A Love Lost, and a Life to Be Regained
He was not her type. He was too old for her. She would never give him her number.
And then she did. And he called her. And they fell in love.
He called three times a day for a week before she finally answered. Alena Kastsiuk picked up the phone that May morning in 2011 only to yell at him for waking her.
“How about sushi?” he responded. Ms. Kastsiuk, a waitress who had worked other low-paying jobs, had little money for such luxuries. Her refrigerator was empty, so she agreed.
The sushi date lasted five and a half hours. Although he was almost twice her age, Ms. Kastsiuk, a film directing major from Belarus struggling to find her way into New York’s film industry, discovered much in common with the Russian pianist across from her. The pianist, Vladimir Spitsberg, had arrived in New York State more than 20 years earlier, worked as a digital media arts instructor at Touro College in Manhattan and played with his band, Gypsy Fun Trio, at a Russian restaurant and piano bar in Midtown Manhattan.
They married three weeks later. “Maybe three and a half weeks,” she said.
It was not a marriage of convenience. Neither was a United States citizen. They married for love, but the ceremony was a nightmare.
On what was supposed to be her wedding day, Ms. Kastsiuk discovered that the security tag was still attached to her dress. Mr. Spitsberg pulled at it, and yellow paint exploded on her gown.
She changed into a sundress, and they hurtled to the Brooklyn clerk’s office with 30 minutes to spare before it closed. But they forgot their rings and had to turn back to retrieve them. They made it back to the clerk’s office just after it closed.
Friends were waiting at Uncle Vanya Cafe in Midtown and the party could not be called off, so they put together an impromptu ceremony with a friend splashing them with Cognac and sliding the rings over their fingers. He declared them married.
The next morning, they returned to the clerk’s office to marry for real. By 2014, they had created Karma World Productions, a film company, where she handled the editing and videography and he produced the music.
Ms. Kastsiuk had noticed signs of her husband’s health problems — his ashen face and frequent sweats — before their marriage. Sometimes he would collapse on her couch, unable to make it home. But he did not tell her about his longtime heart and blood pressure problems.
Mr. Spitsberg lost his teaching job in 2014. His band started to play at a different restaurant later that year, leading to further stress. He was asked to advise a film project about Russian immigrants in the United States, but the job fell through. He agreed to compose the film’s score, instead.
Depressed, Mr. Spitsberg drank, skipped his heart medication and refused to go to a hospital. Helpless, Ms. Kastsiuk watched as his late hours with the band and heavy drinking took a toll.
“I was fighting for him all the time,” she said. “But his style of life was taking him away from me.”
On May 13, Ms. Kastsiuk heard her husband calling from the bedroom.
“He was sitting on the bed, white and sweating,” she said. “Everything was wet.”
She called 911 and waited for help. “Sit close to me,” he said.
When emergency responders arrived, the numbness in his chest had spread to his legs. As Mr. Spitsberg was taken to a hospital, Ms. Kastsiuk followed on a bicycle, calling his cellphone repeatedly on the way. But Mr. Spitsberg, 51, was pronounced dead before she arrived.
In the emergency room, she held his hand, not letting go until his fingers turned blue.
On a cold December morning, sitting inside a Midtown office, seven months after his death, Ms. Kastsiuk still spoke of him in the present tense. She reflected on a life beginning with their romance.
She had come to New York in 2008 at 21, initially on a student visa. With $100 in her pocket, she supported herself as a maid, a waitress and a flower seller. Meeting college students in film school in fall 2010, she produced several small video projects.
But Mr. Spitsberg had introduced her to an entirely different New York, with evenings at Samovar, the Midtown restaurant where his band played, drinking vodka and singing Russian songs. She networked with producers, became a business partner with her husband and made films. Without children, the couple got a West Highland white terrier.
Returning to their Coney Island apartment on the day he died, she felt trapped, as if still in the moments before his death. Valeriy Zhmud, the friend who led the couple’s unofficial marriage ceremony, joined her with a bottle of Mr. Spitsberg’s favorite pinot noir, and she opened the fridge to find the pork that he had cooked the day before. Overcome, she threw it out.
But life outside the apartment continued. The band hired another pianist. The couple’s film company halted operation.
Financial trouble, which had been a problem for years, increased after his death. Though she is in the country legally, Ms. Kastsiuk does not have a green card, something she is pursuing now. She received a one-time payment of $255 from Social Security after her husband’s death. Without his income, she is looking for a roommate to split the cost of her $1,350 rent.
Over the summer, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, provided Ms. Kastsiuk with $1,481 of Neediest funds to cover one month’s rent and electricity.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Kastsiuk recalled. “And I didn’t think they’d help me. I’m not Jewish, but that didn’t matter to them.”
The organization has helped with another month’s rent and provided bereavement counseling to help her start over in a city filled with memories of her husband.
She takes comfort in walks with their dog. “He’s the only family I have right now,” she said. “He looks at me and understands my heart.”
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/nyregion/neediest-cases-fund-belarus.html?_r=0
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