Russian Tattoo (16 page)

Twenty-Five

W
e borrow five hundred dollars from a friend and book two tickets to Leningrad from London in July, 1982. Two birds with one stone, says Andy, who knows I've wanted to see London since the fifth grade, when I first learned about its history and its landmarks in the English class of my new school. Two birds? I ask, perplexed. In Russian, traveling to both England and Russia kills two rabbits with one stone, but whether it is birds or rabbits, the thought of seeing both London and my native city makes me exhilarated.

I buy several pairs of blue jeans, orders from actresses at my sister's theater who are thrilled at the prospect of a direct merchandise connection. A pair of American jeans costs an actor a month's salary of 120 rubles on the Leningrad black market, where deals are made in the murk of underground metro passages and where products are difficult to authenticate before the money changes hands. I am not sure if I feel perfectly comfortable with the prospect of selling jeans at such exorbitant prices to my sister's friends, but Marina insists that I'll be doing them a favor.

Where else can they get a guaranteed pair of Levi's?
she writes in a letter.

In Gostiny Dvor, next to vinyl shoes? They can't wait, these girls, and the talentless Mashka Blinova is the worst. Every morning, as if she had no memory, she sidles up to me to ask how many more days until you arrive.
You're deranged, I tell her.

Marina's words fly across the page, and I can almost taste her irritation.
Stop pestering me,
she tells Mashka.
Stop pissing boiling water.
I can hear her voice ringing in the greenroom, admonishing the jean-starved actress for her dogged questions.

After I reread my sister's letter, I convince myself that selling jeans to her actor friends is a noble obligation I can't possibly refuse. Besides, Andy reminds me, it is the only way we can afford this trip.

London rises from the dusty pages of Soviet textbooks like a daydream: Westminster Abbey with its Gothic soaring flight of pointed windows; jolly and robust Beefeaters at the Tower who pretend to guard me as if I were a prisoner while Andy clicks the camera; a clothing store called Laura Ashley, whose flowery dresses in the magazine
England
I used to ogle for hours instead of opening mail and answering phones at the House of Friendship and Peace.

I think of my seventh-grade English teacher, Zinaida Petrovna, lecturing the class about the Norman Invasion of 1066, the Great Fire of London, the construction of Big Ben. She wore a crow's nest of graying hair and a moth-eaten cardigan carefully mended with brown thread, but London—the London she could never see—was her passion, her unrequited love. She paced between the rows of desks, speaking ardently about the wars, the plagues, the royal weddings and betrayals—pausing in midsentence as if those foreign cataclysms had been part of her own life and she needed a moment to fumble through her memory for what happened next—as we sat there, inattentive, steeped in our adolescent dramas, clueless about what was being offered to us. I let the names of kings and queens fly past my ears, dreaming about some boy from the senior grade, concocting plans to rope my sister into taking me backstage after her performance to get close to her actor friends. So now I stand in front of massive gravestones, not recognizing the clusters of gold letters carved into the marble, unable to weave the threads of individual lives into a comprehensible tapestry of royal history. And where is Zinaida Petrovna now? A lawful pensioner, probably, sitting on a bench in the Summer Garden where Pushkin used to go for a stroll, bending over a small bed of dirt to water cucumbers and dill at her crumbling dacha. Instead, she should be the one inhaling the briny air from the Thames, as damp as on the embankments of the Neva. She should be the one walking in her brown cardigan toward Westminster Abbey, where she would, undoubtedly, have no trouble figuring out instantly who is related to whom underneath these hefty marble angels. She, who should be here, is locked in Leningrad, while I am sauntering around London, ignorant of its history and undeserving of all its royal grandeur.

After a week of guilty sightseeing, we get up early and, loaded with two heavy suitcases, take the tube to Heathrow Airport. Our bags are packed with blue jeans for the actresses from my sister's theater and presents for everyone I could think of since I began planning the trip. I thought of my mother hurrying from her medical institute to the district visa office to apply for the documents necessary to invite us to stay at my old Leningrad apartment, of her joining the line forever snaking out of the waiting room along the wall of the narrow corridor with a blinking fluorescent light. I thought of Marina hoarding bottles of Bulgarian ketchup and cans with cod liver and sprats. Where does she get all those cans with fish and jars with mayonnaise, and coffee beans that disappeared from stores when I was still a senior at the university? Where does she get beef for my mother's sour cabbage soup and lamb for the shish kebabs she is so good at marinating for summer cookouts at the dacha?

I thought of my university friend Nina and her son, Mitya, who is now two, living in a place that has never heard of disposable diapers. I thought of Nadia the
refusenik
, whose family has been refused a visa to leave the Soviet Union to go to Israel, of her mangled right breast, which she showed me after she got home from the maternity hospital, where a female doctor with small, surly eyes gouged out a few inches of infected flesh before scolding her for having developed mastitis after giving birth. I thought of all of them while filling our suitcases with panty hose and baby pacifiers, mascara and eye pencils, lipstick, powder, and T-shirts we bought at a wholesale store on Thirtieth Street in Manhattan. I thought of all of them while packing blouses, pants, skirts, and jackets from the clearance rack at a store called Mandee.

It is already noon in Leningrad, and I know my mother has been looking at her watch since she got up—earlier than usual—because she couldn't sleep. I know she has calculated every step of our trip, giving Marina updates of where we are at any given moment. “They must be on their way to the airport,” she says, glancing at her wrist. “They're probably going through customs right now,” she offers, not knowing that the only place that requires you to go through customs control when leaving the country is our Motherland.

Mama is probably wearing her best dress, the one I sent her with my first paycheck from Beefsteak Charlie's. Her eyes are smiling, which makes them even bluer, as she moves around my sister's room, which is for the next three weeks going to be mine and Andy's. She walks with a light step, humming an old war song, barely recognizable to anyone who can hear her because—like me—she has no ear for music.

“Are you excited?” Andy asks, and from his face I can see that he is. I nod, but there is a dark fear lodged inside me, the old dread of facing Soviet customs agents, the old panic at being powerless and guilty before the stone-faced guards of my country's borders. I don't want to admit to Andy that I am scared, but he can see it from my stooped shoulders and my bitten lips. I stare at my boarding pass, questioning my sanity when I suggested to him a few months earlier that we spend July in Leningrad. It sounded so exciting then, when the trip was hypothetical and airy as a cotton cloud. We were thrilled to find inexpensive tickets: People Express to London, Aeroflot to Leningrad, and the thought of seeing everyone, of walking on the streets of my city again, almost made me breathless. But now, looking at the Aeroflot plane, I feel as I did in the waiting room of the Leningrad dental clinic when our first-grade teacher took the whole class for an annual visit of drilling cavities and filling root canals.

There is nothing to be afraid of, I tell myself. My Soviet passport says “resides abroad” stamped in official purple ink, and our marriage license is safely packed in my handbag. I may still be a Soviet citizen, but I am married to an American who is right here, next to me, monitoring my every step. No border guard would dare prohibit me from stepping onto Soviet soil, or leaving it once I am there, I tell myself. Why then are my palms so clammy? Why can't I be as nonchalant as all these Western tourists?

In London it is still morning when we join a group of British passengers waiting for our flight to Russia. They leaf through their guidebooks with maps of Leningrad, all except a woman in her fifties, whose face, beneath a layer of Western creams and cosmetics, carries faint marks of her Slavic heritage. She is talking to a man who may be her English husband as she glances in my direction because from my tensed mouth and slumped back she knows I am Russian. Maybe she recognizes herself in this same airport thirty years earlier, terrified before her first visit back home.

Once we strap ourselves into the polka-dotted Aeroflot seats, the engines start without warning, and, with the speed of a military jet, the plane roars down the runway and up into the low sky. The sudden thrust of the engine presses my back into the seat, and my ears pop. The stewardess, wearing an orange life vest to demonstrate the emergency procedures, stumbles and almost falls, her fur hat rolling down the aisle.

Andy takes my hand and squeezes his fingers around it.

“Welcome to Russia,” I say, although I don't know if he can hear me over the thunder of the engines.

I have heard different explanations of why Aeroflot planes suddenly become silent in midair, hovering noiselessly as if their engines were turned off, or why they descend almost vertically, in a mad dive that makes the passengers gasp as their lives flash before their eyes. One theory suggests that Russian military pilots rotate flying civilian planes, bringing their cavalier style to Aeroflot takeoffs and landings. Another attributes the insane descent to the Soviet prohibition against taking pictures from the plane, as if those patches of woods we are able to glimpse on the way down were full of rocket-launching facilities and secret military installations. I don't care about the reason. I simply lace my fingers with Andy's and we both exhale when the plane touches down and we taxi for what seems like twenty minutes past a wall of evergreen forest and fields of unmowed grass, toward a small structure with the word
leningrad
and a red flag on the roof beating in the wind.