All the Wars

by Jaime Gill

I’ll pretend not to be me. There’s so little of me left, it won’t even be difficult.

This self-dismantling has been underway for ten years now. I remember that 2013 morning, the frightened texts bouncing across Russia’s vast skies. Reading the “traditional family values” law—our President’s filthy fingerprints all over it—I glanced at Nataliya hunched over Artem at our table, patiently correcting his history homework. I knew that under this law, our family had no value at all.

I was swept away by the torrents of panic and predictions, and breakfast burned. I tried rescuing it, but it was irretrievably spoiled.

St. Petersburg became impossible. The LGBTQ family network we’d joined on monthly outings for years met one last time, to dissolve. Other family social groups were suddenly, mysteriously full. One morning, I opened Artem’s empty lunchbox to replenish it, and found a note in adult handwriting: “Keep your child away from mine.” How it got there was a mystery. I didn’t ask Artem, didn’t want him to know it was ever there.

I said Moscow would be better. Huge enough, surely, to allow one little family to live and breathe. For a year, I was right. Then came the chest-beating news that we had taken Crimea, and Nataliya—Ukrainian and queer—became a double enemy of the state.

Nataliya wanted to follow a few friends of ours who’d left. I said no. Russia was my country, and if only the brainwashed and the bigoted remained, who would save its soul?

A long war of attrition began between us, a psychological mirror of the battle at the Ukraine border. I reminded her why her parents had brought her here as a child, the opportunities Russia provided, the better future. She said that future had changed. I said we’d change it back. She said we’d be happier in her homeland, Artem would be safer. I forwarded articles about neo-Nazi thugs waving Ukraine’s flag. She said better a few fascist rabbles on the streets than a whole nation under a new Stalin’s thumb. The endless hamster wheel of the arguments shattered us.

One night I returned to a cold, empty apartment. I wandered our rooms aimlessly, a ghost with nobody to haunt.

How could I be angry at Nataliya with so much else to rage against? Yet, I was, for a long time.

I had been a teacher, wife, mother, and activist. Now, I was an activist only, and my life became war. I weaponised personal agitation into political agitation, but no matter how hard we kicked at the state, it kicked back harder. Our defiance didn't dim but, as our numbers diminished, so did our impact. We retreated from the hot, white lights of public protest to shadowy resistance.

I pretended to forgive Nataliya so she'd send me photographs of Artem. I’d stare at his sweet round face, my thumb covering up hers if she shared the frame. We made plans for me to visit but didn’t discuss resuscitating our marriage. The anger in my heart receded, but love never filled its space again. Meanwhile, I built a new family with my fellow activists, a family that never came home with me.

There was actually a time when we thought we were winning, that the Kremlin’s ageing ogre was finally weakening. Imagine! I remember celebrating the defeat of the anti-trans law in a boarded-up basement bar. Wild, beautiful Kiril wore a rubber mask of the dictator, an obscenely wobbling dildo glued to the forehead. We threw buckets of pink paint over his writhing, naked body.

But after our tanks rolled towards Kyiv, half the brave, brash people from that night fled the country. I couldn’t blame them: we were all on so many lists. Half the nation felt it, the tightening of millions of nooses. By the time the anti-trans law was revived—a horror film monster refusing to die—there were few left to fight. I no longer had the strength. Nataliya’s sister had emailed two weeks earlier. My family had finally been erased, not by statute but by the falling concrete of a bombed apartment block.

Safety is a delusion. Russians never forgot that, and now the world’s beginning to remember. Nataliya must have known at the end. Artem, too. I can’t think about that.

The latest hate law says we are extremists, cuckoos sneaked into Russia’s nest by international LGBT terrorists. What a joke. Kiril was arrested last night in a club and charged with conspiracy, and drug-dealing thrown in for good measure. He doesn’t even drink.

If he’s released, I’ll perform my last terrorist act, driving him to the north-western border. Afterward, I’ll head East, deep into winter, like millions of besieged Russians throughout the centuries, waiting out the enemy.

I will not leave this country that hates me, or what was it all for?

But I will not be me.

I’ll be a war widow. A traumatised patriot accepting the gratitude and commiserations of my new neighbours, but not their social invitations

I’ll lock the only clues that I am me in a suitcase under my bed, filled with all I have left of Artem. Some outgrown clothes, two toys, photographs. No ashes, of course. They are lost in vast ash snowdrifts in another land.

Also locked away, deep in my heart, I’ll keep a dream, and wait for it to come true.

For all his surgeries and doctors, all his germaphobia and paranoid precautions, death will come for the Grandpa in The Bunker. Perhaps as an assassin's bullet, a virus his pampered immune system can’t fight, or the sheer decrepitude that claimed so many of his Kremlin predecessors.

If there’s dancing in the streets of Moscow, I’ll catch a train across Siberia to join. If there isn't, I’ll dance alone.

But on that day, I will speak Artem's name to everyone I meet, everyone who’ll listen. On that day I will be what is left of me again.

BIO: Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living in Cambodia. His work been published by Litro, The Guardian, the BBC, Beyond Words, voidspace, Wanderlust, In Parentheses, Write Launch, Beyond Queer Words, Vine Leaves, and the Bangkok Post. He consults for non-profits across South East Asia while working haphazardly on a novel, script, and far too many stories, several of which have won or been finalists for multiple awards including The Masters Review annual contest, the Bridport Prize, the Beyond Words challenge, the Farnham Flash Fiction Award, the Rigel Prize, and the Plaza Prizes. Find him at www.twitter.com/jaimegill or www.instagramcom/mrjaimegill or jaime.gill@gmail.com.