Russian Tattoo (4 page)

Five

I
am at the kitchen table writing a letter home, telling my mother and sister about my roommate's bride candidates from India, when the front door opens and Sagar walks in with a girl. “Roxana,” she says as she extends her hand, strong and assertive. Roxana is tall, at least as tall as Sagar, with long, dark hair that falls down her shoulder blades in big, lazy curls. She is definitely not Indian, but not American, either. She speaks with a sharp accent that is different from Sagar's—gliding vowels and harsh
r
's—an intonation I can't place.

They linger in the living room, and I don't know if I should offer them something to drink. I don't know if I should welcome Roxana into our house or be an indifferent roommate and go back to the room I share with Robert and shut the door. I know what my mother would do—hover over the visitors so she could later complain that they have left dirty footprints all over the hallway or haven't hung up their coats on the hook by the door—so I do the opposite and go to my room. But then I remember Sagar's expression when I saw him standing in the doorway next to Roxana, an expression of his wanting me to see her. As if she were a bride candidate and I were his mother evaluating his choice.

I go back, pretending that I was simply taking a detour on my way to the kitchen to offer them tea. But the idea of tea, something I would offer guests back home, seems absurd in this heat, and a quick survey of the refrigerator results in my finding only little dregs on the bottom of an orange juice container and a bottle of something called root beer. Cold beer would be all right, I decide, and bring out the bottle and three glasses.

“Would you like some beer?” I ask Sagar and Roxana, who are sitting on the couch leafing through a brochure of the weekly sales I brought from the supermarket. They seem awkward around each other, as if they've just met and don't yet have enough to share.

They nod and I pour. The beer foams in the glasses, as beer should do, but when I take a drink, it is pure formaldehyde rushing up my nostrils, my mother's anatomy department with its organs, bones, and cadavers, distilled into a glass. I gag, spew it back with a noise unworthy of a hostess, and run into the kitchen for paper towels.

When I return, Sagar and Roxana are on their feet, looking bewildered.

“I thought it was beer,” I say, feeling like an idiot. “But it smells like formaldehyde.”

They smile, smelling their drinks, not finding anything unusual about root beer. It occurs to me that they have never come in contact with formaldehyde, that no one but me could have such a visceral dislike of root beer, that our reactions are triggered by bits of memory that float under the radar of consciousness, moving us still further apart from one another.

“Where are you from?” I ask Roxana as I wipe the table and the floor.

“Cuba,” she says. “Havana, the capital,” she adds. When she says “Havana,” a spark of pride glints in her eyes, the same little flame that burns in my throat when I say “Leningrad.”

“See,” I tell Sagar, who can't stop staring at Roxana with a soft, unprotected gaze. “Cuba and Russia. This is a plot. You're surrounded by communists.”

My mother would be happy, I think, to find all this order,
poryadok
, here. No one jumps in front of you on a line because there are no lines. Buses course along their routes, with no passengers hanging out of their doors. Stores are brimming with products and all you need to do is buy them.

Yet everything was more understandable back home. All emotions were out in the open, from salespeople's resentment to bureaucrats' indifference. With the absence of social courtesy, you knew when a cashier had had a bad day because she gave you a stony stare and angrily tossed the change into a plastic tray when it took you longer than a second to open your wallet. You knew that a saleswoman in a stained white gown thought you brazenly overstepped your bounds when she glared at your request to slice your half a kilo of bologna. “Slice it?” she would repeat to the people waiting on line, inviting them to join in teaching you a lesson. “Would you also like me to wash your dirty underwear?” she would ask, fists on her hips. You got the message that a wiry babushka behind you on a bus was getting off when her elbow knifed into your kidney. Things were clearly delineated so we always knew what to expect. We felt happy when we were handed the log of bologna we would wrap in newspaper and carefully place in a string bag next to a loaf of black bread, still warm. We could easily slice them both at home, after all.

Rudeness was ordinary and familiar, a way of life adopted by people who were continuously deprived of the most basic things. Salesclerks glowered and customers cowered. Bureaucrats ordered and the rest of us complied. Life was predictable if you played the pretending game called
vranyo,
the game I learned in nursery school from Aunt Polya, who was in charge of the kitchen and who wasn't really my aunt. She loomed over us with a pitcher of warm milk and slices of buttered bread that had absorbed all the rancid smells of the kitchen, watching closely to make sure we ate and drank properly. We all knew she was watching us, she knew that we knew, and we knew she knew that we knew. She gave us surprise glances, and we chewed diligently, pretending we didn't expect her to look.

We all played the game: my parents played it at work and my sister Marina played it at school. We all pretended to do something, and those who watched us pretended that they were seriously watching us and didn't know we were only pretending. Life was simple if you sliced your soul in half, as you were supposed to. One half—for yourself, your family, and your close friends; the other—for all the salesclerks, teachers, and officials, who didn't need to know what you thought.

I have a sense that there is a different reality here simmering underneath all this sterility and order, a life bubbling under the courtesy and politeness. This liquid center, red and hot, is the heart that pumps blood to make it all work, to motivate what people do here. That heart is still months away, hidden deep under protective layers of tissue and bone, and I am not at all sure if I'll ever see it.

I am in a pizzeria, standing next to Sagar and Roxana. Slices behind the counter are hot, cheesy, and cheap, and the toppings kept in metal containers personalize every order, making me think I am eating something different from what I had yesterday. Sagar's eyes are also fixed on the onions and peppers behind the glass, but I know he is thinking about something else because his glasses are down at the tip of his nose and his eyebrows are mashed together in a frown. A letter arrived from India yesterday and, instead of sending more bride pictures, his mother announced that she was coming to Austin to see him and discuss the matter in person. “She's already bought a ticket,” said Sagar in a grave voice. “She still thinks I'm twelve.”

The only two people interested in pizza toppings are Roxana and a three-year-old girl in front of us, whose mother has picked her up so the girl can see the containers. “What do you want on your pizza, sweetie?” asks the woman. “Olives? Pepperoni? Mushrooms?” she says, pointing to each one.

I don't know why the woman is asking a three-year-old what she wants to eat. I don't know what a three-year-old can possibly know about pizza toppings. Isn't it up to her mother to make these decisions? Back in Leningrad, I ate what was left for me under the chicken pot warmer. I think of my nursery school again and of Aunt Polya, her eyebrows penciled in carbon, who made us sit at tables pushed together and drink warm milk out of thick ribbed glasses. “Eat your soup, Gorokhova, or you'll die!” she shouted in her kitchen voice you could hear all the way on the street.

“Do olives look good?” the mother in the pizzeria line persists. “Or would you rather have sausage?”

I sympathize with the girl, who leans over the counter, peering through the glass, trying to figure out if green peppers trump meatballs. Wouldn't she be happier with toppings her mother ordered, not burdened with having to examine the containers, safe in the knowledge that her mother knows what she needs?

I think of my own mother, an apron with flowers over her housedress, cranking the metal handle of a meat grinder until its face erupts in red twists of beef squeezing into a bowl underneath. She adds egg and stale bread softened in water, mashes the mixture with a fork, and from her palms come perfect ovals of
kotlety
she drops into a frying pan, where they begin to brown and sizzle. Now I know why I bought that package of meat Robert hated: it looked like what my mother used to stuff down the throat of the meat grinder for
kotlety
, infrequently available and juicy, stored in a red pot on the refrigerator's top shelf, one per person for the next three days.

“Mushrooms,” the girl says. “And pepperoni. And olives. And extra cheese.”

The mother orders, and I can hear in her voice that she knows her daughter won't eat all the toppings she says she wants.

“Did your mother give you all these choices?” I whisper to Roxana.

She shakes her head and sighs. “I wish she was here now to choose the toppings for me. She would choose meatballs, I think. Just like the ones she used to make.” The self-confidence I've been envying in Roxana has evaporated, and her eyes have turned fragile, pooled with sadness. Roxana and Sagar are both pensive and serious now, for reasons that are diametrically opposite. One is dreading his mother's visit; the other longs for her mother to be close.

And what about me? I am here because I married Robert—someone I knew for a total of four weeks, someone I thought I was in love with—to escape both my mother and my Motherland.

When my turn comes, I don't ask for any toppings. Plain, I say. Plain as our Leningrad kitchen, as our store counters, as our food. Plain as my realization that I am—and will always be—a stranger here.

Six

R
obert says I must look for a job. He is a graduate student and his stipend from the university barely pays our rent.

“How do I look for a job?” I ask him.

“Classifieds,” he says and goes back to leafing through his notebook.

I don't know what classifieds are or where to find them.

“Look in the newspaper,” Robert says, reading my puzzled face. “That's where they advertise job openings.”

The idea of looking for a job in a newspaper makes me giggle. The newspapers I am familiar with are
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
—
Truth
and
News
—and there is an old joke about no truth in the
News
and no news in the
Truth
. Both papers fill every line of their four pages with articles about the biggest-ever harvests of grain in the Ukraine or the worst-ever unemployment anywhere west of Bulgaria. They offer imperious descriptions of NATO's bullying tactics and fiery accusations of fraudulent voting in Latin American countries that don't celebrate Cuban Liberation Day. On the bottoms of their last pages, they pour salt on the Zionist ulcers of Israel, where at least ten of my friends now reside. Everyone knows that newspapers report news, real or concocted, to enlighten and educate the citizens about current politics. Why would they lower themselves to such an inglorious function as listing job openings?

The next day Robert brings home a paper called
The Austin Times
to show me the classifieds. We lean over the tiny print announcing available positions: a certified teacher for grades K–5 (what kind of grade is K?); a manager for a restaurant (experience required); a receptionist for Texas Instruments (apply in person).

I don't know what a receptionist is, but I imagine a big factory called Texas Instruments, not unlike the secret boat factory with no hint of any boats where I worked for two months after high school. I copied drafts of what could only be warship design and carried them to production rooms with bawdy men who whistled when I passed.

“Go there and apply in person,” Robert says. “It isn't far from the university,” he adds, looking at the address. “A few blocks north of the student union.”

“What's a receptionist?” I ask, although I don't know what a student union is, either.

“A receptionist?” he repeats incredulously, as if I'd asked him what a shoe or a slice of bread is. “It's a secretary, basically. Someone who says ‘May I help you' when you call on the phone with a question or a complaint.”

I am terrified of making phone calls, always expecting to be admonished for thinking that dialing a set of numbers from home could resolve an issue or answer a question. And what kind of perverse justice would place me on the other side of this exchange, without making me mute and paralyzed with fear?

But Robert doesn't know this. He has an American brain that is not wired to harbor phone paranoia, so I pretend that I want to be a receptionist and am not at all petrified by the possibility of answering questions or mediating phone complaints from the Texas Instruments customers who speak an English I can barely understand.

Robert doesn't know this and I feel I shouldn't tell him since I already hear a trace of irritation in his voice. He is busy and doesn't have time, his tone seems to say, for such mundane things as food shopping or helping me to find a job, or simply holding my hand and telling me everything will be all right.

The next day I walk to a bus stop and wait for a bus to take me to Texas Instruments. I stand outside the glass bus shelter, hoping to catch a sigh of wind. A bus appears from around the corner and roars past without slowing down. This seems odd, but maybe it is off duty, I think. Ten minutes later, another bus appears and, just like the first one, rolls past the bus stop, washing the little shelter with scorching fumes. A doubt creeps into my head: Is this really a bus stop and not a rain shelter? Do American buses make their rounds at off-peak hours? Do I look so different they don't want to allow me onboard? When the third bus leaves me there standing in its wake, I begin to suspect that the reason these buses refuse to stop here must be me. I imagine these bus drivers taking one look at me—standing there alone, scared, in a sundress my sister had sewn out of a batch of Soviet cotton with a blue cornflower print—and knowing immediately I look undeserving of an air-conditioned American bus ride. Maybe they can even tell I resent interviewing for a receptionist's job.

I unfold my Austin pocket map, find Texas Instruments, and start walking. I walk for about an hour, the top of my sundress drenched with sweat. When the Texas Instruments sign finally appears in the distance, I walk past a field of gleaming cars, past a bed with straggly flowers, past a building with no signs that doesn't look like a factory. There is no one to ask directions. Whatever Texas Instruments is, it is eerily empty and quiet outside, as if this were a Ray Bradbury story and the entire population had been wiped out by the poisonous gas of an alien invasion—everybody except me, an alien.

Doors have no signs; windows are covered with uniform blinds. Could this be a secret factory, after all? I summon up all my courage and push open one of the doors. The temperature drops thirty degrees, and I am in a corridor with more doors and a man in a suit waiting by an elevator.

“Excuse me,” I say sheepishly, both glad and uneasy to see a human being. “Where do I apply in person?”

The man stares at me, his hard eyes on my sweaty sundress.

I pull
The Austin Times
out of my bag and point to the receptionist ad.

“Oh, Personnel,” he says and points to the depth of the corridor. “Room 153.” As I start walking, I can sense the man's disdainful stare on my back.

A woman in her forties with rich blond hair points to a chair on the other side of her desk. In her gray eyes gleams the same bemused contempt I saw in the suited man near the elevator. She is wearing a tailored blouse and a gold bracelet, her nails as red as her lipstick, and the homemade sundress I considered elegant enough to lug to the other side of the Atlantic suddenly looks unseemly in this office with the strange name
Personnel
.

The woman, coldly polite, asks me to fill out a one-page form. She doesn't ask what skills I have to be a receptionist. She doesn't ask me anything, not even the standard question of where I come from, because my sundress must have already answered all her inquiries.

Back home I tell Robert about my bus and my interview fiasco.

“Did you flag down the bus?” he asks.

“I was standing at the bus stop,” I say. “Who else would be standing at a bus stop except someone waiting for a bus?”

Robert puts his arm around my shoulder and draws me closer, but it's an awkward gesture and I almost trip. He looks uncomfortable, as if he knows he needs to hold me but doesn't know how.

“Bednaya devochka,”
he says in Russian, “you poor girl.”

It feels good to be called
bednaya devochka
, despite the fact that I'm balancing on one foot, ready to tip over. It feels good to think that it is Texas Instruments's loss not to hire me as their receptionist, that I would have probably gotten the job if I'd known how to flag down a bus.

“You know what?” says Robert and releases his embrace. “Let's celebrate your first interview. Let's go out.”

I am just about to open my mouth and say that there is nothing to celebrate, but Robert has a gleam in his eyes, the look he wears when he has made a decision. I like this look, and it makes me forget about the nonstop buses and the frosty offices of Texas Instruments.

He asks Sagar to borrow his Volkswagen and we drive to somewhere in the center of Austin, a place where stores are so clumped together that people don't have to walk outside in the heat. All the buildings are low and tidy, just like the center of Washington. Eye-pleasing and functional.

We park and I follow Robert to a place called Olives. A young woman seats us at a small table near a window. She is long-limbed and beautiful, and I can't believe that a perfect specimen like this has to host in a restaurant rather than open programs on television.

“What's the only thing worse than being dead in Texas?” asks Robert when the woman departs, and from the way his mouth crinkles at the corners I know it's a joke. I make big eyes and shrug, to play along.

“Being ugly.” Robert chuckles, pleased with his sense of humor.

The woman comes to our table to take our order, stunning in her faultlessness, and I feel even worse than I did before: I don't have her beauty; I can't speak English as she does, natively; and I'm not as friendly and charming, in either language.

I can't decipher the dishes Olives has to offer, so I close the menu and ask Robert to order for me.

Fifteen minutes later a plate arrives with something full of red sauce smothered with melted cheese.

“Lasagna,” announces Robert proudly.

I start eating the lasagna carefully, poking with a knife and fork under all those mysterious layers.

“How is it?” asks Robert, and because it was his choice I say I love it. He nods, satisfied, and focuses on his own plate, chewing his chicken with total self-absorption, the same way he seems to deal with people. Concentrated on himself, turned inward. He moves his head from side to side rhythmically, as if replaying in his mind Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique,
which he was listening to when I returned from my failed job search.

We eat silently, and the perfect woman removes the ruins of our dinner.