Spring Before Summer

‘I celebrated my 20th birthday in jail.’

With each year, I feel pressure alleviate and evaporate, like water in the pot where you boil pelmeni. And perhaps that’s what real maturity is: the courage to get the fuck off your own back.

I celebrated my 20th birthday in jail.

An actual, metal-bars-and-police-officers jail, with prostitutes and drug addicts and a guy walking around with a rubber stick, poking it inside cells, saying, “Get the fuck away from the door or I’ll mess you up!”

It was in Sheremetyevo Airport (Moscow’s Heathrow), and I was there with my then-girlfriend, Angelina. The offence? She was under 18, a minor, and we were going to Amsterdam for my birthday. We didn’t have money, so the day before, I sold my grandmother’s golden bracelet — I would never wear that, I wanted to say when she handed it to me, but instead said, “Oh my God, thanks so much,” pondering the nearest pawn shops to my apartment — and used the money to buy Angelina and I two tickets to Amsterdam with a pre-booked hotel on the canals.

When we, blissfully happy and naive, approached the border officer in Sheremetyevo — Russia is a country where you have to “check out” and be checked whether you’re worthy enough to leave — we were told to “wait on the side” while the other passengers happily handed in their passports and were let go en route to Egypt or Turkey or some place like that. Then a guy about my age approached us and said, “Follow me,” which is one thing you never want a police officer — especially in…