An Emigrant’s Observations: What “Home” Means After Nine Years Abroad

English
By Anatoly
11 min. read

Julia and I have been living in Austria for nine years now. We first settled in Linz and later moved to Vienna, where we have spent most of our life abroad. When I say that I am going home, I no longer need to explain which country I mean. Yet from time to time, I come across people who are ready to explain to me that I no longer have a real home. Sometimes there is such satisfaction in their words, as though they are finally able to tell me about some great misfortune that I have somehow failed to notice myself.

For years, Russian state propaganda has encouraged this contempt for people who have left the country. On television and social media, emigrants are eagerly told how miserable their lives abroad have become. They will forever remain outsiders, live without proper rights, and endure humiliation until they finally realise what a terrible mistake they made. Those who openly oppose the war receive especially harsh treatment: they are already labelled traitors. To me, such statements sound like official permission from the state to harass people. You are allowed to despise those who have left and even consider that contempt a sign of love for your homeland. Most importantly, people who remain in Russia can avoid changing anything about their own lives, even if those lives have become little more than a struggle to survive.

Surprisingly, you can recognise the same tone in conversations with people you know. “So, are you cleaning toilets over there?” asks someone you once knew, although not particularly well. Or they confidently predict, “Just wait until things get tough. You’ll come crawling back home.” This person may know almost nothing about my life in Austria, but is already perfectly satisfied with the version they have imagined. In that story, I am supposed to suffer, regret leaving, and wait for an opportunity to return. Any information suggesting otherwise only gets in the way of their version of reality.

I am amazed by how much effort some people put into convincing themselves that someone else is unhappy. An ordinary difficulty becomes proof that the entire experience of emigration has been a failure, while being satisfied with your life immediately raises suspicion. Surely you are lying. Surely you are hiding something. Gradually, you realise that your actual situation means almost nothing in such a conversation. What matters to the other person is preserving their conviction that you have lost.

And this raises a painful question for me. Why should any of this make me want to return “home” even more? There are people I love and memories I treasure in my hometown, but now those memories are mixed with the voices of people who seem to look forward to my humiliation. Talk of returning begins to sound almost like a threat: one day you will come crawling back, and then we will see what becomes of you. This attitude only makes me want to distance myself even further. I find it difficult to associate a sense of home with a place where some people I know are so willing to deny me the right to a happy life of my own.

Even before the war, when travelling to Russia was still possible, my mother used to ask me, “So when are you coming home?” I understood that she meant Krasnodar, but that word, “home,” always gave me a strange feeling. By then, I had been living separately from my parents for many years and had a home of my own. Julia and I had married and built our life together long before moving to Austria. Yet in conversations like these, our home somehow remained something temporary, no matter how many years we had already spent together.

Gradually, something else began to bother me: it seemed that I was expected to want to return. I could explain that our life in Austria was better, that we had opportunities here we had previously only dreamed of. Even something as ordinary as being able to drink tap water without worrying made me happy. But none of these details could overcome the belief that life was always better back home. And even if it was worse, that changed nothing, because “home is home.”

When I hear the words “You don’t choose your home; you love it,” I sense some kind of heavy obligation. Apparently, a person is supposed to long for a particular place regardless of what life was like there or what they wanted for themselves. Even your own well-being becomes slightly shameful: you have made yourself far too comfortable away from your family. Sometimes it feels as though any story about a happy life needs to come with explanations, just so your loved ones will not think that you have become happier without them. I even wrote a separate article about this.

Meanwhile, Julia and I were settling into life in Linz, and we were finding more and more reasons to enjoy the world around us here in Austria and Europe. New acquaintances became friends. We wanted to meet people, spend time together, and invite them to our home. Gradually, the city became a place where people were happy to see us. Even an ordinary encounter with someone we knew added something to that feeling of closeness, which at first was difficult to describe in any particular words.

When friends and family came to visit us in Linz, I wanted to show them the city and share the things I had grown to love. My mother also had the chance to see Austria, and after her visit, familiar places began to remind me of the time we had spent together. Previously, much of what I associated with people close to me had remained in Krasnodar, where I had spent the first 35 years of my life. Now we were creating shared memories thousands of kilometres away, and those visits made Linz even dearer to me.

Later, we moved to Vienna, where we gradually developed our own circle of friends and discovered favourite places. At the same time, my attachment to Linz remained. Before travelling there, I would look forward to writing to friends, arranging a meeting, and seeing the city where we had spent our first years in Austria. As I settled into Vienna, I was pleased to discover that I still felt even better in Linz than I had back home in Krasnodar.

I experience a similar feeling in cities where I have never lived. My grandfather and I visited Prague and Vienna, and travelled to Munich, Nuremberg, and Florence. He is no longer alive, but I can return to the places where we once walked together. Familiar streets bring back memories of him and of myself as a younger person, with different thoughts and a completely different idea of the future. Sometimes, for a brief moment, the past feels surprisingly close. Life continues around me in the present, but suddenly I manage to feel something of the time when my grandfather was still by my side. These returns mean a great deal to me.

Julia and I first travelled to Prague together back in 2007. Later, the city also became connected with our wedding, and since then we have returned so many times that it is difficult to count. I do not think there has been a year when we have not visited at least once, and often we have managed to come twice. We know Prague well. We have our favourite bars and restaurants, and people we know whom we enjoy seeing again. Over the years, we have spent so many wonderful days of our life together here that every new trip makes me happy long before we even arrive.

Something similar has happened with other cities. Venice, for example, holds another deeply personal memory for me: it was here that I proposed to Julia. Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to see Venice simply as a famous city that everyone is expected to admire. Behind everything that attracts millions of visitors, there is always a memory of the two of us. Venice has long been part of our family history, and I enjoy returning there with that knowledge, years after the decision we made back then.

Rome gradually became a place that felt like home to Julia and me. It is not an easy city, and you need to find your own way of enjoying it. I feel comfortable walking through its streets and love returning to my favourite restaurants, especially those where people already remember me. There is something genuinely warm about being recognised. You have arrived from another country, yet there is a place here that draws you back, where your arrival is no longer a first introduction. Sometimes it is precisely these small details that give me the calm feeling I associate with home.

We also visit Málaga often enough for each trip to feel like a continuation of the previous one. When you return, you already know where you want to go, and it is a pleasure to be recognised in certain places. I treasure this feeling of returning to a familiar life that you can become part of again after a long absence. Gradually, Málaga has become one of the cities I find myself missing.

We often go to Bratislava simply for a change of scenery. It has long been a familiar and nearby city for us, and there is a special pleasure in that too. Sometimes you just want to get away for a little while and spend time in another city you already know well. These trips now seem like an entirely ordinary part of our lives, although there was a time when the very possibility would have made me happy as if something extraordinary had happened.

For me, Budapest is closely connected with the Sziget festival. Every time, I look forward to returning with that special excitement you feel before something you have loved for a long time. Along with the festival, the city itself has become dear to me. I want to find myself once again in a place where we have been happy so many times and add a few more wonderful days to our existing memories.

In Naples, this feeling came surprisingly quickly, even though I have only been there two or three times. It seems a little strange even to me to talk about feeling at home after such a short acquaintance, but I genuinely felt happy and peaceful there. Bari has also become close to my heart. It still makes me happy to think that there are now Italian cities in my life that I want to return to with such a simple, almost homely feeling.

Paris, on the other hand, remains a city I would like to get to know better. I would love to feel as relaxed and familiar with it one day as I do with Prague. I do not have that feeling yet, but the possibility of discovering and falling in love with so much more is exciting in itself. It is interesting to imagine what Paris will become to me after future visits and what memories and experiences will eventually connect me to it.

I would also very much like to return to Barcelona, where I have always felt happy and found so much to enjoy. I remember it fondly and know that I would gladly visit again. There is something encouraging about these wishes: so many more encounters with places I have already grown to love lie ahead, along with so many new experiences I cannot even imagine yet.

Over the years of emigration, the world has become much closer to me. More and more of it feels familiar, yet at the same time it seems so enormous that I want to keep discovering it. Sometimes I wonder how much my sense of home depends on how I feel within myself. When I feel at peace with myself, it becomes easier to settle into a new place, take an interest in people, and feel comfortable among them. And then the thought of another journey brings a pleasant sense of anticipation: I wonder what else might one day become dear to me.

When I think about why so many different places have become close to my heart, I always think of Julia and our life together. We shared so much of what made these cities feel like home. Our life together means a great deal to me, and I love thinking about how much we still have ahead of us. With her, I feel loved, I can be myself, and I can look forward to the future with pleasure, even though many things in that future are still far from being as stable as we would like in the world we live in.

Over these years, my wife and I have changed cities and addresses, settled into new places, and moved on again. I know how much it means to me to share the things that make me happy with Julia, to tell her what I am thinking, and to listen to her. Perhaps that is why, when someone asks me where home is, I now want to give a very simple answer, without long explanations about where I was born, what nationality my passport says I have, or where I am supposed to feel comfortable and at home. My home is wherever my wife Julia is.

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О проекте:

Меня зовут Анатолий. Я автор проекта «Жизнь эмигранта». В 2017 году я эмигрировал с семьёй из Краснодара в Австрию. Мы с женой работаем в маркетинге, а для помощи тем, кто хотел бы переехать, создали сайт Emigrants.life.
Проект «Жизнь эмигранта» ― это ежедневные новости о жизни, быте в Австрии и Европе. Переходите на сайт проекта Emigrants.life, подписывайтесь на наши страницы в Telegram , Facebook , Instagram, Twitter , а также принимайте участие в голосованиях в нашей группе в Telegram .

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