Russian Tattoo (5 page)

Seven

R
obert says I should go to an agency.

“An agency?” I ask.

“They'll help you find a job,” he says and sighs.

I try to imagine what Robert could be thinking right now, a painstaking and ungrateful task. A little less than a year ago, he nobly offered to marry a Russian to save her from the clutches of the Soviet state. He was going to bring her to the land of capitalism and freedom, where she would immediately feel at ease since she was already fluent in English. She would live with him for the first few months before she'd find a teaching job, helping him with his Russian grammar and pronunciation, listening to him practice the violin, cooking minute steak. Maybe she would even continue to live with him, providing Karen the Russian professor didn't mind this arrangement, providing the new foreign wife didn't become a stone around his neck, dragging him down the slope of routine existence from the heights of classical music and cosmic research.

She seemed mature and independent, cynical of the Soviet circus around her, eager and ready to make a new life. She seemed learned and well read. He thought she would look around, get used to the eight-hour time difference, and plunge into the culture, just like he did on his six-week stay in Leningrad.

All by himself, last summer he ventured into a
gastronom
near the university dorm in search of yogurt, puzzling the potbellied woman behind the counter, who didn't seem to know the word. He was pronouncing it correctly, he was sure of that, rolling the tongue against his front upper teeth, just as his Swarthmore professor had taught him. Nevertheless, the woman stared at him with annoyance, her arms folded across her stained, white-coated stomach. Yogurt, he repeated again, only to watch her shrug and turn away. He found another store and asked again because he was persistent and unafraid. He even befriended a black marketeer who had approached him at a metro station entrance, asking to exchange dollars into rubles at a rate of one to three. The black marketeer, Valery, invited him to his apartment at the end of the metro line, where his wife was doing the laundry in a Finnish washing machine—Valery's pride—parked in the living room, which, as it turned out, wasn't really a living room but a bedroom with a folding table and a sleeper couch against the wall. There are no living rooms in Russia, said Valery, a little culture lesson Robert immediately tucked away.

A year later, back in Austin, Robert couldn't understand why this Russian he brought here wasn't asking questions, making friends, trying to blend in. He felt disappointed in her. He felt trapped. How could a smart, English-speaking woman with a green card and a roof over her head not be able to figure out how to find a job or what to buy in a supermarket to make dinner? A supermarket so much better stocked than any yogurt-deficient
gastronom
in Leningrad.

In a room with fat folders stacked on shelves along the walls, I sit on the other side of one of the four desks. Across from me is a woman with hurried movements and nervous eyes, a cup of coffee next to the form she's filling out, a pencil she is holding like a cigarette in her left hand.

“First you have to sign this,” she says and points to the bottom of a page filled with tiny single-spaced print.

I try to read a few lines, but the words refuse to make sense. “What is it?” I ask.

“Just a standard agreement,” says the woman. “You agree to pay the agency your first paycheck and ten percent of your salary thereafter for a year.”

I have no idea if this is a regular practice in employment agencies or a ploy to enslave a newcomer ignorant of the rules. I don't know what constitutes a paycheck here or how much people make. I run my eyes over the document again, the words staring back at me in their indiscernible force, like linked rows of black fences. With her fixed gaze, the woman lets me know that at this moment my possible future employment hinges on my signature, so I pick up a pen and sign my name at the bottom of the page.

“Good girl,” she says, plucking the paper away. As she files it into a folder, I see a small name plaque on the desk,
stella conroy
. With her nervous eyes and nails bitten down to the flesh of her fingertips, she doesn't look like a Stella.

“What are your skills?” she asks me.

From her dismissive voice it is immediately obvious she knows that I don't possess the skills required in the application. What are my skills? I was a lab assistant in my mother's anatomy department, where I pulled rabbits out of their cages in the basement, strapped them to a centrifuge, and spun them at near cosmic speed as a contribution to animal research for the Soviet space program. I shuffled work orders at the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace and wrote phony letters to get myself out of the university exams on Scientific Communism. I taught English at Leningrad University and Russian at the summer program where I met Robert.

“I can teach English grammar,” I say to Stella Conroy.

She stops fidgeting with her pencil, takes a sip of her coffee, and tosses the cup into a wastebasket under her desk. “Can you type?” she asks.

I think of my Erika portable typewriter probably still sitting on my desk in Leningrad. But this woman is obviously not interested in my Russian typing skills. Can I type in English? Since typewriters with Latin keyboards were as scarce as copying machines in the Soviet Union, the answer should be no.

“Yes, I can,” I say.

“How many words per minute?” she asks, her pen hovering over a box in the form.

I don't know if I can type at all, and I certainly don't know how many words a minute I'd type if I could.

I shake my head and shrug.

“Forty? Fifty? Sixty?” she offers, impatient to put a number in the box.

I try to calculate in my mind how fast that would make me type. A word a second seems meteoric, especially considering I am not familiar with the keyboard.

“Twenty or thirty,” I say. “Maybe.”

Stella sways the pencil in her left hand, looking at it longingly, as if it were a cigarette. She puts down her pen, gets up, and reaches for one of the files on the shelf above her desk.

“Here's a spelling test,” she says, pulling a page out of a thick file. “Cross out all incorrect spellings.”

I stare at the two columns of words on the page. The first one is
verbatim
, a word I've never seen. It doesn't look like an English word to me, so I cross it out. As my eyes run down the columns of words, I realize that I don't know about one third of them.

Stella looks at the page I hand her and says I didn't pass.

“Can you do anything else except typing?” she asks.

I can teach English grammar, I want to say, but I don't.

When I get back to the house, I squeeze into the corner of the couch and stare at a linoleum square by a coffee table leg, then out the window, where a couple of rickety bushes separate the front of the house from the empty street. This house in Austin is as quiet as our dacha near Leningrad, but infinitely more sterile. I can't believe that I am almost longing for our dacha, the place where I spent every spring Sunday ankle-deep in cold, soggy dirt, turning up beds for future cucumbers and dill with a spade rusted over the winter, yanking dandelions out of strawberry bushes later in June, lugging string bags full of apples to our Leningrad apartment to make jam for the winter. Why am I even thinking about that shack? Maybe because it was the deep well of smells that still tingle my nostrils: mushrooms we picked in the woods and spread on newspaper on the kitchen floor, strawberries sighing in big copper pots on the wood-burning kitchen stove, moldy sheets that survived a long winter in a house without heat.

This town, Austin, is flat and antiseptic, a padlocked gate with no chinks between the boards to peek inside the fence. It is just like Robert—impenetrable and foreign. All these immaculate roads, one-story houses, and bushes scorched by the heat may as well be scenery in a play about life on another planet, one of those alien universes Robert invents in his science fiction stories. It feels like a bad dream I've had so many times: the curtain opens, I am onstage, and no words come out of my mouth because I don't know my part.

Eight

T
o do all this walking I need a pair of sneakers, says Robert. He points to the white and blue shoes he wears to walk to the university every morning. Sneakers, he repeats, so I'll know what to ask for when I get to a store.

After peering into the windows of several stores on a shopping street near the university, I finally see sneakers displayed on a wall in orderly rows. The store is small, and a man behind the counter looks bored. He springs into action when I ask him for sneakers, size seven and a half, vanishing into the back of the store, then reappearing with the pair I've selected. He is cheerful, his balding head gleaming under the neon light. I don't know why I chose sneakers with white and green stripes made of what looks like suede; maybe they reminded me of the shoes I once glimpsed in a magazine called
England
left open on my boss's desk at the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace.

The salesman points to a stool for me to sit down on as he kneels, a sneaker in his palm like an offering. Please, I plead silently, don't put these shoes on my feet. I am not ready for this, having just arrived from a land that had no shoes at all. Twenty-four years of nothing have warped me, and now I am stupefied by all this enthusiasm and kneeling.

The man takes hold of my foot and slides on the shoe.

I walk around the store, supple suede enveloping my feet.

“They look great!” exclaims the man, watching me turn in front of a store mirror.

I think so, too, but how do I ask him about the price? When do customers ask salespeople here how much a product costs? Should I have asked before he knelt in front of me, thus possibly preventing all this cheerful prancing around?

As soon as I take off the white and green sneakers, the man scoops them up and puts them back in the box. “Terrific,” he cries out, another word I don't know. “So we're all set here,” he says and heads toward the cash register.

I can no longer delay the agony. “How much are they?” I ask.

He looks at the box label. “Forty-four ninety-five.”

I open my Russian wallet, not big enough for dollar bills, and examine its contents. One twenty, three fives, and a couple of singles. I pour the bills onto the counter where the man is already writing out a receipt. “This is all I have,” I force myself to utter.

The man stops writing and looks at me as if I've suddenly turned into Grishka, a drunk with a battered face who used to sleep under my Leningrad courtyard archway. He picks up the bills and counts them, already knowing that it is eight dollars less than the amount on the box. There is annoyance in his eyes, but also suspicion.

“Don't you have a credit card?” he asks curtly.

I don't know what he's talking about.

“Visa?” he says and peers from above his glasses.

“I have a visa,” I assure him. “I am a resident alien,” I say and pull out my green card.

The man throws up his hands in frustration, probably lamenting the moment he knelt before me, his balding head glistening with drops of sweat. I feel guilty for entering this place, for sauntering before a mirror in sneakers I couldn't afford.

“Take them,” sputters the man, nodding toward the box. “And go,” he adds and waves me out of his store.

I walk home slowly, the box with the sneakers weighing on my arm, a reminder of the most recent humiliation. The streets are empty, and people only come outside when they leave the stores and stride through the heat to their cars. I walk and walk until a car pulls to a stop a few feet ahead. The driver rolls down the window, and a whiff of arctic air escapes together with the man's voice.

“Do you want a ride?” he asks and smiles, baring his perfect teeth. He is sun-tanned and middle-aged, and in my mind he fits perfectly into the empty corridors of Texas Instruments. No one in Leningrad, I know, would bother to pull over their Lada or Moskvich and offer a ride to a total stranger lumbering through one of the hottest days of the decade. They would all be busy honking at streetcars and pedestrians, asserting their rights among fume-spewing public buses and state-owned trucks with creaky cabs and wobbling tires. Austin cars don't have to worry about any of this, gliding on roads that don't look like jagged slabs of concrete tossed together by a deranged giant, on tires with enough tread to take them all the way to New Jersey, with windshield wipers that don't have to be removed once the car is parked, as a precaution against theft.

I know, of course, that the man is not a kind stranger looking to give rides to foreigners on foot. From the way the tip of his tongue touches the corner of his mouth I can tell what he really wants.

“Thank you, but I don't have too far to go,” I lie.

“Where are you from?” asks the man, leaning his elbow on the open window. “England?” he ventures, squinting a little. “Scandinavia?”

Despite the man's pedestrian intentions, I wish I could say I were from Britain or Sweden.

“Russia,” I say. “Leningrad. Former St. Petersburg,” I add because the man is just staring at me, silent. His fingers stop rapping on the window frame, and I can read nothing behind his watery gray, foreign eyes.

“Well, as you wish,” he finally says and rolls up his window. As the car starts moving, I see him gazing at me in the rearview mirror.

I stand there, awash in the exhaust fumes, as his car turns a corner and disappears from view. The street is completely empty now, the low evening sun burning its last rays onto the brown patches of grass. I start walking again, the only human soul as far as I can see. I walk one block, then the next, and then another one, as if I were in a science fiction film, a survivor of an attack aimed at the entire humanity traveling by foot. I see myself the way the man in the car must have seen me—unmoored, unattached to a vehicle, utterly alone.