Russian Tattoo (6 page)

Nine

R
obert asks if we could read a Russian book together. To practice his Russian, he says. This is a good sign, I think, that he is asking for Russian practice. Maybe it means he hasn't been seeing Karen.

Robert never mentions Karen, and I never ask. Yet, in my mind, she is always there with us, somewhere in the corner of the room, quietly observing everything that goes on, like an ever-­present ghost. I can't quite make out her features or pull her into focus. But I know that she sits there and watches us: undressing in the dark, fumbling for each other dutifully, making ordinary love. Her presence is palpable and discomforting; she is a membrane between Robert and me, like a full-body prophylactic that keeps this relationship sterile of emotion. Without ever seeing her, I hate her.

I sit on a couch in the living room and try to think what parts of Russian grammar Karen would teach Robert. But instead I think of my courtyard friend Masha, the object of my childhood envy, who went to a special English school and who lived in an apartment with a living room. My Leningrad apartment had two rooms where we slept and a kitchen, where we ate. The idea of a room with no apparent function and a coffee table where no one drank coffee seemed truly decadent, and I was jealous of Masha's English skills and her apartment luxury. Should I feel happy now, sitting on a couch in a rented living room on the foreign side of the world?

Robert lingers in front of a shelf, picks a book, and sits down close so we can both see the text.
chekhov
, I read on the front.
plays
. As he turns the pages to
The Three Sisters
, I don't know if I should correct his pronunciation like a diligent teacher or cheer his fluency and ignore a foreign accent, like a supportive wife. Which role should I now play? Since Robert wasn't in my class in the Leningrad Russian Program, I don't even know how good his Russian reading is. But then I don't know most things about Robert.

He turns the pages and stops at a scene in Act 2. “This work is without poetry, without thought,” he reads Irina's words. “My dear God, I dream of Moscow every night; I've almost lost my mind.”

“I've almost lost my mind,” I repeat to accentuate the palatalized consonants but also to add the drama and urgency missing from his voice. “We will be in Moscow,” I continue, jumping to the next scene.

“In Moscow,” repeats Robert, trying to flatten his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as Nina taught him last summer in her phonetics class.

“Softer,” I say, “softer. And the stress is on the end, like in the word
toska
,” a word I think of but don't translate for him.

This is what gnaws at the three sisters all the time, even when their cheerful military friends come calling with stories about their past, cherished life in Moscow. The sisters wallow in
toska
, wearing black dresses, loving inappropriately, and cowering before a new sister-in-law who blossoms from a shy philistine to a full-fledged bully by the time the sisters realize that there is no escape. How could the provincial town where they live, a place with one school and one post office and no one to talk to, compare to the culture and splendor of the city they left behind?

Toska
, I say so that Robert hears how the
o
sounds like an
a
because the stress falls on the end of the word.

“Definition of
toska
?” Robert asks, ready to file the meaning into a compartment of his scientific brain.

If I could recite the definition of
toska
, in English or Russian, there would probably be no Chekhov or
The
Three Sisters,
or the entire pantheon of Russian literature Robert is so keen on deciphering. It is a paradox, really: for him to understand Russian literature, he needs to know the definition of
toska
, while it is precisely trying to shoehorn
toska
into a definition that guarantees the failure of that understanding.

Toska
is a combination of melancholy and longing, I say. It's a deep sadness and the awareness that something has been lost. It's what you find in every Russian book published before 1917, I explain, the year when melancholy and sadness were outlawed in favor of general optimism and enthusiasm for our bright future. But there are also other ingredients in
toska
for which I don't have words, things submerged deeply under the layers of silt on the soft bottom of the Russian soul.

What does Robert think of me? I can't read much behind his thick-lens glasses, behind his all-day absence at the university doing research that is as dark to me as the cosmic matter he is studying. Should I sit in on a freshman class he teaches and try to understand his personality along with the basics of college math? Or maybe I should buy some real beer, catch Sagar off guard one evening, and ask him for any insight on his roommate he can offer?

I know one thing about Robert: he doesn't seem to need people. He spent a year in Afghanistan on his own, without human contact, if you don't count a local doctor who wanted to inject him with a rusty syringe when he was bitten by a scorpion. Robert seems to treat people the same way he wants to be treated himself: he leaves them alone. In our first week in Princeton, he invited two high school friends to his mother's house, a small gathering Millie and I planned together. Half an hour after they arrived Robert disappeared—a grave offense at any Russian party, leaving before the guests get tipsy enough to forget about the host. I went up and down the stairs, looking in every room of the house, until I found him on the third floor sitting under the rafters in a rocking chair, thinking. I don't remember what I said—what could I possibly say, still in a fog of jet lag and culture shock? He just sat there, rocking slightly, legs crossed, glasses in his lap. I thought frantically of what I was going to tell his friends downstairs. I thought that if I were in their place I would leave and never see him again.

I probably said something like “Your friends are downstairs to see you. Why are you here, in the attic?”

“Because they bore me,” Robert probably answered.

“But you invited them,” I said, and he simply shrugged, going back inside his head, where more exciting things were happening.

Back in Leningrad, Robert had seemed as mysterious as the world he came from. He was a writer with a published novel, a violin player, a lover of the Russian language. He was also a physicist who understood cosmic laws, which made him as enigmatic as the world he had invented on the page. Robert had met Sakharov on his previous trip to Moscow. He'd read more Russian classics in the original than any neighbor I knew in our apartment building. But my knees had never gone weak when I looked at him. So I felt guilty when, a week after I tutored him in Chekhov, he tried to resuscitate our nonexisting chemistry by filling a bathtub with pine-smelling, bubbly water and inviting me to join him. The whole room smelled of spruce, and it made me think of our New Year in Leningrad—a white sheet of fake snow under a three-foot scrawny tree, a bottle of sweet champagne called Sovietskoye, and the midnight glow of a television that softened my mother's face and made everything seem right. The Austin tub was too small for two people, Robert and I splashing awkwardly, soaking the bathroom mat with water.

I thought of my gut melting when Boris from Kiev rolled up a blanket and we climbed into the mountains in the Crimea during one month we spent on a remote Black Sea beach. Boris's eyes were so blue that a silly smile stretched across my lips every time he looked in my direction. He had a cinnamon tan and hair bleached by the sun to peroxide white, and I felt happy standing on a cliff, watching his body through the green prism of water shimmering along the rocks as he hunted for crabs. It was simple being with Boris, as uncomplicated as elbowing in line for tomatoes at a local store, as basic as living on the beach.

I thought of Robert's former girlfriend's apartment in Manhattan, where we spent a night just a month ago. The former girlfriend and her husband both worked for some American corporations, so we saw them only late that night, when we came back after walking up and down the city. Robert and I slept on the living room floor, turned away from each other, pretending we didn't hear the former girlfriend and her husband's lovemaking behind a thin wall only ten feet away.

I felt guilty for not being more attracted to Robert, for not loving him with every nerve ending of my body, the same way I loved Boris. By the time the water in the bathtub cooled, I felt guilty for saying farewell to Boris on a slushy Leningrad street, for abandoning my mother and sister, for leaving behind the curved façades and lace ironwork of Leningrad. I felt guilty for leaving my father lying in the cemetery on the other side of the Neva under the snow and rain, with Baltic winds slowly erasing his picture from the headstone. By the time I climbed out and dried off, I felt so guilty that the only right thing to do seemed to be to pack my sundress and my sandals and get on the first flight back home.

The truth was I didn't even know what awaited me back home if I decided to return. What if Boris had been right when he tried, just before my scheduled wedding with Robert, to convince me not to leave the country? He ignored his Kiev engineering duties and rushed all the way to Leningrad to tell me I was making a terrible mistake. “You'd be marked,” he warned, as we were sitting in a Georgian restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt, gulping champagne, then cognac. “Nobody would want to be around you. Even your closest friends.” The dizzier I got from the cognac the more eerie his words felt, until I saw myself as
vrag naroda
, enemy of the people. I'll be just like my mother's uncle Volya, who was arrested in 1937 and never heard from again, I thought, as we staggered out into the icy wind of Nevsky Prospekt. I'll be a person with a dubious past and certainly one without a future.

Ten

S
oon after my employment agency fiasco, I find work in a small sandwich shop owned by a young man from Vietnam. He is my age, or a few years older, perhaps, and he has probably also been damaged by his communist motherland. Yet his smile is open and his movements unstrained, and he walks around his just-about-to-be-opened eatery as if he has never heard of a state factory cafeteria or a five-year plan. His name is Truong, but he tells everyone he is Terry. Terry is easier, he says, for Americans.

Maybe Terry is right and I should also tweak my name and introduce myself as Helen, or Elaine, or Ellen, which is easier for Americans. And what about my patronymic of Ilyinichna, written into documents as my middle name, as unpronounceable as Goro-khova?

Terry and I get the place ready: he composes the menu and brings loads of paper products, and I mop the floor. His older sister, whose name is Fuoc, comes to help, introducing herself as Fanny.

“Nice to meet you,” I say to her, proud to use the phrase I have just learned.

Fanny smiles and tells me to go clean the toilet because she just inspected it and found some rust stains. She says something in Vietnamese, pointing at the dining area, and Terry obediently walks around the counter where he was drawing pictures of his sandwiches on a billboard and starts moving the tables closer together. I don't know what Fanny did when she was Fuoc, but I imagine her in the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace, where I worked at eighteen, giving orders to everyone below her in rank, just like Tatiana Vasilievna, the coordinator of the English-speaking countries and thus of the entire civilized world. Every morning, Tatiana Vasilievna sailed into the reception area, where I sat behind a desk, and handed thick batches of paper to the typist and reams of unneeded advice to everyone who happened to be there.

I go to the bathroom to scrub the toilet. I am on my knees, leaning on the sponge because the rust stains don't want to disappear. The more I rub the lower my spirits plunge until they can't plunge any lower.

“How you doing?” asks Fanny. I look up at her where she stands, framed by the bathroom doorway, with the dining room lights bright behind her, as though posing for a portrait.

For a moment, I consider letting Fanny know exactly how I'm doing and what it feels like to kneel in front of a rusty toilet bowl, being ordered around by a Tatiana Vasilievna from Vietnam. But then I think of my previous job searches and say that I'm doing fine.

A few days later, Terry and I stand behind the glass counter and take orders. The pictures of his sandwiches, along with their descriptions, are on the wall behind us, drawn meticulously by Terry's artistic hand. I am grateful that the sandwiches are numbered; I still don't understand American pronunciation, so different from what I heard on my university tapes recorded by British professors.

For a week, there is a line to our counter at lunchtime. Terry whistles unfamiliar tunes when he smokes in the back and asks me if Americans eat sandwiches for dinner. Should I stay open till ten? he wonders.

I don't know if Americans eat sandwiches for dinner. Until a week ago, I didn't even know they ate sandwiches for lunch. I know that Terry is ignoring the fact that I am not an American and he couldn't have found a more uninformed listener to test his business plan.

But I like Terry's drawings and I'd never tell him what I really think. I don't want to disappoint him, so I answer his question the way he wants me to.

“Sure,” I say. “You can stay open for dinner. These are excellent sandwiches. I could eat them all day long,” I add, another lie. This feels like the old Soviet
vranyo
—the pretending game we played with the state. I wonder if Terry had to play the same game in Vietnam. I wonder if he knows that I am pretending, praising his sandwiches as my favorite food; I wonder if he knows that I know that he knows I am not telling the truth.

I pretend. Five days a week I pretend to be excited about sandwiches. In the stores I pretend to examine the products as if I knew what to do with them. I pretend Robert is the same Robert he was in Leningrad. I pretend there is no Karen. If I look at my present job as a role, it makes it easier to feel okay when Fanny shows up and orders me to move the tables around or mop the floor or rub the glass surface of the display case until it sparkles.

As our lunch lines grow shorter, she shows up more frequently and orders me to do more cleaning and moving. Terry goes outside to smoke more often, especially when she is around. He paints a sign that says
50% off with coupon
and adds another sandwich to the menu, a fluffy concoction where the main ingredient is whipped cream. I don't know what a coupon is, but the sign, despite its unquestionable artistic value, fails to bring people to the store.

Two weeks later, there are no lines at all. For a day we sit at one of the tables staring at the front door. It opens once or twice, not enough to wipe the frown off Terry's forehead.

The next day Fanny shows up and tells me they no longer need help.

The first and only paycheck I received from the sandwich shop had a three-digit figure on the front, $162.46, the biggest dollar sum I've ever seen. From the way Robert's face lit up when I handed it to him I knew I could no longer stay home, look at the pictures of Sagar's brides, and watch horror films on TV.

Across the street from Terry's sandwich shop is Milto's Pizzeria. When I worked at Terry's, I used to watch a short man in his forties walk around the tables spilling onto the street and shout orders back to someone inside the restaurant. I cross the street and ask Milto if he can give me a job.

“What are you making at the sandwich shop?” Milto asks.

I give him the number, which one of Robert's friends referred to as minimum wage. Since Terry's store is still in business, Milto cannot know that I've been laid off and must think that I am looking for a better-paying job.

“I'll pay you ten cents an hour more,” says Milto and shakes a cigarette out of a pack, giving me time to respond.

“Good,” I say, as proud of my luck as Milto is of his shrewdness, thinking he's just outbid a business rival.

The following day I am at Milto's Pizzeria moving tables around and mopping floors. Every morning, Milto explains, I must take the tables from the indoor restaurant where they are stacked for the night, set them outside, and plant an umbrella in the middle of each one. I try to figure out how heavy each table is, using a common unit of weight, the same way back home the values of things were measured by the price of a ubiquitous half-liter bottle of vodka. “The yarn is so damn expensive these days,” my sister would complain, returning from a farm market with skeins of wool to knit herself a sweater, “ten half liters a kilo.” Does each table weigh two twenty-kilogram suitcases like the one I brought from Leningrad, or three? I don't know the answer, but I know it is definitely more than one because my arm still remembers the weight, and it takes me half an hour to drag all of the tables outside, one by one, as they screech on the asphalt, announcing the beginning of Milto's lunch.

In addition to moving and mopping, I am entrusted with standing behind the counter and taking orders, then placing toppings on pizza slices and sliding them into the big steel oven behind me. Once the slices are in, I start thinking of my old Leningrad courtyard or my upcoming test called a GRE, which usually makes me forget about the oven until a customer comes up to the counter and inquires why it's taking so long. At that point the slice has been so shrunken and charred that I have to go through the process again, under the customer's angry stare, hoping that Milto is elsewhere, unable to witness my inadequacy.

The good thing is that I can eat all the pizza I want and even take a few slices home and reheat them for Robert's dinner. Compared to what he is probably getting from Karen, a few slices of reheated pizza isn't much, but I don't know what else I can give.

An airmail envelope from Leningrad arrives in the mailbox, our address carefully made out in my mother's square handwriting.

Our dearest Lenochka and Robert,
she writes.

I just returned from the post office where they told me I couldn't send you the nesting doll, matryoshka, I'd bought because it's made with pieces of inlaid wood. I also wanted to send a souvenir salt dish Marina brought from her theater trip to Armenia, but it isn't allowed in the foreign mail, either. So I sent you two bars of chocolate instead. At least, something sweet. Everything is all right here. We had a scare when a man came from the district housing office to announce that
, since you'd left, we had too many square meters per inhabitant, which meant they were going to take one room away from us and move another family in. Of course, Marina got very angry and yelled at the man, but he wouldn't budge; he must have heard arguments like that before. “Start moving your stuff out of this room,” he said and pointed to the piano. “We'll see about that,” I replied and pointed to the front door. “That's just great,” barked Marina in her stage voice when the door banged shut. “Back to the paradise of communal living, with some idiots from the provinces making pickles in our bathtub.” But then I remembered that my brother-in-law from Kineshma went on vacation at a Volga sanatorium for free every year because he was a war veteran.
I am a war veteran, too, I reminded Marina, and I've never had a free vacation, so maybe I could claim the ten extra square meters of my apartment as a veteran's perk. So I went to the district office, stood on line, and wrote a request according to the form hanging on the wall under glass. Yesterday we heard the good news: my request was approved. So we don't have to move the piano and the couch out and no strange family from the provinces will be moving in.

I stare at the rows of Coca-Cola bottles behind the glass of a refrigerated cabinet. What would I do if they hadn't approved my mother's request? If our Leningrad home had been turned into a communal apartment because I decided to marry a foreigner and leave? And what would my mother say if she knew I worked in a pizzeria moving tables and burning pizza slices?

America is the mouth of the shark, she'd say. She warned me many times, but I wouldn't listen because, as she'd always pointed out, I am stubborn as a goat.

I write back that I am planning to enter graduate school at the University of Texas next semester, studying Russian literature, although I have no idea what literature or language possibilities the university has to offer. All I know is that I have to take a test before I can even apply, a strange test called the GRE. Robert and I went to a bookstore the other day and bought a thick volume called
GRE Practice Tests
.

“It's pretty simple,” said Robert as I stood by the bookshelf, leafing through the tome in my hands. “Take all the sample tests and you'll do just fine.”

Standing at Milto's counter, I think of all the tests I had to take at Leningrad University. We would draw a card from the examiner's table, read the three questions written on the paper, prepare for twenty minutes, and then face a bored and exhausted professor. We had to speak succinctly yet eloquently about the topics we'd drawn, plugging in all the relevant facts we could remember to convince the examiner that we deserved a decent grade. Those much dreaded exams were always subject-specific and required intensive book searches, scrupulous note taking, and blunt memorization.

I don't understand the principle of the GRE practice tests. Why are we given five possible answers to each question? And the questions: what exactly are they aiming at? It isn't literature, or language, or history, or any other subject I am familiar with. The test paragraphs are short, trivial, and boring. They have words I don't know and they test things I can't figure out.

“It's multiple choice,” says Robert, and although I know the meaning of every word separately, I can't figure out the overall phrase. “Only one answer out of the five is right,” he says. The paragraph in front of me describes the changes in the population of some neighborhoods in Detroit. I don't know what the Detroit population has to do with linguistics or literature and how my choosing the correct answer will help the head of the Russian department make a decision as to whether I will be a good candidate to study the works of Nabokov and Mandelstam.