Love across Enemy Lines: Elena and Meg's Cracking Wild, True Life, Planet Crossing, Run for Their Lives

By M.F. Aitken

I lived a shallow and meaningless life; until I met a brutally honest Russian online. She changed everything about the way I saw the world and my place in it. By effecting an elaborate escape to meet me in Kyiv, Elena loosed a bloody vendetta against us. Our only hope was crossing the planet underground, entirely on our own and unsupported. By refusing to put our fate in the hands of others, we managed to survive, stay together, and more than anything else, we learned to love and trust ourselves.

During this unthinkable, year-long run for our lives, I not only rescued the deer-in-the-headlights Russian who crashed into my life, but found and rescued myself.

This is a story about standing up for what you know is right for you. It is about accepting, trusting and loving yourself. It is a story of strength, of courage, of adventure, of taking responsibility and finding freedom.

This is that particular story, the one that went viral a few years back, about those two women who sailed across the world without knowing how, or having any right to land along the way. The very story NPR and then BBC picked up and sent around the world. That's the one, only this time, it's recounted by one of the participants in that zany run for their (our) lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.F. Aitken
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224380237

M.F. Aitken

Find out more about Meg Stone at elenameg.com

Book preview

Map

escape-route

Elena and Meg's escape route, heading west.

1 – By Hammer and By Hand

Muzzle to wood. Teeth gritted. Eyes narrowed. Squeeze the trigger, and…

Ka pow!!!

Absolutely nothing defines satisfying, like blasting four inches of cold-galvanised steel through a two-by-six header. I put down the BFG and stood back to gaze upon my handiwork: a skeletal frame of heavy lumber that would someday become a wall. I gave it a good yank or two, and luckily, nothing came loose, crashed down, or flattened me.

Frankly, I was in love with the home-reno Armageddon I'd unleashed upon my embarrassing fixer-upper. The neighbours, on the other hand, weren't nearly as charmed by my invocation of chaos and calamity. Take this bloke across the street—good ol' Ralph with his own Craftsman bungalow. He strongly encouraged me to spend a few hundred bucks on a nail gun, before my reno-geddon had the neighbours pulling out guns of their own. Truth be told, waging total, DIY war got a lot easier, thanks to that BFG.

I know what you’re thinking BFG stands for; especially you gamers, so I'll let you in on a wee secret. BFG is what I lovingly call a Big Framing Gun. It placated the neighbours—to an extent. The thing is, one good ka pow! instead of countless hammer blows and a blue streak of filthy language, was all it took to drive a four-inch nail.

Moving on, let's talk about language: filthy, foreign, or otherwise. I spent a lot of time blasting walls full of nails and counting everything I could while doing it. In Russian. I know that's a wee bit fey. So, I'd be counting studs, those are vertical, wooden struts that hold up the wall, not the pub-crawlers you probably had in mind. Anyway, I counted plenty of studs. Ah-deen, de-vah, tree, quatre… ah, bollocks! Quatre is French. I'm always mucking that one up. I pulled off a glove, poked at a laptop on a table-saw. Ah hah! Che-teary… che-teary, che-tier-ee. Took me an age, but maybe I'd pick up some Russian vocabulary. Eventually.

So, what's all this cursing, neighbours, Russian, studs, and BFG codswallop got to do with love and enemy lines? Well… rather a lot. And you'll see why, once I tell you a wee bit about myself.

Did I just hear a groan? Get a grip. I majorly ken, and I'll keep the backstory brief. But by crikey, it's fundamental for understanding the bloody why-in-hell for what lies ahead. Maybe you want to take notes or get comfy. You probably ought to kill the phone while you're at it. A wee dram wouldn't hurt. In fact, I'll pour myself a finger or two in the meantime.

OK, here goes. I grew up in a typical middle-class family. We were safely well-off, yet wildly dysfunctional. Imagine Life on Mars meets Downton Abbey. Then again, what family isn't a colossal train wreck in today's day and age? For instance, Dad was a highly respected, violently alcoholic, and stunningly successful psychopath. Could have been his Slavic roots from who-in-hell-knows-where, Ukraine, or The Ukraine, or The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, or, There's no such thing! if you ask Putin.

Then there's my mum's ancestral lineage. It traces a long line through Scotland, all the way back to the Bronze Age. Ah hell, it could have been the ice age. I mean, who really knows these things? I'm probably a Neanderthal.

Hey you! Aye, you in the recliner. I could hear you snoring halfway to Inverness. Come on, mate… stay with me, or we'll never get through this.

All right. Where was I? Aye, Scotland.

All this ancient history matters, insomuch as it deals with culture. Reality time: we didn't have any, unless you think there's such a thing as American culture. And before you get your knickers in a knot, Canadian culture is the same thing: no-culture, or something so cravenly contrived and rammed down your throat, you learn to hate your very existence. Us boomlets, or gen-X-ers, or whatever hyper-trendy label you want to slap on an entire generation of the human race—didn't really want culture foisted on us. I mean, let a kid decide between Super Mario and mind-numbingly boring, stinky, abusive and wildly irrelevant multiculturalism, and it was no contest.

Seeing as culture comes from our parents' kith, kin and clan, I'll start with my dad's contribution; a couple of alcoholic zombies we had to call, Baba and Djee-djee. Which, in case you don't know, means granny and grandpa in Ukrainian. In weirdly erratic orbits around our Ukrainian grandparents were countless uncles and aunts from the old-country. I'm not actually sure how many siblings my father had, but take it from me, it was a lot. And along with them came various offspring generated en route or shortly thereafter. Crikey, Baba must have been popping them out and stacking them up like cordwood.

Mum's side of the family tree either didn't exist in an alcohol fuelled haze, or it was well hidden. As a result, us kids absolutely adored the Scottish side of our family, which drove Dad into paroxysms of borderline, narcissistic and possibly homicidal rage. Although he had clawed his way up and out of the cringe worthy quagmire he grew up in, some pathological, mega-guilt complex compelled him to force his Ukrainian kin—which included numerous cousins living in a dirt-floor, real-time study of foetal alcohol syndrome and recessive genetic intellectual disorders—on us. I suppose it was his special flavour of payback for any time he allowed us to spend with my mum's parents and relatives. Strewth, Canada has its own version of the Ozarks. That halfwit with one tooth and a banjo; he's probably a cousin of mine.

Having grown up wearing shoes and appreciating personal hygiene in ourselves and others—and preferring computer games and pyjama parties, over raw spirits and solvent abuse—we naturally liked the Scottish side of our family more. I was just a wee bairn, so who am I to say why I preferred one side of the family over the other. But, to be fair, Mum's folks and relatives didn't stink, chain-smoke, spit, scream at each other in Polish-Russian-Ukrainian Creole. Run over one of their children with farm machinery. Pass out drunk and choke to death on their own vomit. Blast shotgun holes in the walls. Drive vans through taverns. Die of a subdural haematoma in the guest bedroom. Or force one of their kids to commit suicide for being gay—maybe, and I'm just throwing this out there, it could be that kind of behaviour—AKA culture—that had me and my sister crawling from our skin whenever we were exposed to it. But hey, I'm just saying… you make up your own mind.

Hard-time with Dad's side of the family usually followed an endlessly long, car-sicky, air-conditioned to below freezing, gasping for air while Pops chain-smoked a couple or more packs of Pall Malls—and don't you even think of cracking a window—road trip to whatever sparsely settled wasteland his kin squatted on. When we got there, and Dad managed to drag us kicking, screaming and feigning stage four brain cancer, from the car, Baba would start wailing hysterically, in what sounded like Klingon, at grandchildren she didn't recognize. Us weans would inevitably end up gagging on gristly mystery-meat—that Dad strongly encouraged us to, Choke down, or so-help-you-God! while Djee-djee sat, catatonic, absolutely blootered, on a plastic covered sofa, staring at a dead console TV festooned with Jesus figurines. The highlight of our enforced visits had to be Djee-djee hawking up a colossal tobacco-snuff boogie for his special tin beside the sofa.

Ahh, good times. Good times, indeed.

You know, thinking back—which tends to require emergency psychotherapy—it's hard not to feel sorry for poor ol' Pops. He fought so hard to make something of himself, yet waged such a battle with his wife and kids to enforce equal visitation with those members of his family that weren't dead, deranged, dangerous or incarcerated.

Wrapping up this sob-fest, us kids flew the toxic nest of family dysfunction as soon as legal, or even earlier in my case. Then, without the bonds of siblings that detest each other holding the family together, Mum and Dad mercifully divorced. They eventually re-married—other people, that is—but good ol' Pops just kept on drinking himself to ruin. He wiped out a brilliant career in medicine and medical research. Then, no big surprise, his next marriage failed, and he drank himself to death. He went down in flames, literally—along with the house. Lawyers picked the estate clean, leaving just enough of its smouldering carcass for each of his offspring to buy a house of her own.

And that lays the foundation for my own reno-geddon. If my house survived the war I waged upon it, and I ever finished it, I intended to call it, home. The thing is, finishing: actually, being done, was highly unlikely, given the unhealthy obsession with perpetual reconstruction I was manifesting like an axis 1 mental disorder.

Everyone assumed I would renovate and flip the bungalow for a tidy profit. To prevent friction, I let them think whatever they wanted. An architect told me to bulldoze the thing. An estate agent offered more for the lot than I paid for the whole shebang. Over back-deck barbecues, friends laughed at my dumb luck. You guessed it, an impetuous, estate purchase on a tear-down, transformed me into a property tycoon. Or, so they thought.

The thing is, I couldn't care less about property development. To me, renovation was a mysterious alchemy for changing the past, or better yet, building an entirely new one. My bungalow's century of built-in history meant I didn't have to start from scratch. With I-beams and huge hydraulic jacks, house movers lifted the building off its crumbling foundation. Then, concrete breakers and JCBs scuttled about, carting away the old stones and mortar. A new foundation was formed and poured, and I signed it with a hand print in the wet cement.

I stopped at nothing to resurrect the bungalow and do it myself. The size of the project was spine-tingling thrilling. With painstaking attention to period detail, I more than doubled the original square footage. By hammer and by hand, I was building my fantasy home. A dream so real, maybe even I'd believe it. I loved the idea of a place lived in for generations by a family with memories they weren't afraid to remember. And by simulating a well-worn antique, I was determined to inherit the memories of a past that, simply, never happened.

I breathed it all in. Cherished New England shingle cladding, genuine lath and plaster, knob and tube wiring, and leaded glass windows. Original patina became my narcotic of choice. While dreaming up a brand-new past through the haze of dust and construction carnage, I imagined walls covered with sepia-toned photographs in chipped and mismatched frames. Dogs, long gone, staring eagerly out of the past. A classic, yawl-rigged sailboat. Friends with a silver cup and championship grins. A beaming uncle with a big fish taken somewhere Hemingway might have hollered at a bartender. Christmas trees. A huge table loaded with food, tipsy relatives in paper crowns. Babies, then bairns, then teenagers with bikes, cars, boyfriends, then graduation gowns, then weans of their own.

OK, I know what you are thinking: I've gone right off the rails. But, believe me, I knew there would be no pictures to split the lath or crack the plaster. And I didn't actually think I could build myself a home, but by giving it my best shot—by reproducing details others might miss—I could at least have the house. Missing out on a childhood of my own, and then, finding myself grown up with no foundation to build upon, I was desperate to create, connive or conjure up a place in one of those ubiquitous, yet unattainable, ideal families.

About children and families: when it comes to bringing a wee bairn into this fucked up world, I wouldn't wish childhood on anyone. I guess it's because back in the days I should have been preoccupied with being a child myself, I was instead busy watching for telltales of danger and playing psychopathic, twisted games instigated by warring parents. The families of friends and neighbours were nothing like ours. I thought it was some kind of conspiracy to look normal. Some demented charade normal, happy families put on.

It felt like everyone summered on the Riviera. Then, all tanned and heroically normal, they'd come back and shingle their walls with Nautica memorabilia. At least, that's how it all seemed to me at the time. A lot of years have gone by, and although I might still feel that way, I majorly get it: not everyone lives misty, sepia-toned lives, but it certainly carries over. And it eats away at you, leaving huge chasms you'll do anything to fill. In my case, it left me scratching obsessively for answers—maybe even meaning—in all things Scottish-Ukrainian. You could say, I was on a forensic quest to the root of that childhood destroying evil. If only to see it for what it was. Face the robber of safety. Make sense of it. Have my Magnolia moment with the arseholed past, and then, be done with it.

Scotland was achingly beautiful, but the Scots were as frozen, fossilized, and immovable as the glaciers that for millions of years carved bens and lochs from its granite backbone. Whatever lurked there, in a culture and history that thrilled me, would never reveal its truths and dark secrets of evil. But, just between you and me, I think it has something to do with the whisky. And tartan. By crikey, wool tartan is something you never want to feel against bare skin.

Then the wall crumbled. Not Hadrian's Wall, or even the wall my father shoved my head clean through, but the Berlin Wall. AKA, The Iron Curtain. And so, the Evil Empire, and especially Ukraine, spread out before me like a mysterious kingdom of secrets, beauty, culture, and discovery. Of course, it all turned to shite as oligarchs, gangsters, and hair challenged KGB bosses squabbled over the USSR's smouldering carcass. Yeah, yeah, yeah… I know, ancient history. Who cares? Let's cut to the chase: The Ukrainian, Orange Revolution. The intoxicating thrill of it drew me to Kyiv with a passion I simply didn't know I had in me. It was exciting. It was young. It was brash. It was a new Ukraine, disowning an uncomfortable past and building a better future.

I wanted in. So, I studied Russian. It covered more territory than Ukrainian. In the end, parroting audio lessons, running software, cramming books and taking classes only got me so far. Getting real meant communicating with actual Russian speakers, which I happened to find on what passed for social media at the time—essentially, chat rooms and profiles. Hey, give me a break; this was 2005, Facebook was barely a database for rating campus cuties. I posted a profile on some Russian chat site; probably made a major fool of myself. Aye, what the hell, the Russians' and Ukrainians' amusement at my wholesale botching up of their language turned out to be a win-win situation for me and them. Not to mention a sardonic introduction to the online, Slavic subculture.

And that, was how I met Elena.

She was an architect in Ivanovo. An industrial, Russian town a few hundred miles east of Moscow. She practised English on me and gave my inept Russian her best shot. I loved the things she talked about and the sincerity with which she described her life in provincial Russia. To one of her emails, she attached photos taken on an all-inclusive with her boyfriend in Türkiye. They were gorgeous shots, but conspicuously, Elena herself was missing from each one of them.

In passionate detail, she described the sites and antiquities of central Türkiye. And, with just as much passion, she told me about hating the man she was with. I replied with simple common sense: don't date someone you hate, and why not send some pictures with you in them?

The frequency of our correspondence increased exponentially after that. If you're wondering why, Elena explains it better than I can, in her third-person memoir: Talking to the Moon. That’s her account of escaping from forced marriage in Russia, to freedom in Ukraine. In a nutshell: what she was going through during—and before—the events I am describing. Believe me, I had no idea what Elena was going through at the time. I just loved getting closer to this intriguing, and intrigued Russian. In each other’s virtual company, we found an escape that drove us relentlessly closer. I was learning to trust Elena. She was learning to trust herself. I found her naiveté off-the-scale hard to believe, and it crossed my mind more than once, that maybe she was mocking me. I mean, no one could be that thunderstruck by common sense. It was like follow-your-heart was the encryption key to a Theory of Everything.

Devastatingly sincere. Wickedly intelligent. Innocently childlike. Terrifyingly trusting. She had me knocked for six. I grokked—via our tenuous data stream—that I held this woman's heart, her future, her very life in my hands. Let me tell you, scary doesn't begin to describe how that feels.

2 – No Turning Back

It was a Saturday, and I think it was morning. That far north, sunrise doesn't come early. In late autumn, you're lucky to see the street lights switch off before noon.

Torrential rain was rapidly transforming my garden into a sea of mud and rotting leaves. Most of them, still on the trees. You see, Victoria doesn't have seasons as conventionally accepted by the majority of humankind. It has cold-and-wet and more-cold-and-even-wetter, or rainy season and rotting season. For you romantic types, that means the leaves don't change colour and drop gracefully from the trees in glorious splendour. Oh no, they just die on their branches and rot there.

Dawn wasn’t even a hint on the horizon by the time I was dialling an endless string of numbers. And then I waited, and waited… while nothing happened; not sure whether the phone actually connected. I glanced at my watch. Timing was of the essence. Elena's mother went crackpot mental when we spoke; thus, the cloak and dagger arrangements via email.

I glanced at my watch, making sure I had the time right. Still, nothing but an eerie silence from the other end of the line.

I whispered, Elena, is that you? Are you there? If it had connected, who was I speaking to? Hello, can you hear me?

Finally, Yes, hello. Elena murmured. I can hear you. I am also… glad. I am very glad to hear your voice.

I love talking to you in real time.

More silence from her end.

Nervous, I prodded: Tell me something about your day.

Silence.

Anything. Give me a feel for what it's like to design buildings. I waited, holding my breath.

With me? She inhaled slowly. Ya, I, I am, OK. She was struggling in English, trying not to let it show. Then, Meg… oh Meg. Her voice was suddenly low and confident, gathering strength. Meg, I, I miss you very much.

I. Miss. You. Also. I spoke slowly, giving Elena time to translate. I think of you always. I re-read your wonderful letters all the time.

Elena said nothing for quite a while, but I could hear her breathing. It's okay. I'll speak. You can listen. The things you have written, all you have told me, you astonish me. You surprise me. You make me see things differently.

Silence.

Oh dear. My turn for a deep breath. You are so different. Crikey, how would that translate? I started over. Elena?

Yes, Meg?

You are my Russian princess.

Frozen silence.

Could I have blethered anything more pathetic? I took a deep breath. Hoped I hadn't blown it. Elena, are you there? Don't be silent. Say something. Anything at all. I want to remember your voice.

Meg, I, I love you.

With those words, Elena rocked my world. That someone could bare her deepest feelings to me: a disembodied voice on the other side of the planet. It unravelled decades of programming. Indoctrination. Insecurity. Propriety. Expectations. She trusted me with her heart.

That anyone could put herself at such risk and could place in another, such trust; crikey, it simply flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about love and how others felt. I so wanted to be like Elena. I so desperately needed to trust someone with my own heart. And here she was, a frightened soul from darkest Russia, doing what I never thought possible; allowing herself to feel. Allowing herself to fall.

What I was searching for my whole bloody life, she had found. For Elena, it just, was. And it was without the hundred-year-old bungalow. The latest fashion. The right club membership. The newest car. The most friends. The biggest bank account.

It's hard to describe how it feels, when everything you built your life and reality upon, begins to crash down around you.

~

Every left turn, right turn, signpost, cyclist, parked car, lane change and traffic light were potential lawsuits. Crippling fines. Major altercations. Headline: Estate Car on Hillside Sparks Mayhem! Panic! Mass Hysteria! Let’s just say, I really hate driving in Victoria. Getting to the home centre's order desk certainly didn't improve my mood.

Poke, poke… click. Poke. Pen tapping on a CRT monitor. Beep! Eh! The clerk, a skater with a Rogaine starved mullet, grunted: Laaah-val, pee cue. He gave that a think, Oh yeah! It ain't here, eh. Went to pee cue.

Scuze me?

Like I says. It went to pee cue. He swung the CRT around to show me.

P. Q, I snarled. That means, 'province of Quebec'!

Yeah, like I said, eh. Laa-vall. Province of kwah-beck.

Bloody hell, it's a suburb of Montreal!

Montreal, eh? He squinted at the screen. Wicked hockey players!

Can you get one from another home centre?

Nooo wayyyy! Special order, eh. Gotta go through customs an shit. Hayyy, maybe that's why it's at pee and cue?

No, it was cleared. They rang to tell me it was in.

Ain't no one phoned you from here. It ain't my problem, lady.

"No, it certainly isn't. And you aren't hosting a society meeting at your period, Arts and Crafts restoration. A heritage-building graced by a naked twisty-bulb, instead of that chandelier. What a disaster!"

"Chill out, lady. It's just a light fixture, eh."

"Just a light fixture? Calling this thing, just a light fixture, is like calling Aida, just a tune! I scrambled for my Blackberry. Oh. My. Dog! I have to cancel. I'll be the laughingstock of architectural gatherings for years to come. This cock-up makes a mockery of my cedar-shingled walls and perfectly matched mouldings!"

~

I swung the Volvo onto the drive. Twinkling shards of coloured glass littered my hand antiqued, cobble pavers. Typical! Another tranche of smashed, Victorian ornaments. Last merry-fucking-Christmas, I put up God-damned lights!

I bought the bungalow back before Oak Bay turned oh-so-trendy. But with subprime lending out of control, and house flipping launching property prices into high Earth orbit, old and run-down morphed into period and up-market, making it The super-swish locale for the upwardly mobile and their hateful, enraged teenagers. The spoiled gytes gave their lives meaning by stomping on anything even remotely kind, gentle or beautiful.

My mobile chimed. New Message!

Whoa! From Elena.

My heart raced. Olde worlde, Victorian, Christmas ornaments be damned! I just faked the happy-holidays anyway. In my last email, I suggested we meet in Kyiv. I'd been revelling in the Orange Revolution and frothing at the mouth to get back. It seemed like a great place and situation in which to meet in person.

Elena's response: Kyiv is too far. Parents will never let me go to there.

Parents! How old was she? On the phone, she sounded like an adult. In photos, she looked like an adult. An adult with a deer-in-the-headlights look, mind you. But not in a million years would I have thought she was beholden to her parents for permission to travel.

Until then, my discourse with Elena was heartfelt, honest. Truth be told, I found things she wrote rather moving. She brought the people and activities around her to life for me. The photos she took were quite literally a graphic representation of how she saw even the simplest of things. More than once, they left me in tears. Elena was an astonishing presence, unquestioningly open and emotionally honest. It's why the email I just got from her didn't feel right. Something lurked between the lines. Something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I was genuinely worried about the extraordinary woman reaching out to me through the data-stream.

~

My joke was meant to lighten the mood. It didn't. Typical! When deans and department heads crack jokes, it's uproarious. Doctor William Hackett—that's PhD, not MD—AKA, my guv, scowled at me from his colossal, California Mission-style, solid red-oak desk.

I tried to deflect his glare by glancing side to side at the symmetrically placed, period, Arts & Crafts, leather chairs. Apparently, the epitome of understated elegance and style. They looked more to me like electrocution chairs, minus the straps and steel beanie. Knowing Hackett, it was probably just the fashion statement he was aiming for.

Hey kiddo, you still holding that Arts & Crafts jamboree, at your shack this Friday?

Crikey, I'd forgotten about the society meeting. Ah— I guess. Look sir, my ersatz chandelier ended up in Montreal.

Great! I mean, sorry about your lamp, babes. William catapulted toward his desk; period springs on his antique chair shrieking like a stuck pig. Thing is, Sarah wants the meet-n-greet at our place. We'll make it a combo faculty barbecue, TGIF kind of thing. He snatched the phone. Started dialling. After the artsy-fartsy snobs drool all over the Stickley and Tiffany, we'll party hardy.

Snobs drool?

They will. Even you, babe. Wait until you get a load of the sofa I won at auction.

Won?

Dumb blonde, don't wash with me, toots. You know, I'm talking, highest bid. Bat-shit high, but it's a primo piece. He chucked his glasses onto the desk to better shoulder the phone. Then, dismissing me with a wave, added, And bring something Martian, Venetian—that hippy food you eat.

Vegan? I said.

Yeah, whatever. Bring your own grub. Unless you like your din-dins twitching and bleeding.

~

Since meeting Elena, my interest in the whole Arts & Crafts, Edwardian resurrection had started to wane. Something about my interaction with the quirky,

Reviews for Love across Enemy Lines

[daydreamer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a story! Well worth reading. I wish there would be some safe place for them to take refuge for years at a time. This is a love story full of grit. Highly recommend.