You Are One of Them (4 page)

“Let me braid your hair,” Jenny used to say. I’d sit in her desk chair while she used her fingers to get my tangles out. “Don’t you love having your scalp scratched? My mom always used to scratch my head when she did my hair.” I did love it. Her fingernails sketched gentle patterns as she separated strands, prepared to plait. My mother had never braided my hair. I couldn’t even remember her brushing it. When she was done, Jenny pushed me into her bathroom to confront the mirror. “What do you think?” she’d say. I always thought it looked perfect.

Jenny and I were best friends. That title mattered then. We didn’t throw the term “best” around lightly. You had to earn it. I’d never had a best friend, but I didn’t tell Jenny that. I didn’t tell her that until she came along I’d never felt like I belonged anywhere. I knew that the other kids at school thought I was strange. I was the first kid whose parents got divorced. I was quiet and pensive. They could smell the sadness on me, rank and stale. Jenny and I exchanged friendship pins—safety pins decorated with tiny colored beads—that we fastened onto the laces of our L.L. Bean Blucher moccasins. We pricked our fingertips with one of her mother’s sewing needles and became blood sisters. Our bedrooms faced each other across the street. The houses were too far apart for us to actually see into each other’s rooms, but at bedtime we exchanged good-nights, flicking our flashlights on and off three times: blink, blink, blink. I couldn’t fall asleep until I saw her light winking at me. With Jenny I felt safe.

•   •   •

S
OMETIMES I THINK
of the three of them—my sister, my father, Jenny—nesting inside one another, like a
matryoshka
doll. Each loss has to be unpacked to find the loss that came before. My sister is the smallest doll, the kernel of pain. My father is the next one, and then Jenny. And if there are bigger dolls, the hollow shells that contain the others, they represent various boyfriends who abandoned me, usually because I was too serious, too “intense.” Their departures were just echoes of a much earlier grief.

If “defection” seems too strong a word—“A defection is a deliberate betrayal, is it not?” said my college shrink. “It’s not as if your sister or Jenny
chose
to die”—you have to remember that I came of age during the Cold War. When I was a kid, the United States and the Soviet Union were always keeping score. Each defector claimed by the other side was a point. If your country is so great, why did so-and-so leave?

I was one and a half when Mikhail Baryshnikov defected while on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in Canada. And seven in 1979, when another Soviet dancer, Alexander Godunov, slipped away while the Bolshoi was in New York. (“Those dancers sure are good at sneaking around,” my father said. “Must be the ballet shoes. They can walk without making any bloody noise.”) KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected in August of 1985—just eight months after Jenny died—and then escaped from his CIA handler at Au Pied de Cochon in Georgetown and marched up the street to the Russian embassy to redefect. In high school my friends and I used to go to Au Pied de Cochon for croque-monsieurs after we’d been drinking at house parties. The restaurant was open all night and was a good place to sober up before curfew. On those boozy nights when I tried to mimic the carefree behavior of my peers, I always thought of Yurchenko, who missed his homeland enough to return and risk execution. So yes, I said to my shrink, maybe Jenny’s death wasn’t deliberate, but she betrayed me
before
she died, and besides, when you’ve had as many people disappear from your life as I have, you start to wonder if you’re defective. You start to wonder if there’s somewhere better to go.

“T
HERE ARE GANGSTERS
IN
M
OSCOW,”
my mother said when I told her I wanted to go to Russia.

It was 1995, six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I had just graduated from college. My classmates set off for New York and San Francisco—several of them went on to make millions at Internet start-ups—but now that the Cold War was finally over, I wanted to see the former Soviet Union. I’d also begun to harbor romantic notions of journalism, and I’d heard that it would be easier to break into a newspaper there. A new English-language daily was hiring expats. I even argued that my trip would help my mom’s foundation—it had been exactly ten years since Jenny’s death, and a commemorative journey to Russia would be good PR.

What I didn’t tell her is that I had another reason for wanting to visit Moscow. A month before graduation, I’d received a strange letter. It arrived inside a manila envelope from my mother, who periodically forwarded mail that came to Washington. It drove me crazy that my mom never added a note of her own. She had never been the kind of parent who sent letters or care packages, but I would have settled for scribble on a Post-it:
“See you at graduation!”
This package, though, contained only a white envelope addressed to me in a broad sweeping hand:

Sarah Zuckerman

c/o Jennifer Jones Foundation

P.O. Box 408

Washington, D.C. 20008

USA

The envelope had a corporate logo, but it was not one I recognized. DDBD in orange block letters and beneath it, in gray, MOCKBA. I’d fulfilled my foreign-language requirement with two years of Russian, so I knew that MOCKBA (pronounced “Moskva”) is “Moscow” in the Cyrillic alphabet. I turned the envelope over. The return address was printed in the same corporate orange: Petrovka Ulitsa 26, Moscow, Russia.

Dear Sarah,
the letter said,

You are Sarah which is friend of Jennifer Jones? You organize Jennifer Jones Festival? I am Svetlana which is friend of Jennifer in Russia. We with Jennifer spend much time together when she came to USSR. We were on the pioneer camp. She often talked about you. I always want to meet with you.

I know that you lives in Washington, in USA. Many people thing that “grass is always greener on the other side of the fense” but I am not agree. Moscovites really love their city. This is why I invite you to Moscow. It is capital city like Washington. Since perestroika, it is easy for traveling here. I can organize for you special tour. I can tell you many thing about Jennifer.

Please to write to me. My address in web: Svetlana.Roma
[email protected]

Sincerely yours,

Svetlana

Officially, my mother organized the annual Jennifer Jones Festival, but she always forced me to say a few words at the opening ceremony—a ceremony that had seen increasingly lower attendance over the years. The year before, my remarks were addressed to sixteen people, and most of them had wandered into the room by accident. But the writer obviously had a problem with her verb tenses in English. I
was
Jennifer Jones’s friend. My mom started the foundation right after Jenny’s death, and now she was already hard at work on plans for the tenth annual Jennifer Jones Festival. In fact, I had already ignored several frantic calls requesting my input. My mother’s voice-mail messages were delivered as if through a bullhorn:
“JENNY’S LEGACY IS IN YOUR HANDS!”
she said in one. She did not seem to understand that most people had stopped worrying about nuclear war. The Cold War was over, and anxiety about a hot war ended with it.

I looked at the letter again. How bizarre, I thought, that someone all the way in Moscow could be reached instantly by electronic mail. E-mail was still a novelty in 1995. My high-school friends and I used it to correspond from our various college campuses, but our messages retained the formal conventions of letters. They were long, began with proper salutations and closed with “Yours truly,” and betrayed our collective uncertainty about this new technology.
“Did you get my last message?”
we wrote, or
“Write back to let me know you received this.”
We often telephoned each other to verify that e-mail had arrived. Cyberspace was so mysterious. This was pre-Google, so we weren’t yet relying on the Internet to answer our every question; in fact, we weren’t consciously using the Internet at all, just our various college e-mail servers. I had never heard the term “Web site,” let alone seen one. One of my friends tried to tell me about the seemingly mythical “Internet,” and I nodded indulgently, certain it was something that would only capture the imagination of Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts. Most e-mails I received were from on campus, many of them completely inane. You could target the whole student body by addressing an e-mail to ALL:STU and these “all-stus” ranged from announcements about various a cappella performances
(“Tonight in Kirkland Hall: Scott Hardy solos on ‘Africa’ by Toto for the last time before he graduates!”)
to drunken nocturnal confessions
(“Yes, I’m gay. Are you happy now?”)
to prank messages sent from the accounts of those who had failed to log out of public computers. (
“I’m proud to be a Psi-Uterus!”
was a message that came from the account of a woman who spent a lot of time at Psi U frat parties.) I still felt a shiver of surprise when messages appeared in my in-box, especially when they had been sent from another city or state. And now it was possible to write an e-mail to another
country.
Not just any country either, but to our former Cold War nemesis. When Sting wondered if the Russians loved their children, too, he could not have imagined that we’d be e-mailing those Russian children.

I don’t know how Svetlana found me, but I recognized her name from Jenny’s book. She was the girl plucked by the Kremlin to travel around with Jenny and her parents.

After Jenny returned from the Soviet Union, a New York publishing house gave the Joneses a lot of money for a book detailing her travels.
My Trip to the Soviet Union
consisted mostly of photographs of Jenny smiling outside various Soviet monuments and tombs of unknown soldiers. A ghostwriter was hired to tell Jenny’s story. It began with this sentence: “It all started when I decided to write a letter to Yuri Andropov.” There is no mention of the fact that it actually started when
I
decided to write a letter to Andropov. There is no mention of me in the book at all. The book was rushed into production for holiday sales in 1983. Jenny gave me a copy for Christmas. It had a giant picture of her smiling on the cover. Inside, she’d written,
“I wish you could have come with me!”

Look at the cover photo and you’ll see the Jenny I remember. She was pretty in a wholesome, unthreatening way. Her cheeks dimpled. Her glossy brown hair was always parted in the middle and pinned back with tortoiseshell barrettes. Her eyes were blue. She had a light dusting of freckles on her dainty nose. Her expression tended to be open and warm. She had long, graceful arms and legs. She was unfailingly polite. She wore classic American clothes: polo shirts and crewneck sweaters in primary colors. Central casting could not have found a more ideal candidate to represent American childhood.

Pictures of me at the same age—we were ten when she was invited to the USSR—reveal a wan, wary child. Jenny and I were always about the same height (her mother measured us every six months against a wall in their kitchen, and our pencil marks climbed in tandem, never more than a few centimeters apart), but while she was thin, I was so bony that I looked emaciated. If I had been born just a few years later, I could have capitalized on the heroin-chic trend. Even in photos of supposedly happy occasions—Christmas morning, my birthday—I am not smiling. This is partly because I had braces at the time and was reluctant to open my mouth in front of the camera, but mostly because I was a serious child. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t the one who went on the tour of the Soviet Union. My sullen face wouldn’t have won over the media or the Russians. Jenny was a natural diplomat. And she was so photogenic that when she returned to the States, she was offered roles in several films. She might have grown up to be a movie star, like the other Jennifer Jones. The one who married Selznick.

The cover photo was taken at a Soviet Pioneer camp on the Black Sea. Jenny was invited there to meet the Soviet youth, to witness their loyalty to the party and their devotion to friendship and peace. The Pioneers were like Girl Scouts with a political agenda. They marched in formation, they sang the praises of the motherland, “the country of happy childhood.” In the picture Jenny wears one of the Pioneer uniforms: a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a scarf knotted around the neck, a crisp blue cotton kilt, and white kneesocks. Slightly out of focus behind the smiling Jenny is Svetlana—also uniformed as a Pioneer with a red kerchief. The caption inside says,
“Svetlana Romanova and me at Artek.”
She had been recruited by the Kremlin because she spoke some English. And probably because she was as ideal a representative of Russia as Jenny was of America. She had blond hair, tawny skin, and a wide-eyed Slavic face—and although she was only twelve, you could see outlines of the feline beauty she would become. When Jenny returned from the USSR, she would not stop talking about her new friend. “Svetlana is so good at ballet,” she would say, or “Svetlana gave me this lacquered Russian box.” I never responded to these comments. I felt like I was being replaced. It was bad enough to have been left out of the trip. Our friendship was already on shaky ground, and by the spring of sixth grade we were often passing each other in the halls at school with little more than a nod. It might have been awkward if Jenny didn’t travel so much, but she missed fifty days of school that year because of media appearances.

I didn’t e-mail Svetlana right away. I wasn’t ready to dredge up the past. For years I had kept a file box of Jenny memorabilia under my bed. I even brought it to college with me, because I worried my mother would confiscate it for her own collection. She was still petitioning the Smithsonian to create a Jennifer Jones exhibition at the Museum of American History. But I hadn’t opened the box since I arrived on campus. After years of being known as the best friend of the girl who died (“Such a
tragedy,
” everyone always said to me), it was a relief to finally be viewed as my own person. In college I was Sarah Zuckerman, not Jennifer Jones’s best friend. I made a point of telling no one that I knew her. And, to be honest, no one remembered Jennifer Jones. She had been reduced to a footnote in the history of the Cold War. Once during my freshman year, I asked the people at my dinner table if they knew who she was. “Is she that girl in our psych seminar? The one who always wears her field-hockey jacket?” asked one. “Was she on that TV show?” said another. “The one about the girls’ boarding school?” A few people mentioned Jennifer Jones the movie star, but most people responded with blank stares.

As graduation loomed, I worried more and more about what I was going to do next. I felt qualified to do absolutely nothing, and the real world filled me with dread. In those days résumés were supposed to include a list of all the computer programs you knew, as if Adobe proficiency were a predictor of success, and the fact that I knew only Word seemed proof that my liberal-arts degree was worthless. I had no job and no plan. College was comfortable—so comfortable that I had stretched out my time there, going abroad for so little academic credit that I had to remain on campus for a fifth year. I had always been young for my class; now I would graduate, like most students, at twenty-two. I liked the pattern of my days. Midmorning lectures in imposing Gothic buildings, afternoon seminars in quaint clapboard houses, late nights in the library, where friends were never more than a few carrels away and could be easily coerced into coffee breaks. It was a picturesque campus on a hill, and even in winter, with several feet of New England’s snow on the ground, the place seemed to be bathed in warm light. It was a nostalgia factory; we were being trained to be sentimental about the school so that we’d respond to their relentless appeals for money after we left. But I couldn’t be cynical about the place. I was happy there. I liked formatting my life around a syllabus, checking off assignments at each due date. I liked hunting and gathering for my meals with orange plastic trays in the dining hall. The parties were appealingly predictable: the supply of drinking cups always dwindled long before the kegs were dry, so it behooved you to snag one early or bring your own. I even liked the dorms. Sure, the furniture was institutional, but not having to decorate took the pressure off. I’d been lucky to live in a single room all four years, and every fall it was so easy to settle in. You just needed to unfurl your bedding, plug in your fan, shelve your books. No IKEA assembly, no grocery shopping, no cooking, no grieving mother. I knew I’d never have it so good.

So I found myself thinking about Svetlana. I had been waiting for a letter from Moscow since 1983. Now that I’d finally received one, could I really ignore it?

I went to the library computer lab and e-mailed Svetlana a week before graduation:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: May 17, 1995

Dear Svetlana,

Yes, I am the Sarah Zuckerman who helps organize the Jennifer Jones Festival. She was my best friend before she died. I’ve wanted to visit Moscow for many years. What do you mean by “special tour”?

Best,

Sarah

It was her reply that made me determined to go to Russia:

Dear Sarah,

How do you know Jennifer Jones is dead? Because you saw on the television? You must believe also that your American cosmonauts walked on moon! Americans are like the kindergarten. You believe every thing you see. Here in Russia we know that news is not truth. When trouble happened, television here showed Swan Lake on all channels. Everywhere you look, it was Swan Lake. The last time Swan Lake was on the TV was during coup in 1991. There were tanks in the street but on television, ballet.