Russian Tattoo (21 page)

Thirty-Two

I
t is August 1991, and we place a call to Marina in Leningrad. She has already made two trips to visit us in Nutley: one in the mid-1980s and the other soon after Sasha was born, both immortalized by sets of pictures Mama has installed in her new photo album. Every now and then we look at my sister wearing New York City T-shirts in front of Manhattan landmarks; we turn the pages to see her on the deck of our house—raising a glass of wine, bending over the baby carriage, setting down a plate next to my mother, whose face is shining because both her daughters are again together, if only temporarily, on the same side of the Atlantic Ocean.

There are photos of Marina at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, where we all went for Christmas at the invitation of Andy's younger brother, Frankie, who is the dining room manager there. Mama's album unfolds a series of images of my sister happy to be in America: Marina circling the Concord skating rink on rented skates; my sister showing Frankie's wife, Jen, how to season a turkey; Frankie introducing Marina to the Russian celebrity performer for that night, someone my sister, a celebrity actress herself, has never heard of.

But now Marina is back in Leningrad, and we place a call to her once a week, a complicated and expensive affair. First, we must reach an American international operator, who then, often unsuccessfully, attempts to connect to the Soviet operator handling overseas calls. My mother always takes her watch off her wrist and stretches it on the kitchen table under the wall phone to keep track of the time we spend talking to Marina. At three dollars a minute, we must be quick and concise.

Andy dials the American operator, but there is a delay and he leans against the wall with the receiver pressed to his ear. I give him a quizzical glance, and he shrugs. We wait, my mother shaking her head to demonstrate her irritation. “At these prices, it would be faster to fly there,” she grumbles.

Then Andy straightens up and separates his shoulder from the wall. “Really?” he says into the phone and listens intently, his face scrunched. Then he is put on hold again. “The operator says he thinks something has happened in Russia,” Andy tells me, and I immediately translate it to Mama. “They may have overthrown Gorbachev.” Mama and I simultaneously look at each other because we know that no Russian government has been overthrown since 1917. “The operator doesn't know what it is,” says Andy, “but it is something big.”

That evening and the next day we are glued to CNN, watching people building barricades on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, the same streets where only a couple of months earlier these same people marched under red banners to celebrate International Workers' Day. I peer into the faces gathering in front of the Parliament in Moscow they now call the White House: fathers with their school-age children getting a hands-on lesson in history, women with faces wrinkled by worry for their sons who have rushed to protect the building from encroaching tanks, pensioners who have seen cataclysms before, waiting on the sidelines, leaning on their canes. Are these the same people who over seventy years have patiently been bringing their own ropes?

“I told you this couldn't go on forever!” says Andy, whose words, when we visited Leningrad, I dismissed as the naïveté of a Westerner who had never had to face the enormity and might of the Soviet state. This is a machine, I told him, that incarcerated and murdered tens of millions of its own people; a state that defeated Nazi Germany, at the price of tens of millions of more deaths. This, I reminded him, is a place with eleven time zones and seventy nationalities; a place with nuclear weapons, fifteen independent republics, and three major television channels.

I was so certain I knew my country—its past and its future—better than an American ever could. Is it possible that Andy, precisely because he was an outsider, was able to see through the veneer of all that Soviet prowess, which I simultaneously used to ridicule and fear, and catch a glimpse of the system's crumbling core?

I think of those in Leningrad I know so well, wishing I could see what they are doing at this very moment, trying to imagine this day through their eyes. Is my sister scared, shivering at the thought that this new state of emergency will keep her forever caged within the confines of our Motherland? Is she sitting behind a locked door to our apartment—the music of Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake
flowing from every television channel as an absurd accompaniment to something none of us has ever seen—watching from our balcony as the crowds beneath bustle toward Isaac's Square, the seat of the city government? Or maybe she is among the crowd, among those shouting men and sharp-elbowed women climbing into cabs because today all taxis are giving free rides to anyone heading to the square?

I know Marina has a visceral abhorrence of crowds, which she has harbored since her first visit to Moscow, when she was eight, an experience that may have shaped her cynicism about our Soviet life. My sister told me the story when I still lived in Russia, and this is what I am thinking about now as CNN is showing us Moscow: Mama and Marina chugging on an overnight train from Ivanovo to see the May Day parade in Red Square, to see Stalin himself standing by the Kremlin wall.

It is early morning of May 1, 1950, and Marina, Mama, and Mama's cousin Katya, whose couch they're sleeping on, are walking toward the Moskva River, where Katya's group from the telephone center is assembling before the demonstration. Katya is a
telefonistka
, an impressive title, a word that rolls off Marina's eight-year-old tongue like a whistle. It is sunny and warm, the perfect weather for International Workers' Day, and the streets have been washed by blue trucks that she saw earlier spraying water in heavy, blazing arches. Marina is between Mama and Katya decked out in their best dresses, holding their hands, jumping over the puddles left by the trucks.

They wait in the crowd before the entrance to Red Square, and then everyone starts walking: people with banners and portraits of the politburo members and red carnations made from paper swaying on long wire stems. At the entrance to the square they stop, jerk forward, then stop again, and Katya explains that this is where they are going to be divided into six columns. They inch past a row of men in military uniforms, their gold epaulets touching, so that no one from one column can slip into the column closer to the Kremlin, where the politburo watches them from above the square.

Mama hoists Marina onto her shoulders so she can see. Now my sister is in the midst of a forest of swaying sticks with flags, banners, and portraits, in the midst of balloons and red carnations. She squints and peers to her left, where everyone else is peering. There, five columns of people away, a group of men stand on granite platforms against the Kremlin wall. In the center is a separate dark figure in what looks like a military uniform. Marina knows it is Stalin, the country's conscience and revolutionary glory, the people's father, as the radio reminds them every morning. He is the father to all who march in this square and all those gathered around radios from here to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Only he is so far away Marina can barely make him out. He looks tiny and ant-like, not at all like the man they all know from paintings, grand and immortalized in oil, and there is nothing glorious about him that she can see.

Then the ant called Stalin raises his hand, and the square explodes. Every mouth opens in one uniform roar, and the forest of banners and portraits shudders and sways, as if struck by a blast of wind. It is so terrifying that Marina starts screaming. She screams and screams as hard as she can. But the May Day demonstrators are all safely below, and she is the one trapped in the eye of the storm. Poles on her left rattle by her ear; sticks with portraits seem to aim at her head from the right; flags shake with crimson furor and hiss like flames. The roar peals over the square like thunder, mouths fusing into one howling throat, one hungry set of jaws with rows of sticks for teeth, ready to crunch and chew and spit her out.

Marina shrieks and sobs, all in vain, because her voice doesn't stand a chance against the roar of the whole square. She hunches over and rubs the tears around her face. With her arms over her head, cowering and bawling, she rides on Mama's shoulders to the side street, where Katya finally hears her cries.

Staring at our television, I wonder if Mama is thinking about that trip to Moscow, too. “I'm so worried about Marina,” she says, her eyebrows mashed together. “I hope she isn't foolish enough to go outside. Maybe they will cancel the theater because of all this,” she says, wistfully. I know how much Mama wants Marina to be with us; how much she would give to have her right here, watching these barricades on television.

“They will cancel everything, for sure,” I say. One look at the barricades and the tanks makes it clear that no curtain is going to rise today, no movie screen will spring to life, and no school bell will summon students to their desks. No matter how it ends, I know what we are watching today on our television screen will be a chapter in future history books. It all feels like Sasha's febrile seizure, I think: For decades, Russia has been ill and it is now burning with fever. The overloaded system shudders and goes into shock.

We sit in front of the TV all day. People mill around the barricades, pass thermoses of hot tea to soldiers sitting on top of tanks, and I know that Mama, like I am, is thinking one thing: how is this all going to end? We both know that Russian revolutions do not usually boast peaceful finales. In a grave voice, an announcer speaks about an elite division of special troops approaching Moscow's center, and I don't have to translate anything because the screen is now filled with images of steel rumbling along the streets. Mama sighs and shakes her head. She is the only one of us who has seen real tanks.

The scene switches to a Russian woman, tears in her eyes, standing in a small crowd on a Moscow sidewalk. “What does this all mean?” she laments into the camera, which pans over a line of armored vehicles parked on the side of the street. “Our own sons must shoot at us now?”

We all hope no one shoots as we look at the people on the street, their faces not stained with familiar cynicism and resignation. A young, bearded man directs a small crane lowering a block of cement to form a barrier; a group of students wave the driver of a trolley bus to join the line of cars barricading the entrance to the square; a soldier whose face is splattered with freckles smokes on top of a tank hatch. The camera follows an elderly woman, wearing a dark coat and with a kerchief around her head, carrying a string bag full of bricks. She stops, lifts out the bricks one by one, slowly, and places them on the barricade.

I wonder what Mama thinks of the barricades and the tanks. Whose side is she on, my enthusiastic, communism-building, wartime surgeon mother? After three years in America, does she still believe in the bright dawn and the necessity of marching in step with the collective? I wonder what she thinks of the tricolor Russian flag, beating in the Moscow wind, instead of the bloody red Soviet banner that branded her entire life.

It is now very quiet in the room, so quiet we can hear one another breathe. Two synchronous visual moments align themselves and freeze before my eyes: a division of tanks in the center of Moscow set against a sea of people, and the three of us—across the world—watching the confrontation on the screen. This is how I will remember the day: the sultry silence of a New Jersey summer; Mama's frozen profile with anxious crinkles at the corners of her eyes; a kerchiefed Moscow babushka helping build a barricade from a string bag full of bricks.

Thirty-Three

F
or a couple of years, we don't hear anything about Marina's green card lottery, but my mother is persistent. She fills out an application once a year as the rules allow. Each time, she makes sure I buy a money order for a hundred dollars, the price of the petition, and write the name of the U.S. State Department on the front. Then she walks to the post office and gives the envelope to the clerk in person, to witness that it is stamped and sent on its way.

In 1993 a phone call comes from Leningrad: Marina, choking on her own words, announces that she has just received a postcard from the U.S. Embassy in Russia.

“What postcard?” I shout into the phone because I can hardly hear her across the static of international ether.

My mother is standing next to me, craning her neck, trying to hear what my sister says, prompting me what to ask her. “I can't hear anything,” I whisper, waving at Mama to be quiet.

“A postcard!” Marina yells. “About the green card lottery. I won.”

My mother throws up her arms, then presses them to her chest, as if her lungs had suddenly emptied of air.

I tell myself I also feel ecstatic, but maybe not quite as excited as my mother. A doubt creeps into my mind, a toxic thought of utter selfishness. I am ashamed to reveal it to anyone, so for days, I wallow alone in the tar of its sordidness.

Thirteen years ago I left Russia, primarily to escape my family. Now, my family has followed me here, one by one. My mother came for a visit and never left; my older sister is soon to arrive, a newly issued green card in hand. I'm lucky my aunt Muza, with her three married sons, her five grandchildren, and a dog, is too provincial to consider relocating to the lair of rotting capitalism, five thousand miles away.

Unwelcome images float to the surface, and I try to push them back down. I imagine a key scratching around the keyhole, unable to find the opening. I hear Mama yelling at my sister; I see Marina slumped in our Leningrad kitchen chair, an unlit cigarette hanging from her lip. I want to banish these pictures, but they keep rising up in my memory, like bile.

“You have to learn to play the hand you've been dealt,” Andy reminds me in his therapist voice. “Stop wishing for another hand.”

Since it is getting more and more difficult for Mama to climb steep stairs to the third floor of our house, we decide to rent her an apartment within walking distance of where we live in Nutley. Or maybe this decision is less noble and more selfish than it appears on the surface. Maybe this offer, so pure and admirable at first sight, is nothing more than a defensive move before Marina's imminent arrival.

With the help of a friend who is a paralegal, I fill out the forms and collect the necessary papers. I must guarantee that Marina won't end up on welfare, that she is educated and healthy and stable. The pages are filled with little squares of moral excellence, and I check them all. Has never been arrested, check. Has never been associated with the Communist Party. Has never taken drugs. Has never carried a weapon. Check, check, check. On the U.S. immigration form, my sister is a paragon of constancy and integrity, a perfect immigrant any country would be happy to embrace.

When I call the real Marina, she sounds anxious and brash.

“You have no idea what life is like here,” she yells into the phone, her voice carrying across the ocean in the full scale of its outrage. “You can't imagine the hopelessness, the desperation. It's
bespredel
,” she says, using the Russian word that in three short syllables encapsulates the idea of being placed beyond all possible limits, the word we have all overused in our Soviet kitchens for so many years.

“But what happened to the putsch of August 1991?” I ask, knowing instantly how naïve it sounds, how simpleminded and silly. “That was only two years ago. There was euphoria on people's faces. I saw it with my own eyes. We all saw it.”

“Euphoria?” Marina mocks. “Don't make me laugh.” Her voice is familiar and taunting, but it is edged with new gloom. “We are all on the
Titanic
here, and it is sinking. I get up at seven in the morning to save a place in line for milk. For milk! Yesterday a woman recognized me in the store, from a play or television, I don't know. You? she asked, wide-eyed. You have to stand on line, too?”

I look around as I listen, at a carton of strawberries I just brought from ShopRite, at my neighbor's pool just behind the fence. I try to imagine Marina standing in the hallway of our Leningrad apartment by the phone, in front of a refrigerator empty of everything except milk, alone and afraid.

Two big things happen almost simultaneously. On the phone, Marina tells us that she has just received her green card. On this side of the ocean, Dr. Klughaupt peers at the picture of my mother's mammogram and points to a white spot in her left breast.

“It's most likely cancer,” he says.

In my mind, the word
cancer
immediately conjures up my father. I see him sitting in bed in his long underwear as Mama turns the knobs on our television set, summoning a figure-skating couple gliding over a rink, a woman pirouetting on one foot, her back almost touching the ice in a movement called the death loop. I see him hanging on the shoulders of Mama and Marina, who carry him to a waiting taxi that will take him to the hospital. The sound emerging from the doctor's mouth hisses through the air and lacerates my ears, like a curse.

I wonder if Mama has a similar reaction to the Russian word
raak
when I translate to her what Dr. Klughaupt said.
Raak
—with its all-reaching claws capable of cutting off oxygen and squeezing out life—a word no one wants to hear at a doctor's office, on either side of the world.

“But at her age, it is probably fully curable,” the doctor adds quickly, and I immediately translate that, too.

My mother accepts the diagnosis calmly, with the unflappability of a survivor. The same stoicism she used when she knocked on the door of every party boss in Leningrad to get my father into a hospital, when she operated on a nine-year-old wounded boy in a military hospital during the war despite the order not to treat civilians, when she kissed me good-bye at Leningrad International Airport thirteen years ago, accepting our separation, which she thought would last forever.

Marina arrives on the day following Mama's outpatient lumpectomy. It went well, said the surgeon: she removed ten lymph nodes, and only one turned out to be cancerous. The doctor is the same age as I am, but this is where our likeness ends—she is blond, self-­confident, and optimistic. She enthusiastically recites the instructions to me: Change the dressing tomorrow. Call if she develops a fever. We'll follow this with six months of radiation and five years of tamoxifen. She will be fine.

“You'll be fine,” I say to Mama, but I am not sure she believes me. She smiles anyway because she knows that tomorrow Marina will be here, because of her tenacity. Tomorrow the three of us will reunite and be together again, just as we were in Leningrad, the thought that makes me simultaneously ebullient and nauseous.

Mama's new apartment looks onto the tops of trees and has almost as much light as our old place in Leningrad. The ceilings are lower, but the parquet floors are newer, and, unlike in our old apartment, the faucet in the bathroom gurgles with hot water at any time of day or night.

Marina, no longer dazed and jet-lagged, keeps it unbearably clean. She also changes Mama's dressings and whips up complicated meals for both households, the two of them and the three of us. “It's so easy here,” she says, “when you don't have to spend half your time searching for ingredients.”

A week after her arrival, she walks to a local deli and gets a job making sandwiches and salads. Several days later, the deli's counter blooms with containers full of Marina's borsch and bowls of salad Olivier she whips up as effortlessly as she did back home. She invents a recipe for roasted chicken breast, the best-selling item at lunchtime, followed by my sister's baked
pirozhki
stuffed with scallions and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

Every day, as I drive to work past the deli and the apartment building where my mother and Marina now live, I feel guilty for my fetid doubts, for underestimating the talents of my older sister.

A month after Marina's arrival, my mother and sister invite me to bring Sasha for an early dinner after her kindergarten day is over. I am a little uneasy because this is our first dinner together since I left our Leningrad kitchen. It feels like the first rehearsal of a play, with three of us performing new roles: my mother as the hostess in her own apartment albeit not in her own country, my sister as caretaker and newcomer trying to find her footing, and I—a guest, a translator, and a cultural adviser to both of them. To add to the pressure, I am also the procreator, the parent of the family's only offspring.

We sit around the table in Mama's living room, our former kitchen table we recently replaced with an antique Andy pulled out of our basement. The armchair and the reading lamp are from our house, too, next to a glass side table with a wrought-iron frame Mama found on a Nutley sidewalk. I think of how the three of us used to sit in our Leningrad kitchen, the smudged oilcloth under our teacups and little saucers with dacha strawberry jam, the smell of yesterday's soup and fried onions permeating the walls. Here it smells of the lilacs I cut from a bush in our backyard and of the freshly made culinary concoction still simmering on the stove, the pot Marina stirs with her resolute hand.