Russian Tattoo (17 page)

Two soldiers with machine guns watch as we leave the plane and climb into the waiting bus. Inside the terminal, our British group is locked in a room where we must fill out customs declarations: our wedding bands, my silver chain, three hundred dollars in cash. Foreign media, none. No gifts, either (I carefully removed the tags from every piece of clothing I brought: presents are subject to a tax equal to the item's price). In our suitcases, the Soviet customs agents find stacks of jeans, jackets, and shirts that could last us for several months if we don't bother washing any of them. But they don't seem to be interested in clothes, looking, probably, for a tome of Solzhenitsyn or a copy of
The New York Times
.

Next to us the Russian woman in her fifties is helping her British husband to navigate the customs form. She looks up and gives me a little smile. “You look so scared. Like a bomb has exploded on your face,” she says in Russian.

I am scared, and I feel the fear spreading its tendrils all the way to my fingers, making them tremble. I know this fear courses in the veins of every Russian, like a disease. “Is it your first time back?” asks the woman, already knowing the answer. Is it possible, I wonder, that in thirty years I will be like her, straight-shouldered and dignified, not afraid of Soviet border guards, not intimidated by their stone faces and their guns?

We are eventually herded through the narrow corridor to passport control. Andy goes first. I see him stand before a woman in a military shirt with epaulets, who is perched on a chair two feet above him. Expressionless, she stares at him, then at his passport, then at Andy's reflections in the mirrors in her fluorescent booth. After five minutes of silence, she stamps his passport and pushes it under the glass. A turnstile opens and Andy crosses over onto Soviet territory, where my mother and sister are trying to push to the front of the waiting crowd to greet us.

I am next.

Twenty-Six

M
y mother's hair is thin and snow white, covering her head like the fuzz of a baby bird. “Like during the war,” she says and pats her head with her palm. “I look like a typhus victim.” After I left, Marina tells me, Mama's hair, long and brown, began to fall out in clumps, and for a year or so she had to wear a wig. Then it started growing back, white and fluffy as the Leningrad January snow.

I kiss my mother and Marina three times on the cheeks, the Russian custom. I press into Mama's breasts and stand still for a few moments, enveloped by her softness. I stroke Mama's hair, the white down around her head, like a halo. She opens her arms to Andy, and in her eyes I read approval.

For the next two days, we are corralled at home in my old apartment, sitting in the kitchen in front of endless plates of
pirozhki
filled with cabbage and egg my mother baked, chunks of beef slathered with mayonnaise and roasted under a crust of grated cheese. We feast on Marina's famous potato
kotlety
swimming in a sauce of wild mushrooms they picked the year before in our dacha woods. I know that this cornucopia of tastes required weeks of hoarding and standing on lines, things I used to do with my mother and sister before my provincial aunt came to visit for the summer, her three sons in tow, or when my mother's Kiev cousin, Aunt Mila, rode on a train for two days to bathe in the translucent air of white nights. It is our family's tradition to secure enough food to impress our guests, especially those from far away. Yet, after two days of eating, I can see that Andy has become restless, and, from the glances he throws me across the table, I know he is dying to escape the kitchen.

I try to take the dishes to the kitchen sink, but Mama stops me. Guests aren't allowed to do any work. “Go rest,” she orders and walks to the bathroom to turn the water heater on.

There is nothing to rest from. We open the door to the balcony and look down onto the street. A few people are waiting at the bus stop, where every morning I used to take bus number 22 to my English school. It crawls out from behind the corner, a double yellow Hungarian-made Ikarus, its two cars connected with an accordion of black rubber. Behind the bus stop is a kiosk where we returned our empty bottles: fifteen kopeks for a half liter of milk, sunflower oil, or vodka. I tell Andy an old joke:
Two friends meet on the street. —What are you up to? asks Kolya. —Working, saving up to buy a car, replies Sergei. And
you? —Drinking, Kolya says. Five years later, they meet again. —How are you? Kolya asks. —Working, still saving up for a car, says Sergei. And you? —I brought back all the empty bottles, says Kolya, and bought myself a car.

Shards of conversations reach my ears, but their rhythm seems wrong, as though a tune previously known but now forgotten. Only two years have passed, but a strange feeling floods me when these familiar scenes unfold below, like frames of a film I know well, only dubbed in a foreign tongue.

As I stand on the balcony awash in sentimental thoughts, Andy thinks of more practical things. He looks down and sees a truck parked in front of a corner liquor store, a line forming behind it. I have already taught him the first lesson of Russian shopping. When you see a line, join it, and only then find out what is on the other end.

This seems like a perfect opportunity for us to escape the four walls of my apartment, if only for a little while. “Let's see what they've delivered,” Andy says. “And bring some money,” he shouts as I follow. He runs out the apartment door and down six floors of stairs because he hasn't yet figured out our Soviet elevator system: to go downstairs you must press the up button to get the cabin to the top floor.

Three minutes later, we are at the end of the line, behind men in construction gear checking their pockets for change. It turns out, the line is for cheap port called
chernila
, or ink—just as noxious and purple as the name—one ruble twenty-three kopeks a bottle. But the truck has also delivered cases of vodka called Golden Ring, too expensive for getting drunk at work, the best Stolichnaya made for export. Since no slicing or wrapping of this scarce commodity is involved, the line moves fast, and fifteen minutes later we are inside the basement store, hugging four bottles of Golden Ring, the most we can buy because there is a limit of two per person.

Mama wants to keep us in the kitchen, all to herself, plying us with borsch and
pelmeni
and racking up the guilt just in case we decided to leave this culinary paradise. Nothing has changed in the two years of my absence. I am still leashed to this table with an oilcloth whose sunflower pattern is smudged from wear; I am tethered to the bathtub faucet that dribbles water in a capricious trickle and to the gas heater that doesn't light; I am enslaved by the pot of mushroom soup, by a casserole of meatballs on the stove. But on the third day, watching Andy pace Marina's bedroom like an animal in a cage, I revolt. I act as an
egoistka
, to use Mama's word, and selfishly choose my husband's sanity over my family's control.

“I haven't shown him the city yet,” I plead, as if I were twelve and had to ask for permission. “We'll be back by evening,” I quickly add, letting her know we'd rather not be chaperoned.

“Well, do as you like.” Mama pouts and rattles the dishes into the sink.

A wave of resentment rises in my throat like vomit—the memory of every past quarrel we ever had, the anger at being a child again—but I swallow it and say nothing in response.

We take a bus to the center of the city and walk under the poplars along the Boulevard of Trade Unions toward the Admiralty and the Neva. It is a cool, drizzly day in July, a typical Baltic summer day, and Leningrad looks just as it did when I left. The red banners of the Communist Party hoisted on yellow and light green façades clash with the classic lines of Palace Square and the baroque stateliness of the Winter Palace. It isn't simply the incompatibility of the old and the new, it occurs to me, that has always been an odd idiosyncrasy of Leningrad; it is the dissonance between the artistic truth and the monstrous Soviet lie it has been forced to accommodate.

We cross the street to walk toward the Hermitage when a babushka, who has been sweeping the pavement with a bunch of twigs tied to a pole, stops, props up her hip with her fist, and begins to yell.
“Besstydniki!”
she shouts after us.

“What does she want?” Andy asks, regarding her in slight bewilderment, bemused by the sight.

It takes me a few seconds to figure out that she is outraged because we didn't use a crosswalk to get to the other side of the street.

“All of you foreigners,” she shouts in Russian, brandishing her broom. “You have no shame. You come here from all over—and you don't have the decency to go by our rules!”

A few people have stopped to look and consider if they should take part in this scandal spawned by a couple of disrespectful foreigners.

“We have neither shame nor conscience,” I say to Andy, repeating my mother's words, as we hurry away under the babushka's smoldering gaze.

“They come here from God knows where and they behave as they wish!” she continues screaming, now louder because she has acquired a small audience.

Maybe because I feel guilty, or maybe because I am curious to revisit places that I know will always be tucked into the corners of my memory, I yield to Mama's pressure that we should all spend a couple of days at our dacha. “It's only a bus ride from Peterhof,” she says, trotting out another reason why we should go. “You'll get to see the fountains and the Summer Palace of Peter the Great. How can you be in Leningrad and not visit the fountains?” she asks, producing an ace that she knows I wouldn't dare challenge.

The next day we pack our bags and take an electric train to Peterhof. We wake up to an overcast sky, but by the time we step onto the platform in the town Peter the Great ordered his architects to copy after Versailles, the wind has ripped holes in the sheets of clouds, and the sunlit gold spire rising above the roofs points us in the right direction. We trudge along the spectacular cascade of fountains: the golden statue of Samson tearing a lion's jaws open, nymphs pouring water down from their eternal jugs. It is difficult to do much sightseeing with the heavy bags we have packed, so my mother volunteers to sit on a bench and guard our things. Freed from our load, we stroll around the lawns of the park—signs in the grass prohibiting us from stepping off the path—all the way to the coast of the Gulf of Finland, from where we can glimpse the golden dot of St. Isaac's Cathedral dome gleaming in the sun.

Andy is impressed by all this royal splendor, but I am already thinking of our next stop, the dacha, with trepidation and unease. There are no fountains there, not even running water. I conjure up an image of my dacha, and pictures readily float to the surface of my memory: cranking up a rusty well chain in our yard and filling two watering cans so Mama can lug them to the beds with tomatoes and dill; hauling buckets with drinking water from a pump a quarter mile away. Andy already knows this, but he was raised in a garden apartment in Queens, so all I've told him about our outhouse and our well is stored in a part of his brain with such other improbable things about my country as getting drunk on paint thinner or rolling naked in the snow.

The bus takes us to the end of the road, and from there we walk, just as we did for over twenty years when I lived here. We walk past the Gypsy house open to every gust of wind and every hooligan because it has no fence, past the Gypsy bull tethered to the same flimsy stick in the middle of the field covered with little suns of dandelions. My heart sinks when the dacha comes into view: it is even more dilapidated than I remember, with peeling window frames and whole patches of walls bereft of paint, with tall weeds drowning frail bushes of strawberries and squash. The structure is visibly leaning to the right, as if tired of standing straight for so many years, as if it has finally decided to give up.

“We didn't have time to come here and do much work,” Mama says apologetically. “We had so much to do in the city to get ready for your visit.”

“It's really nice here,” Andy says when I translate my mother's words, but I can see he is just being polite.

Marina turns the key in the lock, and it takes her a few vigorous pulls to force the front door open. Inside it is airless and stale; it smells of dead flies and moldy sheets. I have never loved the dacha because of all the gardening work it required, but this is the first time I have felt embarrassed being here. My eye is quick to notice the little things I have never paid attention to: bloated floorboards, kitchen walls papered with yellowed copies of
Pravda,
mouse droppings on the faded oilcloth of the table. I feel embarrassed by my own embarrassment, as I awkwardly walk on creaky floors from the kitchen back to the veranda, breathing in the stifling air of my former life.

Having spent every summer of my childhood here, didn't I see the ruin of this place? Or is it possible that it has only deteriorated in the two years of my absence? Deep down I already know the answer: in these two years, my eyes have become accustomed to a different reality—that of painted walls, flush toilets, and level floors.

“We're going to have dinner soon,” says Mama, sending my sister to the garden to pick some lettuce and dill, hurrying to unpack the bread and
kotlety
she brought from the city. I know she senses what I am thinking, and I help her rinse the dishes in a bowl of warm water as she unwraps bologna and cheese and puts away the sheets of newspaper so she can reuse them to bring back the leftovers.

After we eat, Marina soaks the dishes in a bowl of warm water, the same bowl I remember we used to make jams, while Mama takes us around the garden. We walk between the bushes of black currants and gooseberries, under the branches of apple trees full of little green apples that won't be ready to eat for six more weeks, past beds of onions, radishes, and carrots, but mostly weeds.