Little Failure (4 page)

I
AM BORN
.

My pregnant mother crosses a Leningrad street and a truck driver honks at her, because scaring pregnant women is the thing to do. She grabs her stomach. The water breaks. She rushes to the Otto Birthing House on Vasilyevsky Island, an important floating appendage to the map of Leningrad, the same birthing house where she and her two sisters have come into the world. (Russian children are not born in full-fledged hospitals as in the West.) Several weeks premature, I drop out of my mother, legs and ass first. I am long and skinny and look a bit like a dachshund in human form, except that I have a fantastically large head. “Well done!” the orderlies tell my mother. “You’ve given birth to a good
muzhik
.” The
muzhik
, the sturdy, brawny Russian man, is the last thing I will ever become, but what rankles my mother is that the orderlies are using the informal form of address with her (
ty
versus
vy
). My mother is sensitive to these distinctions. She is from a good family and not merely another Jewess (
yevreika
) you can informally insult.

The Otto Birthing House. For a “member of the future Communist Society,” this Art Nouveau–ish building is as fine a place to be born as any in the city, perhaps the country. Beneath my mother’s feet, an exquisitely tiled floor bearing the motif of waves and butterflies; above her, chrome chandeliers; outside, the enormous Petrine buildings of the Twelve Colleges of Leningrad State University and a calming burst of Russian evergreens within the subarctic landscape. And in her arms, me.

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated. Breast, condensed milk, whatever you have I will suck on it, bite it, swallow it. Years later, under the tutelage of my beloved grandmother Polya, I will become a fatso, but for now, thin and lean and hungry is how I’ll go.

My mother is twenty-six, and by the standards of the time she is old to be a mother. My father is thirty-three and is already halfway into
his existence as far as the local life expectancy for men is concerned. My mother teaches piano at a kindergarten; my father is a mechanical engineer. They own an apartment of about five hundred square feet, with a balcony, in the center of Leningrad, which makes them privileged; in relative terms, far more privileged than we will ever be in the United States, even when a minor colonial in Little Neck, Queens, is added to our portfolio in the late 1980s.

What is also true, and what will take me most of my life to understand, is that my parents are too dissimilar to marry successfully. The Soviet Union is supposed to be a classless society, but my father is a village boy, from difficult stock, and my mother is from the Petersburg cultural class, a class that has its own problems but whose miseries are laughably minor by comparison. To my mother, my father’s kin are savage and provincial. To my father, hers are pretentious and false. Neither of them is entirely wrong.

My mother looks half Jewish, which, given the place and time, is too Jewish by half, but she is beautiful in a compact, practical way, a modest beehive of hair sitting atop a worried face and a turtleneck, always a smile ready at the corners of her cheeks, a smile reserved mostly for family. Leningrad is her city, much as New York will soon be hers as well. She knows where the occasional chicken cutlets are sold and the pastries bursting with clotted cream. She holds on to every kopeck, and when the kopecks become cents in New York, she will hold on to them even more. My father is not tall, but he is handsome in a gloomy Levantine sort of way, and he takes care of his physique—indeed, for him, the physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself. At my own wedding many years later, more than one person will jokingly remark that it is odd that such a good-looking couple could have produced me. I think there is truth to that. My parents’ blood did not mix well within me.

Fathers are not allowed into the Otto Birthing House, but for the ten days we are separated my father is struck by the sharp (if not terribly
unique) feeling that he is no longer alone in the world and that he needs to be next to me. In my first years on earth he will express these feelings, let’s call them love, with great skill and single-mindedness. The other aspects of his life, a generally uninspiring career engineering large telescopes at the famous LOMO photography factory, his dashed dreams of becoming a professional opera singer, will fall away as he tries to fix the broken child in his arms.

He will have to do it quick!

Swaddling is still merrily practiced at the Otto Birthing House, and the dachshund-shaped me is tied with a giant blue bow (
bant
) around my neck. By the time the taxi from the birthing house arrives at our apartment, my lungs are nearly empty of air and my comically large head is nearly as blue as the bow strangling me.

I am revived, but the next day I start sneezing. My anxious mother (let us count the number of times “anxious” and “mother” appear in close proximity throughout the rest of this book) calls the local poly-clinic and demands a nurse. The Soviet economy is one-fourth the size of the American one, but doctors and nurses still make house calls. A beefy woman appears at our door. “My son is sneezing, what do I do?” my mother hyperventilates.

“You should say, ‘Bless you,’ ” the nurse instructs.

For the next thirteen years—until I don a husky suit for my Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Ezrath Israel in the Catskills—I will be sick with asthma. My parents will be scared witless, and often I will be, too.

But I will also be surrounded by the strange, unbidden beauty of being a sickly child, the homeyness of it, the safety of lowering myself into a fort of pillows and duvet covers and comforters, oh those madly thick Soviet comforters that are always bleeding their Uzbek cotton interiors. There’s ghetto heat coming off the radiators, but also my own musty child warmth reminding me that I exist as more than just a container for the phlegm in my lungs.

Is this my first memory?

The earliest years, the most important ones, are the trickiest. Emerging from nothingness takes time.

Here is what I
think
I can remember.

My father, or mother, awake through the night holding my mouth open with a tablespoon so that I don’t suffocate from asthma, so that the air will get into my lungs. Mother, gentle, worried. Father, gentle, worried, but sad. Scared. A village man, a short but tough
muzhik
, set before a malfunctioning creature. My father’s solutions to most problems involve jumping into a cold lake, but here there is no lake. His warm hand is at the back of my head brushing the fine hairs with sympathy, but he can hardly hold back the frustration when he says to me, “
Akh, ty, Soplyak
.” Eh, you, Snotty. In the years hence, as we realize that the asthma will not go away, the anger and disappointment in that statement will become more pronounced, and I will see the curl of his thick lips, the sentence broken up into its constituent parts:

Eh.

Sigh.

You
.

Shake of the head.

Snotty.

But I’m not dead yet! The hunger is strong inside me. And it is strong for meats. “Doctor’s kolbasa,” a soft Russian mortadella substitute; then, as my teeth grow in complexity,
vetchina
, or Russian ham, and
buzhenina
, dangerously chewy cold baked pork, a taste of which will linger on the tongue for hours. These foodstuffs are not easy to arrange; even the prospect of stinking week-old fish will draw hundreds of people into a queue stretching around the corner beneath the flat, pink morning sky. The optimism of the post-Stalin leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw” is long over, and under the increasingly sclerotic rule of the comically doddering Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union is beginning its swift descent into nonbeing. But how I hunger for my meats along with several teaspoons of
sgushchyonka
, condensed milk,
in the iconic blue cans. “Milk, whole, condensed, with sugar” might be the first five words I try to read in Russian. After the heady nitrites of the kolbasa, I am blessed by a touch of this sweet, dispensed by my mother. And each circle of love binds me closer to her, to them, and every subsequent betrayal and misjudgment will bind me even closer. This is the model of the cloyingly close Russian Jewish family, but it is not peculiar to our ethnicity alone. Here in the USSR, with our freedoms circumscribed and the doctor’s kolbasa and condensed milk in short supply, it is only amplified.

I am a curious child, and nothing is more curious to me than the electric outlet. The height of experience for me is to stick my fingers into those two shabby holes (Freudians, you’re welcome) and feel the jolt of something more alive than me. My parents tell me that inside the outlet lives
Dyadya Tok
, or Uncle Electric Current, a bad man who wants to do me harm.
Dyadya Tok
, along with my meat vocabulary (
vetchina, buzhenina, kolbasa
) and
Soplyak
(Snotty), are some of the first words I learn in the mighty Russian tongue. There is also my savage cry of
“Yobtiki mat’!
,” a childish mispronunciation of
Yob tvoyu mat’
, or “Go fuck your mother,” which, I suppose, provides a nice overview of the state of relations between my parents and their two families.

My hunger and curiosity are evenly matched by worry. It will take five more years before I formulate death as an end to life, but my inability to breathe gives me a good preview. The lack of air is making me nervous. Isn’t this elemental? You breathe in, and then you breathe out. It doesn’t take a genius. And I try. But it doesn’t happen. The machinery is creaking inside me but to no effect. I do not know other children, there is no basis for comparing myself with them, but I know that, as a boy, I’m all wrong.

And how long will the two creatures holding my mouth open with a tablespoon continue to do so? I can tell that it is hurting them terribly.

There is a photograph of me at one year and ten months taken at a photo studio. Wearing a pair of children’s jogging pants with their outline of a cartoon bunny on one of the front pockets, I hold a phone
in my hand (the photo studio is proud to exhibit this advanced Soviet technology), and I am getting ready to bawl. The look on my face is that of a mother in 1943 who just received a fateful telegram from the front. I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. “Why was I so scared of everything?” I ask my mother nearly forty years later.

“Because you were born a Jewish person,” she says.

Perhaps. The blood coursing through my veins is mostly Yasnitsky (my mother) and Shteyngart (my father), but the nurses at the Otto Birthing House have also added 10, 20, 30, 40 cc’s of Stalin and Beria and Hitler and Göring.