Searching For A Home

Andrei and I stepped outside into the unseasonably cool August night. Lights glowed in the little windows of the cottages that lined the rutted dirt road. All was quiet. The breeze carried the smell of fresh bread and milk.
It was my fourth night in Belarus. My mother and I were staying with my grandmother’s cousin, Vera, on a three-week visit to our ancestral village, Mankovichi, part of a little ring of hamlets on the outskirts of Stolin. But I was on my own that day. My mother decided to stay home with Vera, and I went to go visit Andrei, my cousin, twice removed, at his parents’ house across town.
“Andrei, where are we going?” I asked.
“K kostru (to a campfire),” he answered.
I didn’t understand at first. His heavy Belarusian accent trounced my meager two years of Russian classes. I pretended to know what he said, and walked with him down the road.
We came to a field. Andrei’s sister, Olga, was setting up a table underneath a willow. Andrei began stacking wood and it hit me. A campfire, I learned the word a few months before in class.
His friends and cousins joined us. We roasted little pieces of salo, an Eastern European style salt cured bacon, on skewers, and ate them with black rye bread and pickles. The Milky Way stretched all the way across the sky like an old road into a distant past. The fire burned, burned, burned; glowing with the stars across the night. I remembered my grandmother. She never talked about her life in Belarus. Her family fled to Paraguay just before the territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939, never to return.
I understood my grandmother’s sadness, the nostalgia brimming in every dish of varenyky and borsch she made when I was a child. This is where I was from. The old road had finally led me back.