Russian Tattoo (13 page)

Twenty

A
ndy shows me how to write a résumé, and we re-create my Russian life—my university English classes and my desk duty at the House of Friendship and Peace—using phrases such as “educational background” and “work experience.” Committed to paper and arranged in columns under headings, my Russian past looks unfamiliar and impressive, having acquired unexpected solidity and heft. It looks as if it were the past of someone else, some other Elena Gorokhova, self-confident and successful, who welcomed foreign delegations visiting her city, then at night dove into the depths of philological research at the university. I didn't know I had a master's degree in English and linguistics; I didn't know what a master's degree was until Andy told me. It feels satisfying to be called a master, even though I still have trouble mastering which article to put before which noun.

“If you want to get a college teaching job, you have to go to graduate school and get a doctorate,” says Andy, and I think of the Russian doctoral degree I never even dreamed of, which marked the top spot on the Olympus of Russian academia, accessible only to heads of major university departments, professors whose office doors were never opened to reveal a live human being inside.

“With the amount of credits you took,” Andy adds, “you may already have a doctorate.” The other day he pored over the translated copy of my university diploma, five typed pages of courses I took for six years after work, four times a week, two classes a night. “I can't believe the amount of hours you studied English,” he says. “No wonder you can speak it.” I am not always sure I can speak or write it, but Andy's voice is so tender and sincere that I decide to believe him.

I tell Andy of walking along the Neva embankment with my university friend Nina when classes ended at ten, of the dark contours of the Admiralty and the Hermitage on the other side, grim and unglamorous at that hour of the night. We walked over the Palace Bridge—the river strapped under the armor of ice for five months—leaning into the wind, talking about banned books, Tarkovsky's films, and those who had already left the country. “I'd go anywhere to get out of here,” Nina said. “Anywhere. Even to Patagonia.” In our tight friendship, she was the one with a Jewish husband and hopes for immigrating to the West. I had no such far-reaching plans: my biggest wish was to reunite with Boris from Kiev, whom I'd met in the Crimea. Four times a week, Nina and I walked and talked, trying to glimpse into the future—not the bright future that glared from the pages of
Pravda
but the real life lurking ahead of us, as impenetrable as a winter night in Leningrad.

We walk into our apartment as the phone is ringing, and I sprint to the receiver on the kitchen wall. A man from Hudson College is asking for me. I straighten up, as if ordered to stand at attention, as if afraid that he can see me all the way from his office on Kennedy Boulevard, stooping and clutching the phone in my sweaty palm. He is looking at my résumé, he says, wondering if I could come in for an interview tomorrow. They have a summer position, teaching English as a second language, starting next week. The person who was going to teach the class quit this morning without notice, he says, exasperation in his voice.

“What did I tell you?” says Andy, triumphant that his plan is working. “Out of the hundred résumés we sent out, we may have just found you a job.”

I am proud of such an un-Soviet initiative on our part, even though I am not sure if I have received a job offer yet. All I think about is the ominous word
interview
, which takes me back to the half an hour of sweating under the incinerating gaze of Bonita Binder of SCS Business and Technical Institute, who made it clear she almost never hired nonnative speakers of English to teach immigrant students. I sat on a folding metal chair across from her desk, rehearsing every phrase out of my mouth, summoning up every phonetic rule I ever learned at the university in a desperate attempt to demonstrate that I could sound like a native. Of course, I knew I couldn't, and I knew that she knew, the obvious travesty sitting between us like a foul monster, making me muddle up verb tenses.

In my navy dress from Bamberger's, I am sitting across from the dean of Hudson College, Steven Cromer. He is wearing a white shirt with a red tie, his suit jacket hanging on the back of his chair, and I am relieved that I decided to wear the stern navy dress to look as businesslike as he does. The dean sounds much more friendly than Bonita Binder, telling me about the ESL classes and asking when I moved here from the Soviet Union. He is the first person I have met in this country who doesn't call it Russia, who knows about the fifteen republics that constitute my country. He is a sociologist, he says, who applies statistical methods to locate and count the references to his articles in an ocean of world research. I admit that the scientific significance of his quest eludes me, but these references must excite him because he gets up and starts pacing back and forth on his long legs, covering the length of his office in four steps.

“I was referenced in the Soviet journal
Family and School
last October,” he says, and I nod vigorously, acknowledging that I am aware of the publication and assuring him that it has a wide audience of Soviet parents and teachers. Talking about the Soviet Union brings a faint smile to the dean's lips, as if it were a fantasyland he'd always dreamed about visiting.

“I saw from your résumé that you're from Leningrad,” says Steven Cromer.

“The real capital, much more beautiful than Moscow,” I gush, watching the dean half-close his eyes as if he had the image of the Hermitage imprinted on the insides of his eyelids. “Moscow is eclectic, nothing but a big village,” I go on, trying to say what I think will please his ears. “Leningrad has a soul.”

“All those free universities and free health care,” says the dean dreamily, and I don't know if I should say something to qualify the adjective
free
or keep quiet. I don't want to tell him about hospital wards without water and sheets, or abortions without anesthesia, or university admissions boards with lists of party bosses' children in their desks, so I remain silent. “We have a lot of students from Cuba here,” says Steven Cromer. “The Soviet and Cuban governments seem to have figured out some things.” For a moment, I think of asking what students from Cuba are doing in New Jersey instead of attending free local universities, but I don't. The possibility of waving farewell to Bonita Binder's expressionless face and the KGB-style phone labs at SCS Business and Technical Institute makes me want to jump up and down, although I know perfectly well I can't do it in the serious office of a college dean.

“Congratulations,” says the dean and shakes my hand. “Welcome to Hudson College.”

For a moment, I am stunned. Was that the entire interview? What about checking if I know the participial constructions or the proper use of the perfect progressive tenses? Or pointing out that I've missed an article or two, something no Russian will ever learn? Or asking me for the most effective way to facilitate group work in a multilingual classroom? Instead, the dean stands up and says he hopes I will be happy as part of the Hudson College family.

I am already happy. Steven Cromer walks to an open box sitting on a chair and lifts out a booklet with a spiral spine. “You should read this report,” he says.

“Steven Cromer,” the front page reads.
Contributions of a Comprehensive Faculty and Staff Development Program to a Comprehensive Community College.
I think the title is unnecessarily redundant, but I nod enthusiastically, letting the author know that I am eager to find out more about him and the college where I am going to teach for the next six weeks.

A column of sun slants through the window and lights up the silver
G
on the dean's belt buckle, a symbol I recently saw on the cover of
Gentlemen's Quarterly
in a kiosk as I was walking to work. I say good-bye, and Steven Cromer probably thinks I am smiling because I have enjoyed his musings on all those free perks I foolishly left behind, but the truth is I can already imagine Andy's laughter when he hears about my new boss, the socialist with a Gucci belt.

Twenty-One

I
t is August and we are in the Catskills—Kastilsky Mountains, as my former SCS students used to call them. Kastilsky sounds so familiar, so nostalgic. It is as if the name belonged to a railway station where electric trains from Leningrad slowed down by a grove of birches and balding firs that hid your old dacha with a caved-in roof and a wavy fence.

We are visiting Andy's younger brother, Frankie, who lives in a sprawling house with sloping floors and a pond near the fringe of the forest. Swarms of gnats do their evening dance over the brown surface of the water, just as they did near my dacha in Leningrad. Frankie's given name is Fred, but he recast it in the sixth grade because his friends from Queens were all Italian. He could possibly pass for an Italian, I think, with waves of dark hair and a tall, slim build. But there is a drop of sadness in his light green eyes that can only be traced to a tiny Jewish town in prerevolutionary Russia, which his grandparents fled around the time my mother was born, three years before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

Taking turns, we climb up a wobbly ladder helping Frankie paint the house as his three-year-old daughter, Heather, pedals her tricycle on a grassy path between the driveway and the shed, making a breakneck U-turn by the compost pile around a rhubarb patch. This could be my Russian dacha if the dacha had magically expanded, growing water and sewer pipes inside its walls and sprouting a chimney reaching all the way down to a furnace that could work on a fuel other than wood. We would be the envy of our whole village near Leningrad and especially of our truck driver neighbor, Fyodor, who—in his two years working for a state lumber factory—delivered enough materials to his own backyard to build a two-story structure that towered over our fence. Frankie's house even smells like our dacha at the end of summer: of burned wood, dust, and slices of sinewy rhubarb stems on the kitchen table, hard and sour, waiting to be dropped into a pot of boiling water for compote.

But I know this isn't our dacha, and even the old familiar smells cannot fool me. I know this is America, where I don't have to weed or water or harvest anything since there is nothing growing around the house except robust bushes and patches of tall grass. I know this sliver of country life in the Kastilsky Mountains is as un-Russian as the Austin supermarket. The house is too grand to be a dacha, the land around it too spacious and wasted. And the lilac bush by the back door is full of withered clumps of flowers, rust-colored and parched, because no one had cut them off in June and put them on the kitchen table in a vase to usher in the humid, fragrant breath of summer. Despite the gnats, the pile of compost squirming with worms, and two skinny birches trembling on the forest fringe, this isn't Russia. Despite the lilac bush with common, heart-shaped leaves, this isn't home. The trees are thin, and many look as if they haven't yet recovered from the winter, their branches tentative and slender. This is a teenage forest that has grown too fast and now boasts the height but not yet the maturity or breadth of bone.

Yet what I find under the leaves is viscerally Russian: a mushroom on a tall stem, its red cap and black specks near the root placing it, undeniably, into the category of noble mushrooms. It doesn't belong to the army of skimpy peasants we had to pick in Leningrad—hollow stems and silly umbrella heads that were only good for salting—because of the dozens of mushroom hunters who had arrived by sunrise and who also knew the spots. As I wiggle the red cap out of the ground, I see another one, just as big and splendid, and then a smaller one, and then a real giant you would never find in our dacha woods because it would've been picked a long time before it could reach this size.

I take them all, as many as I can carry in my arms, a glorious harvest that would humble any mushroom-picking rival around my dacha, an armful that would make my sister weep. Proudly, I walk into the house, smiling at the lucky chance that has allowed me to accomplish the impossible. I carefully put the mushrooms on the kitchen counter to sort and clean and get them ready for the skillet.

Heather is by the sink, watching me wash the mushrooms, asking if she can dry them. Of course she can, I say, and she carefully runs pieces of paper towel over the sponge underneath the caps. I chop the mushrooms up and they begin to sizzle in the biggest frying pan I can find, infused with melting butter, releasing the familiar forest smell of dacha and home.

My timing is perfect. Out of the kitchen window I see a car pulling up in front of the house: Andy's parents, Doris and Artie, who live fifteen minutes away from our apartment, have just arrived to join us for an August weekend in the Kastilsky Mountains. I watch his mother, with carefully styled blond hair and lipstick, bustling to get her jacket out of the backseat—a mother unlike any I remember in my Leningrad courtyard. Every morning, my mother and the mothers of my friends brushed their hair into donutlike updos held by hairpins, their faces never marred by makeup. Like everyone else, they owned one good dress, a house robe, and a few skirts and blouses they wore to work that fit on a couple of hangers in the family's armoire. Doris wears silky jackets and high heels, which lift her up to the height where her sons can embrace her without bending down.

The mushrooms are ready. I slather them with sour cream because I want everyone—Frankie and his parents and Heather and Andy and Frankie's wife, Jen, who should be back from her babysitting job any minute—to experience the pure forest taste.

The whole family is in the kitchen now, kissing and embracing, unable to ignore the thick, woody smell that has permeated the air. The dish rack is full of clean plates, and I pick one up and spoon the first portion of the fragrant stew.

“What is this yummy-smelling thing?” asks Doris, taking a step toward the stove.

“Wild mushrooms,” I say proudly. “Fresh out of the forest. I just picked them twenty minutes ago.”

Back home the reaction would be a joyful racket and a clamorous struggle to get the first taste. But what is happening in Frankie's kitchen looks more like the final scene from Gogol's
Inspector General
, the most famous silent scene in the history of theater. Doris stands frozen in the middle of the floor, halfway to the stove. Artie is by the kitchen door, his mouth open as if he were going to say something but suddenly discovered that he'd lost the gift of speech. Frankie's arms are stretched toward Heather, who is by the stove, looking up at the plate in my hands, anxious to try the mysterious dish. Because everyone is still, I freeze, too, not knowing what to do next, trying to decipher this awkwardly strange reaction to a simple offering of food.

“They're really good,” I say to break the silence, picking up and chewing on a forkful of the mushroom stew to demonstrate what I think should be obvious.

“I don't know, dear,” says Doris, breaking out of her trance. She shakes her head and steps closer to the stove to take a better look. Her hands are on her hips as she leans forward to examine the contents of the frying pan. “Wild mushrooms . . .” she mutters, stepping away as though the smell alone could poison her. “I just don't know.”

“I want to try them,” whines Heather. “Please, Daddy, please!”

I stand by the stove, feeling like an idiot for having desecrated a healthy American kitchen with a wild menace from the nearby woods. They must all think I am trying to poison them. I suddenly see myself with American eyes, eyes that never spotted a wild mushroom growing out of the forest loam. As far as they know, I may have cooked the most venomous mushroom called
muhomor
, the one my mother used to chop up in a saucer with a little sugar—and the next morning the windowsills of our dacha were black with dead flies. But worst of all is that I now see myself with the eyes of Andy's parents: it was bad enough that their American son opened his house and his soul to a recent arrival from the land of collective farms and five-year plans, but now she is trying to impose her fungal, foreign ways on their entire family, starting with an innocent three-year-old.

“I want the mushrooooooms,” Heather keeps whining, tugging on Frankie's arm.

“No,” says Andy, and she stops, taken aback by the determination in his voice. “The first person allowed to try this is me.”

“Not fair!” yells Heather as Andy approaches the stove and heaps a mushroom ladleful onto a plate. For a minute, he stares at the dark stew, then takes a breath and sends a forkful into his mouth.

“You're right,” he says. “They're delicious.”

We stand side by side near the stove, working on our plates of mushrooms, finishing every last bit, a certainty congealing in my mind, the first rational thought commemorating the six months' anniversary of our mindless bliss. A certainty as permanent as the ancient oak near my dacha, as solid as my mother herself with her ingrained demand for stability and order. Maybe it is the flavor of wild mushrooms that makes me see what's happening, but one thing suddenly becomes perfectly clear. I realize that my mother no longer needs to whisper to Marina her fears that I will be stranded and lost in an alien land, ending up alone, with no one to lean on.