"“Nobody speaks Russian the way I do,” Yelena says. “Except for my sestry, and not all of them will speak it anymore, not even with me. They've forgotten, or they don't like the sound of it." Which ones do and don't speak Russian? I'm guessing that Olivia doesn't?
Yeah, Olivia definitely stopped speaking Russian about the same time she stopped being Olga, and that was a very deliberate choice. The younger ones have mostly forgotten - Marta and Kseniya were so young when they left they don’t remember much if anything, and Irina and Lyudmila will swear in Russian and chat up the babushkas when they go to Brighton Beach in the summer, but not much else.
Svetlana and Evgenia are still relatively fluent; they talk to each other sometimes just to keep it up, and when Steve and Bucky visit it never gets old talking heavily-accented slangy Russian with Bucky just to see Steve’s face. But sometimes Vasilia makes this face when she hears Russian in the house and none of them have quite got up the courage to take on asking her about it directly. (If they did, it’d be hard for her to give a straight answer; it’s complicated, and it’s not—it’s not that she doesn’t want to hear it, exactly, it’s just… maybe it’s easier not to, because it doesn’t fit: this is a house they’ve filled with American accents in ways both deliberate and accidental. Svetlana forgot the word for April and Vasilia heard her velar fricatives softening, Xenni played—and sang—Taylor Swift twenty hours a day until Evgenia unplugged the CD player and hid it under her bed. It’s a house that’s put Russia and Russian away behind them. And then—and then, Vasilia will hear someone on the subway, some fresh off the boat emigre settling into Little Odessa, and she misses it like air she won’t let herself breathe anymore. So—Natasha, sometimes, because she gets the same expression in her eyes Vasilia sees in the mirror, and Vasilia knows even if Natasha’s missing something different in those moments, not Russia or a mother tongue but something stranger, unspoken, it still feels like a shared pain—and Russian is a good language for pain, for them.)
