In Exile (essay)

Author's note: I'm more pleased with how this piece turned out than just about any that I've written. I've been working on it more lately (and not posting it here), so if you've read this before July 2010, this is entirely different, and hopefully better. It's still very much a work in progress.


“A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, following his
four-year exile in Omsk, Siberia


Siberia is complicated—-difficult to describe, strangely enough. It seems like it should be easy. Each of the initial stereotypes that come to mind are true, after all, both about the land and the people. When you really get down to it, though, comparing whole societies is, as it should be, problematic. I recall, however, that people never spat on me in America—-not even during my stint as a door-to-door salesman. In hindsight, I think it’s the spit versus lack of spit that entrenched my initial bias in place. Note to self: Russians are mean—-I have proof. I brushed it from my coat.

Six days a week and well into night, we were asking to get spat on, wandering the crooked, grayscale streets searching for podyezd doors left carelessly open. The thick steel doors and their steel locks were put in place specifically to keep people like us out, and though the foot-thick concrete walls around them eroded right onto my jacket sleeve—another stain—when I brushed by too closely, the doors themselves received regular upgrades and often boasted sophisticated key technology. A bare-minimum cost for intimidation. The Russians themselves, by the way, were similarly steel-faced, unsmiling, and I didn’t smile at them either. But this is about the buildings. The Stalin-era apartment buildings that house nine-tenths of the Russian populace are built vertically, and almost without exception, they’re either five or nine stories tall. The nines have elevators. In neither type are there hallways—only entryway-stairways, called podyezdy, with four or six apartments on each floor. A five-story podyezd took about 20 minutes to knock through, assuming nobody expressed any interest. Nine floors took 45. People at home in Idaho Falls or suburban Buffalo, where Malcomb was from, lived in houses. Homes. I beat Malcomb in chess five times in a row last week. When the two of us would find a door open, we’d start at the top, knock at each apartment, and pray for a sober person to emerge and say “Mormons?!? Of course I want to hear your message!” That or hot girls. In the absence of either, each slammed door widened the gulf between the Russians and me. My friends in America were partying, going to school, my family was sitting around the fire watching a movie, and here I was for two years, living a monastic life with an ironically bald cohort, walking around in a concrete-stained suit, and perfecting my pronunciation of nyet.

Missionary work was hard all throughout the former Soviet Union, but in the Siberian city of Omsk it was famously more so. I don’t know why. Our church was fairly new there, membership was sparse. But that was the case all over the country. Even in 2005 and in August, the land itself was cold, dark, and vast—a centuries-old natural prison. I hate to use the word bleak, which seems so obvious for Siberia, but Omsk was that more than anything else. It remains the unconscious standard by which I judge all usages of the word.

I never really felt at ease wandering around Omsk in a suit, since the
rebyata—literally “children” but in practice often something more like “hooligans”—were somehow worse there than in other cities. More outgoing, that is. “Ey, Amerika!” followed by some cursing in one of two languages, then a guiltless plea for money or a threat of some sort. Still, walking in twos helped, especially when your bald, broad-shouldered companion was scowling half the time. That actually was helpful. I had no idea how Bankston did it. He was another Omsk missionary, and he was always smiling, defenseless like a doe. And he was skinny, too, like me. The rebyata never actually did anything to me, luckily. In the summertime, the misty Siberian sun lingered well into the morning hours at such latitude, which helped. In the winter, of course, the opposite was true, and the sun started to set almost immediately after it made its appearance. But then, though, it was outrageously cold—too cold even for danger. So it all balanced out.

“The city was built almost entirely by prisoners,” I was told by a local soon after
arriving. “The name ‘Omsk’ is an acronym for Otdelyonnoye Myesto Ssylky
Katerzhnikh—Remote Place for the Exile of Convicts.”
Bad PR.


It was Wednesday, our day off, and on the last Wednesday of the month, about eight of us went to check e-mail at a new internet club. The city had a few such places, in random basements and back alleys. No matter how crazy things got in Russia, the general attitude was that it was always ok at home, and that’s what we got to remember on Wednesdays. I got to be consciously from there—the magical, stable, prosperous place that I wouldn’t have even believed existed if not for the weekly e-mails. On the way to this particular internet club on the last Wednesday of the month, which club was in both a basement and a back alley, Malcomb and I traversed the broad mud field separating it from the street by leaping between concrete slabs and other random debris. The place itself was inhabited by a dozen or so lanky teenage rebyata in black jackets and pointy shoes, scattered throughout the dimly-lit room playing war games and surfing the net. I always got the impression that much of the Siberian youth yearned, as I did, for personal connections to the stable world outside, even if they had never seen it. They saw us, and they liked that we were there, even if they’d never show it. So I assumed, anyway. We were palpable evidence of elsewhere. Malcomb and I sauntered past them to a room in the back.

I don’t remember who first logged onto CNN there in the back room, but within a minute or two, each of our eight monitors swung to the same story: a giant hurricane was tearing, at that very moment, through the southern United States. The honor system rule against outside websites went out the window as we collectively pored over hundreds of photos of people sitting on rooftops, trapped, floating face down through the muddy debris-filled streets. When one missionary came across new information, he’d yell it out to the group—this many dollars in damage, that many lives lost. I didn’t yell out so much. I was mostly just silently engrossed. It was incredible. A good chunk of New Orleans leveled. We knew New Orleans. A couple of us had been there.

One member of our suddenly animated group was noticeably less engulfed by the chaos occurring back home. It was Bankston, the smiler, who had only recently arrived in Omsk, though his reputation had preceded him. Elder Dustin Bankston was different from most of us in a lot of ways. First, there was the smiling, regardless of his audience, always, always smiling, but not like the one I’d put on at the end of a long day, timed just long enough to be seen through the peephole. Sometimes he even broke into song, though his voice was high and whiny—one of his honestly weaker attributes. He was a weird guy. For whatever reason, he was an extremely successful missionary, though. He was beloved by the Russians in a way I couldn’t comprehend, other than that he was maybe somewhat of a novelty. It was obvious even then that he was far less obsessed than the rest of us with preserving national bravado, at least in the traditional sense. Maybe it was because he had almost served his full two-year term and had learned from experience. I tend to wonder, though, if it had something to do with his origin.

Before he left it behind to come to Siberia, Bankston lived with his mom and younger sister in a 19th century mansion right on the coast in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. To the rest of us mostly-sheltered Northerners and Westerners, he was the South. He always said “no, sir” and “yes, ma’am,” and he even sang in a gospel choir, which is odd for a Mormon. He was full of stories about crocodiles and trailer homes. His best story, though, was about how his mom, a respected nurse, had recently bared all for the MTV cameras at Mardi Gras. This sort of behavior is also uncharacteristic of Mormons. No, Bankston and his family weren’t shy, per se. But on the last Wednesday in August, when the flashing dot on the CNN map was directly over his hometown, he didn’t have much to say. And he didn’t get any e-mail.


The next day was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Siberia.
“Congratulations,” said our American mission president on speakerphone the next morning. Malcomb and I called to inform him of the situation with Bankston, of which he was already aware. We mentioned that our compatriot didn’t seem overly disturbed by the whole ordeal. He was quiet at the internet club, and later that day still seemed indifferent about the questionable existence of his house. Malcomb said he was in denial.

“It’s antebellum!” Bankston’s reedy voice sang when he told us. “It survived Hurricane Camille. It can withstand anything!” Had Bankston known that his entire hometown had been leveled, he may have felt differently. He had to know, though, and his outward confidence baffled me. The president assigned Malcomb and me to watch out for Bankston and prepare him for the possibility that everything was gone—basically, to let him down gently, assuming the worst. Later that day, Malcomb and I spent an hour trapped standing in a hot, crowded trolley bus experiencing electrical problems. In my journal that night, I lamented the inefficiency of such Russian “conveniences” for an entire page. I said “it’s a good thing that the majority of Americans are nice enough to lie when Russians ask questions comparing our two nations… Nobody that has lived in both societies can even approach a comprehension of how much better things are in America.” I also stated simply, “God bless America.” I don’t recall the tone of voice that hovered above the metallic ink that day, but I hope it was grateful. In context, it doesn’t seem likely, though.

At our missionary meeting the following day, I knew Malcomb would be insensitive toward Bankston, and he was. “It’s all gone, man!” Bankston took it with the same smile as always. I tried to be the bigger man and comfort my senior elder, telling him that while the Lord does indeed watch out for His servants, it’d be wise to mentally prepare for the possibility that he no longer had a home. But while Bankston remained more or less unfazed, I could feel my own steel door faltering. Here he was, a prisoner in Omsk, and while he’s away doing good, his home is attacked. It wasn’t fair. We were all prisoners, but most of us probably deserved to be there for one reason or another. Malcomb and I certainly did. Bankston was the best man among us, and yet it was his home, his point of reference destroyed, his neighbors floating face down on CNN. It didn’t bother me theologically. Every day, I fielded the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” That was easy: good people are tested, just never above that which they are able to bear. Bankston had been so tested, and he appeared to be passing. I would have failed pitifully.

As I sat in silence, a younger missionary spoke. “Hey Bankston, if you need a place to stay for a while, you can live with my family in Utah.” Another concurred, offering his own house, and then another followed. Even frigid Malcomb offered lodgings with his family in Buffalo. I don’t think Bankston seriously considered any of the offers, though. He smiled as he sang to us about Dixie, unprovoked. I wish I was in de land of cotton—old times dar am not forgotten. I’m sure a big part of him did wish he was there, but I also realized that Bankston was Bankston, even in exile. He didn’t need to validate himself by consciously remembering where he was from. He just plain was from there, and even if he never saw home again, he had gleaned the best things from it. He had lost it because he was the only one of us who didn’t need it.

Bankston’s last three months in Siberia were harder than most. A couple weeks after the hurricane, his mom got a hold of him. As a nurse, she had been working night and day in a care center, with no way to call out. Some things were salvaged from their antebellum house, but most things were gone. Work in Omsk continued much as it had been before. Though it was only mid-September, winter had already made noticeable advances. Wind pushed through the crooked avenues, forcing us into heavier coats and hats as we scoured the bleak town for open doors. A punk on a crowded trolleybus unzipped the front pocket of my bag and almost had his hands on my wallet when I noticed him. I told him “nice try,” then elbowed him in the stomach, not nearly as hard enough, on my way off of the bus. I needed to be better.

It was only years later that I made the connection between the Russians and their steel doors, exhibiting stone-faced severity only on the outside. It seems so obvious now. The thing is, it was a front, yes, but a front understood and agreed upon by the whole community. Bankston figured that out, and responded to it as one probably should respond to someone who takes themselves too seriously—with a smile. His may not have been the Russian way, but it was real, and was received warmly. The front of mirrored toughness I had built up to that point was, conversely, entirely artificial, and the locals could see right through it. With time, I started to figure it out, and things got better.