Russian Tattoo (23 page)

Thirty-Five

I
continue to teach Sasha to read and write in Russian because I want her to be perfectly bilingual. I want her to melt when she reads the poems of Akhmatova, just as I do. When she is six and seven and eight, she complies, which fuels my fantasies. I imagine her swooning over the simplicity of Pushkin's verse; I picture her with a flashlight under a blanket, turning the pages of
Dead Souls
, deciphering the weird wit of Gogol. Closing my eyes, I visualize her engrossed in
War and Peace
—all four volumes—without skipping the battle scenes, as I used to do. I see her memorizing the poems of Lermontov and Pasternak and reciting them flawlessly before speechless groups of stunned relatives and friends.

When she is nine, we sell the Nutley house because we want a better school for Sasha, the school that glimmers in my childhood memory, radically refurbished by the crafty team of nostalgia and time. What was that school really like, the place I remember with such fondness? Did I feel any true affection for Leningrad school number 238 when I studied there, or is this the tenderness cultivated by looking back through the deceptive prism of so many years? This was the school that sharpened our minds and softened our hearts, my memory murmurs. We read Pushkin in fifth grade, it whispers; we read Dostoyevsky in ninth. We solved algebra formulas in seventh grade and mastered trigonometry and calculus in eighth. We studied world history, from the Bronze Age to the ascent of capitalism everywhere except in our Motherland. We memorized and recited poetry—all of us, including class hooligans and perennial failures with blank eyes who always sat in the last row and were kept back to repeat the year.

In search of that illusory school, we decide to move to Ridgewood, hoping that Sasha will be as enthusiastic about the prospects of a better education as Andy and I. In the middle of all the contracts and inspections, of packing up what Mama, who is moving with us, has managed to accumulate, we fail to notice that our daughter has developed deep friendships with Megan from her grade and Chris from her dance class and Marl from our block. Years later, I will find one of the letters she wrote to Megan that summer:

I can't believe school is already out. I think you should forget about the hair club, OK? I think we should have the spy club. If we have the spy club, we'll have to have a spy school at someone's house who is in the spy club. You can't tell anybody about the spy club cause then it won't be a spy club if everyone knew about it. I don't know if we should have a mystery club. If you say yes to the mystery club I'll be very happy because we have a mystery to solve. The mystery is, why are we moving from Nutley to some place called Ridgewood? Why didn't my parents ask me? Cause if they did, I would definitely say no.

I try to convince myself that we are moving to a place where she will quickly make new friends who will be more like her. When we find Sasha hiding in her closet clutching Puffy and gouging her name into the Sheetrock with a ballpoint pen, it is too late to alter the plans.

On the morning of the Nutley house closing, we sit in the attorney's office, Andy and I and the young couple who just bought our house. I know I should feel happy: we sold the house without a broker on the second Sunday when we led scores of strangers up and down our stairway with its chestnut banisters, past the stained-glass windows, up to the third floor we built for my mother, back down to the living room full of built-in bookshelves, and out the hallway with the fireplace we had lit, on the advice of a neighbor, to give the house a more homey feel.

I should be happy, but I sit there straight as a stick, trying to breathe deeply and swallow whatever is rising up in my throat. The swallowing doesn't work, and I realize I've clapped my hands over my face because I am weeping. A moment later I scrape back my chair and race out of the room. In the blurry hallway I find a bathroom and collapse on the tile under the sink. I crouch on the floor, sobbing and wailing, completely blindsided by this sudden eruption of grief. What am I crying so bitterly about? I know I should go back and sign the contract, but I cannot stop bawling. There seems to be an endless supply of tears being pumped out of the dark inner pool, and the faucet gurgling over the sink does not have enough water to wash my face clean of salt and snot. What am I just about to lose? The first house I've ever had? The built-in bookshelves, the crystal chandelier, the place that made my mother realize that every Soviet bureaucrat had lied to her? The kitchen cabinets we stripped by hand, the deck where Sasha learned to walk?

There is a knock, and I hear Andy's voice. He opens the door, hesitantly, and fits himself under the sink, scooping me into his arms.

“I'm so embarrassed,” I mutter between gasps for air. “I don't know where this came from.”

“We have to go back,” he says, but I don't move. I can't go back yet. I can only crouch in a ball in Andy's arms, sobbing into his chest, leaving wet spots on the good shirt he wore to the lawyer's office.

Sasha goes to fourth grade at the new elementary school in Ridgewood, where it turns out she is no longer the top student in her class. She is surrounded by children with sharper math skills and better reading comprehension, children of parents described by acronyms: CEOs, CPAs, and DMDs. Andy and I have acronyms, too: MSW and EdD, but they might as well be Cyrillic symbols that do not blend into the alphabet of our neighbors' Tudors and sculpted shrubs.

My daughter is nine, and she is already an experienced complainer. No one else in her school is required to do the extra work of Russian reading, she points out every time I open a book of children's verses from my Leningrad days of elementary school.

“Why am I the only one?” she demands, looking wistfully out the window to where a neighbor is tossing a ball to his dog. “It's not fair,” she laments, her invariable refrain to anything she does not want to do.

“Because I want you to speak two languages, like me,” I say, in what I don't yet recognize as my mother's teaching voice.

But Sasha doesn't want to be like me. She wants to be like everyone else. Everyone else in Ridgewood plays lacrosse and soccer, so she joins a local soccer team and for a while we spend weekends driving back and forth to games. When Sasha is tired of sitting on the grass, she announces that she wants to try swimming. Instead of sitting in lawn chairs, Andy and I now sit in the chlorine fog of the pool, waiting several humid hours for a thirty-­second match.

None of her friends speak a second language, and she draws tic-tac-toe squares on the page designated for declining nouns when we bend over an old book with pictures of Young Pioneers feeding chickens. I enroll her in a Russian class in Fair Lawn, the town where Russian immigrants move up from Brighton Beach after they learn how to write CVs and program computers. Sasha hides in the last row, pretending to listen to the teacher, who sprinkles the six or seven bored American children with bits of our imperial history told in a language they barely understand.

I sit by the door on the outside of the room, privy to every detail about the life of Catherine the Great and the beginning of the Hermitage collection, making believe—when Sasha emerges from the lesson—that I haven't heard a word. On the way to the car, I ask my daughter what she has learned today. Nothing, she says, and invariably shrugs.

When Sasha is eleven, we buckle under pressure and yield to her incessant demands to get a dog. We research the breeds: the size, the health, the character, affinity to children. Andy narrows down our search to a Lakeland terrier, a sturdy sixteen-pound dog as difficult to find in the Northeast as it is to describe to anyone we know. It's like Asta in
The Thin Man
, Andy explains to anyone who asks, only instead of black and white it is one color, sand. Few people seem to know who Asta is—or the
Thin Man
, for that matter.

In July the three of us drive to Maryland, where a litter of Lakeland terriers reside in a garage adjacent to the breeder's house. There are three puppies, the color of apricots, and Sasha scoops up the smallest one and holds him in her arms the way she still cradles her stuffed dog, Puffy.

“Deema,” she coos over him, short for Dmitri, the name of the Russian counselor in her summer day camp, and I am foolishly happy that, after all, my Russian efforts haven't gone to waste.

“Tell me a story,” Sasha says from the backseat.

“What kind of story?” I ask. We are in the car, driving home from a Russian lesson, or maybe from swimming class.

“A story about your life.”

I am glad she wants to know about my life, and in my mind I quickly scan my Leningrad years for a satisfying tale. The Young Pioneer initiation when we turned nine? Dimka the Hooligan and his girl-terrorizing campaign of braid pulling? It seems appropriate to start in third grade, and I begin, in Russian, with our homeroom teacher, Vera Pavlovna. She is tall and sharp-elbowed, I say, and a brown cardigan trails from her shoulders like from a clothes hanger. We called her Veshalka, I say.

“What's
veshalka
?” Sasha asks, and I realize she doesn't know the Russian word for a clothes hanger.

I translate the word, but its English equivalent feels false on my tongue, altering the story I barely had a chance to start. If Sasha doesn't know the word
veshalka
, how many other words doesn't she know? My next sentence comes out artificial and clumsy because I now try to monitor myself for simple vocabulary and syntax. As I strain the words through the filter of my mind, I feel as if I were speaking to my students at Leningrad University's Russian Program, where this whole American adventure started almost twenty years ago. By now the story is so stripped of any heft it isn't even a story.

When I glance in the rearview mirror, I see that Sasha twirls a strand of her light brown hair around her finger, losing interest. As I turn into our driveway, I am depressed by the thought that my daughter and I do not share a native language.

More and more often I switch to English when I speak to Sasha. It is much easier for her, I reason. Is it also easier for me? In English, I don't need to monitor myself, trying to avoid the words she may not know; I don't have to force the stories into simple sentences and first-grade grammar she will be able to understand. Yet the more I switch to English the more I viscerally resent it. In my heart, English—just as Russian—is a barrier between us.