The Wanting (30 page)

The television glowed brighter and brighter in my eyes, the bold colors of childhood enveloping me almost like the embrace of my long-gone father; and in a richly detailed Russophile style, a style so realistic and sympathetically drawn I could almost believe it was actually happening, I saw a great prince raise a golden sword above the head of the fearsome witch as the narrator began:
In the time before time and the days before days, in a land beyond the mountains and past the far green sea, there lived a great prince in search of a wife. “Bring me the partner of my heart,” he said, “a maiden true and fair, for I am lonely and wish to marry.” He sent his minions far and wide to find the most beautiful and kindhearted maidens in the land, but search as they may, they found no one to suit him. So one day he donned the cloak of a peasant and the shoes of a stable boy, and went into the woods in search of the witch, Baba Yaga.…

“What is this?”

“Huh?”

“What are you doing?”

I opened my eyes. It was Mother, her shoes still on her feet, her hands grasping the sides of her head, her mouth curled into astonishment.

“Uh, dreaming,” I said. Indeed, the taste of sleep coated my mouth, and some story of witches and maidens—I don’t know—some fairy tale that … I couldn’t remember, exactly.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “And my mushrooms. You’ve eaten them all.”

Ruefully I surveyed the mess of cans and empty beer bottles strewn about the sofa. “Where were you?” I demanded. “I was worried.”

“With her,” she said.

“With her what?”

“With her,” she repeated. And then Collette sidled in from the entry hall and gave me a little wave of hello.

“Hi, sleepyhead!” she said.

The sight of Collette arm in arm with my mother was no less a fairy tale than the one that had been swirling in my head. Having fallen asleep watching
Goodnight Children
, I found myself not fully able to comprehend that the TV was no longer on and that Collette was standing in my living room. Smiling, she came forward, bent gaily at the waist, kissed my nose, and whispered, “Romochka. Idiot.” Now she deftly cleared away the beer bottles, the emptied jar of pickled mushrooms, and the stinking can that once held my mother’s delicious sprats. Mother offered me a look of disgust. “Clean yourself up if you can manage it,” she said. But I lay there a few minutes more, wanting to taste not so much the minute particles of saliva Collette had deposited upon my nose as the syllables she had imparted to my ear:
Romochka. Durak!
She could have called me Roman or Roma. Guttman was how she usually referred to me at parties. She might have used Romka, Rommy, Romashka. But
Romochka
. As if I were a naughty boy. My little Romochka! How troublesome you are! What a little devil!
Durak!

They’d gone to the Tishinksy rynok and brought home all manner of zakusky, fresh parsley, cucumbers, green onions, eggplant. My mother boiled some potatoes and found an ancient bottle of vodka, I think from the time of Khrushchev, from which she was able to eke three tiny glasses and which she doled out like nectar, drop by drop. In the meantime, Collette set down a
tablecloth, and the two of them prattled away as if they’d known each other earlier in life, had met by chance at the bus stop on Kutuzovsky, and simply picked up where they’d left off, the years between only a comma in some ongoing conversation. I could not help myself—the glow, which even I had to admit had become tarnished through these months of rejection and jealousy, returned to Collette’s person, filling the kitchen with golden happiness. Her smile, her hands, her hair, her neck, her eyes, the sound of her voice, the sway of her hips, the pleats of her skirt were all too beautiful, too wrenching, for me to hold a grudge.

“Stop fidgeting,” my mother remarked.

They went on to analyze which stands in the rynok were the most reliable for green vegetables, where to buy the fattest chicken, the freshest fish, though in fact my mother almost never went to that rynok or any other. Then Mother began to bitterly complain about her neighbors.

“Oh!” Collette laughed. “I have this Plotkina with her little mutt, Vova. What a pair! I think the dog is smarter than she is. At least he knows where to pee!”

Then my mother did something I could never have expected. She cleared the dishes, sat back down, and said, “You know, my husband, Lyopa, left us.”

“It is hard to be left,” Collette replied.

“You’re too young to say such a thing. Roma, do you remember when Papa left?”

Under the table, Collette placed her hand on mine, but her eyes remained altogether upon my mother.

“Lyopa was a brilliant man,” she said, “maybe even a genius.”

“Yes,” replied Collette, “Roman has told me.”

“And then gone.”

“And then gone. I understand.”

“Roma has already told you?”

“You tell me. I want to hear. I want to know everything.”

“I didn’t think so. He doesn’t talk a lot.”

Collette produced a smile that seemed to say: Yes, that’s how he is. They were talking about me as if I were not in the room, and
I could not have been happier. Collette planted two elbows on the table, rested her chin on her two fists, and made it clear that my mother had her undivided and earnest attention.

My mother then told the story of how we lost my father and at the same time were evicted from the house on Veshnaya and how we came, the two of us, now that Katya was gone, to this apartment and the life we now were leading.

I was fourteen years old, the age at which I was eligible for Komsomol, and to which, in spite of everything, I yearned to be accepted as early as possible. Everyone of course was always accepted, but that did not ease my anxiety for one moment. I was desperate to be Russian and more than happy to become a devout Communist, if only it would help me to squeeze inside a pair of traditional felt boots. There was only one person who was in my way: Dima Chernapolsky. He was the most popular kid in school, a great basketball player, sang like an angel, his father was a colonel in the KGB, he lived in our building, and he hated me. He hated everything about me, and his main joy in life was to spread rumors about me that often reached the ears of our teachers. I was a thief, I was a homosexual, I was a Zionist, I cheated on tests. But I asked myself, in what way was he superior to me? Smarter? Wittier? Able to write a coherent sentence in history class? He was a party brat and belonged in a party school, and if he wasn’t, there had to be something wrong with him. Probably he was retarded. Yet because of him my popularity had plummeted, and I was isolated and miserable.

One day, I came upon him laying claim to the hill of garbage that had grown like a Tower of Babel in the no-man’s-land behind the row of garages that lined the alleys off of Bogataya Pereulok.

Look at him up there, I thought, king of the fucking hill. But it was my hill. I used to climb it many times; I used to reign over that stinky realm.

A string of curses erupted from my mouth. I would have to bring Dima to his knees. Crush him. Break him. It didn’t matter to me that he towered over me, an athlete, a hero of the school. I
wanted him to cry. Because even then I knew, once you cry, it’s all over.

I stole around to the back of the trash heap and without any warning charged up the hill screaming my head off.

Amazing to me in that moment, and to this day, Dima Chernapolsky collapsed almost immediately and in no time at all was weeping. He begged me to stop hitting him. And finally I did, but not before I kicked him down the hill and watched, laughing, as he lifted himself up and limped away. Only when he was gone did I grow quiet and contemplate the magnitude of my victory. I could go to school again with my head held high. Dima was mine! I owned him. I took myself to an ice-cream stand to celebrate.

As soon as I got home, however, my parents accosted me. “Where have you been?” “We were worried to death!” “Look at you!” “What happened?” “Your clothes are filthy!” In the living room, the rest of the family was waiting, a single accusatory, disappointed look animating every face: Uncle Maxim, Aunt Sophie, Katya, my cousins Julia and Danka, and probably the ghosts of my grandparents and great-grandparents on every side. They all stood in the same forlorn posture, wringing their hands as if waiting to be shot.

Then my mother yelled at me, “What have you done to us, you stupid, silly boy?” She clutched my filthy shirt between her fingers. “Who made you this way?”

“All right,” I heard my father say from somewhere that seemed very far away. “Enough.”

But my mother shook me violently. “You!” she cried, “you!” And then, for the only time that I can remember, she slapped me, hard across the face, and I fell backward against the telephone table. “We did not raise such a child!” she screamed at me. “We don’t know this child!” She spun around, addressing the walls, the ceiling, the windows, “Not our fault! Not our fault!”

Finally, my father emerged from the circle of family. He looked me in the eye—a look I shall never forget, a look that squeezed me into a ball and shot me into the most profound darkness—and
then, without a word, he turned to my mother, held her firmly by the shoulders, and forced her to sit. “Calm down,” he said to her.

Behind him, my illustrious uncle Max was about to speak, but my father lifted his hand. “Roman,” he said evenly, “do not say a thing. We already know everything. Colonel Chernapolsky has already been down to see us. He gave us a letter. Shall I read it?”

I cannot recall his words exactly, but the charges were laid out like a denunciation in
Pravda
. Dmitry Valerivich (no longer Dima, but Dmitry Valerivich) had been brutally assaulted, to such an extent the police should be brought in to investigate. Such an instance of hooliganism must not be tolerated; the influence of a boy such as myself on the students of Moscow School Forty-two could only lead others into degeneracy and error, clearly the result of Western music and the Guttman habit of listening to the BBC, which, by the way, was well known. How, Colonel Valeri Chernapolsky asked himself, can a boy who has been given every possible chance, every possible advantage of our Soviet system, a free education, a universal education, and unequivocally the very best education in the world, a boy who is a Young Pioneer and a candidate for Komsomol, who in any other country would most likely be a pariah but here is treated 100 percent as an equal, even more than equal in the opinion of many, how could such a boy turn his back on those who nurtured and cared for him, those who taught him and tried to instill in him Soviet values and a clean, wholesome Soviet spirit—how could such a boy victimize the innocent and terrorize his schoolmates? Because he is an agent of terror! Because he is a reactionary bully! Because he is a Zionist hooligan!

“They’re going to have us kicked out of the apartment,” my mother bawled. “And you,” she said to me, “you’ll end up working in a factory.”

“Don’t be absurd,” my father said. “It’s just an argument between two boys. No one is getting kicked out of anywhere. Even Chernapolsky wouldn’t go that far.”

“Of course he would!” she cried. “You will go down and speak to Colonel Chernapolsky yourself. And you will speak to his wife, too. Because believe me, she’s behind this. You will get down on
your hands and knees and you will beg for mercy. You will say, Marta Gregoryevna, on behalf of my son, I beg mercy.”

“Are you crazy? I’ll do no such thing. I was once considered for membership in the Academy of Science, for heaven’s sake. The highest honor!”

“I’m crazy? I’m crazy? Don’t you see, you stupid Lyopa, what’s happening here?”

“I’m telling you, calm down,” he said.

“We’ll be out on the street, all of us, and why? Because of your son. You and your academy. What academy? The Academy of Idiots? In your dreams there may have been an academy for you, but not in this life! Who made him like this? A fighter! A hooligan! A monster who refuses to listen to anyone! He thinks he knows everything! You know everything, don’t you, Roman? I suppose I taught him this! It was you! You! You stupid, stupid Lyopa! Who walks away from the academy? Who turns his back on the university? No wonder he couldn’t get into special school! No, Lyopa, you will go down there and you will beg. You will get down on your hands and knees. You will do whatever they ask. You will do whatever they want.”

“My name is Leopold,” he said. “You will call me Leopold.”

“Go, Lyopa!” she cried.

“Tatyana,” Uncle Max said.

My father was still standing in front of me, but suddenly he smiled and placed his hands on my head as if he were about to recite a blessing.

“Lyopa, go!” she commanded.

My father seemed not to hear her. Or perhaps he did not need to answer because he had already decided to go, for it seemed to me then that a yes had fallen upon his shoulders.

“Lyopa!” she demanded.

“Yes, all right,” he muttered, still smiling at me. One could not call it a happy smile or even, as often happens between couples, a smile of familial contempt. Only now can I say with any certainty what that smile might have been—it was the smile of the ibex in the moment of flight. It was the smile of the leopard, unaccustomed
to daylight but driven by starvation, that flashed through his eyes.

Then, so unexpectedly, he bent down and kissed my cheek. “Don’t worry, Roma, my darling, everything will be all right. The morning shall come, just as always.” He stood to his full height, looked around the room and into the eyes of his brother, Max, and walked out the door.

He did not return home that evening, and it was a very long time before I saw him again.

My mother was right, by the way. We were all to be removed from the apartment on Veshnaya. But Uncle Max being Uncle Max came to an accommodation with the colonel, and only my mother, sister, and I had to leave. At first we were compelled to live in a horrible place—with some distant cousins in Volgograd—but somehow Max, using what little pull he still possessed, and greasing the palms of those who knew someone who knew someone who
perhaps
could manipulate the waiting list for housing, in other words,
po blatu
, found us the apartment on Tishinskaya where my mother was now sitting at the kitchen table, lost in conversation with Collette Chernoff. Max spent a fortune on us, maybe everything he had, but never said a word about it. And as it turned out, my mother was much happier in this apartment than she ever was in Veshnaya. And why not? It was a small, cheerful building constructed with simple, decent lines, roomy balconies, and a friendly disposition: it seemed delighted to be sitting on its little tree-lined street. Plus there was considerably more room for the three of us, and it had all the modern conveniences, and the only complaints my mother had to suffer were her own.