Andrei picked up an unused bread plate from a nearby table. “This is Bishkek,” he said, pointing to one edge. He swept his finger across the plate’s diameter to the opposite side. “Here is Eugene.” Pronouncing the name of my hometown, he emphasized the first syllable, shortened the second: Yew-jin. “It’s mistika.”
I stood next to him, translating for my friends and relatives gathered on the terrace of a lakeside resort in Wisconsin. It was a second wedding of sorts, taking place almost a year after we signed our marriage certificate in a dank, low-ceilinged government office in Bishkek. There we had celebrated with friends at a hotel outside the city, next to a bluish mountain river that charged over boulders, posing for photos under birch trees that glowed yellow before the sun dipped behind the canyon wall. Our guests raised toasts to wish us many tapochki—pairs of slippers—in our future home.
I don’t remember how I translated mistika that evening in Wisconsin, but I remember that I needed to stand up straight or the neckline of my flowered dress gaped and exposed my unfancy bra. I remember how rapt our audience was as Andrei described the mistika of our meeting. I knew this was how he liked to think of it: as something magical, metaphysical. Two people from opposite sides of the world, brought together by the unseen forces of destiny, prodded by the sly hand of fate.
“Do you think it was by chance that you came to Kyrgyzstan?” he would sometimes ask me, not expecting an answer.
Nichevo nyet sluchainovo. Nothing happens by chance. For Andrei this is as clear as the water in Lake Issyk-kul, where his parents met as schoolmates in a shoreside village. Their families came to the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic from other parts of the USSR after the Second World War, drawn to the sunny Central Asian climate, the abundant fruits and vegetables. After finishing school, Andrei’s father left to harvest wheat on the Kazakh steppe, his mother to help rebuild factories in Krasnodar as part of her duties as a komsomol, or Communist youth. They happened to meet again after moving to Bishkek, then called Frunze, where they discovered that they lived in two different suburbs but had the same address: 26 Kirov Street. Mistika.
But when Andrei remarked on the coincidence his parents dismissed it as unremarkable. Every Soviet city or town had a Kirov Street. But he saw fate at work—just as, years later, he was sure it had taken me to Kyrgyzstan.
As far as I knew, it was the State Department that had brought me to Bishkek. Itching for a change from my desk job in Washington, I managed to secure a two-year assignment as the human rights officer at the embassy. This was shortly after September 11th and Kyrgyzstan was suddenly strategic, a short flight over the mountains to Afghanistan. The understaffed embassy was desperate for help and willing to take someone who was new to the region and its languages. I had limited knowledge of the country; in graduate school, a friend who had served as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers in Kyrgyzstan had showed me his photos of snowy mountains and apple-cheeked high school students, and I had felt ignorant for not realizing that Kyrgyz people looked Asian.
Perhaps I should have known more about the countries that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR. After all, I’d visited the Soviet Union the summer I turned fifteen, when my father adventurously added it to the itinerary of a family trip to Europe. In Moscow, St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Kyiv and Odessa, we stayed in concrete monstrosities built for foreign tourists, bathed in cold, brownish water, and ate from buffets featuring sliced gray bread, boiled potatoes, and bright, tangy borscht. My favorite was the ice cream: I couldn’t identify the flavor, but it was sweet, rich and quickly became soupy in the metal dish. I didn’t yet know the terminology of human rights, but I sensed a heaviness in the atmosphere, saw it embedded in the faces of the guards who searched our train from Helsinki for religious literature or other contraband.
Andrei and I discovered that he was in Leningrad the same summer, travelling on a putyovka – a group excursion that was a gift from his mother before he began his Soviet Army service. Destiny may have watched as we slipped by each other in the surreal midnight dusk. Maybe, I joked, he was one of the young men who whispered, “Can we buy your jeans?” as my family crossed a bridge over the Neva. Andrei chuckled at my naivete; the locals would never have let an outsider from Frunze into the black market for jeans. We might have seen each other, he said, but it wasn’t yet time for us to meet.
Just as well, I think, recalling my braces and awkward short haircut. And even if we had met somehow, it was still the Cold War, our countries official enemies. A few years before my family’s trip, an American girl named Samantha Smith became famous after writing a letter to the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, asking whether he planned to wage nuclear war. Andropov answered her and even invited her to visit the USSR. I had felt envious of Samantha: of her fame, of her wholesome, straight-toothed smile as she posed with Soviet children at a summer camp in Crimea. Why hadn’t I thought to write a letter to Andropov?
Still, my family enjoyed some cachet during our visit, even if the intent was to minimize our contact with Soviet citizens. On internal flights, we were escorted onto the plane separately from the other passengers. As we disembarked, Aeroflot flight attendants smiled patiently at our attempts to say do svidaniya: until we meet again. I had no idea that I would someday learn this language, would return to what had once been the Soviet Union.
After I arrived in Bishkek, a Kyrgyz friend I’d met through my graduate school classmate invited me to come along to a dinner gathering. It was a chilly evening in November, but the apartment was warm with the smells of fresh balesh, a Tatar meat and potato pie. Andrei entered in a faded sherpa jean jacket bearing a present for the hostess: a painting of his, a lone tree on a wintry hill. He made his friends laugh with stories I couldn’t follow with my still-basic Russian. Despite the language barrier, I was intrigued.
The idea of getting to know him better gave me extra motivation for the Russian lessons I was taking before work every morning. My teacher, Irina, imprinted dark lipstick stains onto my coffee cups as I struggled to make primitive sentences about boys or girls or apples. “Memorize!” she commanded every time we encountered the distressingly frequent exceptions to the rules. That winter Irina led me through the dense forest of Russian case endings. By May, as wild poppies exploded vivid red in the foothills of the Ala Too mountains, I could finally have halting conversations with Andrei.
Ne skuchai, he said as we parted after one of our first weekends together, and I was puzzled—was he telling me not to miss him, or not to be bored? The expression can capture both ideas, I later learned. It would have been easier if he’d said do svidaniya.
The small caretaker’s cottage where he lived and painted rent-free in exchange for watching over a disused hotel was in a village not far from the embassy, on an unpaved road whose potholes I bounced over in my car with its red diplomatic license plate. He had never travelled outside of the Soviet Union, had no passport. He thought that the world looked huge enough from his view across an empty field to the boxy apartment towers on the city’s edge. Sometimes we spent time in my embassy-provided apartment in the city and while he appreciated being able to take a hot bath or watch movies, I never felt that he saw me as a ticket to a more comfortable life. He lived hand-to-mouth, but he was happy, having found freedom and solitude and a space to create after two chaotic decades. He wasn’t looking to change his life by dating an American. Part of what convinced him to do so, he says, was the evidence of mistika: the signs he kept seeing. That we were both in St. Petersburg the same summer. That his birthday is on June 9 and mine is on June 10. That our hometowns both lie near the 44th parallel on opposite sides of the globe, and four is his lucky number.
“The cosmos wants us to be together,” he likes to say. Is it a coincidence that upon first seeing Andrei’s photo, with his strong jaw and high forehead and barely visible smile, a friend of mine dubbed him “the cosmonaut”?
In his opinion, the best way for us to leave this earth, when that time comes, would be to go down in the same plane—so that neither of us is left alone. But I’ve always been a nervous flyer, someone who can’t help thinking at the start of every flight that it might be my last. These fears peaked during my time in Central Asia, every time I strapped myself into one of the creaky Soviet airplanes still in use in the region, with their bald tires and floppy seat backs. Aircraft that shuddered and groaned as they lifted off. I would gaze down at the craggy mountaintops, close enough to touch, and wonder if it was my fate for the plane to spiral toward them. Samantha Smith died in a plane crash a few years after her visit to the USSR, and at the time I had wondered what she experienced, whether she had been afraid.
Once I was in an Antonov turboprop as it descended toward the verdant cotton fields near Osh, the crooked outline of Mount Suleiman coming into view. But I didn’t hear the landing gear coming down, and shouldn’t it have by now? Hot panic crept up my neck and before I knew what I was doing, I rose and approached the flight attendant. The wheels aren’t coming down, I explained, grasping for the Russian words, but the vocabulary didn’t matter. She sent me back to my seat with a hissed warning and a stern pointed finger.
“Izvinite,” I apologized as we disembarked after an uneventful landing, putting my hand over my heart the way locals did, but her posture stiffened as she said, “Our Soviet planes are stronger than your Boeings!”
For all my worries, it was Andrei who once experienced an emergency landing on a flight from Bishkek to Moscow. “Dami i gospoda!” “Ladies and gentlemen!” the pilot announced, then went silent as the plane rattled and made a sharp turn. Andrei wasn’t particularly nervous. As he likes to say, everything will be as it should be, even if it turns out differently.
I fear flying but also sort of love it, for the adventures it takes me on, for the chance to sink into daydreams while up in the clouds. At times Andrei’s conviction that we’re destined to be together has stirred up ambivalent feelings too. While terribly romantic, sometimes it felt constricting, a subtle drag on my wings. Suggesting that invisible forces tethered us rather than our free will. Like being sent to your assigned seat, or like my family’s predetermined itinerary in the Soviet Union, which had us report to a dark, empty dining room before one early flight, because breakfast was on our program whether we wanted it or not.
I once told Andrei about an acquaintance whose friend lost her daughter when a small plane crashed into their home. It seemed so horribly random: what were the chances that the plane would fall exactly there and then? He agreed it was tragic but took the view that the very unlikelihood of the event meant it wasn’t random. I protested—was he suggesting that a little girl could possibly deserve that? No, he said, it probably had to do with whoever she was in a past life.
Nothing happens by chance.
As we navigated our differences, each confronting the other’s mentalitet, sometimes I considered whether the universe knew what it was doing. For example, as I gradually became aware of his penchant for certain conspiracy theories, like his doubts that anyone, cosmonauts or astronauts, had landed on the moon, or his belief that certain planes emit chemicals designed to change the weather. We had debates that left us both frustrated, where he accused me of being naïve. I wondered whether he embraced these theories because of having an artist’s exploring mind—the boy who saw magic in that shared address, 26 Kirov Street, the adult who depicts his understanding of the metaphysical world in his paintings. A self-taught artist who didn’t have the kind of educational opportunities I had and found his own ways to seek out answers to his many questions. Or maybe it was the influence of growing up in the Soviet Union, learning to be deeply skeptical of official versions of events. He wasn’t the only one. Stranno, stranno—strange, strange, he remembers people saying after Samantha Smith’s death. Nothing happens by accident. But they weren’t sure whether it was the CIA or the KGB.
His belief in alternative explanations and his belief in fate both suggested that larger forces were influencing our lives, whether the universe or a powerful elite that controlled the sistema. Perhaps equally ingrained in my psyche was a belief in the role of the individual—like the idea that a young girl’s letter could unfreeze U.S.-Soviet relations—and a desire for explanations to be straightforward. But how to explain how someone so suspect of the sistema fell in love with someone who, as a U.S. government employee, was a small part of it? And that we connected despite seeing the world very differently? Maybe this was my proof of mistika.
It was hard to have conversations about the conspiracy theories, but I did probe into the question of fate, asking Andrei whether he didn’t think our own choices played a role. “Of course,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the signs.” The universe giving us hints that we’re on the right flight path, as it were.
When we were thinking about having children, I wondered whether it was a sign that a family of storks built a nest on the roof of our apartment building in The Hague, where we lived at the time. Or was it a sign when a violent July storm left the nest a ragged, teetering pile of sticks? We started to pursue different options when we faced fertility issues, but none of them felt right, our efforts halfhearted. Maybe we were tempting fate, Andrei suggested, and sometimes I felt the same way. Perhaps, despite those wedding toasts, we were meant to have a home without many pairs of slippers. The idea brought me some comfort, even relief, but I worried that accepting this as our fate was equivalent to giving up—or letting indecision become the decision, as I sometimes tend to do.
These days I wonder whether we would have seen so much of the world together if we had children. “Our destiny,” Andrei will say, pointing at a spot on a map when we plan a trip, and I don’t correct his English. Everything will be as it should be, even if it turns out differently.
In our living room in The Hague, next to the window where the storks swooped by, I sometimes couldn’t stop myself from watching a TV show called Air Crash Investigations. As I cringed through reenactments and listened to experts discuss whatever factors might have been relevant in that case, I was struck by how often the causes of disaster are complex, a unique combination of bad luck and bad choices. Take the report into the crash that killed Samantha Smith, which lists dozens of possible factors, from the noisy cockpit to lousy weather to high turnover at the airline. An intricate web of potential causes, even without the suggestion of foul play that was popular in the Soviet Union. Amidst so many variables, what folly to think that I could guess at whatever scenario reality might deliver or that my nervous hypervigilance could stave off catastrophe. Our Soviet planes are stronger than your Boeings.
I might be a more relaxed passenger if I knew the formula that determines how our actions intertwine with all that we can’t control. But this formula is mysterious, unknowable. It’s mistika. Any love story, I suppose, involves a dose of mistika, with a series of events and decisions that transpired a certain way, interacted in a certain combination—like how Andrei and I wouldn’t be together if the Soviet Union hadn’t fallen apart, if September 11th hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t made up my mind to leave Washington, if his friends, determining that we should meet, hadn’t invited us both to dinner.
We moved to Oregon in the summer of 2020 after living in Warsaw for several years, flying to New York on a near-empty plane where the Polish flight attendants wore gauzy gowns over their uniforms. It felt like it might be my country’s turn to fall apart, as the presidential campaign raged alongside the virus, as the president touted conspiracy theories from a very different and more dangerous perspective than Andrei’s, and as we saw what can happen if people stop trying to listen to each other. It felt like a good time to buy a book on conspiracy theories so that I could try to better understand this phenomenon in all its complexity. The house we rented in Portland was on the corner of Holland Street, reminding us of our seven years in the Netherlands. Down the block grew two persimmon trees, a fruit that sellers at the bazaars in Kyrgyzstan display with bottoms up so you can see them cracking open, full of ripe sweetness. It may be naïve to see these as signs that everything will be as it should be. But I’m pretty sure it’s not by chance. It’s part of a particular chain of events bringing two people together, from opposite sides of a plate.
