The Name

I must begin with the name, although the name explains nothing.

Ivan.

There are millions of Ivans, perhaps, and each one is innocent of the others; but people do not believe this. Give a man a name and they will build a country around him, furnish it with prisons, churches, tanks, grandmothers in black shawls, drunken uncles, snow, icons, and secret police--and then demand that he confess to having lived there.

I had never lived there.

I had never even set foot there.

Nevertheless, I was Russian.

"You're Russian, right?" Cordelia asked me at college.

It was 2014. Crimea had been taken--or returned, depending on the person speaking--and photographs of Putin stared from every newspaper box. On television there were masked men, flags, burning buildings, solemn experts pointing at maps. Even the maps seemed accusatory.

"He has a very Russian name," she said to someone else, as if I were absent.

I smiled and tried to quietly say "quarter Russian," which is what I believed at the time. I had developed a smile for such occasions: neither agreement nor protest, merely the smile of a defendant who has not yet understood the charge.

Later she spoke to me about Pussy Riot. Why? Because of Ivan, naturally. Had my name been Adrian or Lucian, perhaps she would have spoken to me about Romanian monasteries, Nadia Comăneci, Ceaușescu, or nothing at all. Nothing would have been merciful.

The truth was embarrassingly complicated. My mother was Romanian. My father was Romanian. My blood test, that little commercial oracle into which I had spat, declared me Romanian, Hungarian or Czechoslovakian, Ukrainian or Belarusian--everything except the thing strangers saw immediately.

But evidence has never defeated imagination.

My mother's father had given us the names. That was all. A grandfather reaches across time, places several syllables upon a child, and dies; decades later those syllables become a border checkpoint.

People asked whether I had relatives in Russia.

They asked why I had a Russian name.

They asked why I still had an accent when I had been in Canada since I was seven months old.

That last question always amused me in the most painful way. What answer could satisfy them?

Because my tongue is disloyal?

Because some foreign infant remained hidden inside my mouth?

In Victoria, long before college, a woman named Marilyn--or Marilynne; hatred does not become more precise merely because one spells it correctly--shouted at my mother at work:

"I hate you! Go back to your fucking cuntry!"

My mother was competent. Marilyn was not. This, perhaps, was the true country from which my mother had been ordered to depart: the intolerable country of competence, where another person's inadequacy becomes visible.

My mother returned home and told me what had happened. She did not cry. That made it worse. A person who cries asks to be comforted; a person who does not cry leaves the pain standing upright in the room.

Years earlier, some junior-high-school girls had spat at her while I was still in elementary school. I did not see it, but afterward I imagined it constantly. In my imagination the spit remained suspended in the air, glittering with the terrible immortality of insignificant cruelties. The girls went home, ate dinner, forgot. My mother carried it with her?

When I was about twelve, my mother had a Portuguese boyfriend. Once he asked me to help him carry a great heavy sofa--or perhaps it was only one enormous section of it--and I tried. I truly tried, but my arms failed me. For this failure he called me a faggot.

I told my mother. He denied it, naturally, or reduced it to something harmless: he had merely said, "Forget about it." Cruelty often revises itself the moment a witness appears. Yet not long afterward I heard him say to her, with the injured innocence of a man unjustly accused by the existence of another human being, "Is it my fault if he's gay?" I stood somewhere nearby, listening. It seemed to me then that I had become a charge laid against him, although he was the one conducting the trial.

Then, one night in Victoria, two men approached me. One pushed or shoved me--I cannot remember which, though my body remembers better than language--and called me a faggot.

The word was less surprising than the shove; I had heard it before from inside a home. The shove said something more complete: You occupy space improperly.

For years afterward, I suspected that everyone agreed with them in secret.

I honestly never felt that anyone really liked me.

There: I have written the childish sentence, the shameful sentence, the sentence that explains too much and therefore explains nothing. Perhaps some people did like me. Perhaps I failed to recognize it. But loneliness is a dishonest accountant: it records every insult and misplaces every kindness.

In Edmonton and Calgary, people sometimes assumed that I had just arrived in Canada. Others tried to intimidate me physically. Once a Romanian man called me Russian even after speaking Romanian with my mother. Facts entered his ears and emerged defeated.

A Filipina hairdresser once told my mother that she did not sound Romanian.

"I know Romanian people," the woman explained.

My mother knew only two languages: Romanian and English. Yet apparently she had failed to sound like herself.

This is a peculiar tribunal, the tribunal of strangers. They ask no documents. They summon no witnesses. They look at your face, hear three words, and hand down a nationality.

At college, even the classroom sometimes became another border checkpoint. One professor spoke about Soviet Russia--its evil, its authoritarianism, its crimes--with such concentrated severity that I began to feel, irrationally but unmistakably, that Soviet Russia had become the darkest regime in human history, darker than Mao's China, darker than every fascist dictatorship and theocracy, and that I, the only person in the room with a Russian name, had somehow been appointed to answer for it.

No one accused me. That was precisely what made the feeling so difficult to challenge. I sat quietly, conscious of the name above my face, wondering whether the others had become conscious of it too.

My French teacher once asked whether I knew Russian. There was no mystery behind the question; there was only Ivan. I had to say no. I felt ashamed while answering, although I could not determine what the shame concerned: not being Russian, not knowing Russian, or having once again disappointed the country that strangers had invented for me.

Buffy (a fellow student) said Canadians were still affected by the Cold War.

I thought about that for a long time. The Cold War had ended, but perhaps wars do not end; perhaps they retreat into people's reflexes. An empire collapses, statues come down, borders change color on maps, yet decades later a boy called Ivan stands in a hallway and becomes the involuntary ambassador of a country he had never seen.

And because they insisted I was Russian, I began sometimes to want to become Russian.

This is the most humiliating part.

I wanted to learn the language. I imagined moving to Russia. More absurdly still, I imagined that in Russia I might become heterosexual, as though sexuality were a stain produced by Canadian weather//atmosphere, removable by snow, Orthodoxy, stern men, and grammatical cases.

I pictured myself transformed: harder, simpler, forgiven.

There are fantasies born not from desire but from exhaustion. A man tires of defending what he is, so he dreams of surrendering to what others have already decided.

When people called Russia monstrous, I sometimes wanted to defend it. When they wrote "russia" and "russian" with a small r, when they called Russians terrorists, zombies, a people without culture, I felt the insult enter me despite my protests that it did not belong to me.

Then I would swing violently in the opposite direction. I would try to become pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian, righteous, purified. I read and listened to people who promised strength, tradition, resistance, civilization. Some praised Putin. Some condemned him. Some dressed cruelty in revolutionary language; others dressed it in aristocratic language. Infrared, Maupin, Prilepin, Spencer, Apolloism--names and banners passed through my mind like rival armies through an undefended village.

I mistook extremity for belonging.

One side said: They despise you because you are Russian; therefore become more Russian.

The other said: They despise Russians; prove that you are not one.

Neither asked who I was.

Worse: I did not ask either.

I wanted a verdict. Romanian, Russian, Canadian, Ukrainian, heterosexual, homosexual, traitor, victim, civilized, barbarian--anything final. A condemned man at least knows where he must stand.

Sometimes I opened Duolingo and studied Romanian. The exercises were innocent.

The woman has an apple.

The boy drinks water.

My mother speaks Romanian.

Such peaceful little sentences! No one annexed anything. No one spat. No one demanded that the apple return to its country.

Yet even Romanian felt partly imaginary to me, a locked room whose key I had inherited without being taught which door it opened. I was supposedly eighty-four percent Romanian. Eighty-four percent! As if the soul could be measured like flour. But I could not transform a percentage into a home.

One evening my mother sat beside me, tired from work. She was older than she had been in Victoria. I suddenly remembered Marilyn shouting at her, and the schoolgirls spitting, and the hairdresser declaring that she did not sound Romanian.

"Do I sound Romanian to you?" my mother asked jokingly.

I looked at her.

Her accent, which strangers treated as evidence, was simply her voice. I had heard it when she was angry, when she was frightened, when she counted money, when she spoke in her sleep. It contained no border. It was the first country I had known.

"Yes," I said.

Then I corrected myself.

"You sound like Mama."

She laughed, but I felt something inside me break--not dramatically, not cleanly, but like ice softening beneath dirty spring water.

Perhaps a name is not a country.

Perhaps blood is not a country.

Perhaps the contempt of strangers is not a country either, though one can live there for years.

I am Ivan. This is true.

I am my mother's son. This is truer.

Beyond that, I still do not know. But for the first time it occurred to me that not knowing might be less shameful than accepting the identities forced upon me by frightened people.

Outside, Vancouver continued indifferently. Cars passed. Someone shouted in the street. In another apartment a television spoke of Russia, Ukraine, Europe, civilization, destiny.

I closed the window.

Then my mother said something to me in Romanian, and although I understood only part of it, I understood her entirely.