Russian Tattoo (32 page)

Fifty

T
he street under the windows of my apartment, which was Maklina Prospekt when I lived here, is now called Angliisky, or English, Prospekt. It is ironic, I think, that only after the fall of communism did they rename my street after the passion I had harbored for as long as I lived in this city.

Sasha and I walk away from where Griboedova Canal makes a sudden bend, past the building where my high school friends Tania and Nadia used to live, across a small bridge where the street stops, as though astonished by the sudden expanse of the river that springs before our eyes. This is the unglamorous part of the city, too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes, a shipbuilding district with construction cranes stretching their necks into the sky.

My old school, where I deciphered the mysteries of the English language, is just around the corner, and the previously abandoned historic triangle called New Holland, wedged between the two sleeves of the canal where Peter the Great built the first vessels of the Russian Fleet, boasts newly restored brick gates and expanses of shaved grass. The view of the canal's wrought-iron banisters juxtaposed against the Neva with the university buildings in the distance, as if etched into the low pewter sky, is so familiar it wrenches my heart.

We stand by the granite banister and look down on the lazy waves that lick the stone when a boat passes by.

“Would you like to do the honors?” I ask Sasha.

“Not really,” she says. “I'm not sure I can do this.”

“I thought you'd have the honor as the youngest in the family,” I say, a cowardly attempt to get out of doing myself what we have come here to do. “But you're right. We should do this together.”

She takes a breath and steadies herself. Out of the zipped compartment of my pocketbook I take a small plastic bag. Before Mama's ashes were buried at a cemetery in Fair Lawn, I asked for a few ounces to take with me to Russia, so that part of her would stay where she lived most of her life.

She lived three lives, my mother: first, in her native town of Ivanovo, where she lost two brothers and gave birth to my older sister; then in Leningrad, where she gave birth to me and where she buried my father; and finally, in my house in New Jersey, where she raised my daughter and wrote down the story of our family.

Sasha and I hold our arms over the water and release Mama's ashes into the salty Baltic wind she knew so well. For a few moments, they dip and swerve with the air current over the surface of the river; then they are gone, the breeze carrying them away in its gentle palm, out of our sight.

I think of what Mama must have felt when she moved here from Ivanovo, when she took the first breath of the Neva brine. It was the first big city she had ever seen, with its baroque, mint-­colored curves of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre only two blocks from her new apartment. I wonder what she felt walking past the eighteenth-­century mansions and the golden needle of the Admiralty, what she thought of the broad avenues in the city center and the mazes of its courtyards. I wonder if she had felt as I did on my first visit to a supermarket in Princeton when she saw Leningrad grocery stores with their sawdust-covered floors and sweet smells of bologna and cheese, a gastronomic heaven after the four hundred grams of war-rationed bread in her native Ivanovo.

I think of how difficult it must have been for her to leave this northern capital of gauzy light, of how sweet it must be now to return.

Sasha and I are at the last stop on our Petersburg itinerary, the final destination of our trip. My childhood courtyard has been emptied by the summer: most children are in their dachas, tending reluctantly to their mothers' patches of tomato seedlings, shivering on the windy beaches of the Gulf of Finland between the watering and weeding. My old nursery school is no longer here, but hopscotch squares are still chalked on the asphalt. In the center of the yard five poplar trees, tall and creaky, rise around the playground, and tufts of their fuzzy seeds float through the air like snowflakes.

Sasha walks around the courtyard, snapping pictures of those arches between the buildings leading to other quads that tantalized me when I lived here, of crumbling bricks and little puddles pooled in cracks of asphalt. I sit on my old courtyard bench and see ghosts. They parade out of my head onto the sidewalk—preserved by time, as ageless as I am never going to be.

I see my nursery school friend Genka, who dares me to explore the vaulted hollows under the buildings—enticing, scary, and forbidden. While our teacher is distracted, Genka and I hide behind aluminum garbage bins and dive under an archway, a damp tunnel that leads to another courtyard and then to the street so maligned by our parents for its dangerous streetcars and speeding trucks.

I see the building garbageman, a gnome with black stubble sprouting through his cheeks who works in the cellar shoveling raw garbage dropped from each apartment through chutes. On rare occasions he climbs up the stairs and crouches on the ledge to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette, his smell hanging in the air long after he is gone, the smell of rotting potato peels and fish skeletons and his whole underground pool of decomposing trash.

I hear Aunt Polya—not really my aunt—in a stained apron over her round stomach, shouting at me as I am standing in the nursery school corner, punished. In her kitchen voice, she warns me about my bleak future in real school, where everyone will know not to trust me because I dared to disobey the teacher, because I am the one infamous for placing the interests of the collective beneath my own.

I look at the courtyard metal gate and see a taxi waiting to take my father to the hospital. He hangs between my mother and Marina, his arms around their shoulders, an open coat thrown over his long underwear, as if it no longer matters what he wears, as if his relevance to the world dressed in street clothes has ceased to exist. I see him through the glass recline across the backseat, reedy in his blue underwear, ashen as the sky.

Strangely, I see Frankie. When he was granted several months of remission, I offered to take him to Petersburg, and for a minute a spark ignited in his eyes before he chose to do what he had always done, take care of his daughters. I know Frankie would have liked my city, its pale façades and pearly domes the color of the overcast sky. I see him walking through the gate into the courtyard, still carefree and healthy, his head full of dark, wavy hair down to his shoulders.

“Mom,” calls Sasha and shakes my arm. “Are you all right?”

I am all right. I nod, and from her smile I know she is beginning to understand something about ghosts. She is beginning to understand something about other things, too, the deeply personal and guarded things. We both are.

I think of my mother, and her face comes together before my eyes, as if my mind, like a camera, brought her features into focus. I think of our watching figure skating in her Ridgewood basement when she made a comment about a contestant's tattoo, smiling at the girl on the screen, saying the tattoo was beautiful. Was she able to sense what I never told her about my own daughter?

Sasha has finished with her photos and sits down next to me on the bench. I turn to her and take her hand. It feels like the right time, and I hope I am ready.

“So let me see those tattoos of yours,” I say in Russian.

She winces at first, but then the whiff of panic in her eyes fades and I can see relief. She is glad that I've finally asked her, that I am interested in the deepest part of her, the most flawed compartment of her soul. Or maybe it is my own flaws that have drawn me to the edge of this revelation. I steady myself as she rolls up the sleeves of her shirt.

Her arms bloom with the intricate red and green design of the
matryoshka
nesting doll Marina painted for me soon after she moved to the United States, the doll that still adorns the prime space in my home, the kitchen. I think back, to the time when Sasha became interested in that doll, taking it apart and lining the pieces up on the kitchen counter, asking me all kinds of questions about my sister's design. I was thrilled by her sudden interest in Russia back then, unable to figure out the reason for her unexpected curiosity. Now, of course, everything makes sense.

I force my eyes to stay on the
matryoshka
's red scarf amid the pattern of violets and leaves inked into my daughter's arms. Black clouds rush through my head, but I take a deep breath to steady myself and shoot them down, just as the Russian government did, dispersing rain clouds on the night of the graduation festival. I think of how Mama always loved me—despite a million things I had done to gouge more lines into her face and turn her hair as white as this courtyard in January—a sadly belated moment of recognition that makes me move closer to Sasha and drape my arm around her shoulders. I swallow what I would have said only a year ago; from now on, those words will be hidden on the lowest shelf of my soul, where they belong. My eyes are now directly above the long, wheat-colored braid of
matryoshka
my sister painted, as complicated on Sasha's skin as the original still sitting above my American refrigerator.

Russia is tattooed on my daughter's arms as permanently as it is tattooed on my heart.

We sit on the bench without moving, without saying a word.

The wind tosses the poplar snow against the playground fence, and little blizzards are whirling under the bench, around our feet, just as they did every June for the twenty-four years I lived here. The breeze brings the smells of city dust and traffic fumes, so familiar they itch my eyes. I still know this place and its people to the marrow of their bones, to their soft, unguarded core, which had once sustained my own life, yet I am as much of an outsider here as I am on the other side of the world, in my adopted country. The truth is that there is no bridge between the two lives—the past and the present—that would conveniently span the memory of loss and the promise of an onward search. There is only a wound, the inner divide of exile. A daughter of an anatomy professor, I should have known that sliced hearts do not become whole, that split souls do not mend. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. We are unmoored and disconnected, like these poplar seeds blown into the crevices of the buildings, into the corners of the world.

I look up and see another ghost: Mama walking home from work with a string bag full of groceries, our dinner. Her hair, still brown, is brushed back away from her face and held up in a bun, as she arranged it every morning of my childhood, with me watching her patient fingers dip and twist expertly at the back of her head she couldn't see. I want to run toward her, but my legs, like in a dream, are filled with lead. When she makes another step to turn the corner, she sees me. She smiles her younger smile and opens her arms.

“Lenochka,” she says, my name as soft as her cheek. “I'm so glad you've come.”

Again, she is as tall as I am, and I press into her neck, into the pillows of her breasts. She smells of our Leningrad life, of the life I lived here with my mother and sister and father: of wild mushroom soup, of the dusty straw of our barn loft at the dacha, of our evening tea with bowls of black currant jam, guiltless and sweet. Tears course down my cheeks, leaving wet spots on Mama's dress with a red apple print I remember so well, and the warmth of her embrace heals and makes me feel forgiven.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to my agent, Molly Friedrich, whose generosity and insight have guided me through the painful process of writing this memoir; and to my editor, Priscilla Painton, for her wisdom, exacting eye, and sharp scissors.

My appreciation goes to my early readers Mervyn Rothstein, Irina Veletskaya, and Sydney Tanigawa, for their support and honesty. I thank Lucy Carson for always being there when I needed advice. A special thank you to Jeffrey Brown for his writing suggestions, generous heart, and mushroom pizza. My gratitude to Loretta Denner for her rigor and style.

Spasibo
to my sister Marina for her stories and her artistic soul. She is the only one left from our small Russian family.

And finally, this book would not be possible without the two closest people, whom my mother would have called my American “ours”: my husband and my daughter. To you, my love.

About the Author

Elena Gorokhova is the author of
A Mountain of Crumbs
, a memoir about growing up in Leningrad, Russia. At the age of twenty-­four she married an American and came to the United States with one twenty-kilogram suitcase to start a new life. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.