Moscow, 1980

I’m sitting on Holly and Kolya’s couch, watching Easy Rider.

Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper traverse miles,

landscape changing from dust, red rock to lush Louisiana green.

Suddenly, I´m transported home -

a biker movie about the intolerant sixties South

makes me long for the fishy breeze of Lake Michigan

and the thick drawl of angry men in a redneck diner,

leaves me longing to hear the sounds of English

when I go out to buy milk or bread.

It’s April in Moscow.

Spring is only a promise in the chives I bought at the market
this morning

from an old woman with scarf and two gold teeth

who called me Devushka though I am hardly a girl

anymore. Beretye. Take them.

I pay her fifty kopecks, nibble them on the bus back to my dorm

their bitter green burning through my palate.

I’ve almost made it through this Russian winter.

Holly is from our Georgia, not theirs.

She got out of Savannah where nobody understood why she loved

men and women, both.

Right now she loves Kolya, a Russian man.

They live in this little apartment in a cement building on Lenin Hills,

Where Holly feeds me dinner, invites me to watch the American movies people

bring her from home.

Jack Nicholson with his southern accent

sounds like Holly.

But no nostalgia for her!

Kolya can’t believe it: 1980 and I still haven’t seen this film!

How could I miss it?

He’s amused that as I watch I’m longing for home.

He’s amused at how I savor the small town brass band,

the rancher and his passel eating outdoors in the sun,

the dust, the simple grace spoken by a naïve hippie

who has just sent bags of doomed seed into hard-packed clay

at my delight as if this film were a love poem to the workers of America.

Clearly I am missing the point.

Kolya tries not to ruin my enjoyment.

He sees I have no idea what is coming, this

unwelcoming America showering the Vietnamese with napalm

murdering in the South for the crime of integration

while Peter and Dennis and Jack were enjoying the wind in their hair on their bikes,

how this America will blast them, leave them bleeding, burning, dead.

1980. Moscow.

Kolya is happy he’s too old for the Army.

Too old for Afghanistan.

He tries not to ruin the surprise ending for me.

But he can’t resist completely.

Right before the end

before Peter Fonda, his American flags, the jacket, the helmet,

his peaceful grass-smoking smile go up in the great conflagration

he turns toward me, head tilted, slight smile and asks:

Do you love your country?

- Deborah Adelman