Last night as Russia invaded Ukraine, I listened to Scheherazade.
My daughter is a music performance major studying horn at the University of Iowa School of Music, a first-year student who should have begun her journey in the fall of 2020, but the family collectively decided she needed to wait a year until the pandemic was more settled. I am never quite sure if we achieved that definition or not — what is settled, anymore — but she was vaccinated, then boosted, she’s in an apartment owned by family, supported in every way by family, and even has a car. The pandemic grinds on, but she is there, on her own for the first time, playing music all day long and being as normal of a college student as one can be in these strange times. She’s in the orchestra and the band, and every few weeks my partner takes the day off work, I clear my schedule, and we drive the 130 miles from our house to hers. We do a bit of gentle reconstructing of her apartment in the form of dishes, laundry, and shopping, fussing over this and that and placing orders of things we decide she needs. We order dinner in, then we pile into the car, put on our masks, and experience the joy that is seeing our daughter play in an ensemble.
We’ve attended her performances since elementary school, but ever since the pandemic cruelly cut her high school career short, we’ve learned to appreciate each one as a precious gift and privilege. The first performance since spring break of her senior year was orchestra last fall, and it was the first time anyone had performed at the university in 18 months. Emotions were high, and music had never been more powerful.
There have been many concerts since then, and we’re always glad to go, but sometimes we are tired. Yesterday was the one break in the weather, a strange peace between an ice storm and a snow squall, and I admit, while we still wanted to see our daughter and hear her perform, remaining in our cozy house watching our latest anime instead was attractive. Of course we still went, and as always every moment of our full family together was healing and hopeful, a nostalgic reunion of the tight bonds we made during the lockdown and her unplanned year off. But an hour before the concert, I started to feel unwell. My body has had a rough go of things the last two decades, and it’s not uncommon for it to randomly go on some kind of strike. This round was odd, though, a mysterious burning sensation across my skin as if I had encountered a major allergen, but nothing was there, I had no fever, and my skin was cool to the touch. My stomach joined in the fray, and when my condition began to worry my daughter, I quickly packed it all away and put on a good front while inside feeling miserable and uncomfortable.
Then we arrived at the venue, I picked up a program, and realized they were going to play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
I have loved that piece since I was a first-year, just over thirty years ago. I heard it in an introductory humanities course focused on Western art and music. We listened to it in class, and I immediately ran out and attempted to find it on my own. I believe I checked out a cassette from the college library, then copied it. I listened to it over and over again while in school, and every so many years I would rediscover it once more, listening all the way through for a few weeks until I would drift away. It’s probably been at least a decade since I really listened to it, but here it was back again. However, for the first time in my life, I would hear it live.
The University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra is an impressive performance group, and their director, Mélisse Brunet, is a large part of that. She is the first female orchestra conductor at Iowa, making her debut at that first concert last fall. I knew this performance was going to be incredible, and I was excited. But I learned I was not prepared.
I think everyone found me slightly comical, the way I effused and emoted to every performer and Ms. Brunet, which is such a shame because it truly was I think the most moving moment of my life. The last six years have been acutely difficult for me in so many ways, and the last two have been largely marked by an absolute shutdown, professionally and personally. I’ve rethought how I approach my career (and am still working on what that looks like for me going forward), I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve come out to myself and the world as nonbinary, and I’m in the slow, overwhelming process of sorting out how I interface with the world now that I am more authentically myself. And of course, my state and country are reminding me why it was so hard to come out to myself in the first place. Earlier this week my state house of representatives voted through a bill prohibiting trans children from playing in sports matching their gender. Prior to that, they had joined the throngs of bans on teaching diversity in the classroom. As we drove from our home to our daughter that day, the Texas governor labeled every parent assisting a transgender child in their transition to be a child abuser.
In hindsight, my strange phantom hives seem a fairly obvious reaction to acute, chronic stress. But now here I was, despite feeling ill, about to hear one of my favorite pieces played by talented musicians. For free.
I felt the way I feel when my partner, an avid pop music fan, feels when he talks about live concerts. I’ve heard that piece so many times — I’m listening to it now — but I had never, ever heard it played while I was in the same room as the symphony. As I draft this post, I’m listening to the New York Philharmonic with brand-new, top of the line Bose headphones, but it is nothing compared to that live performance last night. I felt that music. I breathed it, I was that music. My ill feelings were washed away in wave after wave of adrenaline. My brain, my body, every part of me remembered every note, every swell, and I had to stop myself from trying to hum along, from waving my arms and stimming the way it moved me. I settled for leaning forward, tapping feet and moving fingers and beaming so hard my face hurt behind my mask. Near the end of the fourth movement, I began to weep.
In that moment, the world was perfect and beautiful, and I was profoundly glad to be alive.
When the last notes faded and the conductor lowered her arms, I was the first one standing, whooping like I was at a basketball game. For hours all I could say was, “That was so great,” in-between fawning over the musicians. Then we got in the car, celebrated with McDonalds Shamrock shakes, dropped my daughter off at her apartment, and set off on the long drive for home.
That was when I opened Twitter and saw what had happened in Ukraine.
My euphoria evaporated within thirty miles, replaced by sadness, then rage. Thoughts of how the Republicans in my country wanted to deny people like me the right to exist. Thoughts of how the government of Russia had no problem putting its people and the people of Ukraine at risk of death simply to appease its own insecurities. I scrolled social media endlessly, knowing this was not good but not being able to help myself. By the time I got home, my chest was tight and I felt ill again.
Thinking of it now, it makes me so sad. As we’d walked to the car, I was full of dreams, trying to think of something I could do to show my gratitude to the orchestra. Was there some gift I could order? A donation, maybe? Perhaps a note. Or perhaps nothing, but I looked forward to imagining possibilities all the way home. And then, just like that, those plans were gone, and I was in the same dark soup I’ve spent six years trying to pull myself out of. Today I didn’t write any notes to the orchestra or send any gifts. I bolstered our cash on hand, restarted long distance on my landline, and walked my daughter through practical preparations she needed to make. I soothed my spouse when he despaired at not being able to protect his child from the fears he thought we’d buried in 1992. I didn’t write the new stories I wanted to write, I skipped lunch because I was too sick from hearing Chernobyl in the news again.
Just before the pandemic, I published a short category romance with a popular trope: marriage of convenience. The Professor’s Green Card Marriage, I called it. It wasn’t the type of story I wrote normally, so I did more planning than usual and thought every detail out as much as I could. After a great deal of consideration and research, I decided to make the immigrant in the relationship from Ukraine. Then came even more research, on immigration laws, and Ukraine and its people. What I learned broke my heart. Such a beautiful country, such amazing people, such a bountiful place, and such tragic, unimaginable, sustained loss. I had only vaguely heard about the famines of the early 20th century; I hadn’t known they involved unknown millions of people who starved because the Soviets wanted them under better control. I didn’t know that the moniker “The Ukraine” which I’d heard all my life was actually a Russian insult, the equivalent of calling them “the sticks” or “the back country.” I didn’t know that their capital city wasn’t Kiev, but Kyiv, and that too was a Russian phrasing. I didn’t know how hard the Soviets worked to kill their native language. I didn’t understand the full horror of Chernobyl or how the Soviets had essentially sacrificed the Ukrainian people in order to preserve their image. I had only vaguely known about the Orange Revolution. Now I knew it all, and I did my best to respect this history as I wrote what must be, by its category definition, a cozy, heartwarming romance.
But even as I wrote it, I had to constantly rework whole sections of the plot as the United States immigration policy changed in real time. I had to learn all the ways those changes affected real life immigrant couples. I had to learn about real immigrants facing horrible threats here and in their country of birth. And because my characters were gay men, I had to bear in mind the difficulty and unique threats that brought to their stories.
I did my best, and the story went out into the world. But Ukraine has never left me. I’ve watched us sliding to this moment thinking not of oil prices or the stock market or the prospect of cyber attacks, but of the real people I had learned about, the Youtubers I had watched to learn bits of Ukrainian, the documentaries about grandmothers allowed to live in the outskirts of Chernobyl, the people who gave joyful explanations of their beloved homeland to filmmakers promoting tourism. I thought of the Ukrainian Etsy seller I’d ordered something from last week, when I darkly joked that Ihoped the package would make it. I thought of the seller, who I’d contacted Monday to assure her I didn’t need the item in a hurry or at all if she was in danger. That day, she kindly thanked me and said, with a bit of bemused dismissal, that she was fine. This morning she emailed me to apologize, everything was closed and she couldn’t give me a refund because of the banks, and there was shelling, and she was so sorry. I told her to please forget everything about the item and to keep herself and her family safe.
Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a peer to Richard Wagner. He was a nationalist, proud of the Russian style he helped create, but his career would end with him expelled from the conservatory where he taught, only to be reinstated but never celebrated as he had been. Like so many Russians, he created beautiful works of art. Like so many Russians, he saw difficulties and wars, and was disillusioned in so many ways by the country he loved.
As I listen to Scheherazade today, I know hearing this song will forever mean feeling bittersweet. That concert was a joyful moment of culture and art, of music that surpasses time, of young people playing music and dreaming of careers devoted to sharing the beauty and power of sound. That performance was a brilliant gift, from a long-dead Russian composer and musicians furthering their careers. And it all happened while another Russian dragged us all back into conflicts that were supposed to be faded into history.
The legend of Scheherazade is the tale of a person who keeps herself alive by telling stories, by tantalizing the powerful leader every night with tales so compelling he couldn’t bring himself to kill her, not yet. Today the world is holding its breath, transfixed by the reality unfolding in Ukraine. When I feel the darkness pulling too hard, I will remember how my daughter’s orchestra surprised me with the joy of music and reminded me of the beauty a century-dead Russian once made. I will remember the way they washed my pain and sorrow away, how they made me cry, and how they made me believe. I will not forget, and I will continue to offer the world my own stories, in hopes that somehow, together, we can keep the monsters entranced and live to see another day and tell another tale.
May you, may the people of Ukraine and Russia, may the whole world never lose the wonderful, precious gift that is art.
