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a journal, using one of the two graph-paper notebooks Mom had brought over. On its cover I wrote “Journal Number 2”; I’d left the first one with my Romani cousin Zhanna, daughter of my dad’s sister back in Moscow, imprisoned at the bottom of her dresser until I decided what to do with it. It contained the old life, and I wasn’t sure how much of it I wanted to bring over.
    Zhanna was the only person I trusted not to read it because she’d lived most of the events mentioned in its pages along with me. We were the same age and spent a lot of time together during concert tours.
    Once we boarded the train to Estonia in the middle of the night, twenty-five of Grandfather’s musicians and their families stuffed canned-food-style into the last three cars. When the ticket agent at the Moscow central station found she was dealing with Gypsies, all the good tickets mysteriously sold out. We were stuck riding in the back, where everything swerved and rattled and swayed from side to side like a shark’s tail.
    Inside our private car I fell asleep to the mechanical heartbeat under my ear. Say what you will, but a train is an insomniac’s paradise. You can complain about the drafts and the sheets with stains as old as the Kremlin, but once your head hits that pillow, the train song reaches for you.
    The only reason I woke up early the next morning was Zhanna’s voice outside our compartment door. On the bunk above, my father snored in harmony with the train, and Mom was already up and making her rounds. As the band’s administrator, she was a mother hen to twenty-five fully grown adults.
    I slid open the door.
    â€œAnd then you cut up the goat balls and add them to the salad,” Zhanna was saying.
    â€œIs that so?” The conductor was a woman shaped like a barrel with two sacks of flour hanging off the front. She stood with her hands behind her back and did her best to sound nice, but I could tell she was ready to find Zhanna’s parents and lecture them on how to raise a proper little girl.
    â€œYes,” Zhanna continued, and nodded to me for support. Her golden hair gleamed in the sunlight. “But you have to make sure they’re fresh, not shrivelly. That’d be disgusting.” She made a face.
    â€œLittle girl. Your language is inappropriate and you shouldn’t make up such stories.”
    â€œBut I’m not, am I, Oksana? Don’t our parents make goat-ball salad all the time?”
    At eight years old I was looking into the mischievous eyes of a best friend. I puckered my brows at the barrel woman.
    â€œAll the time. Goat, sheep, even ferret balls.” The conductor cringed. “They’re a delicacy all over the world. Even in Italy.”
    In a Russian’s eyes, especially a Russian woman’s, Italians are gods. “Girls, you are horrible … But really?”
    We nodded in unison.
    â€œHow do the Italians eat them?”
    Zhanna’s expression was innocent, clean of doubt, even though her mom had stepped out of their compartment and seconds remained before she came to investigate and we got punished for the rest of the tour. “With spaghetti sauce, of course.”
    The pain of missing my cousin was so tangible I felt like I could quite possibly extract it with tweezers, like a splinter of glass, had I been able to reach that deep inside myself. To ease the longing, I figured I should create a list of things I missed about Russia and then one of everything I didn’t. Lack of sanitary napkins and tampons, for example. (We used to have to wrap gauze around bulky wads of cotton, which was responsible for a number of bloodstained skirts and pants. Also, it made you walk like you’d spent one too many days in the saddle.)

    Me, Aunt Laura, and Zhanna in Moscow, 1988
    I never thought I’d be homesick for a place I had been eager to leave, but the oddest things went into the “missed” column: the