The Turning (3 page)

By the time I reached our apartment building on the Prospekt, the snow was a sloppy porridge. The building, which stood across from Kazan Cathedral, was once known as the Zhukovsky mansion. It had started out life as the home of an aristocrat, and not just any aristocrat. My grandfather says it once belonged to my great-grandmother Katya’s family. When the revolution came, the family fled for their lives. Grandfather remembers how as a little boy his mother would take him and his sister, my great-aunt Marya, to see the mansion. His mother had told them stories of how her own mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra. She had even shown him pictures of the four daughters of the empress and the tsar, pictures that had come from a locket given to her by the empress herself. When two small rooms in the mansion became available, Grandfather had pleaded with the family to move there. Grandfather said, “How my mother would have rejoiced to see us living in even one of the rooms in which she grew up.”

The apartment stairway had an elegant sweep to it, but it smelled of cabbage and bathrooms. This evening, and not for the first time, I had to stumble over a man sleeping off too much vodka. The apartment itself, which looked out onto the Prospekt, was shabby and moldering, but you could still see bits and pieces of its past glory, like a woman whose shabby dress is trimmed with a bit of real lace. The floors of our small sitting room, where my grandparents slept, were of inlaid wood, and there was a ring of faded flowers painted around the wall. Besides the sitting room there was a bit of a kitchen and a tiny bedroom for my parents. I slept in what must once have been a closet. Sometimes the gowns and furs that had hung there long ago crept into my sleep, and I dreamed I was dressed in satin and jewels, whirling around the ballroom of a palace.

Down the hall from our apartment was a bathroom we shared with several families. If you were not up at the crack of dawn, the hot water was gone. Still we were lucky. Aidan and her husband had to live in a communal shelter with not a thing to call their own.

In our apartment we lacked for room, but we never lacked for liveliness. There were cries of delight and much excitement over the article in the magazine, which was passed from hand to hand. Grandmother Yelena, who was the most emotional one in the family, had tears in her eyes. Grandmother worked in the Leningrad library, but her life was writing poetry. For many years she had not been allowed to publish her work. The Soviet Union had stilled the voices of all its great poets. Anna Akhmatova had been silenced and Osip Mandelstam was sent off to a prison camp to die. Grandmother says, “It brings tears to my eyes when I look at the shelves in the library and imagine all the books that aren’t there. Somewhere there must be a ghostly library with the books of all those silenced writers.” Tonight her tears were happy tears. She kissed me on both cheeks and hugged me to her.

“How proud your great-grandmother would be of you,” Grandfather said. “When she was a young girl, she saw all the great ballerinas dance. She sat in the royal box with the tsar and the empress and their daughters. In those days the ballerinas had grand dukes falling at their feet, sending them armfuls of roses and precious jewels.”

I said, “I would gladly settle for a big cabbage or a fat chicken.”

“I have a better reward than that for my famous daughter,” Mama said. She produced a package from the Hotel Europa, where she worked as a chambermaid. When she cleaned the rooms, she emptied the wastebaskets. The Americans and the Japanese had the best wastebaskets. Their baskets were full of treasure. There might be a pair of pantyhose with only a small run, a broken lipstick, or a can of hair spray that wasn’t quite empty. There were American magazines and even books. Mama once found a pair of jeans with the knees worn out that Grandmother spoiled by patching when they would have been perfect with the holes.

There were some things Mama was forbidden to take. The little half-empty bottles of lotion and shampoo and the used bars of soap left behind by the tourists belonged to the head housekeeper, who sold them. If Mama took them, she would lose her job. She was not supposed to take toilet paper and Kleenex either, but every night she brought home a few sheets of each.

Mama opened her package and, as if she were taking a rabbit out of a hat, proudly produced a pair of women’s shoes. The shoes were black patent leather. One of the heels was missing. Many of our streets are still made of cobblestones, so that was not the first pair of tourist shoes to be ruined. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on swampy land where there were no stones, but when the city rose from that swamp, nearly three hundred years ago, Peter gave the order that every visitor to the city must bring three stones with him. People who wished to live in the city had to bring a hundred stones. From those stones Peter made our streets, and many of the stones are still there.

“The shoes can easily be repaired, and they are your size, Tanya. The soles of your own shoes have holes.” Mama was so pleased with her gift. I tried to look grateful, but the truth was that they were old ladies’ shoes, and I knew I would just stick them under my bed and wear my worn ones.

Father had been silent, as he always was when Mama brought things home. He hated to have her rummaging through wastebaskets. “Have you no pride, Svetlana?” he would say.

“Ivan,” Mama would tell him, “if all you had to dress yourself with was pride, you couldn’t appear in public.”

On this day Papa said nothing, for he had other things on his mind. Papa—who practiced medicine at the Erisman Hospital, where my great-grandmother Katya had once been a nurse—worried day and night about the state of health in the Soviet Union. The week before, he had submitted an article to the medical society. He had warned that the death rate was spiraling. The twin curses of tuberculosis and AIDS were killing thousands. He hoped the article would rouse the government into doing something. Now, from the expression on his face, we could see his article had been returned. “What is the point?” he asked. “The government doesn’t want to admit the truth. Our nurses must use dirty syringes because there is no money for new ones. The blood supply is contaminated. Our patients are sicker when they leave the hospital than when they enter.”

Mama, whose answer to everything was food, began ladling out the soup. The tiny apartment was filled with the wonderful aroma of borscht. There were pieces of meat in the soup along with the cabbage and beets. There was even a spoonful of sour cream to go on top of each serving.

“How can you complain, Ivan?” Grandfather said. “Here we are all together filling our bellies. None of us is in a prison camp, and our own Tanya is growing into a fine ballerina. You don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t know what real suffering is. In the Great Patriotic War we ate pine bark and glue.”

“Georgi,” Grandmother said, “no one wants to hear about how bad things were in the old days.”

“Well, then,” Grandfather said, “let them think about what is going on now. We are just a month away from the election, and who is paying attention?”

I knew that we would not get through a meal without talk of politics. In our family everyone had an opinion and we kicked our opinions back and forth as if the kitchen table were a soccer field. It was politics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If politics were food, we would all have been fat as pigs. For generations our family had risked their lives to argue politics. My great-grandparents had been exiled to Siberia for speaking out. My grandparents had once been sent away as well. Now, in one month, there was to be an election, and everyone in the family had an opinion. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were running for different positions, but really they were running against each other for control of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to take baby steps in the direction of a democratic government; Yeltsin wanted to plunge right in.

Grandmother Yelena slapped her hand on the table. “I am paying attention. I’m voting for Gorbachev. He has given us perestroika, a new start, new thinking. He has relaxed censorship. Finally writers are seeing their work in print.” Only the month before, Grandmother had had a poem published in the magazine
Literatura
.

Grandfather Georgi’s face became red. “Perestroika! Where is it? What have we had from your Gorbachev? Five miserable years of broken promises. Even if you have the money, anything you buy is shoddy and useless. The government is full of bribery and thieves, and Gorbachev is afraid to do anything about it. The coal miners are striking for a living wage and our factories are shutting down for lack of coal. There are people starving and our great leader Gorbachev wants to double prices on food. And where is your Gorbachev now when there is work to be done? He is off in the Crimea, like an imperial tsar, basking in the sun in his twenty-million-ruble palace, while half the population starves and the army and the KGB plot against him.”

“No one says things are perfect,” Mama said, trying to calm things down by being on both sides at once. “but maybe the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. Of course, Yeltsin has some good ideas.”

“We must do something now,” Grandfather said. “Things could not get worse than they have under Gorbachev. I mean to give Yeltsin a chance.” For months Grandfather had been working on Yeltsin’s election campaign in Leningrad.

“Just be careful, Georgi,” Papa warned Grandfather. “Gorbachev is determined to silence Yeltsin. If you stick your neck out for Yeltsin, you may find a noose around it.”

“Being careful is not in Georgi’s nature.” Grandmother sighed. “He has been fighting for freedom in this country as long as I have known him.”

Papa said, “Anyhow, what good is an election when there is only one party, the Communist party, to vote for?”

“We mean to change that,” Grandfather said. “People are resigning the party by the thousands. Unfortunately that only makes the party leaders more desperate. I’m afraid they are willing to do anything to hold on to their power.”

All the discussion seemed foolish. What did it have to do with me? I had heard these arguments a thousand times. Nothing would change in Russia. Russia would never be a democracy. In Russia there seemed to be no future; in the outside world, anything seemed possible. Escape was the answer. If I decided to go with Vera, I would never have to listen again to the same old arguments.

I busied myself sewing ribbons on my ballet shoes. The shoes were terribly expensive, and you were lucky if you could get through a performance with only one pair worn out. I wore out nearly two hundred pairs a year, and each new pair had to be broken in before it could be worn. First, the sole had to be grated on Mama’s potato grater so that I didn’t slip. The box of the toe, the part that supports you when you are en pointe, had to be mercilessly hammered so that the box seemed a part of your foot. Finally, because I had the misfortune to have a second toe longer than the first toe, I had to stuff cotton in the shoe so all the toes were equal.

While the arguments continued, the door to the apartment opened, and there was Aunt Marya stamping her boots to get rid of the snow. She is really my great-aunt, but we are so close that I call her aunt. She has had great tragedy in her life. The man she was in love with, a soldier, Andrei, was killed in the last days of the Great Patriotic War. She never married but devoted her life to the Hermitage, Leningrad’s great art museum.

It was difficult to find stylish clothes in the Soviet Union, but Aunt Marya was always stylish. It was as if the ravishing pictures she lived with all day in the museum lent her some of their elegance. She was wearing a wool cloak embroidered with flowers and a long matching skirt. Over this was thrown a wool shawl in a brilliant blue.

I longed to tell Aunt Marya that I was thinking of running away from the Soviet Union. I was sure she would be sympathetic, for she had once told me, “Tanya, many years ago I was invited to go to Paris when some of the paintings from the Hermitage were being displayed there. What a city! The boulevards, the Seine, the fashionable women, and Tanya, there are restaurants where you can order whatever you like. How I longed to stay, to escape all this dreariness. I could not. I couldn’t leave all my lovely pictures in the Hermitage. It was during the days of Stalin. To get money for a bigger army, Stalin was selling some of our finest paintings to a rich man who had a museum in America. Though I knew I could do little about it, still, I had to be in Russia standing guard over the pictures. But Tanya, I have never forgotten Paris.”

After she took off her boots, Aunt Marya kissed everyone and exclaimed over the article in the magazine. “I can tell from this article that the editor of the magazine has his eye on you, Tanya. You are sure to be picked to go on the tour to Paris, and how I envy you. You must visit all my favorite places for me.”

Mama gave Aunt Marya a cup of hot tea and some bread and jam. “You are just in time to take sides,” Mama said. “We are shouting at one another as to who is to lead the Soviet Union, Gorbachev or Yeltsin.”

“We will be very lucky if that is our choice,” Aunt Marya said.

“What do you mean, Marya?” Mama asked.

We all listened, for as second in command of the Hermitage, Aunt Marya overheard political gossip while showing groups of important politicians around the museum or attending receptions at which members of the government were present. The officials spoke more freely than they might have if they could have seen through Aunt Marya’s charm to her sharp mind.

“We had a little contingent from the politburo yesterday,” she said. “They came to see if they had received their money’s worth for the fortune it had cost to clean the Leonardo da Vinci. I trailed along, smiling and smiling at them as they talked away. There seems to be a feeling that both Gorbachev and Yeltsin are embracing too much freedom to suit the old-line Communists. I believe they would like to get rid of both men. If the country is not careful, we will have another Stalin on our hands.”

Grandfather’s face was very red. “I hear the same thing. Nothing could be worse, but how could they fix the election? I don’t see that it is possible.”