Russian Tattoo (18 page)

“Since Dedusya's death, it hasn't been the same,” Mama says. My grandfather's image readily comes into focus: he is standing among all the fruit bushes he planted, a mane of snow-white hair, legs growing out of the earth, his body as solid and unyielding as a tree. I know Mama has the same picture in her mind—Dedusya commanding us to water or to weed—but how can I explain any of this to Andy? How can I make him see my grandmother's round face in our kitchen window watching me play in the sandbox, or smell the raspberries sighing in a pot on top of the wood-burning stove, or feel bare feet sloshing through the marsh on the way to the hard, windy beach on the Gulf of Finland?

Mama moves to the vegetable bed to show us tiny cucumbers hanging under the umbrellas of leaves, and we obediently follow. I know I can't begin to explain a Leningrad dacha to someone from New York, so I don't even try. What I don't know anymore is where I belong. Which end of the ocean that divides the continents, the ways of life, should I now call home?

Twenty-Seven

A
ndy wants to take us all to a restaurant, and Mama is bewildered. She doesn't understand how getting on a bus and sitting in an empty room, at the mercy of surly waiters and questionable cooks, can be better than eating what she and Marina have prepared in our own kitchen.

“They're all so spoiled over there,” I hear her grumble to Marina when she doesn't think I am within earshot, standing under the coatrack in the hallway, as I used to do when I was a child. “They live all the way on the other side of the ocean. They never knew what we saw here. It's easy to go to restaurants when you didn't see the war.”

My mother saw the war, up close, from the operating room of a train parked on an auxiliary track and turned into a mobile hospital, a mile away from the front.

“Here you go again, using the war as an excuse for our present mess,” snaps Marina.
“Tol'ko by ne bylo voiny,”
she mocks. “We will withstand anything if only there will be no more war.” This is what my grandparents used to say, this is what my aunt from Kineshma, and my uncle from Ryazan', and even my erudite aunt Mila from Kiev said. This is the refrain I was brought up with, the statement I used to hear from every Russian over fifty.

“When did the war end?” Marina says, and from the sharp intake of her breath I know she is not really asking a question. “Almost forty years ago. I don't see life being better now than it was after the war, or when Khrushchev ran this country, or in the nineteen sixties, when I was in drama school.” Marina's voice now seems to project into an audience, deep and appropriately dramatic.

“Don't boil over,” Mama says. “You always exaggerate, you're always too negative.”

“I'm too negative?” Marina's voice rises another tone. “I am not negative enough! If you stopped waving flags for a minute, you'd see what I'm talking about. We live in a country full of hypocrites and bandits. And of people like you, the true believers, those who survived Stalin only because he was too busy murdering the other twenty million.”

There is silence, and I know my mother has tightened her mouth, thinking about whether she should respond. She has heard all this before, my sister's degree of bullishness in inverse proportion to the recent number of times her key has scratched around the lock, not finding the keyhole.

“It's time to stop blaming the war and start living like normal people,” says Marina, back to a whisper. “Like they live in other countries.”

“And how exactly do you know about life in other countries?” asks my mother.

There is a short silence, and I know my sister has paused to give Mama one of her big-eyed gazes of contempt. “Just look at them!” she hisses, probably pointing to our room. “In two years you haven't learned anything. Haven't you seen enough pictures of normal life?”

“Pictures are pictures,” says Mama, her voice metallic after my sister's tirade. “We don't know what life there is really like.”

There is another pause, and I can hear Marina snort. “You don't
want
to know.” I hear clanging of pans, Marina bending over the lower shelf of the kitchen cupboard in search of a pot big enough for her famous soup made from a Georgian recipe. “It's so much easier to shut your eyes on this disgrace and talk about the war.”

Two days before our planned outing Andy and I go to Kavkazsky restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt to test the food and reserve a table for six. Besides my mother and Marina, we have invited my sister Galya, whose small apartment is close to the end of the metro line, and my best university friend, Nina, whom I haven't seen since last week, when Andy and I, to my mother's displeasure, chugged for an hour on a tram to visit her at home.

My mother has never liked Nina, and this may have been one reason I have always stayed so close to her as a friend. To Mama, anyone not belonging to our family is a
chuzhoi
, not one of us, and thus is subject to a stricter set of judgments. With only so many jars of mayonnaise and cans of sprats to go around, we can only feed our own, she has always believed, just as we can only help and feel sorry for our own. I used to resent my mother for her narrow-eyed glances toward my friends who came to the apartment when I lived here. They heaped their coats on top of the refrigerator, she would complain, or for hours occupied the kitchen drinking endless cups of tea and arguing about useless, impractical things.

I used to sulk at my sister for her lack of manners when Nina, who didn't have a phone at home, would ask to make a call when she visited. As my friend was dialing the second number, Marina would stomp out of her room, her eyes burning with anger as if Nina had crossed some obvious hospitality line, and announce in her stage voice that she suddenly needed to call her theater. I wished my mother and my sister had come from Leningrad, like Nina's parents, and not from a provincial town on the Volga.

I am surprised at this resentment, its edges still raw; at how easily I snap at Mama when she complains that Nina has called her only twice in the last two years. And why would she call you more often? I wonder. To hear reproach in my mother's voice because deep in her heart she believes that it was somehow my friend who induced my departure; that, if it hadn't been for Nina, I might have never left?

We walk from the Hermitage toward Kavkazsky restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt I remember as the magnificent parade of lights, a celebration of resplendence, and a sensory feast, the city's main artery lined with palaces adorned with stately columns, complicated moldings, and bas reliefs of stone nymphs. But where is that Nevsky now? If there were no street signs, I would think we were still back in the industrial district near my apartment. Is this drab street the same avenue I've so carefully cherished and stored in my memory? In two years, has Leningrad's relentless Baltic rain washed off all the paint from the buildings, leaving only dirty streaks on crumbling walls and a sense of desperation in the air?

We pass a small crowd of people getting ready to storm an approaching bus amid the clatter of trolleys and trucks and the ferocious whistling from a militiaman trying to prevent two girls from jaywalking. In front of the Kavkazsky restaurant, a doorman dressed in what looks like a silly pretend military uniform stands guarding the door, instead of doing what he has been put there to do, opening it. I have already explained to Andy the absurdity of Soviet restaurants, although he hadn't fully grasped the concept until we sat down at a café a couple of days ago.

After I spent fifteen minutes translating every item on the ten-page menu and after Andy made his choices for appetizers and main courses, a waitress materialized by our table, announcing in a voice simultaneously fierce and exhausted, “We only have beef Stroganoff.”

“Okay,” Andy agreed, “but I'd also like some caviar and a bowl of mushroom soup.”

“We only have beef Stroganoff,” the waitress repeated, fierceness in her voice now taking the upper hand.

“They only have beef Stroganoff,” I said in English, stressing the word
only,
letting the waitress know that she was not dealing with a simple case of a dense out-of-towner.

But what about all these delicacies typed onto the ten-page menu? Andy's eyes seemed to be asking. What about the caviar and mushroom soup? With the annoyed waitress rolling her eyes by our table, I could see Andy attempting to process another case of my country's make-believe, trying to reconcile the fiction of a ten-page menu full of various choices with the typical Soviet reality of having none.

Now, standing before the human turnstile to the front door of Kavkazsky restaurant, Andy has a pack of Marlboros clutched in his hand and two more stuffed into the pockets of his jacket, just in case. The doorman's eyes freeze on the pack in Andy's hand, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his posture losing some of its ferocity. From two steps away, I watch the silent exchange: Andy nods toward the door, the doorman steps aside, Andy hands him the pack, the pack vanishes into the pocket of the man's overcoat, the door opens.

“The universal language,” Andy whispers as we walk in. He has a childish smile on his face, ecstatic that he has succeeded at what looked like a small black-market operation. Inside, the place is predictably empty, and we choose a table by the wall, away from the only other party, a Russian couple sitting in the corner.

“So how did they manage to get in?” asks Andy with a mock frown. “In the absence of American cigarettes?”

“Blat,”
I say, referring to the pervasive method of barter and exchange, the ubiquitous Russian word for personal connections. I can see that Andy doesn't understand, so I try to think of some specific examples of
blat
. “That man may be a manager at a department store that recently received a shipment of Finnish shearling coats,” I say. “And now the doorman's wife has one of those coats hanging in her armoire.” I probably use a sheepskin coat as an example because it was my own pathetic dream when I lived here, a dark envy of every shearling-clad woman that had for years curdled my heart. As Andy knows, it was all academic: I had no
blat
and no money to afford a fur coat even if I did.

“And what about the woman?” he asks, playing along.

“She may be on the university admissions board, one of the professors who has the roster of the students to be admitted in her drawer even before the entrance exams begin. She may also be the head of the university party cell. So the waiter's daughter is now guaranteed a seat at the School of Journalism despite the fact that she couldn't write one good sentence in high school.” I pause, looking at the woman, considering a new identity for her. “Or maybe she is a gynecologist.” I think of my provincial aunt Muza, who usually lumbers home from work with a string bag full of
blat
provisions, her personal connections weaving through the fabric of the town's female population. “If she is a gynecologist, she is a regular at this restaurant, no doubt about it.”

“Okay,” Andy says. “I think I get the picture.”

Kavkazsky also has a ten-page menu, but there is more than one real dish to choose from. We try Georgian red beans with spices and chicken in walnut sauce, then skewers of marinated lamb and flattened chicken
tabaka
, all flavorful and spicy. We try as many dishes as we can eat, but the bill doesn't seem to be able to climb over five dollars, at the blue jean exchange rate, no matter what we order. A saucer of black caviar finally tips the scale and adds a hefty fifty cents to our bill.

“I feel like a millionaire here,” Andy says, counting out the rainbow of ruble notes, his eyes shining with excitement. “I love this place.”

It is ironic, I think, that you can like my country only from far away, armed with Western cigarettes and dollar bills illegal to own for anyone who lives here.

After we finish our exploratory lunch, a second pack of Marlboros makes its entrance into the doorman's pocket and we make a reservation for my family and friends two days from now, a party with caviar, shish kebabs, and vodka, and a price tag of about thirty dollars.

Twenty-Eight

A
fter days of gliding on parquet museum floors past the Hermitage paintings and icons at the Russian Museum, Andy says he wants to be immersed in real life. For the next week or so, we stand on various lines. We buy a log of bologna and wrap it in newspaper to carry home; we bring back four bottles of Bulgarian ketchup that put a smile on Mama's face. We bake in the sun in front of a vegetable store, under a red banner stretched across the building, and leave an hour later with a string bag full of ripe tomatoes from Azerbaijan. “What does the banner say?” asks Andy as we inch toward the door. I translate the slogan, mundane and predictable—“We thank the party for the people's welfare”—one of many crimson fragments of Soviet wisdom spread across the most impressive structures of the city.

When lines for food are no longer exciting, we go to houseware shops in search of Soviet treasures: cut-crystal shot glasses I remember from my childhood, a small metal pot with a long wood handle and a narrow neck for making coffee. We buy an iron padlock with a heavy key that Andy calls an antique. Antique? I repeat because I am not sure I heard him correctly. I think of my mother locking our dacha barn with a contraption just like this one only two years earlier, the key the size of her palm she always carefully put away under a brick near the fence. I think of the curious time warp we are caught in, of my city hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, fossilized in time like a fly in Baltic amber.

I wake up at night, when pencil-thin beams of sun paint stripes on the floor, streaking through the drawn curtains. In June, night is nothing but a few hours of translucent dusk when the sun barely touches the horizon, and even a month later the light still persists, making people sleepless. Who would choose to sleep when the twilight so quickly dissipates, when the buildings come into focus and their eyes of windows begin to shine by four in the morning?

Shreds of conversations float up to our open balcony, students returning from all-night walks on the Neva to watch the lowering of the bridges. What is the language they are speaking? The words are disjointed, made faint by laughter and the distance they have to travel, their cadences indecipherable to my new English-immersed ears.

The first streetcar clangs under our windows and screeches on the turn, waking up Andy. “How did you ever sleep here?” he asks, squinting at the light.

I walk to the balcony and draw the curtains open, letting in another morning. “I don't even hear them,” I say. “I never did.” To me, the clatter of streetcars has always been soothing, like the sound of trains. From the balcony, I look at the tide of roofs rolling toward the gray cupola of Leningrad's only synagogue, at the wrought-iron canal banisters, whose unique design is visible at this early hour. I know Andy and I have the same thought in our minds. It is time for us to go back.

“We're leaving in five days,” says Andy, trying to cheer us both, looking up from the yellowed copy of
A Farewell to Arms
he found on the bookshelf.

For our farewell party we stay at home and invite my friends. We all crowd into Marina's room, talking and drinking, and for a couple of hours it feels like being back in time. It feels like any of a dozen parties we have had in this room, with Nadia the
refusenik
making dissident jokes and Tania, who lives with her husband and son in a communal apartment separated from her mother by a curtain, complaining about the neighbors and her insipid engineering job. I haven't noticed Nadia's pale cheeks or the dark half-moons under her eyes before, but Tania looks the same as I remember. She is broad-boned and stately, with rich blond hair I've always envied, a hefty ponytail that hasn't lost its thickness or luster despite her washing it for years in the communal kitchen sink.

With Nadia and Tania chatting by the piano and with Nina next to me on the balcony from where we can see the smooth skin of the Griboedova Canal, it feels like the old days. But this surface semblance can't fool anyone here. We all know that nothing is the same, and that realization is as palpable in the air as the low clouds of humidity seeping between buildings, promising rain. I can gab with my friends about life here, down to its most delicate nuances, but I am no longer a part of it. I live across the ocean in an American house, the pictures of which I feel uneasy about passing around.

No one needs any pictures, though, to see the distance that divides us. All they need to do is glance at Andy, at his straight spine and unencumbered shoulders, at his Western look—which comes not from leather shoes or Levi's jeans but from the way he moves without apprehension, the way his eyes are not afraid to see into the future.

I don't yet know many things that did—or will—happen to my friends. Nina hasn't had a chance to tell me yet that she lost her teaching job at the university after I left because she kept my upcoming capitalist marriage a secret, thus failing to save the dean of the department from a big embarrassment before his party bosses. “If you'd told us,” the dean said, “we would've fired her, not you.”

We won't know for several more years that Nadia's father will die of a heart attack and her grandmother will die of grief before they finally get a visa to leave the country. They will have to pack up in one week, leaving behind most of the things that have surrounded them for decades, including the apartment the family has lived in since before the siege of Leningrad.

I won't know until 1990 that Tania, her husband, and their two young sons will get on the plane to New York, stay in our house until we can find them an apartment, and file the papers asking for political asylum. It is 1982, the murk of Soviet times, and the word
perestroika
is still completely alien to our ears. None of us—my friends, Andy, or I—can even think of being able to meet again, especially on the other side of the Atlantic.

The next morning we take a taxi to the airport, the same wing cordoned off for international departures where I'd said farewell to Mama and Marina two years earlier. I fill out the required declaration form to let customs know that I haven't sold my wedding band or my silver necklace, that I am not attempting to smuggle out rubles, worthless anywhere beyond the borders of this country.

I kiss my sister and say good-bye, but it is not the bitter farewell of two years ago, when we all thought that I might not be able to return.

Again, Mama surreptitiously wipes her eyes; again, they are like broken glass.
“Pishi,”
she says, “Write often.”

“Listen.” I take her by the shoulders. “We're sending you an invitation to visit us the moment we get back. I've already found out all the details at the embassy in Washington. You'll need to take it to the visa department of Oktyabrsky District and follow their stupid steps.”

She nods and tries to smile, a handkerchief clutched in her hand.

“We'll see you very soon,” I say. “We have a house now; you won't have to live under a bridge.”

She turns away and shakes her head, embarrassed by her fears.

Mama and I have never talked about love, in Leningrad or later all the way across the world. Maybe we have simply taken love for granted, the first rule of survival that binds most Russian families together, the glue that has helped us all withstand the war, and senseless bureaucrats, and Soviet lies.

At the glass door that separates my country from the rest of the world we put our arms around each other and for a few moments stand still. There is an earthy smell on her soft skin: apples, still unripe; damp dacha linens that survived the winter; the bitter, sticky milk of dandelions.