We all need to know who we are. We can only know this once we know where we came from. This is as true for our knowledge of our parentage as it is for information about our ancestry, heritage or birthplace. Such information is often withheld from us either deliberately by malicious or thoughtless human agency or lost in transmission by premature death, dispossession, displacement, by forced or voluntary exile, or by refugee or adoptive status, yet it remains a basic human need for each of us to know who and what we are. Olga’s search for her father was as much a mission of love on her part as it was a quest for a full understanding of her own identity.
In August 1989, Olga stepped from the aircraft on to Russian soil for the first time, soon to meet the father she had never known. The journey to her spiritual homeland had been curiously problem-free. As a foreign visitor, she had expected to encounter the obstructionist bureaucratic tactics and provocative delays for which Russia had long been notorious, but these had proved astonishingly easy to surmount. She was elated. In the lobby of the Moscow hotel that was her destination, she met a trio of formidably unfriendly women, one of whom rudely asked, “Chto vam nado? ”(What do you want?) Olga poured out her story to them: China, her father’s arrest, Stalin, Soviet imprisonment, meeting her father, and soon the women were in tears. They quickly gave her her room key. Undoubtedly, the story they heard was horribly familiar to them. “A true gentleman” was their verdict when Olga later introduced him to them.
From her room, Olga could see the Arbat (a traffic-free pedestrian street) and part of the Kremlin. “Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeni Onegin was on the radio. On television there was a documentary on a Russian Orthodox monastery. I was not dreaming. This did happen and it was truly magical. I did not feel excited or nervous. I was in control of events; they were not in control of me.” But the next morning, she was apprehensive about the meeting. Was this decision to meet, after all, a wise one to have made? What would the consequences for both of them be if it proved not to have been? “I felt nauseous, anxious, stressed. I do not remember how I got dressed, how I left my room and walked out of the hotel, but I knew I was on time for my rendezvous.” Then she went, newly resolute, to meet him. “I recognized him immediately. My father was impeccably dressed, not too tall, fit and agile for his age of 78. He recognized me. We had recognized each other! There were spontaneous hugs, kisses, and tears. We remained speechless for a little while. He gave me a generous bouquet of red roses, which I have dried and keep in a special place today.”
