Little Failure (13 page)

And so the boy who watched his parents and sister slaughtered before his eyes at age sixteen, who ambushed German soldiers on the roads of Belorussia by age seventeen, came out of the war at age eighteen
to collect the typical reward of the era, ten years of hard labor in a Siberian
lagpunkt
, or work camp.

My mother’s favorite thing in the world growing up was sweetened condensed milk (
sgushchyonka
), a cousin of the Latin American
dulce de leche
. Among the oversweetened pantheon of Russian desserts, it would become my childhood favorite as well.

In the labor camps foodstuffs like
sgushchyonka
served as currency—a good way not to get raped or forced into the worst kinds of labor—and so my grandfather would cart up to twenty of those iconic blue cans of Soviet condensed milk to the post office to send to his brother-in-law Aaron. My mother, on the other hand, was allowed only one tablespoon of condensed milk before bedtime.

My mother’s first memory: walking through the ruined streets of postwar Leningrad with her aristocratically thin, ever-ailing economist father, a cigarette stamped permanently into his mouth, as he dragged along twenty cans of
sgushchyonka
to send to her uncle, the prisoner, thinking,
How lucky Uncle Aaron must be that he gets to eat twenty cans of condensed milk!

There is a picture of my mother at the time. She is about four years old and as chubby as I’ve ever seen her, smiling underneath a pleasant brown bob. Born months after the war ended to a family with decent connections and a decent flat, she will one day join that ever-ephemeral phenomenon, the Russian middle class. The picture is one of several of my mother being young and happy—at the Thanksgiving dinner she takes me to my upstairs bedroom with these photos and says, “Look how happy
my
family looked by comparison to
his
,” meaning my father’s. Indeed, there’s nothing special about the photo, except that its upper-right corner has been torn off, and one can discern a crescent of needle holes. Why did someone take needle and thread to this innocent image?

This photograph was “sewn into the case file” (
podshyto k delu
) of my great-uncle Aaron when he was in the camps. At one point, my grandmother had sent a letter with the photograph of my mother to
my uncle Aaron in Siberia, and the camp’s administration had found the beaming face of a four-year-old important enough to sew into a prisoner’s case file.

Perhaps the greatest unanswered question I have toward the entire Land of the Soviets is this:
Who did the sewing?

In a country recovering from the greatest war humanity has ever known, with twenty-six million in their graves (my grandfather Isaac included),
who
took the time out of a starving, snowy day to carefully hand sew the tiny photo of a smiling four-year-old, my mother, into the “criminal” case file of a man—a
boy
, really, by today’s standards—who had watched his family die just half a decade ago, who had fought the enemy back across the border, and who had subsequently been imprisoned for writing poetry and admiring a German tank? So much information is open to us, the past is ready and accessible and Googleable, but what I wouldn’t give to know the person whose job it was to make sure my mother’s photo made the rounds of Stalin’s labor camps, only to end up, as Great-uncle Aaron fortunately did, in a cozy house along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, minus the four fingers on his right hand, lost to a timber saw in Siberia during his decade of savage and pointless labor.

My mother. With her dreams of being buried alive. With her meticulous collection of family photos, some filed under the World War II subheading “Uncle Simon, Wife, Murdered Children,” written in Russian in her equally meticulous script.

My mother, in the first despairing bloom of youth, looking, as she would say,
ozabochena
, a combination of worried and moody and maybe lovesick, a Soviet-era bow crowning the top of her puffy, full-lipped face as if to inform us that the woods behind her do not belong to a sunny summer camp in the Catskills. It is 1956. She is eleven years old in a striped summer dress, resembling, already, a worried young Jewish adult.

My beaming mother in her red Young Pioneer tie, ready to serve the Soviet state with the common Pioneer cheer
I am always ready!
shouted at the top of her lungs. “I never took it off,” she says of the red tie. “After I got into the Pioneers, I never took it off. Even in the summer! Such a great Pioneer I was!”

My mother, serious and dreamy, behind a childhood piano. Her mother ties her to the piano bench with a towel so that she won’t escape to jump rope with the kids screaming for her outside her window. Eventually the music will seep in. She will go to music school and later teach piano in a Leningrad kindergarten. She will marry a man who wants to be an opera singer, who once went to music school just like her, although she will deem his school inferior.

My mother, off camera, in our Moscow Square apartment, tossing from a nightmare in one room while I am tossing from asthma
and
a nightmare in the other. She’s dreaming she left her notes at home and now the kindergarten class won’t be ready for a special performance. I’m dreaming I forgot some part of me, too, a toy version of
Buratino
, the Russian Pinocchio, left on a platform in Sevastopol, Crimea, left for some lucky boy or girl.

My mother in our first American co-op apartment, dark brown curls, backless dress, playing the shiny Red October upright piano we had brought at great cost from Leningrad. Atop the piano, a golden menorah with a fake emerald at its center alongside a white vase filled with chalky ceramic flowers. My mother looks hesitant before the keys. She is already throwing herself into her American work, work that will lead her from the title of Typist to that of Fiscal Administrator for a large Manhattan-based charity. The Red October, useless now, will be given to Goodwill in return for a three-hundred-dollar tax deduction.

“Two girls,” my mother says, holding up the photo of her playing the piano in Leningrad, the dreaming, distracted child, and the other of her, a single-minded immigrant mother, behind the Red October in Queens, New York. “One as I was and one as I became.”

I have known only one of those girls. My dear immigrant mother,
my fellow anxious warrior. The one she became. The other one I have tried to know. Through the stories, the photographs, the archival evidence, the shared love of condensed milk, the Red Pioneer tie I never got to wear but that graced her neck so proudly. I have known only one of those girls. But, please believe me, I have known her.

The author’s beloved grandma Polya rejoins the family in Rome. She has flown in three kilograms of soap from Leningrad. A Soviet newscast has informed her of a shortage of soap in America
.

T
HIS WAS SUPPOSED TO READ
like a Cold War spy novel. Security checks, East Berlin, Soviet customs agents. This was supposed to read like a Cold War spy novel, but the James Bond in question, me, can’t make
kaka
.

“Mama! Papa! Oooooooo!” It is the day before our departure for Western Europe and then America, and I am sitting on my little green potty—write a hundred-page novel, sure; but use an actual
grown-up toilet, I’m too scared of falling in—and I can’t get the
kakashka
out.

Staraisya, staraisya
, my parents urge me, one after the other. Try harder, try harder.
Napryagis’
. Strain yourself.

Later, I’m on the Culture Couch, my stomach still full of undigested cabbage, and I can’t sleep. The suitcases are packed, the living room where I sleep is now dominated by a pair of huge army-green sacks stuffed with decades of accumulated life, specifically the thick cotton comforter beneath which I struggle to stay alive; in fact,
everything
is packed, and the fighting between my parents has reached some kind of worried détente, the usual go-to-the-dicks and fuck-your-mothers and don’t-swear! replaced with gloomy, indeterminate whispers, even as the Bad Rocket belches its smoke outside, and I tremble within on the Culture Couch. I peek at the rising sun, at the signs for
MEAT
and
PRODUCE
. Everything is covered in frost. Real Russian frost. Every snowbank is a fortress on the scale of the turreted Engineers’ Castle, the snow pale and bled out by the brief winter sun. Anyone who has experienced such frost will never abide its mushy Western equivalent.

Neither Mama nor Papa has told me that we are about to leave the Land of the Soviets for good. My parents are paranoid that I might blab it to some adult in power, and our exit visas will be canceled. No one has told me,
but I know
. And I have staged my own form of protest. I have brought on the worst asthma attack yet, a sputtering of helplessness so obscene that my parents consider
not leaving
.

Our apartment near Moscow Square has been sold to the son of a high-ranking party member. The party member’s son and his dad are very keen to see us haul our Jewish asses out and take possession of every square foot of our former property, not to mention our explosive Signal black-and-white television. They will also get the shabby Culture Couch on which I’ve slept and dreamed cultured dreams, tried to play the violin and the balalaika, and, with the help of my grandma Galya, written my masterpiece
Lenin and His Magical Goose
. Also included in the price of the apartment, the floor-to-ceiling
wooden ladder my father built to try to help me conquer my fear of heights and to make me into an Athlete.

Son of a Party Member stops by with his high-ranking father, who happens to have a medical degree. “We don’t know what to do,” my mother tells the Communist Party duo. “The child has asthma. Maybe we should stay.”

Dr. Apparatchik, keen to get the apartment into his Communist son’s hands, says, “My medical opinion is that you should go. There will be better care for asthma in the West.”

Which is so very true.

My mother decides we should proceed with our flight. In response, my asthma gets worse.
I will not let them take me
. In the morning, I try the potty again, but nothing doing, the cabbage inside me knows our destination better than I do. It desperately wants to emigrate to the West, to end its life inside a gleaming Viennese toilet.

The last minutes on Tipanov Street are hazy. Do we sit down for a silent moment before the journey, as is the Russian custom? What’s the point? This journey will have no end.

Taxi to the airport. And there the truth of the matter is revealed to me: Aunt Tanya is here and my aunt Lyusya, who will die a decade later of cancer that would be operable almost anywhere else, and her daughter, my cousin Victoria, the ballerina whose hand I touched through glass during my quarantine, who begs my mother, “I want to come with you!” Everyone is here except my grandma Galya, who is bedridden.
Nas provozhayut
. We are being “sent off,” meaning this is not just a jaunt down to Crimea or Soviet Georgia. This is final. But where are we going?