1994

 Recently, my father, a music collector, bought some CDs of noted modern Soviet composer Boris Tischenko, the once-student of Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote his Symphony No. 8 during WWII. Expectedly, Shostakovich had a marked influence upon Tischenko's music, which, after listening to the CDs, my father described as “difficult” in an impressed way.

He sent a photo of these CDs to Tischenko's son, Vsevelod, who had come to the East Coast in the wave of 90s immigration and whom my father has known for many years. Seva said once that he tried listening to his father's music when he was young and it traumatized him for life. In said life, meanwhile, he hadn't seen his father from a young age, and Tischenko senior had altogether three children and then retired to Italy, where he was friends with and hung out with fellow renowned father of three children, Nobel Prize in Literature winner Joseph Brodsky.

Seva once ran into Brodsky's son, Andrey, when Andrey first arrived in New York, dressed as he was dressed and carrying nothing but a backpack with a bottle of wine in it. He said that ten years later he saw him in New York again, wearing the same clothing and still carrying nothing but a backpack with a (different) bottle of wine.

A talented electronics guy, Seva was responsible for getting my father his first job in America in 1994 at an audio and video repair shop called Servatronics, which exists no longer and has been wiped from Google's memory.

Servatronics was started, owned, and run by a type of man who also nearly exists no longer: an ex-military redneck named either Bill or Bob (we will go with the more likely Bob). Bob was a very large, strong, ruler type man's man who started his business after many years of service, in the suburbs between Baltimore and DC. Among his fifteen employees he staffed mostly Soviet immigrants who competently did the repairs and barely spoke English, and not a single African American. For this transgression he had been sued or cited twice, and effectively forced to hire a Black person. The Black person they hired, on his end, appeared similarly coerced to take the job in order to fulfill a program, and was a true Brotha with a last name like “Adams” or “Smith,” who told Bob and co., “You can call me DJ,” when he arrived.

DJ's job became to stick the labels bearing customer complaints on the A/V equipment they were dropping off, and he performed this job entirely laying upon the desk, creating an atmosphere of validating the reasons Bob was not happy about having to accommodate him in the first place.

At the same time, there waged another social war against a beloved long-standing cultural institution: indoor smoking. Up to that point, every desk had had an ashtray on it. Everyone had sat at their desks smoking as they worked. Abruptly, this was to end. DJ was tasked with making “NO SMOKING” signs and hanging them by the desks, mostly for the edification of the heavily smoking post-Soviet employees and their poor grasp of English.

The sign DJ produced, that went up on the wall, said “NOSMO KING”. Seeing it, my father was struck by “what KING?” and continued smoking in the presence of Bob, who, when he walked by and saw these two things – the sign and my father, who kind of sort of understood its meaning – started yelling about smoking. And then, gradually making a sense out of the situation, he stared at the sign for fifteen seconds in silence, and yelled, “FUCKING NIGGERS!”

This was not in the presence of DJ, I assume (though I don't know). After two weeks, DJ didn't show up one day, and when they phoned home, his brother answered and said that DJ had a stomachache.

There was another American employee there, named Steve, the kind of honorable and lawful man who would keep his promise on a bet, were he to lose one, who gave DJ the benefit of the doubt and said, you never know, maybe he is actually sick, when Seva said that he knew these people's character and DJ was just there to get proof of a paycheck and didn't actually want to work. Steve called Seva a racist, and Seva bet him a six-pack of beer that DJ wouldn't show up again. And he never came back after that day.