No, no, no! Not that road! The one that diverged in the wood:

That’s better. Now, to continue . . .

I had chosen the shadowy one: the one that led to Russia. And what a summer it was!

There I was, just me with my 14 pieces of luggage and boxes at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, looking for someone named Vitold who I hoped would have a sign with my name on it. And by some miracle, I did find him: a large, rumpled, Bohemian-looking fellow of indeterminate age, who would be my driver, my gofer, my jack-of-all-trades, and my savior for the next few months.

Wisely, he had brought along a friend and a truck, and between them they wrestled all my baggage into the vehicle — although from the looks of the truck, I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t simply collapse under the weight. It shook, rattled and rolled all the way into the city and out the other side, to my new apartment/office on the far opposite outskirts of town. And after an endless night and half a day, I was finally “home.”

(Although the shops on the ground level and the cars in the front parking lot are a lot nicer in this picture than they were in 1993.)

And so began three months of KGB spies, the Russian “Mafia,” scary taxi drivers, undercover militia officers, child victims of Chernobyl, young women with peonies, new friends, and much, much more — followed by another year and a half back in the U.S. with our old friends Aksilenko and Shvets, the FBI, the Russian Embassy, the literary agent, a translator, the press . . . and a CIA turncoat named Aldrich Ames.

Descriptions of the events of May through August in Moscow have already been laid out in excruciating detail in Chapters 16-21 and 23 of this blog (and shared here on Facebook); and re-telling them now would just take up needless data space. So please forgive me if I simply refer you to those chapters for the fascinating, sometimes hair-raising, and frequently funny tales of:

Ch. 16 (8/26/24): Home, Sweet Home in Moscow
Ch. 17 (8/29/24): An Unholy Triumvirate: The Moscow Militia, the KGB, and the Russian Mafia
Ch. 18 (8/30/24): A Yankee Doodle Dandy in Moscow
Ch. 19 (9/5/24): Return to Kyiv
Ch. 20 (9/7/24): Last Tango in Moscow
Ch. 21 (9/9/24): The Bones in the Basement
Ch. 23 (9/11/24): Lenin, Come Home

*. *. *

And if you make it through all of that, and still want to know how it all came out, there are:

Ch. 24 (9/12/24): A Juggling Act
Ch. 25 (9/15/24): Once More, in February
Ch. 26 (9/16/24): Aftermath – Part I
Ch. 27 (9/17/24): Aftermath – Part II
. . . and finally . . .
Ch. 28 (9/20/24): Starting Over

*. *. *

Didn’t realize there was going to be homework, did you? Sorry.

But it’s a long, convoluted story — a cautionary tale, really, about the sometimes unexpected, unintended results of the choices we make in life. But not knowing can often bring about the grandest adventures, because if we could foretell the future, we might never have the courage to try anything new. Someone else said it before (and better than) I could:

“For all the sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
– John Greenleaf Whittier, Don’t Quit

*. *. *

And so, in the end, I took the road less traveled by . . . and it has, indeed, made all the difference.

Thanks for reading.

Brendochka
1/11/25

Конец
(The End)

*. *. *