Mom and I during all this sat glued to our TV in New York. But any wild flicker of hope from the gadalka Terri’s prediction died when they announced the successor.
Yuri Andropov, the ex-KGB chief, a hunter of dissidents, was definitely not a nice man.
But though his heart was hard, Andropov’s kidneys barely functioned. Thirteen months later men in shiny mink hats once again followed a coffin out of the mint-green and white Hall of Columns to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march.
Andropov’s successor’s health was summed up by another joke: “Without regaining consciousness, Comrade Konstantin Chernenko assumed the post of general secretary.” He lasted just over three hundred days.
“Dear Comrades,” went a mock news announcement, “don’t laugh, but once again with great sorrow we inform you …”
In March 1985 a barely known agricultural secretary who had been Andropov’s protégé became the Soviet Union’s newest leader. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was only fifty-four, vigorous, with functioning organs, a law degree from Moscow State University, a thick southern Russian accent, a pushy wife, and an emphatic manner that instantly seduced the Western media. Initially Russians didn’t joke too much about the South America–shaped blotch on his bald scalp. The venom came later. Gorbachev was the sixth—and last—general secretary of the country known as the USSR.
It’s become fashionable in Russia these days to glance backward through a mist of rosy nostalgia, particularly at the Mature Socialism of Brezhnev.
“We stole to our heart’s content …”
“Oh, but still we were so honest, so innocent …”
“Families were closer … the ice cream more wholesome.”
From the Gucci-ed and Prada-ed to the miserably pensioned, Russians wax fondly today about lines; recall defitsit jokes; praise the flavor of the Stagnation Era kolbasa. I’m no different here in Queens. Is it not a special privilege, really, to possess such a rich, weird past? To have worn the Young Pioneer tie in that scarlet Atlantis known as the USSR? To savor such a bittersweet lode of socialist madeleines?
Then, over a couple of days in 2011, the violence of the historical reality bears down on me—really, for the first time in my adult life.
I’m sick and keeping to bed. Instead of the new Boris Akunin thriller, I have at my bedside an enormous squishy blue plastic bag Mom has lugged over from her apartment. The blue bag holds letters—two decades of correspondence from Russia from the seventies and eighties. Mom has kept it all, it turns out, crammed helter-skelter into folders, manila envelopes, shoeboxes. Despite the thirty-odd years that have passed, the USSR-issue graph paper and square envelopes with hammer-and-sickle airmail logos and sixteen-kopek stamps saying Mir (Peace) are barely frayed or yellowed. There are birthday cards with garish Soviet roses, and New Year’s greetings featuring the snowy Kremlin we were certain we’d never see again.
Sipping lemon tea, I reach in.
Razluka. The faintly folkloric Russian word for “separation” engulfs me.
This is the third new year we greet without you, my aunt Yulia’s anarchic hand protests. How long can this all last?
In the slanted scrawl and sweetly screwy old person’s grammar of my grandma Liza: litany upon litany of small daily laments to cover the existential pain of losing her daughter to exile.
Navsegda—forever. What was our emigration but death with the concession of correspondence?
But from Granddad Naum not one line in the crowded blue bag. Yulia recently told me that after Mom departed, he morally and mentally shriveled, his face a stony mask of Soviet-intelligence-worker denial. A longtime pal denounced him to the authorities, so that Naum, having escaped war bullets and Stalin’s gulags, faced arrest for his daughter’s “treason to Rodina.” He was saved by Admiral Tributs, the World War II hero. Mother found this out much later and wept.
My beloved little swallow who flew away from me …
The words are Grandmother Alla’s, a few days after we’d left her on a bench by our Moscow apartment. The biggest cache of letters is hers. Her round, emphatic script brings back her hoarse, tobacco-y laugh; as I read I can almost see her, there by her dim bedroom mirror, forcing metal hairpins into her bleached blonde bun.
Raw despair brims in her letters. A woman in her fifties who, after neglecting her son, poured all her latent maternal love onto a child who “flew away.”
My last hope has been crushed, she writes—after months of fresh pleading with the OVIR visa office have ended yet again with the denial of a visit permit. I have nothing to live for …
In November 1977, not long after Grandma Alla’s sixtieth birthday, there’s a four-page letter from my dad.
I can barely lift a pen to write about what has come to pass, he begins.
Alla had been staying over with him when she felt a terrible burning in her chest. She moaned, threw up. The ambulance took forty minutes to arrive. A haughty, very young doctor examined her. She was histrionic and the doc decided she was a hysteric—informed me so directly. He injected her with a tranquilizer and left.
The next evening Sergei found his mother facedown on the floor. This time the ambulance came fairly rapidly. But it was all over. He sat the rest of the night stroking his mother’s hair. Her face was calm and beautiful.
The autopsy showed an embolism: a piece of arterial plaque had torn off and gradually blocked the blood flow over twenty-four hours. In any other country Grandma Alla could have been saved.
Babushka loved you with total abandon, Anyuta, I read, blinking away the stabbing tears. She lived for your letters, leaping twice a day to the mailbox. She died in Brezhnev’s Moscow on a Friday. On Sunday, Dad found my last letter to her, from 4,700 untraversable miles away in Philadelphia.
There are other letters from Sergei, but not many. Barely two dozen in the thirteen years we were apart. Another memorable one dates from May 1975. My first Philadelphia spring was in full, saturated azalea bloom. When Mom came home from work, her eyes were red, and it wasn’t from hay fever. She’d opened Dad’s letter at lunch.
Lariska, dear,
For the longest time I couldn’t bring myself to write to you about “everything.” … What had happened to me is, I suppose, logical—and you yourself predicted it all back here in Moscow. I’ve realized soon enough that living alone is beyond me. The loneliness, the desire to be useful to someone (someone who, alas, is close by). In short, I’ve asked a certain Masha to live with me.
After a bit more Masha explaining, he announces: God willing, in October we will have a child, and these circumstances force me to apply for a divorce.
But apparently divorcing an émigré is extremely complicated. So would Larisa help by sending by registered mail, asap, a letter to the Soviet international court stating she has no objections?
My mother did object. She objected passionately. She’d been secretly hoping all along that Sergei would eventually join us. But being my proud, overly noble mom, she mailed the registered letter the following day.
Folded in Dad’s letter I find now a response that was never sent. It’s from a betrayed eleven-year-old—me:
Sergei. This is the last time you will hear from me. OK, you got married, but only a scumbag could write such a mean cynical letter to Mother. Then a coda in my still-shaky English. OK, gud-buye forever. PS. I dont’ have father any more. PPS. I hope your baby will be stupid and ugly.
A year after Dad’s treachery, a trickle of contact eked back between me and him—if contact applies to a very occasional letter and an annual birthday telephone call. Those static-tormented transatlantic conversations ruined the day for me. Dad sounded not entirely sober, both cocky and timid, tossing off thorny little insults. “I got the tape with you playing Brahms. Hmm, you have a long way to go.” He fancied himself a classical music critic.
By the time I was finishing high school, Grandma Liza wrote to say that Sergei had left his second family—for a much younger woman. And that Grandma had gotten a c
all from Masha, the scorned second wife, warning that his secret plan was “to reunite with his first family.”
At this news, Mom just gave a snide giggle. She had by then moved on with her life.
And the Rodina we’d left behind forever?
It appeared in dreams.
I dreamed all the time I was in the Arbat by our gray building there at the corner of Merzlyakovksy and Skatertny Lanes. A low, ominous sky loomed. I gazed up yearningly at our corner window, seeing the black space where I’d once broken the glass. Somebody would let me inside. I’d take the elevator to the fifth floor and push open our door. Ghostlike, I’d sneak along to our old multicornered balconied kitchen … where a strange woman stood pouring tea from our chipped enameled kettle into Dad’s orange polka-dot cup. It was the kettle that had me waking up in a cold sweat.
Mom was tormented by the classic Soviet-émigré anxiety dream. Not about going back and being trapped behind the Iron Curtain. No, the one about finding herself back in Moscow with her family—empty-handed, with nary a single present for them. She’d wake up seared with guilt and send more money, more gifts to Russia. Our fellow émigrés bought row houses, then semidetached houses, then split-level private houses with patios. Mom to this day owns nothing.
It was the 1987 New Year’s card from Grandma Liza that sounded the first genuine hope.
Consulted the OVIR about processing your invitation to Moscow. They don’t anticipate any problems!!!
By then perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness), and the now-forgotten early-Gorbachev term uskorenie (acceleration) had become the new Soviet slogans.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s being said on TV,” breathless relatives cried in their crackly calls. “But shhh … it’s not for telephone conversation!”
Even my mom, bitterly wised up by the demise of the Thaw and cynical about any USSR leadership, was suddenly buying the Gorbachev optimism. The Radiant Future—perhaps it was finally coming. For real this time! Once again a utopian, fairy-tale Russia beckoned, where store shelves would groan with bananas, wheat bulge in the fields, and the borders swing open.
And the borders did open.
In the early fall of 1987, thirteen years after our departure from Moscow, shortly before my twenty-fourth birthday, Mom came home from the Soviet consulate in New York. “Your gadalka Terri, the fortune-teller …” she muttered, shaking her head in wonderment. She displayed our blue American passports. Affixed to each was the official visitor visa to Moscow.
My mother’s nightmares of returning to Rodina empty-handed set off a frenzy of gift buying, as though she were trying to pack all her years of guilt at leaving her family into the suitcases we were lugging back to the USSR.
What unbeautiful suitcases they were.
Four monster discount-store duffel bags, each resembling a lumpy black refrigerator on wheels. In the chaos of buying and packing I kept flashing back to our lean exodus with barely twenty pounds apiece. “Madam Frumkin, you’re a very wise woman,” a refugee greeter had complimented Mom in Rome in 1974.
Now we were hauling back half a warehouse.
What do you take to a country entirely deprived of consumer commodities? Seventeen packets of two-for-a-dollar panty hose, nude and black, as “just in case” presents; instant coffee; eight batons of salami; ballpoint pens; wristwatches; garish flashing cigarette lighters; heart medicine; calculators; shampoo—and anything with any American logo, for kids.
The specific requests from Moscow were simultaneously maddeningly particular and vague. Hooded terrycloth robes, must be blue. Two jumpsuits for a 125-centimeter-long baby of the nice nomenklatura physician treating Grandpa Naum. Knitting yarn—red with some golden thread—for a friend of a friend of someone who might one day help with admission to an exclusive health sanatorium. Door locks—because apparently perestroika unleashed criminals all over Moscow. Disposable syringes. Because Russians had now heard of AIDS.
Requests for parts for Ladas and Zhigulis (Soviet autos) made Mom groan and gnash her teeth.
I for my part insisted that Dad get no presents. Mom counterinsisted on something neutral yet classy. She settled on a lavishly illustrated book about Proust.
Meanwhile, intent on a grand entrance to the country that scorned us for leaving, I outfitted myself with an extravagant vintage forties raccoon coat.
“Going back to visit Soyuz (the Union)?” asked the owner of the ninety-nine-cent store we’d emptied in Queens. He had a wise smile, a guttural Soviet-Georgian accent.
“How many computers you taking with?” he inquired.
None, we told him.
“You’re allowed two!” he said brightly. “So you’ll bring one IBM!”
Which is how we got involved in a shady Georgian’s black market transaction, in exchange for three hundred bucks and a ride to Kennedy Airport from his cousin. The broad-shouldered cousin arrived promptly in a dented brown Chevy. He clucked approvingly at our monstrous duffel bags.
A few miles along the Long Island Expressway he announced: “First time on highway!”
It started pouring. We drove in tense silence. Then our dented, baggage-heavy Chevy skidded on the slippery road and, as if in slow motion, banged into a yellow cab alongside us. We felt our limbs; nothing seemed broken. The cops arrived and discovered the cousin had no driver’s license and an expired American guest visa. The word deportation was uttered.
How we got to JFK I can’t recall. I remember only the check-in lady at Delta informing us that while we might still catch the flight, our bags certainly wouldn’t.
“My nightmare,” Mom bleated in a very small voice.
“They’ll put the bags on the next plane,” a fellow returnee reassured us. “Of course, Soviet baggage handlers slash bags. Or if your lock is shitty-discount they just stick a hand in. Anything valuable by the surface?”
Mom stayed awake the ten hours of the flight nervously trying to remember what exactly she’d put near the surface inside our duffel bags.
“Salami,” she finally said.
And what is it like to be emigrants returned from the dead? To be resurrected in glasnost-gripped Rodina?
Your plane touches down right after a late-December snowstorm. There’s no jetway or bus. You descend and tramp along the white-muffled tarmac toward the terminal. You tramp very slowly. Or so it seems, because the clock freezes when you enter another dimension.
The northern darkness and the sharp chill awaken a long-buried sensation from a childhood that suddenly no longer feels yours. For thirteen years you haven’t smelled a true winter, but you’re inhaling it now through the cloudy, warm cocoon of your breath. You keep tramping. In the eerily slowed time you hear your pulse throbbing in your temples, and the squeaking of snow amplified as if Styrofoam were being methodically crushed by your ear.
You glance at your mother; her face looks alien in the poisonous yellow of the airport lights. Her lips are trembling. She’s squeezing your hand.
With each loud, squeaky step you grow more and more terrified. Of what exactly you’re not quite sure.
Normal time resumes in the chaos of the passport control lines.
The uniformed kid in the booth stares at my photo, then at my raccoon coat, then back at the photo, frowns, goes to consult with a colleague. I catch myself hoping that we’ll be sent back to New York. But he returns, stamps my American passport, and asks, in Russian:
“So … you missed Rodina?”
I detect a familiar sarcasm in the way he says Rodina, but I muster my best American smile and nod earnestly, realizing as I do that everything I’ve missed will probably have vanished. The loss of the imaginary Rodina. Was that what terrified me in the snow on the way to the terminal?
From the baggage area through the glass pane, a distant heaving wall of greeters waves, gesticulates.
“Papa!” Mom shrieks.
“Dedushka Naum? Where … where?”
And then I spot them—Granddad’s thick dark glass fram
es peering above a bouquet of mangy red carnations.
Wild with excitement, Mom is now waving frantically to her brother and sister. Standing next to them, also waving, is a man with a mane of gray hair and vaguely familiar features.
Something more familiar comes looming along the baggage carousel. They have arrived with us—our four epic duffel bags, with the Georgian’s IBM carton trailing behind. Each bag sports a neat slash near the zipper.
“The salami …” murmurs Mom.
In the frenzy of hugging, crying, touching, I finally recognize the man with the thick gray hair. It’s my father. But not the father I’d imagined from across the Atlantic—a romantically nihilist Alain Delon look-alike who abandoned us with cruel matter-of-factness.
The man now kissing me awkwardly is heavy and old, with polyester brown pants, shabby, square shoes with thick rubber soles, and a collapsed, sunken jaw.
This is Sergei, my father, I’m thinking. And he has no teeth.
“The salami, they stole our salami!” Mom keeps repeating, laughing madly, to Sashka, my gimpy uncle who wears a spiffy, furry karakul cap and seems jarringly, uncharacteristically sober.
“Chudo, chudo—miracle, miracle.” My aunt Yulia is wiping tears onto my raccoon coat.
Glancing sideways at Dad’s toothless mouth, I realize this: I have forgiven him everything.
The anguished nights back in Davydkovo with Mom, waiting for his key to turn in the lock, the divorce letter, the horrible birthday calls. Because while Mom and I have prospered, even flourished, my father’s life and his looks have been decaying. And I’m pretty sure this is true about Rodina generally.
A triumphant mini-armada of two Lada cars delivered us to our former apartment in Davydkovo. The squat USSR-issue Fiats, resembling soap dishes on wheels, proudly bore our epic duffel bags on their roofs. Their socialist trunks weren’t designed for ninety-nine-cent U.S. abundance.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 23