Russian Tattoo (31 page)

“Rest well in Chicago,” she says, holding me in her arms a little longer. “Rest from me,” she adds, a smile spreading to her lips.

I smile. I know I should tell her I have nothing to rest from, but I don't.

“Schastlivo vam
.
”
I wave to both Mama and Marina from the door. It's a Russian going-away saying, a sort of
may fortune be with you
wish.

Forty-Eight

M
arina tells me how it happened. It was nighttime and Mama was in bed, watching her favorite figure-skating program. “I'll come down again,” my sister said, “to say good night.” An hour later, when she got to the basement, Mama was unconscious. Marina yelled her name and shook her. When she didn't respond, my sister called 911.

We want to think that Mama simply fell asleep, simply glided off to another world.

An ambulance came and took her to the emergency room. This time she remained there for only twenty minutes. Then she was gone from the hospital, gone from our house, gone from life.

Andy and I spent that night in Chicago on the phone with United Airlines. They got us on a flight back the next morning, at the alarming price of $1,137. It was almost a relief to argue with a ticket agent, then her supervisor, in a futile attempt to understand how, under the circumstances, they could charge us eight hundred dollars in excess of the flight we booked originally. For half an hour, asking in vain for logic and compassion from a corporation distracted us from allowing the truth to sink in. With a cell phone pressed to my ear, I paced the room of our hotel, my arguments circling as desperately as my feet. As long as I held on to the agent on the phone, it seemed, our return home—the reason for our unplanned departure—was not yet final.

Marina met us outside; we hugged and tried not to cry. Andy made the necessary calls. Sasha drove from Brooklyn, and the four of us sat in the living room all day, talking a little, staring at the floor, eating food from a local restaurant sent by Frankie's daughters, who know what to do when someone dies. The sun crept in through the curtains and painted saffron lines across the floor; then the air became grainy and thickened into dusk. At night, my Leningrad girlfriend Tania drove in from work, and we sat and ate some more. There was comfort in our common passivity, in letting hopelessness and grief swaddle us, make us as helpless as infants, reduce us to nothing at all.

The next day we go to a funeral home to say good-bye. The undertaker opens the doors into a room, and we reluctantly creep in. It smells of flowers, a sickeningly sweet smell I remember from my father's funeral. We don't want to be here, but we know we must be here. We take a deep breath and look.

Mama is in the front of the room, on a table, dressed in her usual gray pants and a wool cardigan she liked to wear at home. We cluster in the corner, six feet away, humbled by the presence of death. Sasha turns to Andy and begins to sob. For a few minutes, we huddle together before approaching the table one by one.

As Andy is standing before Mama, I wonder what he is thinking. What is he saying to her in his mind? Whatever it is, I know she can't understand it. Or maybe she understands it perfectly. No matter how hard she tried, she never learned enough English to be able to speak to her son-in-law. For many years, she diligently wrote down exercises and listened to tapes until she succumbed to the realization that, in her own words, she simply had no ear for foreign language. Maybe that was why Andy was a good son-in-law to my mother: they spoke in broad gestures, devoid of the nuances of intonation. Unlike me, Andy never lost patience with my mother during the last few years, when she shriveled and turned weak.

He lays his hand on hers and then walks away.

Sasha approaches the table tentatively, wiping her eyes, trying not to look straight ahead at Babusya, bereft of life. I imagine her summoning all those years of Russian to her rescue, fishing for words she never said to Grandma while she was alive. The words the three of us—Mama, Marina, and I—were too tough to say to one another in Leningrad, as we were so preoccupied with survival, with the never-ending struggle to carve out our own slices of privacy.

Marina takes Mama's hand and stands still for a few minutes, looking down. She has lived longer with Mama than I have, a life that started in Ivanovo during the war, continued in Leningrad, and concluded on the other side of the Atlantic. Does she regret that all those years she took Mama for granted, as I did? That she sometimes aimed her stage voice at Mama, over the phone from New Orleans and in person during the winter months our mother stayed there? That's how I speak, she would always say to defend herself. That's what they taught us in acting school. This morning Marina told me of an odd coincidence: in her last film role the character she played tried to wake up her dead mother shaking her by the shoulders, just as my sister had to do two days ago. The scene had made her sink to such murky emotional depths that she wailed for hours after the shoot was over, sobbing on the Petersburg bus all the way home. “Was it a premonition?” asked Marina before we came to the funeral home, and I knew that in her mind it wasn't really a question. “My last role,” she said quietly and shook her head. My sister's face looks older, and she lumbers out of the room looking down.

They all leave the room, and I know it is finally my turn.

I stand over my mother, so familiar and already such a stranger. Her hands are gnarled with arthritis, but the sharpness of joints has dulled, leaving the skin thick and white. Her face is white, too, cheeks and lips touched slightly by the undertaker's rouge. I look at her chest, as I have done many times when she would fall asleep in her bed, only now it doesn't move. I lean down and kiss Mama on the forehead. Her skin, so soft and warm, so permeated with the smell of our Leningrad apartment, is now cold as stone. I wipe away the sobs and snot with a bunch of napkins Andy stuffed into my hand before he left the room.

“Forgive me, Mamochka, if you can,” I whisper, hearing this last pathetic plea dissolve in the emptiness of the echoey room. But as soon as the words leave my mouth my request invalidates itself: I know, of course, that she can. I know that, despite her strict façade and her Russian toughness, she always forgave me everything.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, the enormity of loss presses on my heart, constricts my temples, drives my head deeper into the pillow. I lie in bed with my eyes closed and wait for morning. Once in a while I fall back to sleep and have dreams. An old woman is walking toward me, her head down, slowly and meticulously measuring the ground with her cane.
Tuk-tuk
, the sound in rhythm with her plodding steps. The contours of her body and her movements are so familiar that I am certain it is my mother. One more
tuk
toward me and I know it is Mama. I feel so light-headed and happy that I have been granted one more chance to see her and to hold her, a final opportunity to say to her I love her. She will look up and see me any moment now. Lenochka, she will say, and her papery skin will crease in a smile. The woman lifts her head and looks at me, a face I've never seen. I hastily turn away and run, a single thought bouncing around in my head: Who will ever be as happy to see me as Mama was? Who will call me Lenochka now?

I have kept stacks of Mama's letters from when she still lived in Leningrad, and I am sitting in her basement apartment, unfolding the lined pages filled with her squared handwriting. I read each letter, lingering over every page, scrutinizing every sentence, in an attempt to glimpse something that eluded me when she was alive but that would surely stand out now. For over a half century—my whole life—I have defined myself against her, and now, with Mama gone, I have to figure out who I am. I read letter after letter, beginning with 1982, when Andy and I moved to our Nutley house.

My dearest Lenochka and Andy
, she wrote carefully many times over the years, followed by the descriptions of holiday and birthday celebrations, of bouts with Soviet bureaucracy, of fights with drunken plumbers, of colds, play openings, and chores. She diligently wrote of her numerous trips to Kineshma to see her younger sister, Muza, to go to the graves of her parents and her younger brother Sima, to visit, in Mama's words, both the living and the dead. She documented the gradual disappearance of food from Leningrad stores:
there is nothing but bones on meat counters
, she wrote in January 1982;
cheese has vanished entirely and there are lines for butter
, she told me in March 1983. Then she consoled herself with this:
Kineshma's stores are even emptier, and no one there has died of hunger yet
.

Among the letters I stumble onto a note Mama must have left in our Leningrad apartment for my sister.
Marisha, here is a ruble,
her squared words spell
. Buy two bottles of milk and see how things are with bread. Please water the plants.
I put down the note; I stuff the letters back into their airmail envelopes. Again, it is bread and milk and chores, the things that make up a life. There are no revelations—just a series of ordinary moments, too humble for redemption.

P
ART 5

Petersburg

Forty-Nine

I
am in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, my former home. I come here every year, like a felon drawn to the site of the crime. I zip my American passport into the inner pocket of my handbag and pull out my Russian one—the red identification replacing the blue—as the plane taxis past the edge of the northern forest and stops at one of the eight gates of Pulkovo International Airport.

But this trip is different. Next to me is Sasha, on her first voluntary trip to Russia since we dragged her across the ocean, screaming through most of the twelve hours of the SAS flights, when she was eleven months old. Mama was with us, happy in her new role of a babushka visiting from overseas, and our bags were filled with Pampers, bottled water, and little jars of Earth's Best baby food.

This time, when my daughter asked me if she could come along, she looked anxious for the few moments it took me to respond, as if she entertained the possibility that I could have said no.

On our arrival at Pulkovo Airport we found out that, in addition to the school graduation festival, the week we chose to visit my hometown was the week of the International Economic Forum, when police-escorted motorcades whip through the city center, closing roads and clogging streets. Still, it was the prime week of white nights, and for the graduation fireworks Vladimir Putin had guaranteed a clear sky: clouds not complying with the dry executive order would be immediately shot with storm-dispersing chemicals.

I knew I was home.

Nina and her second husband, Sergei, were waiting for us at the airport, waving from behind the glass door that still separates Russia from the rest of the world. It took us two and a half hours of Nina lamenting and Sergei swearing under his breath to get from the airport to their apartment. We inched forward in maddening traffic, jammed amid creaky Volgas, gleaming BMWs, and trolley buses tethered to electric wires overhead. In disbelief, Sasha stared out at a Mercedes SUV that veered onto the sidewalk for a shortcut, its horn blaring at pedestrians to get out of the way.

Our room at Nina's apartment, with eleven-foot ceilings and a faint smell of wool coats and warm tea, makes me instantly homesick. The window looks out onto a square of asphalt and an island of rickety trees amid unmowed grass—one of the many courtyards familiar to everyone who was born here. I think of my own courtyard and of a quiet stretch of the Neva embankment a few blocks away from the apartment building where I used to live, the two main destinations of this trip. Their images rise in my mind—sharpened by the anticipation of what my daughter and I have come here to do—and make me feverish and restless.

For a week, Sasha and I enjoy guest status at Nina's apartment. After a day of walking with my daughter on the paths of the enormous Field of Mars hidden under the froth of blooming lilacs, of standing on the hunchback bridges over the canals that crochet the city into a lacework of 101 islands, we climb the stairs to Nina's fifth-floor apartment for a nightly feast. The table in her tiny kitchen brims with cucumber and tomato salad, boiled potatoes with wild mushrooms that Nina and Sergei have picked on their trips to Finland, pan-fried zucchini with onions Nina made for Sasha, and chunks of hot-smoked salmon, wrapped with thick ropes, from a local farm market. We sit on the balcony and drink Argentinean wine from a supermarket called Okay until the brief dusk lifts and light begins to spread through poplar branches rising all the way up to our windows.

I take deep breaths, as if inhaling pure oxygen, as if I were a consumption patient bathing my scarred lungs in the city's healing breeze. This luminous air, and the arms of open bridges, and the atmosphere of sleeplessness, and the vague anticipation that invariably hangs in the dusk of a June night are still here as they have always been before. Only now—maybe because my grown-up American daughter is here—it finally dawns on me that they are no longer mine. They belong to Nina and Sergei and their few remaining family and friends—to all those who have stayed here.

When I look at Sasha, I see Andy's length of bone and my young mother's inner luminosity that makes her skin glow from within in the sleepless sun of Petersburg's white nights. She is twenty-four, the age I was when I left this city. She is a photographer now, the most unlikely career, short of being an actor, I could have conjured up for my self-conscious and introverted daughter. Like every child, she is—and may always remain, at least to me—a mystery.

She began as an intern in New York City, graduating to a photographer's assistant after eight months of unpaid work; then learned—pretty much on her own—the complex intricacies of digital technology and professional photo retouching. She has assisted on many photo shoots and retouched a number of pictures for major glossy magazines that I proudly lift off the Barnes & Noble shelves. Andy and I no longer have to support her. Just a few months earlier, she completed her first freelance photography assignment for one of those gleaming issues. Her work is now published, with her name in the byline following her title, photographer. She can read Russian, and she tries to speak my native language to Nina and Sergei—in simple phrases but with almost no trace of a foreign accent.

As we walk around Petersburg, she looks for interesting shots, and my city is always ready to oblige. She captures images of a pack of homeless dogs crossing a major street, six motley mutts with torn ears and patches of missing fur following their leader, a German shepherd mix with a limp. She trains her camera on two enormous ravens perched in the poplar tree next to Nina's apartment building, cawing loudly—a sinister omen, according to my mother—and I whisper the magic words Mama used to utter to protect me from bad luck every time she heard a crow's cackle.

We pass a student dorm, and my daughter kneels on the sidewalk to snap a shot of a message sprayed on the wall:
i've been deregistered. call me at 114-2875. olga
. Sasha doesn't understand what this means, and I tell her that we all had to be registered with our district militia at the address of our residence when the city was called Leningrad, a requirement that has survived all the historic upheavals of the last three decades. Olga must have failed out of school and been ordered to leave the city. I tell Sasha that I, too, was deregistered from Leningrad over thirty years ago, but there is no number left where anyone can reach me.

We walk around my city until our feet hurt, adding our footprints to the dust of the streets that I hope will remember every prodigal resident of this subarctic marsh abuzz with mosquitoes. We walk and walk through the limpid air of day and night, as though the constant, untiring movement could convince the city to take me back, as though I could fool the bronze horses and the cobblestones of Palace Square—the place where wars and revolutions happen with eerie regularity—that, after more than a quarter century living on a different continent speaking another language, I still belong here.