My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva & E. M. Swift

Author:Ekaterina Gordeeva & E. M. Swift [GORDEEVA EKATERINA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446565189
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

At our wedding banquet.

Sergei and I were the last to leave. I drove us back to our apartment. I remember thinking, Look at me, chauffering my husband home from my wedding. But it was fun, actually, because I was so used to Sergei driving me. It was one more step of married life.

I also remember thinking how much fun it was to be coming home, just the two of us, to our own apartment. How lucky I was to have someone to come home with, someone who would take care of me. That night, for the first time, I really felt married.

We didn’t go on a honeymoon. I don’t know why. I don’t remember sitting down and discussing it, but I probably thought it was more important to get back onto the ice as soon as possible. That would be typical of the way my mind worked. The way it still works, if I am honest with myself.

The day after the wedding, something sad happened. My mother and I were cleaning the apartment after the party, and a white pigeon flew in through the open window. My father managed to get it out again, but it is a very bad omen in Russia to have a bird fly in your house. It means someone will die. The whole day, my mother was somber and pensive. And that August my dear Babushka died of cancer. She was sixty-two.

We didn’t have luck that week. Not a bit of it. Three days after the wedding, I managed to wreck the beautiful Toyota I had bought in Japan, a car that had the steering wheel on the wrong side. Wrong for Russia, anyway, where cars drive on the right side of the road, as they do in America. I am not the world’s best driver, I admit. It took me five tries to pass my driving test. But this was an extraordinarily inept performance, even for me. The accident occurred on May 1, which is a big holiday in Russia. Many of the roads are closed, and there are almost no cars on the streets. In fact there was, I believe, only one other driver on the street that morning, and I found him. He was moving too slowly for me. Actually, he was stopped at a red light, but I didn’t see it. Maybe I was blinded by the sun. Or the wedding bliss. I don’t know, but I crashed right into this car.

The man in the car came to see who was this crazy person who had hit him, and I burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” he asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

I told him I hadn’t.

“You’re okay? Good.” Then he said something odd. “Let’s go to my car. I have a little TV inside, and we can watch cartoons.”

He didn’t seem very upset that I had wrecked his car. I said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s all right. It’s my friend’s car. You know, I looked up and saw you coming, and I tried to move forward, but you got me anyway.

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