Mother Russia (9781590209028)

by Robert Littell

  “Oh, we’ve got money when it comes to records, don’t you worry your head about that.”

  Pravdin drags his suitcases into the hall as the girl holds open the door. “What’s the lowdown on the building?” he demands.

  “There are a couple of drips on this floor,” Ophelia replies. “The man who lives there is an embalmer.” Her face screws up in disgust. “They say he’s the one who bathes Diadya Lenin every other week. A genuine general has that room. A limousine with the tiniest flag on the fender you ever saw comes to get him every morning. That must mean he’s important, mustn’t it? And the weatherman lives there with his girl friend who’s not here now because she’s having marital problems with her husband. The weatherman is neat; he’s the one on television every night with the weather report, the one with the cute mustache. Upstairs there’s Mother Russia and Nadezhda. And you. Mother Russia is a super lady.” Ophelia leans toward Pravdin’s ear. “She’s a bit off her head actually, but it’s nothing serious. She believes in flying saucers and visitors from outer space and things like that. You’ll get along with her just fine if you know what she likes and what she doesn’t like. She’s kind of old and fussy and fixed in her ways, if you know what I mean.”

  Pravdin, a collector of idiosyncrasies as well as things, settles down on a suitcase. “What does she like and not like, then?”

  Ophelia thinks a moment. “She doesn’t like germs, telephones, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, knocks on the door, starch in shirts or sheets, General Shuvkin,”—Ophelia indicates the General’s door—“meat, sneezing because it lets the soul escape, insane asylums, lightning and electric samovars. As for what she likes: there’s fresh snow, getting letters and writing them, all things the color of absinthe, exotic tea, parrots, wood, Akhmatova, softness, craziness and me. She likes me,” Ophelia laughs happily. “And what is it you don’t like, Comrade Eisenhower?”

  Pravdin remembers some words from a poem. “What I don’t like is mist, bell sounds and brokenness,” he replies.

  “Hey, you’ll get along fine,” Ophelia concludes brightly. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Mother Russia. I’m dying to see how she’ll react to someone with a name like Robespierre.”

  Ophelia grabs one of Pravdin’s suitcases and drags it up the wooden stairs ahead of him. “Zoya Aleksandrovna,” she calls. “Come look—your new attic is here.” Laughing merrily, she tosses back at Pravdin: “Wait until she hears about your mist, bell sounds and brokenness.”

  Zoya Aleksandrovna Volkova emerges from her room and leans over the banister under a skylight. She is dressed in pleated trousers, sturdy walking shoes with low heels and laces, a man’s shirt, wears two ragged silver fox pieces around her neck to guard against chills, carries a fly swatter tucked under her arm. Her hair, twisted into a bun, is gray.

  “Charmed,” she says in a suspicious voice, leaning over the railing to offer Pravdin her hand, palm down. He reaches up and takes it, is uncertain whether to kiss it or shake it; he is struck by her skin, which is soft with age and doesn’t seem to be attached to the bones.

  “Greetings to you, little mother,” he offers politely.

  Mother Russia draws Pravdin’s hand to her bifocals, raises her head to study his nails through the lower lens. “Good, good, you don’t at all appear to be communistical. Here, child, regard the paleness of his nails; it indicates melancholy for certain, persecution maybe. The broadness”—Mother Russia’s thumb polishes each of his nails as she proceeds along his hand—“is a positive sign, yes, it means he’s not, thanks God, ambitious. (Only fools are ambitious is what I think. But that’s another story.) Ah, the white mark is mauvais, mauvais, means misfortune, poor dear.” She looks up suddenly into his face. “What is your given name?”

  “Robespierre, little mother.”

  “Robes-pierre.” She tries it, then shifts the accent. “Robes-pierre. Yes, I like it better, don’t you, that way. Robespierre. Well, God grant you don’t end up the way he did.” She releases his hand, sniffs the air. “You don’t I hope to God have any communicable diseases, do you?”

  “He looks as white as a sheet,” Ophelia comments.

  “No, no, perfectly healthy is what I am,” Pravdin protests. “Pale is how I always look. Hustlers, like Hasidim, avoid the sun. Take my word for it, little mother, from me there’s nothing you can catch.”

  “Tant mieux,” she tosses over her shoulder, heading for the kitchen and indicating with a flick of her fly swatter that he is to follow.

  “You’re in the attic, up those stairs. The toilet’s here. Each of us expected to buy paper whenever we find it, Scandinavian brands preferred. They’re more, excuse the expression, absorbent. As for the kitchen, I suppose Ophelia told you about no meat. No meat includes no chicken. No meat. No chicken. Fish, eggs, grains, herb teas of all sorts. Here”—Mother Russia thrusts into Pravdin’s hands a eucalyptus branch—“put this on your windowsill, it will discourage the mosquitoes. When you’re unpacked call me; whatever you do, don’t knock at my door; never knock at my door. I invite you for an infusion. We will have a conversation, you and I; perhaps we will the both of us together figure out why you have come to us.”

  “I have come to you only to live, little mother,” Pravdin says, puzzled.

  But Mother Russia only smiles as if she knows better.

  Pravdin unpacks his belongings, folds away his khaki shirts on the top shelf of the closet, lays out his toilet articles on the shelf over the small washbasin in his room, disinfects the basin with alcohol that he pours on and ignites. He finds a broom in a kitchen closet and sweeps the attic. From under a dresser he collects a pile of sawdust. Termites! he thinks, horrified. He pulls out the drawers one by one and examines the interior. Nothing. He gets down on his knees and examines the under side. On the inside of one of the legs he finds a layer of wood plaster. He tests it with his fingertip. The plaster is dry, but behind it there is a small hollow. Pravdin leans back on his haunches, wipes away with his sleeve the sweat that has accumulated on his forehead. Suddenly he shudders. Why, he asks himself, struggling for calm, for logic, for perspective, why would they put a microphone in my room? What is it they expect to hear? He is tempted to talk into it, to tell them he knows it’s there, to take a knife and pry it out and fling it from the window (open, with the eucalyptus branch on the sill). But an old camp instinct tells him:

  A microphone you are aware of is something you can fill with silence.

  Pravdin, his pinky angled off into space, sniffs at the infusion, which has been sweetened with small chunks of green apple, as if it is medicinal

  “Drink up,” Mother Russia orders. She hovers over him, tapping her leg impatiently with the fly swatter. “Water lily roots are excellent for the circulation. Judging from the paleness of your skin you could use with a little circulation. Exhale first so you won’t smell it. That’s the way. Now drink. And be careful how you handle my china. Let me see, where was I before I interrupted myself?”

  She inserts a cigarette in a long ivory holder, lights up. The holder bobs as she speaks. “Ah, I was in Lvov. I saw only five cats during the five years I lived in Lvov—all at the same time! They were all, God bless them, black. It was just before they came for my husband. I took it as an omen: five black cats crossing your path at once! They belonged if I remember correctly to a fat Germanic housewife; she was plodding toward her back door with an armload of kindling, surrounded by an honor guard of five equally fat cats, tails en chandelle (you do speak French, don’t you?), weaving gracefully about her. I dropped what I was doing and hurried home to warn him—too late, too late.” Mother Russia sighs; tears well in her eyes. “Don’t mind me,” she says, angry at herself. “I always cry at holocausts.” She blows her nose into a paper napkin. “In Petersburg I met a gray and white torn near the Voznessensky Bridge reeling home after a night in the coal cellars. He hoarsely conversed with me for several minutes, then went on his drunken way. I took that as an omen too and the next day the German
s attacked. Do you like cats, Robes-pierre Isayevich?”

  “I like their taste, little mother,” Pravdin tells her, exhaling as she directed and trying another sip of infusion.

  “Their taste!” Mother Russia gulps her own infusion between short puffs on her long ivory holder. “Did I understand you to comment on their taste?”

  “In the camps, little mother, any cat we got our hands on we ate. Thinking of them as pets was a luxury I never had.”

  “So you’re from the camps then.” Mother Russia contemplates Pravdin’s badly set thumb through a haze of cigarette smoke. “I have put in a certain amount of time too,” she says quietly. “But that’s another story.”

  They are silent for a while. Pravdin grows accustomed to the water lily root infusion and drinks from his cup more willingly. When he finishes she invites him to her room off the kitchen.

  “Waak:, waak, power to the powerful, power to the powerful.”

  Pravdin ducks, pivots, throws up before his face a protective mesh of fingers, finds himself staring through the mesh into the beady eyes of a green-crested parrot who stirs the air with his wings in greeting.

  “Gently, gently, Kerensky,” Mother Russia calms the bird, chucking him under the beak with the swatter end of her fly swatter.

  Pravdin, recovered, takes in the room: large with an alcove, light pouring in through a birch tree, three golden cages containing three green-crested parrots hanging at different heights from an ornate ceiling, a large overhead electric fan that doesn’t work, a brass four-poster (unmade, with the imprint of a small body on one side, as if leaving a place for someone to sleep next to her), a night table covered with books and bottles of herbs and powders, an old prewar Singer sewing machine, worn carpets underfoot, an old gramophone, a 1930s art deco table clock ticking away perfectly, a collection of 78 r.p.m. records, a desk with an old Cyrillic Remington on it, piles of papers, books everywhere, dozens of postcards (yellow and curling at the edges) thumbtacked to the wall above the desk.

  “I collected them as a child,” Mother Russia explains, “when it was an everyday occurrence to receive such things from outside the country in the mail. My father, a fur salesman during one period of his life, traveled a great deal and sent me a card from every city he visited. See”—the fly swatter becomes a pointer—“Istanbul was called Constantinople then; Izmir, Smyrna. You are to sit here.” She plants herself across from Pravdin at a small round table covered with a rectangular cloth with fringes that reach to the floor. “Serve yourself,” she nods toward a bowl of grapes.

  Pravdin selects a small bunch, clips it from the stem with a silver scissors, dips the grapes into a cut-glass bowl, half full of water and a slice of lemon, spits the pits into his palm and deposits them in a heavy cut glass ashtray.

  “Waak, waak, rev-Iutions are verbose.”

  “Another bird heard from,” Mother Russia comments. ‘That one’s named Trotsky. The third one is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I suspect Vladimir Ilyich of homosexual tendencies—the bird, not the man. I have seen him at various times eyeing both Kerensky and Trotsky with that watery stare often associated with sex.”

  Pravdin fidgets uncomfortably. “What does Vladimir Ilyich say?”

  “Oh, he’s the least talkative of the three,” Mother Russia allows. She reaches through the cage with her swatter and taps Vladimir Ilyich on the head.

  “Help, help, waak, waak.”

  Pravdin flashes one of his crooked smiles. “Funny birds are what they are,” he comments.

  “The originals were funny birds too,” Mother Russia says. “I knew them, you know. I knew them all. Ha! I am an old anti-Bolshevik. Kerensky was a fiery speaker but a prude. His fingernails were a walking disaster: narrow, indicating ambition; ingrown too, a sign of luxurious tastes. Oh, I had a certain respect for him in the beginning, I will admit it to you. He was caught between two immense forces neither of which he really understood, neither of which he could have controlled even if he had understood them. For a long time I saw him as that modern existential hero, the man in the middle. But all that ended when he scurried from a back door of the Winter Palace, skirts whipping around his thick ankles, as the Bolsheviks stormed through the front door. Enter Trotsky! He was always nasty and needling. His nails were as pale as yours, come to think of it, though they were much smaller than yours; small nails mean conceit. Vladimir Ilyich was by far the least sexy of the three. His nails were broad, indicating a timidness that was only apparent to those who had the misfortune to be close to him, and round, indicating a generous liberal spirit underneath the hard pragmatic exterior. When I was a child Lenin hid in my father’s apartment in Petersburg. I remember it as if it were yesterday. (I consider memory a form of time travel. But that’s another story.) Lenin, looking ridiculously like a female impersonator in his red wig, presented himself at our door. Mother had no idea who he was and obliged him to walk on canvas rectangles to polish the floors. She made us all walk on the canvas, even father. When I was sixteen I entered the living room one day walking directly on the floor. I remember the clickety-click of my Paris heels on the tiles. Conversation stopped. It was my great moment of revolt, more important even than when I parted with my virginity, which I organized the following year. My mother looked down at my shoes and then at my father, but my father continued reading his newspaper. I never walked on canvas again.”

  “And Lenin?” Pravdin demands curiously.

  “Lenin,” Mother Russia rummages for memories, “seemed to me like an old woman, shuffling around like that in a wrinkled robe polishing my mother’s floors. He stayed three days and spent a great deal of time in the bathroom; his intestines were not in any condition to make a revolution. People came and went. My mother ran out of canvas and made them walk about in their stockings. Her floors shone like they had never shone before. Trotsky was embarrassed to remove his shoes and had to be asked several times. He had holes in his stockings, you see. There was whispering late into the night. One man raised his voice and banged a table with his fist and everyone shushed him. Lenin shuffled back and forth on the canvas and said, ‘All right, what do we have to lose,’ and went off to the toilet. Through the worst of the Civil War someone appeared at our flat twice a week with a basket of bread, some eggs, a bottle of jam, tea and an endless supply of pamphlets.”

  “Waak, rev-lutions are verbose, waak, waak.”

  Pravdin’s lust for the theater gets the upper hand. Thrusting an imaginary microphone across the table in a parody of an eager TV reporter, he blurts: “In your opinion, Zoya Aleksandrovna, what is the difference between our life today and the days before the Revolution?”

  Mother Russia responds instantly to the game. “Ha!” she cackles, “the greatest difference is there are fewer birds in the trees today. And fewer trees. But that’s another story.”

  “Waak, waak, help, help,” barks Pravdin.

  By the time Nadezhda arrives home, just before dinner, they are on their fifth glass of rose hip wine (Mother Russia’s own concoction) and carrying on like long lost friends.

  “Picture it,” Pravdin cries, folding himself into a comic crouch. “After four hours on line the guard asks me, “What are you waiting for, comrade?’ So what do I tell him? So what I tell him is: For the state to wither away is what I’m waiting for.’ “

  The cigarette holder balanced delicately between the fingers of one hand, the stem of a crystal wine glass pressed between the fingers of the other, Mother Russia shakes with laughter.

  “Don’t go away, there’s more,” Pravdin gasps. “When I say I’m waiting for the state to wither away, this old bat in front of me wags her gouty finger in my face and tells”—Pravdin can barely get the words out he is laughing so hard—“she tells me, “Don’t hold your breath!’”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Mother Russia repeats, and she and Pravdin roar together.

  Nadezhda stands at the kitchen door looking from one to the other, not quite sure what to make of it all. Silence reach
es out from her like a hand and touches Pravdin; the sound of laughter slips away and then the muscular spasms of the laughter, and he is left gasping for breath, staring at the girl with the tangled sun-bleached hair plaited into two braids that meet and twine into one another at the nape of her neck. She is wearing a sleeveless blue sweater and blue jeans and a broad-brimmed straw hat with dried wild flowers tucked into a blue band. She enters the room with a flowing motion of broad hips on soft flat soundless shoes, deposits her net avoska full of onions on the table, embraces Mother Russia.

  “Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin declares, leaping to his feet and clicking together the heels of his sneakers, “at your beck and call. I’m the new attic.”

  Nadezhda takes a pad from her pocket, writes on the top page, tears it off and hands it to Pravdin. On it she has written:

  “Oos, Nadezhda Victorovna. Hello to you.”

  “Hello back to you, little sister,” Pravdin answers uneasily, glancing at Mother Russia, holding the scrap of paper in his hand.

  A trace of a smile touches Nadezhda’s lips. She nods, turns back to Zoya and excitedly taps her briefcase; she has come home with a treasure. She scribbles the details on her pad. “Enormous line, joined naturally, waited forty minutes, no idea what was for sale till I came near the head. Oh Zoya, see what I found.”

  Nadezhda pulls from her briefcase a large glossy book of Hieronymus Bosch reproductions. “Look for God’s sake at this triptych,” exclaims Mother Russia, turning the pages. “What a delicious discovery. Feel the paper. Oh my God, it’s French or Swiss, absolutely no question about it. What did you pay?”

  Nadezhda flashes ten fingers four times.

  “Forty!” Pravdin marvels, his palm slapping against his forehead. “A steal is what it is. I can get you three times that with one phone call.”

  Nadezhda smiles and shakes her head, and Mother Russia says, “She would never sell such a thing.”