My Grandfather Sent Me to the Moon

I spent every summer of my childhood at my grandparents’ house in the south of Russia, in a small town whose name almost no one in the vast country of the USSR had ever heard. For me, summer and childhood were that town.

In 1995, before my eighteenth birthday, I no longer spent the summers in Budyonnovsk. That was the year Chechen rebels attacked the town and took over 1500 people hostage. They held them in the very maternity hospital where I had been born.

My grandparents were not harmed. But for safety reasons, their house was sold, and they moved to a city much farther from Chechnya and the war unfolding there. Years later they died in that other city, where their graves still remain.

I have never returned to Budyonnovsk, and I never will. In a single instant, my former realm and the sense of safety bound to it were cut away. I never had the chance to measure this world with an adult eye and understand how I now fit into the world I once inhabited.

When I was little, my grandfather promised me a flight to the Moon — a story involving plywood, a black coat, and a crow on the electric wires. I believed him just enough to eat my dinner. The crow flew away. I stayed.

The house where it happened is gone. So is the city I was born in. My grandparents have passed. The country no longer exists. There’s no way to return.

But as an artist, I try.
Through performative acts, images, and texts, I find myself there again — not as I was, but as I am now — trying to restore feeling in the parts of me that went numb with loss, time, and distance.