The daughter of a double-headed eagle couldn’t stop looking both ways if she wanted to, and so I hung the walls of my childhood bedroom with maps, trying to hold everything in only two eyes. My parents, between them, had two heads, but both looked the same direction—east and up—to the Stars and Stripes fluttering overhead like ribbons of the northern lights. For them, Alaska was America: hamburgers and sitcoms and grocery stores that never emptied. Everything moved east. There was nothing to speak of in the old country. My parents filled the living room with a TV, so I watched White Sun of the Desert and remembered, like Sukov, that the east is a delicate matter. They loved John Wayne, but somehow it was only me, with Tatar blood burning in my ears, that heard the call: “Go west, young woman!” For me, Alaska was Ninilchik Russian and Old Believers, mushroom picking, cigarettes bummed off friends from Khabarovsk while listening to KINO. America was far away—a place one saw in movies. When my parents went to bed, I’d listen to Saturday Night Live through the wall and study my maps. The American ones never knew what to do with Alaska—stuck it off in a box somewhere in a corner—so my favourite was one I tore from a Soviet atlas, a reproduction of a map drawn by Nestor Terebenev in 1866—the year before the Sale—that shows Alaska as part of the expanse of Asian Russia. This, one hundred and twenty- one years before I was born, was the first map illustrated with figures of the Peoples of the Russian Empire. It was the last ever made that shows where I am from.