by Anya Sytenkova
For the first seventeen years of my life, I had the same answer to the classic ‘What did you do over the summer?’ question that makes its appearance during every back-to-school season: I was at my grandparents’ house, in Russia. “Really, the whole summer?”
Yes, the whole summer. For almost two months, I would be a day’s worth of travel, an eleven hour time difference, and two continents away from home in my grandparents’ town of Akademgorodok in southern Siberia. For almost two months, I was surrounded by different people, living an entirely different life, in what felt like an entirely different world. For almost two months, I would be a slightly different ‘me.’ But all of this didn’t fit on the cardboard apple cutout that would go up on the ‘What did you do over the summer?’ bulletin board in the hallway, so I would just write that I was at my grandparents’ house, in Russia.
When not limited to the few square inches of a cardboard apple, I’d try to recount my summer’s adventures to my friends. Nobody else could truly imagine these adventures, no matter how I explained. But I’d have to try. Summer doesn’t last forever, just like my summers in Siberia wouldn’t, but I have to make sure the memories do. I have to let them live on. I have to explain, even if no one understands, even if the joyful memories tumble painfully out of my mouth. Even if no one could hear this, I’d try to explain. Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 2
I’d try to tell my friends about my time at the baza where we spent a week every year – a collection of cabins in the forest outside a rural village on the shore of the Ob Sea, which isn’t really a sea, but a reservoir off the Ob River – already a mouthful. To me, the Ob could have been the biggest ocean. My sister, cousin and I would sleepily amble down the path to the shore every morning before breakfast, shivering in the fifty-something degree wind before chucking our towels on the pier and plunging into the milky water. Chuckling and teasing us, the fishermen on the dock watched us sprint back up the path, barefoot and squealing. Everyone else already at the dining hall knew to await our dramatic entrance, ready with cheers for our valiant sense of adventure. They began to call us ‘the walruses.’
“So it’s like summer camp?” my friends would often ask me when I described it. “Well, no, not really. We just do our own thing all day, and there’s all kinds of people there. I don’t know. I can’t explain.” How could I? None of them had ever been to a baza.
When we weren’t swimming or frolicking around from cabin to cabin, we were playing cards. Mafia, Thousands, poker, but most often Durak, the card game that every Russian child knew, whose name translates to ‘idiot’ or ‘fool.’ Once, my sister and I tried to teach our cousin, who lived in Russia, to play Spit, a classic in our middle school back in New Jersey.
“It’s not too hard to explain,” I promised my cousin, who was wearing the specific look of dread reserved for learning new card games. I shuffled and reshuffled, dealt and dealt face-up, explained and re-explained. I played this game all the time with my friends back home, it wasn’t hard, I had insisted. Not even one round later, we mindlessly went back to playing Durak.
I would tell my friends back home about the giant bounce house in the Akademgorodok town center that would entertain my sister and I for hours upon hours all summer. Begging our Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 3
mom to buy us more and more twenty-minute tickets, we jumped around with the other kids until we physically couldn’t anymore. If we had any extra change, we’d get popsicles together, discussing our favorite brands, bonding over being on summer break. Sometimes, our new friends would tell us that they were also here in Akademgorodok visiting relatives, that they had come all the way from Tomsk.
“The bus ride was like three hours – such a long way!” “Yeah… it was a pretty long way for us too,” I would respond vaguely in my accent-less Russian, knowing exactly what I was doing.
“Really? Where did you come from then?” “America.”
The majority of my summers in Akademgorodok were spent at my grandpa’s dacha: a small cottage accompanying a plot of land, given to the working class during the Soviet era. My grandpa’s dacha was complete with a spectacular assortment of crops, along with a very small, very old wooden house. A ten minute drive from my grandparents’ apartment, my grandpa went to the dacha every day, with us tagging along most of the time. After using a sliver of wood to catch the string attached to a hook in the gap of the closed door, the lock mechanism would click and the door would swing open to a narrow room that housed a distinct smell of vegetables, newspaper, and old wood. The tabletop that ran along the length of the room would be covered in bins of black currants, cucumbers, and radishes, a scale, books, and stacks of filled out leather notebooks: a glimpse into my grandpa’s mastermind.
Everything about every single fruit and vegetable he grew was documented in those pages: the type of fruit, the number of centimeters it grew each week, the weight of each one, Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 4
visual details, all compared to each year’s harvest. Bending down to be level with the scale, I would set the Gertrude cucumber on the metal plate as delicately as I could, feeling immensely honored to be reading out the number of grams it weighed as my grandpa noted it neatly in the designated cucumber notebook. Even the dacha was a place of utmost precision for my laser physicist grandfather. To me, it was simply heaven. We were both at home.
“No, it’s not just a garden,” I have said countless times over the years. “There’s a little cottage too. But no, it’s definitely not a country house.” I try to explain the overgrown grass path, the plastic water bottle faucet, the unmistakable comfort that would wash over me the second I stepped foot at the dacha, but my feeble attempts make me feel like a durak. So much more than just a summer house, the dacha captures the very essence of this other life of mine, a central piece of this other ‘me.’ My mouth starts to water, along with my eyes, as I remember the blissful taste of the berries plucked straight from their bushes, but with a sinking feeling, I realize I don’t even know their names in English, if they even have translations. I wouldn’t trade the memories for anything, but the longing they leave behind scrapes at my mind like the thorns of grandpa’s raspberry bushes.
“It’s hard to explain.” I resign my efforts and leave it at that. What else can I do?
The last time that I was at my grandparents’ house, in Russia, was in 2021, and I had not known then that it would be my last visit there. It had been a typical summer, with my grandparents and uncle and cousins. I readjusted to the routine of responding to my friends’ ‘good morning’ texts with ‘goodnight.’ I was a walrus at the baza. I played at least a hundred rounds of durak. I came back with the usual ‘I was at my grandparents’ house, in Russia,’ prepared for anyone that asked. I did not know that I wouldn’t be going back next year. I did not Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 5
know that I had stepped foot at the dacha for the last time that summer, did not know that my grandpa would sell it two years later in his old age. I did not know that Russia would declare war on Ukraine a few months before I was supposed to go back to my grandparents’ house, in Russia.
“It’s your first ever summer in the United States! How does it feel?”
It felt like a scratched record, like a page ripped out of a book. It was all wrong. It was time for two months of my other life, for two months of experiences that later felt impossible to recount. Experiences that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else or anytime else but my summers in Siberia. Experiences only I knew.
All wrong. I shook with a livid loathing for the government of the country home to so many precious memories that make up who I am. The country home to my first seventeen summers, the country still home to my grandparents. The country that now fills me with quaking disgust, my eyes with hot, angry tears. I now keep in touch with my grandparents through whichever app isn’t blocked yet in Russia. My mother tells them that their world is now a dystopia, but their world tells them otherwise. They don’t understand. How could they? My voice trembles through the unstable VPN connection. My grandparents ask me when we’ll visit again, tell us to come this summer. I try to explain; I have to. Even if they won’t listen. I hang up, swallowing silent tears and the heavy sense of responsibility. They don’t understand. My breath quivers. No one does.
It was my first ever summer in the United States, together with all my friends, but I felt more removed than when I was an ocean away. A part of me was missing, a hole waiting to be Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 6
filled. I could tell my friends all of this – shout it, scream it, cry it out – but they can’t really relate. No one can.
“It’s hard to explain,” I respond.
That last time of being at my grandparents’ house, in Russia, I accompanied my grandpa on our usual walk through the pine forest of Akademgorodok. It was a hot August day, but our long pants were tucked into our socks, our hands ready to retreat into the long sleeves of our flannels. We wore matching bucket hats, the kind with adjustable drawstrings for underneath your chin. The worn rim of the hat sat perfectly atop my grandpa’s wildly bushy silver eyebrows. He placed a small notebook in one pocket of his khaki pants and a pocket knife in the other.
“It’s mushroom season,” he said simply.
Our attire was in preparation for the thickets of stinging nettle that were strewn wildly across every corner of the woods. The biting sensation of its burn is one that I associate with summer, having come home most days with a new bout of red, itchy bumps on my skin from spending all day at the dacha. My grandpa always said that the burns are good for you. I never believed him in my itchy craze, which couldn’t be soothed by any cream. Still, he always moved the nettle branches out of my way, unflinching, though he grabbed them with his bare hands.
A walk through the Siberian forest is very different from a nature walk back home. No reflective neon trail markers, no informational plaques, no signs telling you to ‘take only photos, leave only footprints,’ no tourists there to do so. Just us. The forest had always felt completely infinite in every direction – perfectly straight pine trees climbing towards the clear sky, hills blanketed in luscious ferns, clearings tickled by the playful sunlight peeking through the gaps in the green-needled ceiling. Infused with the rich smell of sticky sap, the air seemed to be at a Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 7
standstill as beams of light caught the momentarily hovering dust particles, splitting up the daylight into slivered slices of sunshine. Our footsteps mingled with the sporadic birdsong chiming from the trees, occasionally interrupted by the persistent thumping of a woodpecker or the uncertain chatter of a squirrel. Otherwise, everything was still.
A sudden but faint wailing sounded as soon as we climbed atop a small hill that gave way to an empty clearing. My grandpa stopped. So did I. We listened. It wasn’t loud at all, but something was definitely crying out. I followed his careful, purposeful footsteps around the edge of the clearing, watching him look for the source of the cries. Suddenly, I froze, my heart jolting upwards, one foot raised directly above the suddenly louder squeaks.
“Grandpa, look!” I whispered. He heard me. Together, we crouched to look at the fallen nest of tiny baby birds crying out into the clearing. It had taken me a second to even realize that they were birds – their beaks were open so wide that all you could see of the creatures from above were the giant chasms of their mouths. They were ugly. Only a couple of threadbare feathers per bird, dark, folded orbs for eyes, all fidgeting around restlessly and wailing all the while.
It was strange: their wails didn’t sound particularly sad, or even afraid, just incessantly insistent. They must have been in that clearing all day, squeaking and squeaking and squeaking to no end, and reaching no end, no matter how they squeaked. The hopping and chippering squirrels couldn’t help; the ants and worms crawling on the ground weren’t one of them. There were no other baby birds around. So they wailed, begging for someone to hear them.
“What do we do?” I asked my grandpa. He was looking down at the gaping, screeching holes that were the birds with an expression on his face that I couldn’t read. He blinked at my Sytenkova, “It’s Hard to Explain,” p. 8
question and looked at me. “We can’t do anything. They will live.”
We turned back to the nest of baby birds. The forest felt even emptier. I listened to them wail.
