Russian Tattoo (24 page)

Like a spy, I live with two identities, American and Russian—two selves perpetually crossing swords over the split inside me. My American self is freshly cheerful and shiny as a newly minted coin. My Russian self is stale and dark, a week-old brick of sour Leningrad bread. It broods and ponders, as it always has, about questions that have no clear answers.

Something deep inside myself does not let the American me take over raising Sasha. The American me is for Andy, his family, and our mutual friends. It is a costume, a disguise. The Russian me is my inheritance, rooted in my veins from birth. The Russian me is for my mother and my sister and my daughter, my blood.

Thirty-Six

A
ndy is on the phone, and I can't put together what he is saying. I understand each word separately, but they blend into nothing reasonable, nothing that makes sense. His voice is unrecognizably hollow, as if he hasn't yet begun to believe his own words. He tells me that his younger brother, Frankie, has suffered a seizure and has been taken to a local emergency room in Ellenville.

I have trouble seeing Frankie in an emergency room, incapacitated and sick. My mind still harbors the last image of him in his Catskill kitchen, standing as tall and unfailing as the main support beam of the house behind him. In what feels like an attempt to block Andy's words, I conjure up a picture of Frankie's house, where we have spent every Christmas and many weekends in the summer since Sasha was born. I think of its creaky steps, sagging in the middle, that descend to the living room; of pots with wilting plants among mismatched pieces of furniture topped with dusty knickknacks that his wife, Jen, has picked up at yard sales over the years. I think of how rarely we saw Frankie in the house during our visits to the Concord Hotel, where he worked, and how Andy suspected that his brother's long hours were a choice rather than a requirement of the job.

I think of last December, when Frankie's daughters, Heather and Amy, adopted Sasha like a younger sister, teaching her about their make-believe world of decaying luxury that flourished in the Concord Hotel, especially around the holidays. The three of them explored the endless hallways and gigantic lobbies, whose blue carpets absorbed the din of festive crowds; they snacked at the coffee shop, where waitresses, who all know and love Frankie, brought them platefuls of free food; they took dips in the pool and wobbled on skates around the rink to the sound of Christmas music. They spent long days at the hotel under the protective gaze of all the people who work there, who watched over and took care of Frankie's girls the same way Frankie watched over and took care of them.

Now Heather and Amy are in Florida. Jen moved to Boca Raton several months ago, while Frankie, after a few weeks of helping the family get settled, went back to the Concord, presumably to keep his job. When my mother-in-law heard that Jen had left, she simply raised an eyebrow and sighed. Andy's father was blunt, making her wince when he sliced the air with the sibilant sounds of the word
separation
.

Maybe it was the stress of that separation that brought on the seizure, Andy and his parents hoped, tiptoeing around the emergency room and speaking in whispers as though any sound could skew the diagnosis in an undesirable direction. They stayed with Frankie all day, dismayed to see him disoriented and exhausted from a battery of tests, anxious in their wait for the results.

Later, an emergency room doctor peered at the scan pinned to a lighted screen, examining every inch of the X-ray, trying to delay what he had to say to the waiting family. His face stiffened as soon as he glanced at the picture, but he pretended to need more time to evaluate what looked like a golf ball with tentacles on the left side of Frankie's brain.

“Look, I'm only an ER physician—I could be wrong,” the doctor finally said. He shook his head, as if deciding whether he should continue. “But it looks to me like a glioblastoma.” The doctor peered at the screen, not able to glance at Andy or his parents, the name of the lethal cancer bursting out of his mouth like a grenade. “If it is what I think it is”—he paused and drew in a breath—“there's no cure.” The doctor removed his glasses and held them to the light of the X-ray screen, staring at the lenses. “The survival rate for a glioblastoma, even with surgery, is around twelve months,” he said finally and hooked the glasses back behind his ears.

At home that evening Andy and I sit on the couch in the living room, shell-shocked and numb, staring into space. Unwilling to accept the diagnosis, we type “glioblastoma” and send it into the galaxy of cyberspace, clutching at straws of information scattered online. The Internet is even less forgiving: six months, we read silently, ten at the longest. There is one legendary blogger, who has survived the disease for a year and a half. We feverishly click on the link and pore over the story of his life. The man writes in confident sentences that coalesce into hopeful, even optimistic paragraphs. It is the only good news we have heard all day.

“Do you remember the last time we were in Ellenville?” I ask Andy as we sit in our bed, unwilling to stay awake in the presence of such terrible news yet unable to sleep. Of course, I know he remembers—and I bite my tongue, regretting the word
last
, which seems to certify that there will be no more trips to Frankie's house. I ask about Ellenville because I want to conjure up Frankie by the Christmas tree, the children ripping up the festive paper that only a few hours earlier was meticulously wrapped around the gifts. I want to see my mother and my mother-in-law in their best dresses straightening up the living room, making small talk neither one could understand; to watch my brother-in-law toss logs into the wood-burning stove at midnight, when he is back from work, and feel the room instantly warm up. I want to go back to the Ellenville of ten months ago, where everything was all right, where we drank champagne, dressed up for dinner, and saw a performance of a famous Russian comedian named Yakov Smirnoff, someone Mama and I had never heard of.

In my mind, I see us piling into our Toyota, Doris and me shivering in high-heeled shoes, wisps of frozen breath dancing around our faces. Jen had come down in a sweat suit half an hour earlier, saying she was tired and wanted to stay home to rest. Rest from what? asked my bewildered mother, who had trouble understanding how anyone could turn down an offer to watch a performance of something—anything—at such a
prekrasny
place as the Concord.

“What a country!” exclaimed Yakov Smirnoff in heavily accented English in front of an audience softened by dinner and drinks. He was about my age, and I suspected his accent was nothing but a stage prop because even my sister Marina, who has never studied English, delivers her broken sentences with less phonetic mangling than I heard from the Concord stage. “In America you break law. In Russia, law breaks you!” said Yakov Smirnoff, and I realized he was cleverly capitalizing on the fact that Russians ignore articles because our native language doesn't have them. “In America you assassinate presidents. In Russia, presidents assassinate you.” Artie looked at me to confirm that what the comedian said was true; I was, after all, an expert on all things Russian. I nodded, since his statement, I had to agree, was the essence of what my Motherland believed in.

“In America, you can always find party. In Russia, Party always finds you!” declared the famous Russian, and I saw that my father-in-law's face—more often confused lately—widened in a rare smile. The girls were all laughing because the oldest, Heather, had decided it was funny, and I didn't know if Sasha had any idea what party Yakov Smirnoff was talking about. My mother, sitting next to me, was the only one with a serious face, since she didn't understand a single word that came out of the mouth of this comedian, who ironically became a famous Russian by leaving Russia.

I looked at the three girls, still giggling; at their fathers next to them, fathers whom they took for granted. I thought of my own father, who died when I was ten, and of my sister Marina, who never even knew her father. He left three weeks before Marina was born, on medical advice from Mama's former infectious diseases professor, because he had an open form of tuberculosis and couldn't stay with a newborn in the house. He died in his hometown on the other side of the Ural Mountains five years later, never having seen his daughter.

When Marina was young, Mama said her father had died during the war. She never specified how he died, and in my sister's mind this vagueness created a vacuum that had gradually filled with plots of varying dramatic intensity and men of progressively ascending valor. They all had blond, wavy hair, but some were more heroic than others, tossing a grenade at a tank and dying in the explosion of flames, while others perished more slowly, like Soviet partisans living in the woods in the middle of the winter, sleeping in log-reinforced trenches hidden under a meter of snow.

At six years of age, Marina already knew that no matter how brave and noble her father appeared in her plots, he was not coming back. If she wanted a father, she decided, she had to take matters into her own hands and find one. So one Sunday, when Mama took her to the Ivanovo town park, my sister didn't waste time in the sandbox or on the swing. Leaving Mama on a bench under a tree, she took off to find a handsome, brave man who could become her father.

It took her ten minutes to discover that there weren't many handsome men in the park. Another few minutes revealed that there weren't many men of any kind: an invalid with an empty sleeve smoking on a bench, a drunk with a purple nose sleeping under a tree. But Marina was not interested in invalids or drunks. She took a path that ran past a kiosk where a woman in a stained apron presided behind glass containers with fruit juice, and that was where she saw him.

He stood by the kiosk with a mug of golden liquid in his hand, his military uniform cinched by a belt with a shining buckle, his black boots reflecting the sun. Two women on a nearby bench undoubtedly saw him, too: they whispered to each other, covering their faces with their hands as they spoke, gave him quick, furtive glances, and burst into hushed laughter. But Marina was already on the path, skipping toward him, pretending to be drawn by the multicolored drinks sparkling in their vats.

When she was about a meter away, she paused. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that the women had stopped whispering and laughing.

“Zdravstvuite,”
Marina said politely, as if addressing her teacher. The man swallowed what was left in his glass. He smiled, his gaze golden and liquid, as if the juice, instead of flowing down his throat, had ascended and lit his eyes from within.

“Do you want to be my father?” she asked, and from the way his smile spread across his face she knew he did. “Come,” she said and grabbed his hand. “I'll take you to Mama.”

They walked past the two women on the bench, stiff and silent, past the empty-sleeved invalid and the drunk sleeping under a tree until Marina saw Mama on a bench near the sandbox, where a bunch of nursery school girls in berets were digging what looked like a war trench.

Marina clasped Mama's hand and set it down on the man's broad palm. “Here,” my sister told her. “I want him to be my father.”

His name was Aleksey, Lyosha for short, and he was a military pilot. But despite Marina's lucky discovery that day in the park and her subsequent efforts to keep Lyosha around, he never became her father. When my sister was eight, Mama married Ilya Antonovich Gorokhov, a stomach ulcer patient at her Ivanovo hospital, and the three of them moved to Leningrad, where my future father's party duties had dispatched him.

I looked at Heather, Amy, and Sasha whispering and giggling, secure in the knowledge that they have fathers, a simple certainty that always hangs around them, as unnoticed and essential as air.

Thirty-Seven

O
n the day after the surgery we all sit in the hospital cafeteria staring into bowls of untouched soup. My mother-in-law looks as if she'd shriveled into her cardigan, its padded shoulders propping up her ears. Her hair, usually set in a careful wave, sticks out sideways like straw, and there are black streaks of makeup under her eyes. I imagine her at home this morning staring at her face in the bathroom mirror, swiping a mascara brush over her lashes with her shaking hand, summoning a routine to remind her why she should go on. Andy's father, Artie, tries to emit authority, but his lips keep shaking and his fingers have trouble grasping a spoon. We don't yet know how deeply he has already plunged into the vortex of dementia, something Doris has been trying to hide from us, blaming stress or exhaustion every time he repeats himself or fails to remember what he told us only a few days ago.

Frankie's wife, Jen, who has flown in from Florida, is arguing against our plan to have Frankie treated by a prominent neuro-­oncologist in New York. Maybe she feels we are ganging up on her, all of us except Doris, who silently stares into her soup, so Jen turns to her mother-in-law in an attempt to find an ally.

It was only last December, before our Christmas dinner at the Concord, that she chatted with Doris about her latest yard sale trophies, lifting porcelain gnomes and flowery cups from a shelf. Jen was wearing a yellow dress, the only time she allowed herself to put on anything but linty sweaters and jeans found at garage sales, and a touch of rouge on her cheeks gave her face an almost happy look. Artie, who always felt that his younger son should have married better, sat on a couch seething at how oblivious Jen was to the torn paper and empty boxes from all those carefully selected gifts now scattered over the rug, how undistracted she seemed by the mess in the living room. Maybe she simply didn't see all the things that were difficult for everyone else to miss. Heather, then in the eleventh grade, had told me only a few days earlier that her mother hadn't seen their cat sleeping in the laundry basket when she tossed the whole thing into the dryer. Heather's face tensed into an ironic smile, as if she wanted me to know that the cat incident was only one small comical example of many crazier, unfunny things my niece had to endure when no family members came to visit.

Now Jen is staking her position at the head of the cafeteria table, loud and illogical, pushing her glasses up on her nose in an incessant defensive movement, acting as if our plan involved shoving Frankie off a cliff to relieve him of further suffering. “He needs to be with me,” she shrieks, leaning over the table on her forearms, spitting the words into Andy's face. “It's my husband and I know what's right for him.”

I listen to her frothing with idiotic examples of the medical advantages of Florida, wondering if Andy and his father were right in their assessment of why Frankie didn't move south with his family months ago. Jen wants to take him to Boca Raton, she shouts, to the homeopathic doctor they both trust—to their life before the word
divorce
crept into their dinner conversations.

Andy, who is used to dealing with hysterical outbreaks, insists that Frankie's treatment should be in New York, and his logical calm makes Jen even more livid. Artie leans on his elbows, slaps his hands against his ears, and begins to hum. Doris pulls out a tissue and dabs at her nose, although it is her eyes and the two black tears crawling down her cheeks that need to be wiped. Andy says that it has all been decided and he has already made an appointment for Frankie at NYU. Jen scrapes back her chair and calls us all fucking bastards. As the most distant relative, I remain the only one who is visibly unperturbed and silent.

We leave our uneaten lunch and go upstairs to Frankie's postsurgery room, which blooms with flowers and visitors. A chef Frankie hired at the Concord six months ago—after the man had been blacklisted from all the Catskills kitchens because of his drinking—sails in, distressed but sober, with a tray of smoked fish on his shoulder. A Dominican waiter I remember from our visits to the hotel squeezes in between the bed and the IV stand. A fragile-looking woman with red hair and an American Airlines tag still attached to her duffel bag, her eyes holding back tears, overzealously rearranges the roses on the bedside table. I wonder if any of them know that Frankie's given name is Fred and that he changed it to be like his middle school friends in Queens, who were all Italian. Three of them are trying to con their way past the head nurse, insisting they are immediate family, all brothers. They don't have a single feature in common with one another or with Frankie. The middle-aged nurse with steel-colored eyes, who has undoubtedly heard all this before, gives them a harsh stare and lets them through.

Perhaps not yet willing to face what is in front of me, I think again of Frankie and last Christmas. I see him in a tuxedo and black tie, tall and more narrow-boned than Andy, with a head of dark, wavy hair hemmed in by a conservative haircut required for the job, standing next to the silver-haired maître d' in the Concord dining room the size of a football stadium. The dining room was replicated in miniature on a blackboard behind the two of them, with circles surrounded by thumbtacks of different colors the maître d' would rearrange as people walked in. I wondered about the color significance of those pins the maître d' was sticking into the board. Did red denote customers who were nuisances, who always asked for more than what you offered them? Did green stand for agreeable? Did yellow mean too unpredictable or too loud?

Frankie led us to a big table somewhere in the center of the dining room, under a complicated chandelier—white tablecloth, starched napkins, real flowers.

“Bring us everything on the menu,” said my father-in-law, grandly pounding the table with his palm. We all knew that Artie didn't really want every item on the Concord's titanic menu. What he wanted was to be able to say those words and watch his younger son, the softer and more obedient one, deliver tray after tray in a demonstration of Artie's continued importance in the family.

I didn't need to translate for my mother since dishes arrived at a dizzying pace. Melon with prosciutto, green salad with hearts of palm, grilled calamari, onion soup, roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes, pasta with seafood, and the weekend special, prime rib. I watched Mama try a bit of every dish set down on our table, praising the tenderness of the beef, giving the plate with calamari a suspicious look. I watched Frankie sail around the dining room, talking to guests, making sure that the waiters and busboys—who have been his friends since he began working here—didn't get blamed for the diners' quirks or the mishaps of the kitchen. I watched him taking care of his friends the same way he took care of his family.

Now Frankie's friends are here in this postop room, looking helpless, wishing they could do something—anything—to take care of him.

“Hey, is this a party or what?” says Frankie as he opens his arms to us. Aside from a patch of padded gauze covering the back of his head, he looks like the same old Frankie I remember from his house in Ellenville. Maybe he is even more handsome with his hair shaved off. “Come on in, everyone. Have some whitefish. It all comes from this man,” he says, pointing to his chef friend, who has set down the tray on the windowsill and is serving portions of fish on paper plates that emerge from a hefty plastic bag he has brought with him. The bag also dispenses forks and knives, napkins and crackers, and I am afraid wine will begin to flow next.

We talk and mingle, as if we were in his Ellenville living room, as if we were his invited guests. Frankie is our host, sitting tall in bed, cheering us all up, telling us everything will be all right—as though we were the ones who needed to be consoled.

After six weeks of radiation, there will probably be a remission, says the doctor from NYU. He is one of the best neuro-oncologists in the country, but even this top expert with charcoal hair and a starched lab coat cannot twist the prognosis into a good outcome.

“Go travel,” he tells Frankie, stacking his most recent MRI into the file with the others. “Now is the time to do what you've always wanted to do. Don't wait too long,” he adds and shakes his head as if to emphasize his words.

I think of a picture of Frankie we have in our family album. It was taken during one of the summers when he was still in college, standing barefoot in the grass, tall and skinny in rolled-up jeans, his curly, thick hair falling down in a lush, dark triangle, touching his biceps. He wanted to go to India then, he told me, to learn meditation and yoga, to hike in the Himalayas, to try to figure out the meaning of life. He has wanted to go to India ever since.

When we get home from the doctor's office, I am ready to accompany Frankie to Bombay. In my mind, I can see us immersed in the energy of a wise yogi who knows everything about life and who may possess powers to cure the lethal tumor American doctors are helpless to approach. There are always reports of medical miracles, I think, especially from faraway places that no one can reach to verify the facts. I stare at the scuffed paperback I bought a week ago at a sale in our local library, an ode to a Buddhist monk with the power to cure incurable ailments who practices healing somewhere among the Himalayan mountain peaks.

“Look,” I say to Andy, knowing how ridiculous I sound, pointing to a testimonial on the back cover of the book signed by someone from North Dakota. “American doctors had given him three months to live. That was ten years ago.”

Andy squints, making a skeptical face, and shakes his head.

Of course, I know that Andy is right. But since my mind is unable to scrape together any hope for Frankie, I hold on to the paperback a little longer, leafing through the dog-eared pages of miracles Frankie's oncologist has never heard of.

When it is clear, even to me, that we are not going to the yoga sanctuaries or Buddhist monasteries of India, I ask Frankie if he would like me to take him to Petersburg, my hometown. “It is a beautiful city,” I say. “I promise you'll love it.” I don't know why I have just volunteered to take my brother-in-law to see where I grew up, but maybe I do know. Petersburg, in my mind, is the most precious thing I hold inside me, and I want to offer it to Frankie as a gift.

But Frankie doesn't want to go to Petersburg. He wants to go to Florida to spend time with his girls.

Andy arranges for him to get on a flight with the Corporate Angel Network, a program for cancer patients who need to travel between different parts of the country. I drive him to Teterboro Airport, and we sit in the waiting room, watching small private planes take off and land behind a wall of glass.

“You can stay at our house for as long as you like,” I say. “I hope you know this.”

It is strange, I think, that we were nothing more than distant relatives until only a few months ago, that I barely knew my brother-in-law before his illness flung him into our life. It is even stranger how close we have become since he spent two months in our house after the surgery, how protective, almost possessive, I feel of Frankie now. I look at his face, still as handsome as the pictures in our photo album, but there is a melancholy in his eyes, even when he smiles: they seem to be set deeper in his head and the whites have become darker, as if Frankie were now privy to some ancient wisdom.

“I can do some catering in Boca Raton,” he says, but we both know it isn't the prospects of catering that are summoning him to Florida. His older daughter, Heather, who is finishing high school this year, signed up for ROTC and has now volunteered to join the Army. A few months from now, after the prom and graduation, she will disappear into boot camp. His younger daughter, Amy, as tall and lanky as her father, wants to try to become a model. Frankie is going to Florida to find a good modeling school for her. He wants to sit on the porch of their house when she comes back from class and watch her walk toward him slowly and gracefully, with a newly acquired gait of confidence and poise, then run and clumsily throw her arms around his neck, the way she has always done. He wants to be there to watch her awkward charm gradually mature into quiet graciousness. I know all this without Frankie saying a word.