Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I moved home from London and Moscow when my mother was dying so I could spend the final months of her life close at hand. Leaving New York had given me independence, but my mother’s death eviscerated my self-created identity; my independence had required something of which to be independent, and that something had been partly the United States and partly my family of origin. Reckoning with my mother’s illness, I concluded that differentiation was overrated. I moved home to be with her and stayed there because I was finally able to accept being more or less American. No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.

A year after I resettled in New York, my London solicitor called to advise me that because I had held a British work visa for six years, I could apply to be naturalized as a UK citizen. I needed only to meet a dozen criteria. I had always paid my taxes; I had never been arrested for a felony. The final criterion, however, was that I not have spent more than two months outside the UK in any of the previous six years, and here, alas, I was in trouble. On a lark, I wrote a letter to the Home Office explaining that I’d been in Russia to research my book and in the United States to care for my mother, but that in my heart I was loyal to the Queen. A bored clerk must have been on duty when my note arrived in the autumn of 1993 because I received citizenship papers by return post.

British citizenship conferred legitimacy on what had previously seemed something of a subterfuge. It allayed some anxiety in me to have dual nationality; I could not only claim two different places, but also be two different people. It seemed to rescue me from the burden of crafting a single identity, from the exhausting attempt to squeeze my contradictory nature into a single narrative. It marked my experiment with foreignness as a success. And it gave me options. I couldn’t look at that new passport and not think about my father saying, “They had nowhere to go.” I had someplace to go, permanently.

The naturalization papers validated my claim to be a world citizen. Though I would doubtless have continued to travel, I now felt doubly justified in exploring far and wide. Days at home often blur into one another; days in strange surroundings intensify life. Tennyson’s Ulysses said, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees.” I cherished travel for the ways it stopped time, forcing me to inhabit the present tense. Augustine of Hippo legendarily said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page,” and I wanted to go cover to cover. I set out to see the change I wanted to be in the world.

My friend Christian Caryl, a distinguished political journalist and essayist, moved to Kazakhstan in 1992 to head the country’s institute of economics; I went off to visit him there a year later. When I said I wanted to go out to the steppes and meet nomads, he laughed and asked what I planned to say when I met them. While hiking up a mountain at the edge of Alma-Ata (which has since been renamed Almaty), we were caught in a blizzard. After an hour of huddling against the storm, we heard a vehicle approaching and waved it down frantically. The driver took us in; he was drinking regularly from a flask, but we were hardly in a position to complain. When he passed his tipple over to me, I took a swig of what I assumed would be vodka, but it was spirt—pure grain alcohol. That single swallow made me temporarily blind and dizzy. Then I passed it over to Christian. Drinking and singing, we made our way down the mountain. When our rescuer asked me what I was doing in his part of the world, I blurted out my line about meeting nomads on the steppes, and he offered to take us to the steppes the following morning. We volunteered to buy the next day’s spirt.