Transcript
Narrator (0:00)
One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar and suddenly I'm right back, sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a 9 year old wants to say, and she replies with a low
M. Gessen (0:19)
listen.
Narrator (0:21)
So we sat there listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full. Hershey's it's your happy place.
M. Gessen (0:33)
My family, if I had to give it an adjective, is elastic. 45 years ago, my parents, my little brother and I came over to this country from the Soviet Union, extending the family across continents. Over the decades, the family my father really stretched to absorb spouses in laws even though they spoke a different language. Children, both biological and adopted ex spouses who chose to stick around, and eventually grandchildren. Over those same decades, as in any family, people made bad decisions, said things they hoped no one would remember, got mad at each other, held grudges, came around, and the family stretched as needed. And then it snapped. Someone did something that bad, that shocking. That person was my cousin Alan. He and his mother, my father's sister Lena, came to the US from Moscow in 1990 when Alan was 15. They stayed with my parents and brother for almost a year. By the time they arrived, I no longer lived at home, so I didn't have much of a relationship with them. Never really wanted to because I didn't like my aunt. And as Alan grew up, I realized, even from a distance, that I didn't particularly like him either. Alan is a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass. He would call himself an entrepreneur. He started his first business in college. He hired students to ghost write papers for other wealthier students. He went to law school and got fired from his first job. He later told me this was because his fine legal mind made the other lawyers insecure. Then he lived in Russia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, working a series of increasingly shady jobs. In Africa, he was involved with diamonds and worked with an Israeli company that provided security for mining. If someone had set out to write an unlikable international huckster character, they couldn't have laid it on any thicker. Allen married a Zimbabwean woman. Word in the family was that she had been that country's beauty queen. They had two kids. Last I knew, all of them, including my aunt Lena, were living in Moscow. And then in the summer of 2019, everyone on the American side of the family got a Facebook message from Alan informing us that he had arrived in the US with His five year old son, who I'm going to call O, Alan wrote. They'd come for O to, quote, commence his studies. I repeat, O was five. His wife, he wrote, was still in Russia with their baby daughter. They had separated. Allen added ominously, things are less than amicable. She might make attempts to contact you with requests detrimental to mine and O's interests. I immediately texted my brother Keith, who was closer to Alan. So our cousin has kidnapped his son and abandoned his daughter. The answer would appear to be maybe, my brother responded, just a note. This isn't the big shocking thing I was talking about earlier, but we're still a few years away from that. I called my dad. He told me that Alan had just shown up at his house on Cape Cod without warning. His five year old son was with him, as was Lena, my dad's sister. I asked my dad if we should do something about the maybe kidnapping, like, I don't know, contact the FBI. This was the wrong thing to say to a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union. He would never call the authorities on his sister and nephew. What he did do was post a picture of oh on Facebook, perhaps a message in a bottle for oh's mom. Sure enough, my father immediately heard from her. Her name is Priscilla. Priscilla wrote to my dad describing the ordeal she was enduring. She said she had gone on a short business trip to Zimbabwe, and when she returned, she discovered that Allen had left with her son. It had been about a week, and only now, from seeing my father's Facebook post, was she learning anything more. Priscilla wrote, I beg you, please, to help me get my son back, or to at least speak to him. Please do not tell them I have written to you. If you are unable to help me, then just ignore my message.