“What if I’d never left, like Oksana’s son, like the young man on the bus? Would I be married and a father by my early twenties, like most of the men here, or was my untraditional living – untraditional by Oksana’s judgment, at least – an intrinsic quality, and would it be my destiny anywhere? If the latter, what kind of outcast would it have made me in Minsk? Or would it have been rubbed out of me the way it had been rubbed out of my father?”
