Will stories have a happy ending?

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Oct. 27, 2004. Jack and his wife Connie attended the naturalization ceremony in 2017 for Svetlana, who is the subject of this piece. She is now a professor at Thiel College in northwestern Pennsylvania and her son Ilia will graduate from Kennesaw State University in May. “As for the happy ending,” she said, “I’m still working on that.”

The road home wound through the Indiana countryside as Svetlana unwound stories from her life on the other side of the world.

We’d first met in Kyrgyzstan, the land of her birth, in 2002. And now she was in the Midwest to take part in a panel discussion at a scholarly conference at Indiana University. It seemed the perfect opportunity to offer a little hometown hospitality and bring her back here for the weekend.

Though we’d worked together and I’d spoken to her journalism students at the American University of Central Asia, it struck me that I didn’t know much about her personal background. A couple of questions was all it took to get the tales flowing as we made our way back through an October afternoon.

She told me about her mother’s grandfather, the leader of a Cossack village in Russia. When the tsar decided that the eastern edge of his empire needed better security, he ordered Svetlana’s great-grandfather to uproot his life and his village and relocate them all in what is now Kyrgyzstan so the Cossacks could patrol the border with China.

She told me about her father’s father, a Chechen who had been exiled to Central Asia by a suspicious Stalin in 1940 along with about 200,000 other Chechens. Chechnya and Mother Russia have had a contentious relationship for generations; many of the headlines we read today have roots going back centuries. The Chechens, exiled internally in the Soviet Union because Stalin feared a “fifth column” while the country fought Hitler, traveled by foot and by horseback over hundreds of miles.

Svetlana’s grandfather’s wife died along the way, leaving him with half a dozen children. He later formed a marriage of convenience with a Ukrainian widow — also in exile — who had about half a dozen kids of her own. 

Svetlana’s father was the offspring of that loveless marriage which ended after the war.

Her grandfather abandoned his new wife and son and returned to Chechnya.

She told me of her parents’ bitter marriage and her own struggles.

She told of the time in 1986, soon after the Chernobyl disaster, that she and other teenage students taking courses in Kiev to become military translators had traveled by train into the “forbidden zone” around the site of the nuclear accident. They somehow made their way to an evacuated town and walked its streets and peered into its empty houses for an afternoon’s lark.

Svetlana was the only one — so far — to experience any effects from the radiation. Soon after her return to Kiev, her hair began to fall out and she was plagued by headaches. It would be months before she returned to normal, and the reality is that she doesn’t know what long-term damage may have been done.

She talked of her young son, Ilya, the product of what was apparently a brief love affair. She won’t talk about the father at all, saying only that there are “legal impossibilities,” which means that he’s either married or politically powerful or both.

It was a long, fascinating trip home.

But there was one consistent thread to Svetlana’s stories.

They never had a happy ending.

That’s what she’s trying to build today.

An outstanding student as a young woman, she later earned a Muskie Fellowship which brought her to the U.S., where she studied at Kansas State University and received her master’s degree in journalism.

Now she’s back in the States, working on her Ph.D. in mass communication at Louisiana State University. There’s no fellowship this time. She’s doing it on her savings from her university job at home and a teaching assistantship from the university.

And it’s going well.

In December, she’ll return to Bishkek for a visit. And when she flies back to Baton Rouge in January, Ilya will be with her.

They’ll be together, looking for that elusive happy ending.