Russian Tattoo (22 page)

I know my sister has spent time and thought preparing this meal: borsch with shiitake mushrooms, homemade eggplant caviar, cucumber salad with sour cream and dill, chunks of salmon steeped in butter sauce. When I compliment her on every course, she waves her wrist and praises the ingredients. “With ShopRite around the corner, I could make dinners like this for a battalion,” she says, dismissing her indisputable cooking talent.

I envy Marina's creativity of pairing shiitake mushrooms with beets, her moxie for figuring out the recipe for the proverbial eggplant caviar everyone back in Leningrad used to extract from cans. Why didn't we ever dare replicate it at home? I wonder, and, with my sister presiding over this feast procured at ShopRite, the answer instantly becomes obvious: because we lacked the ingredients the recipe required.

Sasha eyes the eggplant caviar suspiciously; she eats one spoonful of borsch and licks a dollop of sour cream, leaving the cucumbers untouched.

“What's the matter?” my mother asks her.

“I don't like mushrooms,” Sasha whines and makes a face. I know what comes next: she hates the taste of dill, too.

“Aunt Marina made this especially for you,” says my mother in Russian, in her teaching voice. “You must eat it all.” I know Mama thinks that American schools are too accommodating and permissive, and now this back talk is obvious proof that they allow too much disobedience and provide too little order. Or maybe she thinks that the failure to teach a child proper behavior is not the result of schools at all but rather my own lack of discipline and will. She takes Sasha's spoon and picks out a mushroom. “Here you go: one, two, three.”

Sasha sucks in her lips and flattens herself against the back of her chair. I think of the story Mama has so often told us, the story I would remind her about were she not so intensely focused on the inward search for a culprit of this scandalous revolt. When Marina was little, my mother used to feed her spoonfuls of gooey farina my sister hated and refused to swallow. All day Marina wouldn't yield, banning the glue-like mush from entering her body, so Mama had no choice but to put her to bed with her mouth full and her cheeks swollen like two balloons.

I glance at Marina, wondering if this is also what she is thinking, if scenes with our own grandma in their wooden Ivanovo house are reeling in her head. But we are all playing different roles today—perhaps with the exception of my commandeering mother—so I cannot tell what is on my sister's mind.

“Sashenka, this isn't very nice,” my mother fumes. “We're trying to do what's best for you.” My daughter may not understand what is best for her—and neither may I—but my mother always knows. “Open your mouth, quickly, one, two, three.”

Sasha slides down from the chair and crouches under the table. My mother's orders must have hypnotized me with their familiar controlling cadences: almost automatically, without thinking, I get up and sharpen my voice.

“Come out at once,” I say, a command directed to the floor. “And take your seat at the table.”

I see my mother frowning, just as she did decades ago, when instead of quietly playing in the sandbox with the rest of my nursery school collective, I took off on my own to explore the archways and vaulted hollows under the buildings of our courtyard. Aunt Polya, the food and punishment authority of the nursery school, shouted at me in her kitchen voice and put me in the corner, where I stood upset but not remorseful.

“Sasha, come out of there,” I insist, intentionally speaking English, erecting a linguistic wall to separate myself from my mother.

It is completely quiet in the room, and we hear pedestrians' voices from the street: two brazen children fighting over something with their mother. I don't know what I resent more: my senseless irritation at my daughter or Mama standing witness to my parental helplessness. Crouched under the table, Sasha keeps silent, and I can feel the anger creeping up my chest: the anger at my stubborn American daughter, the anger at my overbearing Russian mother.

P
ART 3

Sasha

Thirty-Four

W
hen Sasha is five, she first notices graffiti scrawled on the overpass over the FDR.

“Look!” she calls from the backseat, an expression of bewilderment and glee spreading over her face. “Who did that?” she wants to know, her eyes focused on the letters she can now read.

“Bad boys,” Andy says. “Only bad boys write on walls.”

She leans out of her car seat to hold the graffiti in her gaze as long as she can. “I want to be a bad boy, too,” she says, and it sounds so precious from the lips of a preschooler that we both giggle foolishly.

By five, she can read in both English and Russian, and I am prematurely happy, content to see that our hours of reading aloud to her have sprouted such enviable results. Her kindergarten teacher tells us that her classmates routinely ask Sasha to read the signs on the school walls and book titles on the shelves. When she obliges, they run over to the teacher to make sure her answers are correct. This, sadly, seems to be the extent of her interactions with other children.

One day when the teacher is sick, the class is taught by a teacher's aide. They are talking about dinosaurs, and the aide writes the word
Jurasic
on the blackboard.

Sasha raises her hand. “Mrs. Cowan,” she calls out. “
Jurassic
has two
s
's.”

“No, it doesn't,” replies the teacher's aide. “Now please sit down and pay attention,” she admonishes and goes on with her dinosaur story.

For a few minutes, Sasha pretends to listen. Then, when Mrs. Cowan has turned her back to the class to write on the blackboard, she gets up and tiptoes to where she knows there is a fat dictionary standing on the shelf in the adjacent room. She has seen its hard red cover and the word
webster
embossed in gold on the front. She climbs onto a chair, reaches up, and pulls the tome off the shelf. Holding it pressed to her chest like a favorite doll, she carries it to the other room and opens the pages to “J.”

Mrs. Cowan is not pleased. “Why do we even have a dictionary in kindergarten?” she complains to the director.

That evening Sasha and I drive home in the golden light of the evening, past the newly constructed buildings of a big pharmaceutical company, its eight stories of glass sparkling in the glow of an early sunset.

“Look at all those windows,” Sasha says wistfully. “Do you think the bad boys want to break them?”

“What bad boys?” I ask.

“You know, the ones who write graffiti on the walls,” she says, and in my rearview mirror I can see a glint in Sasha's eyes.

Inwardly I can't help but respect this bold, rebellious statement from my five-year-old. But I am almost thirty-nine, and I have learned the uninspiring wisdom about the futility of breaking windows. Should I nod in agreement, in the hope that she will learn to stand up to authority? Or is it my job to teach my daughter an early lesson—the lesson I failed to learn from my own mother, the one about the necessity of
poryadok
, order?

Andy and I are in Toys“R”Us looking for Sasha's Christmas present, but I quickly realize that the singular of this noun—
present
as opposed to
presents
—does not fit with the sense of grandiosity fueling this outing.

“One present?” Andy says in disbelief. “When I was her age, I got a dozen presents. All I remember is a sea of gift-wrapped packages, never just one. We have a small family, so we need to make sure she gets plenty of presents.”

I am not at all convinced that it is wise to pile up the whole inventory of Toys“R”Us at the feet of a first-grader who didn't ask for a magic Santa, or a dollhouse with tiny furniture inside, or even a game of Chutes and Ladders. The presents I received in Russia were few, coveted, and treasured. A suede jacket my sister brought back from her theater tour in Latvia, where factories had never abandoned making clothes people would want to wear, or a special edition of collected fairy tales my aunt from Kiev sent me for my birthday. One long-desired present, in my mind, is worth a whole sack of the unrequested toys that Andy has deposited in our cart. But I know I can't persuade him to restock the shelves with all these games and dolls Sasha will not appreciate. This is America, after all, a country of unnecessary abundance and unintended waste. Maybe I still don't understand how it works. So I am willing to defer to Andy in what to me seems like a worthy undertaking clearly bent out of shape. I am willing to believe that we can earn good parenting points with a bunch of gifts from a chain store.

It has been a year since Marina's arrival, and she has announced she is moving to New Orleans to get married. I am impressed by my sister's boldness, but my mother is simply ecstatic. She has been waiting for her older daughter to get married her whole life, always blaming theater and acting for my sister's single state. Who would want an actress for a wife, my mother always lamented, who would voluntarily entwine his destiny with the theatrical lack of order, with the frivolity and chaos of the stage?

My mother has already met Marina's fiancé, Tom, who flew to Nutley a few months ago to introduce himself. Mama says that he looks and sounds decent, and, knowing her critical eye, I decide to believe her.

The story is bizarre and appropriately dramatic. On a wintry day in March, during the six months Marina was waiting for the green card papers to be processed, she was walking along Nevsky Prospekt, wrapping a scarf around her face, trying not to notice begging babushkas and alcoholic amputees, trying not to hear the pleas from Gypsy children and accordions being squeezed by demented Afghan veterans—all the desperate and the grotesque, the detritus that has floated to the surface after the wreckage of a seventy-four-year communist delusion. The wind has swept cigarette butts and ice cream wrappers, whirled them across the sidewalk over patches of dirty ice, and tossed them into people's faces. Another gust of wind, and a page of newspaper flew into Marina's hands, folding a headline in front of her eyes. The Lonely Heart marriage service will connect you to an eligible man in the U.S. Contact us and we will send you up to ten addresses to write to. Photograph required.

Marina had many photographs to choose from: head shots from films and copies of the pictures that hung in her theater's lobby. From the list the agency sent her, she chose six names that sounded good to her ear. Every address ended with the magical letters USA, so she didn't even try to decipher the irrelevant codes of the individual states her prospective husbands lived in. I have a suspicion that—just as my ESL students who tell me they live in the city of New Jersey—my sister didn't know where she was sending her inquiries. She wrote a letter and copied it by hand, five times. Tom from New Orleans, Louisiana, was the only one who wrote back.

“That's what I've always wanted,” Marina says, “to have my own house with a garden where I can grow tomatoes. To have my own life, away from all the insanity of the world, behind a ten-foot fence.”

I know Marina likes to be dramatic, so I try to focus her attention with a practical question.

“Won't you miss the theater?” I ask. “After all, you've been an actress for almost thirty years.”

My sister is absolute, not needing to think for even a moment.

“There is no theater left to be missed,” she quips. “It all collapsed, together with communism. It all went to pieces, just like the country.”

I am as skeptical of my sister's assessment of the arts in Russia as I was when we lived there. For her, theater was always work, while for me it never ceased to be anything but magic. I would have given anything back in Leningrad to be like her—to sit before a three-way mirror and watch my face transform to that of someone completely different, someone you wouldn't find in our school textbooks. I would have given anything to be part of the real make-believe, exciting and meaningful, not the everyday official make-believe we all had to live by. I envied my sister's acting gift as viscerally as I abhorred her taking the magic of Theater for granted.

But it is irrelevant now whether Marina is or isn't exaggerating about the demise of Russian Theater. She is in America “for permanent residence,” as the stamp in her passport announces, and it seems she will be residing in Louisiana, where theater is as nonexistent as green grass in July.

“But you're an honorary actor,” I insist, referring to the national title she was awarded a few years after I left. “Are you really just going to give up acting altogether?”

Marina drives her fists into her hips. “Let me tell you the story of this honorary title,” she says. “The bastards at the Ministry of Culture said I was the sister of a traitor. Of someone who sold out to capitalism.” Marina makes big, serious eyes, impersonating the censors. “We don't honor siblings of deserters who betray the Motherland.”

So here it is, the truth of what I have accomplished: in addition to costing Nina her teaching job at the university, I almost cost my sister a national promotion.

“Our chief director was the one who stood up for me,” says Marina. “It isn't the sister we're nominating for this award, he said to those idiots. It is our own actress who has been with this theater for over a quarter century.”

“The point today is this: everyone has left.” Marina lands the last phrase with a dramatic thump, demonstrating again that her seasoned acting skills have remained intact.

There may be some exaggeration here, but Marina's statement about theater in Petersburg is closer to the truth about all of Petersburg than I would like to believe. After all, my high school friend Tania is in New Jersey now, working in an export company staffed by immigrants from Russia. My
refusenik
friend Nadia is in California, having reunited with half of her college class from Leningrad. My university English professor is teaching Russian in New York, where several of my former students now write computer programs or give private piano lessons.

The only person who has not left is Nina, still my closest friend. All these years I have been waiting for her to come here, thinking that next year would certainly be the one marking her arrival. I have been saving old sets of dishes and silverware she would surely need to start her life here; I have stashed a coffee table in the basement; I have even refused to part with my old car. But Nina's life is complicated, stitched to our common country with the strongest thread. First she couldn't emigrate because she was taking care of her parents: her mother suffered from severe diabetes and rapidly progressing dementia, and, a year after her death, Nina's father succumbed to an aggressive cancer. Then Nina went through a different kind of turmoil, divorcing and getting married again. And now it is her mother-in-law, with a sick heart, who needs her care. Yet, despite everything, I stubbornly hoard all the usable things into a basement corner, hoping that one day she will come and claim every piece of junk I've saved for her.

Thinking of Nina, who lost her job after I left, and of Marina's hard-earned honorary title highlights an uncomfortable truth: my action fourteen years ago was never mine alone. Like the wake from a careless boat, it rippled through the lives of those who stayed behind.

It also, to my consternation and chagrin, has failed to make me into a different person beyond the confines of my Motherland, someone more confident and optimistic. I was naïve to hope, it turns out, that once I crossed the Soviet border I would find myself miraculously free, weighed down only by the one twenty-kilogram suitcase Aeroflot allowed. When I said good-bye to everyone who came to see me off at Pulkovo Airport, when for the last time I glanced back at my family and friends through the horseshoe of the international metal detector, I was silly to think I was hovering on the brink of a brand-new life. I didn't know yet that Russia, like a virus, had settled in my blood and hitched a ride across the ocean.