Russian Tattoo (15 page)

I think of the American sitting next to me, sipping Stolichnaya vodka, on the Aeroflot plane that brought me to this country. We raise our glasses and offer a toast over the pots of new, aromatic foods—Andy to me and I to Lenin, who managed to escape his bright Cuban future on a raft made of tires.

Twenty-Three

B
y the end of the summer I am officially divorced and hired to teach the next academic year at Hudson College. Every two weeks the secretary of the Basic Skills department hands me a payroll check, an amount greater than I used to make at SCS, for less than half the time. I don't mind working less and making more. It allows me to send extra parcels of clothes to my mother and sister and books to Nina, although I am not at all sure if the American novels I pick up at library sales ever slip past the sharp eye of Soviet customs.

Some do, it turns out from Nina's letter, while others do not. Doctorow's
Ragtime
makes it, together with Saul Bellow's
Herzog
and
The Chosen
by Chaim Potok, but two James Bond novels get tangled in the customs net and never reach Nina's address. In my mind, I see a gray-suited KGB official, a graduate of my university's English department—possibly someone I used to know personally—surrounded by stacks of confiscated paperbacks and magazines in English, their spines cracked by the hands of those zealous bureaucrats toiling in his office. I think of these guards who are privy to the latest offerings from the West they seize at the border, hard at work protecting ordinary Soviet citizens from the contagion of capitalism.

Thank you for the jacket for me and shoes for Mitya,
writes Nina, whose son is now almost one and a half.

How did you know that I've been longing for a jacket like this, driving everyone around me crazy with my insanity? With the hundred rubles I'd saved I spent all winter and spring riffling through consignment stores, predictably finding nothing—and suddenly this! You, old girl, with your regular parcels, are an exception from everyone who has left, and now, for the first time in my life, I walk around with my head
held high because my clothes are not worse than those of my students. And for Mitya—you know how absolutely impossible it is to buy shoes here—the stuff our factory Skorokhod produces isn't simply ugly, it is completely unsuitable for the one function it's made for, walking.

Rudik sends his most profound thanks for the medicine,
Nina writes. Recently her husband had been diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, and Andy suggested that we send them the new ulcer pill, Tagamet.

First we didn't know anything about it and Rudik wanted to gobble it up right away.
Then we asked around and found out that it was something completely unique, something no one here has ever seen. So this is our dilemma: should he take it now and hope the ulcer goes away, or keep it for a rainy day? Rudik has made an appointment to see a decent specialist, someone who knows about Western medicine, so we'll do what the doctor recommends.

So glad (and so envious) that you enjoy teaching. As far as England goes . . .

I wrote to Nina earlier that Andy and I were planning to go to London—the city both Nina and I know by heart from our school lectures—as soon as we could scrape together the price of two airfares and a hotel.

I won't make any comments about England since we've decided that it simply doesn't exist. It isn't there, along with France, Switzerland, and everything else to the west of us. The only place that is real is our indestructible Union of Soviet free republics.

And one last thing: it made me a little sad to read that you don't have real friends there . . .

I know I have one real friend, at least—the friend who is four thousand miles away, and the thought of it makes me a little sad, too.

We need to look for a house, Andy says. I don't quite understand why we need a whole house for ourselves, but he talks convincingly about owning versus renting, supporting his argument with examples of higher property values and bigger deductions that fly past my ears. I haven't yet mastered the system of taxes here, but if Andy says we will be better off living in a house, I happily agree.

It is fun driving around new towns and gawking at the interiors of different houses, imagining that we could be the owners of eight rooms, two bathrooms, and a garage, but the idea of such enormous debt is foreign and forbidding. We had no concept of mortgage back home. Whatever we could find to buy we almost always bought with cash, and that direct method of exchange made things simple and quick. There were no lawyers and no banks, and the notion of interest ranked high among capitalist vices, along with violence, sex, and unemployment.

Every Sunday we park at a real estate office, get into the broker's Chevy, and drive around towns that blend into one another along their amorphous boundaries. I think of the Leningrad suburb where our dacha stood, of a field dotted with squatting wood structures surrounded by fences called Old Peterhof, where the next town was on the other side of the woods, a stop away on the electric train. Here, the house we see first is in Bloomfield; its next-door neighbor, our real estate agent points out, lives in Glen Ridge. The broker is in her fifties, with dry hands and graying hair pulled up in a bun, probably a grandmother since the ledge behind the backseat is littered with half-used sheets of ladybug stickers. She reminds me of my Leningrad high school teacher Irina Ivanovna, an English grammarian with a patient smile and a quiet passion for verb tenses.

“What are you looking for in a house?” she asks, a question that bewilders me. What do I want in a house? I think. A sturdy roof, solid walls, and wooden floors, for sure, as well as running water and indoor plumbing—but I know this is not what she means. The agent sees my puzzled face and helps me with more questions. “Are you looking for high ceilings, for instance? Some people won't look at anything with ceilings below nine feet. Or parquet floors?”

I quickly do the feet to meters calculations in my mind. In our apartment in Leningrad—and every apartment I'd ever been in, with the exception of my sister Galya's place, built in the 1960s and called a Khrushchev slum—the ceilings were a minimum of eleven feet high and the floors were all parquet. I nod enthusiastically, confirming to the agent that I would indeed like high ceilings and parquet floors.

“And how about a fireplace?” says Andy, looking at me for approval. “Do we want a fireplace?”

The word
fireplace
elicits images of the Hermitage: tsarist thrones and baldachin beds, rococo carvings and complicated chandeliers, fine mosaics and rare inlaid woods. This is an unwelcome distraction, and I promptly force my mind to pedal back and focus on the room we are standing in. It is an entranceway to a house that was built in 1903. It has a massive oak door with leaded windows, and across from it there is a fireplace. I look up: the ceilings are over nine feet high.

I wish my mother could see me, marching through all these houses, declaring my preferences for parquet and fireplaces. What would she think? Has she ever sat in front of a fireplace—not a museum piece we have all seen a hundred times when provincial relatives came to town and we had to take them to the royal places Leningrad was famous for, not a wood-burning stove she used to heat the house in Ivanovo and at our dacha, but the real thing, a decadently open alcove with enough room for a fire to show off to an audience, to dance and twist and lick the logs with orange tongues of flame? She would be too practical for this, my mother. She would want to restrict the fire to the gut of the stove, close it off with a lid so it was restrained, efficient, and docile. A fireplace, in my mother's mind, would be, without doubt, too wasteful, too disorderly, too free.

“We must have a fireplace,” I say, and Andy nods, confirming our new requirement to the agent.

“All right,” she says eagerly. “Then let me tell you more about this house. The owner died recently and left the house to a charity, which may suit you because they say they'll hold the mortgage for the buyers.”

There is no word for mortgage in contemporary Russian, so there is no way I can describe to my mother what the broker has just told us. The best word I can come up with is
credit,
the word my mother used when we bought our television fifteen years ago. “We bought it with credit,” she proudly announced when two men delivered a huge square box with the price tag of 575 rubles, three times my mother's monthly wages. Every month for five years she went to a local savings union to pay down the credit, even as the television set started heading for premature death with spasms of crackling noise and lines jumping across the screen.

At home, Andy and I sit on the couch and talk about the houses we have seen. One had a porch caving in to the right, an unfortunate reminder of my dacha. In another, the first floor smelled of yesterday's soup, and pots of aloe sat on peeling windowsills, just like the nursery school in the courtyard of my Leningrad apartment building.

“Look, they all need a lot of work,” Andy says, “but they're the only houses in our price range.”
Fixer-upper
is a new word I add to my growing vocabulary of contemporary American, and it makes me marvel once again at the plasticity of the English language, at the ease with which it marries stems and suffixes to create names for novel concepts.

We sit on the couch and talk, not discussing the house with a fireplace until every other place gets its share of pros and cons and is predictably rejected. We leave that house for the end, like a dessert.

Twenty-Four

I
n a letter to my mother I write about our plans to buy a house, knowing that in her mind this will solidify my claim to a normal life. The idea of buying a house, I know, will calm her fears and stop the flow of inquiries about when I am going to return to Robert. I describe the house we put a bid on from memory: three floors, three bedrooms, floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves in the living room, chestnut banisters and moldings, two stained-glass windows, turn-of-the-century chandeliers downstairs. I neglect to say it is a fixer-upper. On paper, it sounds like the palace of Peter the Great that adorns the front of the Summer Garden in Leningrad. In reality, it boasts sooty walls that seem tired of the old wallpaper hanging down in strips over bloated linoleum floors, cracked and uneven as Leningrad sidewalks.

The real estate agent calls us and says that our bid has been accepted, with one condition. In order to qualify for the mortgage the foundation has offered to hold for us, we must be married.

“Can they do that?” Andy asks, annoyance in his voice. He is leaning on the kitchen wall, the receiver propped by his shoulder. “Can they make our being married a condition to buying the house?”

“No, legally they can't,” the agent says. “But they're doing it. Their interest rate is seven points lower than what any bank will give you. So I guess, this means they can.”

I listen to the conversation and cannot help but wonder if Andy is like Robert, willing to get married but not wanting to get married. Is this aversion to marriage something typically American, something that has eluded me since I arrived here, like so many other things I still don't understand?

“Of course, we're going to get married,” I hear Andy say. “We just haven't talked about it.”

We haven't talked about many things. We have simply lived, a year of oblivion and happiness, a year without pointed questions my mother is too far away to ask. Andy hangs up the phone and sits on the couch where I am marking students' essays. “Will you marry me?” he asks, looking at me and waiting for a response, as if he believed there were a chance that I could possibly say no.

I write a letter home that Andy and I are getting married next month, imagining the reaction this announcement is going to receive in Leningrad. I think of my mother on her way back from work unlocking our mailbox, a wooden rectangle with our apartment number, 117, painted in black. She is in a hurry because she has already glimpsed a foreign airmail envelope through the holes cut out at the bottom of the box, and she fumbles for the key with quick, impatient fingers. The elevator may be working—or not—and she may have to walk all the way up to the sixth floor, slowly and methodically, step by step, heaving her weight made heavier by a string bag full of groceries from one floor to the next, resting on the landings by the windows facing the courtyard. She will not open the letter until she gets into the apartment, takes off her coat, hat, and scarf, and puts the eggs, cheese, and butter in the refrigerator that towers in the corner next to the coatrack. She is deliberate and disciplined, my mother; she has always believed in proper regimen and order.

Strangely, I can feel the rough brown wool of her coat, which she carefully hangs on the hook, and the softness of her scarf Marina has knitted. The hallway smells of onions she keeps on the shelf between the outer and inner entrance doors, but also of the melting snow that has already turned to gray slush on the bottoms of her boots. In house slippers, she walks into her room, sits down at the desk, and carefully opens my letter, cutting through the top seam with a letter knife, a part of a desk set including two inkwells and a blotter left from my father.

What does she do when she reads that I am getting married, for the second time in two years, to another American? I see her grasp her hands around my grandma's picture, which stands, framed, next to the family photo album, as if she were telling my story to her own mother. Does she sigh with relief that I won't end up alone in an alien country? Does she sigh with sadness, knowing that this new marriage means I will never come back to live in Leningrad again?

In two weeks, on February 13, she will be sixty-eight, and we are going to call her, booking a call hours in advance, through two international operators. Her face shows the new folds of wrinkles my departure for America has carved into the skin around her eyes. She wants to tell Marina about my getting married again, but my sister's play has opened tonight, and that means no one knows when and in what state Marina is going to come home.

I knew when Marina was drunk before she even opened the front door: I heard the elevator door bang shut and for a few minutes a key would scratch around the keyhole, in slow, unfocused stirs. Then, once she managed to get the key in, it would jiggle tentatively, as if trying to figure out the right way to turn in the lock. Those were the nights when my mother and I would stand by the door, waiting for Marina to slump into the hallway, her eyes half closed, words tangled in her mouth like wet laundry. We would pull off her coat, lifting her arms as if she were a rag doll, then drag her into her room, heave her on the divan, and throw a blanket at her, like a stone.

“Again! Drunk as a plumber!” my mother wailed the familiar refrain. “What did I do to deserve this?” She stumbled through a series of predictable scenes—pulling off Marina's boots and coat—alternating spasms of anger and despair. After hauling my sister inside, I usually abandoned the scene for the room where my mother and I slept, and turned on the television's grainy images as Mama sobbed and helped Marina undress, invoking a lengthy list of relatives who would have dropped dead at the sight of this shame. When the wailing stopped, there was a sharp smell of valerian drops, the plant-based tranquilizer we all turned to in moments of crisis. Then I heard my mother rumbling through the shelf with medicines, pulling out a package of sweet, white, over-the-counter tablets that were supposed to pacify her heart.

The next day Marina would be all sweetness, her bloodshot eyes bovine, seeking forgiveness. In a short-lived fit of postdrunken humility, she would scrub the laundry on the washboard in the bathtub, or concoct a complicated soup, or simply fail to fight with us over something irrelevant and small.

I think of my mother holding my letter in her hand, wishing that no one in Marina's theater would have a birthday, or a play opening, or another happy event that needs to be celebrated. I hope she can tell Marina about my impending marriage as soon as my sister gets home, so they can sigh with relief together, or sigh with regret. I feel sorry for my mother, who is left to dread theater premieres and anniversaries, who has to listen for the tentative scratches of the key all by herself now. I feel guilty that she has no one to help her shoulder my sister to bed, no one to complain to about her curse. But I also feel relieved that I am on the other side of the ocean from my mother and my sister, out of their reach.

Andy and I sit in our apartment and make a list of what we need to do: get a marriage license, make an appointment at the city hall, ask my friends at the college if anyone can lend me a cream-colored dress. We have decided it will be a small affair, just the two of us, with Andy's parents as witnesses.

I think of my first wedding, at the Acts of Marriage Palace on the Neva embankment, where I had to invite my Leningrad family, my aunt from the provinces, and my friends—about twenty people in all—the smallest wedding that place had ever seen. I hated the high-ceilinged room where we stood in front of an official with a red ribbon across her chest so out of place in this formerly splendid, prerevolutionary space; I hated her speech about the creation of a new society cell; I hated being the center of attention, the polyester dress clinging to my legs.

After we sign the papers and exchange rings in the office of a Jersey City judge, Andy and I go to the movies. We sink into the dusty seats of a small theater in the East Village in Manhattan and watch a double feature of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, its old black-and-whiteness as sweet and comforting as the day itself.

My new in-laws have invited us to an expensive restaurant in Greenwich Village, where we sit near a fireplace over small plates with a lettuce called endive and then bigger plates of meat called beef Wellington. We pour champagne and drink to our wedding day. I don't know if Andy's parents are as pleased with our hasty marriage as they say they are. They smile reserved American smiles and wish us happiness.

Back in our apartment in North Bergen, I take off my dress borrowed from a fellow teacher and the gold necklace lent to me by a counselor who works with Andy. Nothing has changed, not even my Russian last name. I think of how cold my actions would sound to a stranger: I married Andy to be able to buy a house just as I married Robert to get away from my family. Two marriages, two years apart. Exactly what my mother did: she married her first husband in 1940 and her second, Marina's father, during the war in 1942. Am I my mother's daughter, after all?