, and not fifteen minutes away. That's true. And not so. Our living connections are like a web or a network of blood vessels. They have a physical dimension that becomes apparent when lost. The integrity of the web is disrupted if an important segment of it is removed or moved. The spider sags helplessly, unable to catch on with its paw, blood flows out into the void. The closeness does not disappear from the fact that my beloved B. now lives in distant, shelled Israel, but I physically miss the opportunity to travel four metro stations, run for flowers and sit in her kitchen on the hated chair that digs into my back, so that she can She screamed at me and fed me at the same time. No, I didn’t do this very often, but always, throughout, one might say, my adult life. And this place hurts like a wound.

I will not list others, because I get wildly upset, to the point of tears, like a small child abandoned in a dark forest, which is certainly selfish. And birthdays, and holidays, and funerals, which are not becoming less frequent, and drinking, and with whom to go to the movies, and with whom to cry into the phone at night (although, let’s say, emigrants can cry, sometimes it’s even more convenient due to the time difference). But, damn it, just a real opportunity to hug with your arms is important, very important. Long distance relationships and marriages have not yet become the prevailing form for a reason.

Besides, I must admit, with each new person who leaves, a vague feeling cannot help but grow that all the best have already left, all the normal ones have already left, and you are kind of like that asshole shown on TV with a tanned neck, who ignored countless calls for evacuation and instead, I stuffed plywood on the windows, and meanwhile Hurricane Milton will land in an hour, whoever didn’t hide - it’s not my fault. But this is cowardice, of course.

After all, putting plywood on windows is a worthy endeavor.

In general, instead of this chaotic text, there could be a simple, short one. Cursed be the one (those) who again broke the world, who is responsible for thousands of deaths and the corruption of thousands of minds, who separated us, turned us into fictitious ones who left and stayed, who killed everyone, robbed everyone, everything as he loves. Amen.

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