Robert tells me about Austin, Texas, where he studies, and Trenton, New Jersey, where he lives, the two places fused in my mind, foreign and unintelligible, two black holes in his puzzling universe. He tells me about the films he’s seen, the people he’s met, the things he’s bought, but he might as well be talking about nuclear physics. I don’t know what “special effects” or “star wars” mean; I have no idea who “teaching assistants” are; and I have never heard the word “parka.” But I nod, pretending I understand, pretending I am sophisticated and worldly. I am a professional at the game of pretense; I’ve perfected my skills over years of practice. Robert doesn’t suspect a thing.
In the beginning of the last week of classes I take him to my courtyard. It is better than many, with a playground in the center—a sandbox and a tall slide made of splintery wood down which I used to glide during nursery school winters. The same ankle-deep puddle in the middle of the yard gleams with a rainbow film of gasoline; “Zoika’s a bitch” is scratched into the wall next to the padlocked door where the scary garbageman of my childhood used to shovel the refuse thrown down the chutes.
The chutes are now padlocked, too, and Zoika, who was indeed a bitch ten years earlier, has left her mother to live somewhere on the other side of the Ural Mountains.
“Would you like to see my apartment?” I ask Robert. It’s probably against the rules of the department for a teacher to take a capitalist student home, even if a student is from someone else’s class. A home visit must normally be set up and approved by the director or, more likely, the director’s KGB husband, but we are here already, in my courtyard, and it would be a wrong thing to do, contrary to all rules of hospitality, not to invite him in.
The front door scrapes open, we walk up the eight cement steps to the elevator, and I press the button to summon the rumbling car from above. As we wait next to the bank of wooden mailboxes, a door to one of the first floor apartments opens, the one where the current janitor, a tall woman in a burlap apron, lives. She clangs a key ring to find the one to lock the door, but the search goes on excruciatingly long, and I know, even though I’m standing with my back to her, that she is gawking at Robert, who looks even more alien inside my apartment building than he did out on the street. The janitor doesn’t even have to wait for him to open his mouth to tell he doesn’t belong here, with his corkscrew hair and his corduroys stamped with metal buttons no Soviet store has ever seen.
The elevator car finally shudders down to the first floor, and I pull the metal door open to let us in. Inside there is a stink of urine, the usual elevator smell, and as the cabin lurches up, we look down at our feet, our backs pressed to a plywood partition that cuts off half the space inside, making the car big enough for only two or three, making it as uncomfortable as everything else here. I curl my toes inside my shoes, embarrassed by this useless partition, by the reek of urine, by the janitor’s look of condemnation. It’s a stupid feeling, of course; I wasn’t the one who built this plywood atrocity, or pissed all over the floor, or branded Robert with a disdainful stare. But I am the one who let Robert see it and smell it. I am, in the words of our American program teacher-trainer, the facilitator of acquisition.
My mother is in the kitchen ironing, bent over an old blanket spread on the table, leaning with all her weight on the heavy iron she’s just heated on a stove burner. She’s doing the linens: sheets, duvets, and pillowcases that are cotton and wrinkle terribly when she wrings them out in the bathtub.
“This is Robert from my American program,” I say, as I wave for him to come to the kitchen. “I was showing him our courtyards, and then he wanted to see a Russian apartment.”
My mother straightens up and sets the iron on a metal trivet. Although she smiles back at Robert and stretches out her hand to meet his for a handshake, I can guess what she is thinking: Americans know nothing about manners; according to the proper etiquette, a man must wait for a woman to stretch her hand out first. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, taking off her apron. “Please make yourself at home while I organize some tea.”
“You can’t avoid having tea in a Russian house,” I say to Robert, who, I can see, is delighted at the prospect.
My mother is taking this tea very seriously, I can tell: she’s rooting in the cupboard for a jar of raspberry jam; she’s asking me to bring the good cups from my sister’s room. I take the cup assignment as an opportunity to show Robert the apartment, and I now look at Marina’s room through a foreigner’s eyes: creaky parquet, wavy and unwaxed for years; wallpaper with flowers that were once yellow; peeling windowsills with pots of aloe and feeble scallion shoots my mother pinches off for salad.
I open the balcony door, and the summer street noise tumbles into the room—trams, buses, and a line to the liquor store that snakes around the corner and ends somewhere under the balcony where we stand. “What are they selling there?” asks Robert in Russian—he’s switched to Russian completely, proud of his case endings, which make him rub his temples and squint his eyes before they stagger out of his mouth, tortured but nearly perfect.
They aren’t selling anything yet. People are lining up because they see a truck parked next to the store, which signals a delivery—of what exactly, no one knows. Yet whatever it is that has just been delivered isn’t going to last long, so they stand there waiting, leaning forward in hope of getting a glimpse of what they’re queuing up for. “Probably cheap vodka,” I say. “Or cheap port. We call it chernila, which means ink.” Robert smiles, and I know he’s just filed the new word away into the coils of his versatile brain.
I’m impressed by Robert’s kaleidoscopic talents, so inaccessible to me: physics, music, writing. I’m bewildered by his curiosity, by his willingness to travel to my city—a grandiose ruin hermetically sealed from the rest of the world—and live in it for six weeks. Most of all, I’m awed by his foreignness. I think I am even attracted to him, and if not to him as an individual, then to his otherness, to the classified, unknowable world he represents. The world I’ve been trying to decipher since I had my first private English lesson with Irina Petrovna when I was ten, the secret and closed place where English is spoken, the place I know so well and yet don’t know at all. Everything alien and mesmerizing and seductive has fused together and condensed in one person gawking down from my balcony at the line for cheap ink.
“Tea is ready!” yells my mother from the kitchen, where Robert and I carry the good cups ensconced on good saucers, the gold-rimmed set my mother inherited from her parents. In addition to a bowl with raspberry jam, I see an open box of chocolates on the table my mother has extracted from the reserve cache of jars of mayonnaise and cans of tuna she keeps for holidays and special occasions. I take one and then one more; the chocolates have acquired a white patina of time from sitting in the cupboard for so long.
She asks Robert about the program, but from her absentminded questions I can see this is just polite small talk. What she really wants to know is what Robert does in America. Where he works, where he lives, with whom. Mundane questions, as practical as my mother.
He studies in Texas, finishing his PhD in physics. Robert rubs his forehead, thinking of the correct conjugations and declensions. When he is not in Texas, he is in his mother’s house in New Jersey. New Jersey? asks my mother. Close to New York City, he says. On the other side of the Hudson. Hudson? asks my mother. The word in Russian is Goodzon, which must sound funny to Robert, as if the Hudson River were a good zone in the middle of the otherwise rotten place.
We spread butter and spoon raspberry jam onto slices of bread, so fresh it gives way under the load. Much better than the cafeteria food, says Robert, chewing and smiling, although I can’t see how bread with dacha raspberry jam can be better than the professorial cabbage stuffed with real meat or the bowls brimming with whipped cream.
While Robert is searching for verb endings, my mother gives him pointed looks. She is trying to figure out what to think of this home visit, knowing all too well that I
won’t be the one to reveal the truth. It’s a game we’ve been playing for as long as I can remember, a game of pretending, not unlike the vranyo game we all play with the state. I pretend that my bringing Robert home means nothing, and she pretends to believe me. She knows I won’t tell her what I really think about Robert, and I know that she knows that I know.
The truth is I haven’t yet decided how I feel about Robert myself.
“DON’T BE AN IDIOT,” says Nina. “This is one chance in a lifetime.”
On Saturday, the Russian language program is over, and all the students are flying back to the United States. As I’ve anticipated, with both hope and trepidation, Robert has said he is sorry to leave. “I don’t want to say good-bye to you,” he uttered in Russian slowly, in search of the perfect grammatical structure.
“I’m sorry you’re leaving, too,” I said and sighed.
“Maybe I can come back in six months,” he offered. “When the fall semester is over at my university.”
“I hope you can. I would like that very much,” I said. “Your coming back.”
I repeat this to Nina, without mentioning my deliberate sighing. “If I could,” she says, “I’d be out of here on the first goddamn plane. This country is doomed, and we’re doomed with it. I’d go anywhere. I’d go to Patagonia if I could.”
But she knows she can’t. She has just married an engineer named Rudik she fell madly in love with, and now they’re living in her two-room apartment with her parents and her brother. I visited them recently in lieu of going to the wedding they didn’t have. Nina cooked a fabulous dinner, and we drank a bottle of red Bulgarian wine I brought, heating it in a pot with sugar and sliced apples to get rid of the acidic taste. Rudik was tentative, not quite a host in his in-laws’ apartment, not quite the passionate romantic Nina had described him to be. He showed me a huge glass vat with coils, which I was certain he’d stolen from a chemistry lab at his job, where from water, sugar, and yeast he produces what he called idealniy samogon, perfect moonshine.
“Do whatever you have to do,” says Nina, “to get the hell out.”
ROBERT WANTS TO SEE a white night, and I take him just before he has to leave. Those of us born here are used to white nights, of course; we close the drapes and sleep right through them without any trouble. But tourists think it’s part of the experience to complain that they can’t catch a wink of sleep because the sun shines in their eyes. Influenced by the romantic nonsense on postcards, they have to flock to the Neva after midnight to gawk in consternation as the bridges open and slowly rise into the sky to let the ships on their way to the Baltic Sea pass through the city center.
Robert and I are walking on the wrong side of the river, from where the open bridges do not allow us to return until three in the morning. The needle of the Peter and Paul Fortress is glinting in the first rays of the sun, which is rising one hour past midnight, as usual, a copper disk making the brick-colored Rostrum Columns glow in the hues of pale rose. We watch the Palace Bridge split in the middle and creak up into the pale sky. Streams of high school graduates float past us—seventeen-year-olds decked out in dresses sewn by their mothers and suits borrowed from their family armoire, celebrating their new freedom. Their exuberance dances on the steel grid of the bridges, bounces off the stone fence of the embankment.
Robert holds my hand, then puts his arm around my shoulders. I find my ear pressed to the wool of his sweater, which has a foreign, antiseptic smell. I don’t know what I want him to do—to hold me closer or to let me go. If he holds me closer, I’ll have a chance of getting on an international flight out of here, as Nina thinks I should. If he lets me go, I’ll be back to my mother’s apartment, to our life of pretense and vranyo. I’ll be back in my courtyard, which is a much better emblem for our life here than a ubiquitous hammer and sickle: the crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind it.
Robert tightens his embrace, touching his lips to my temple, and we stand there, like so many other couples around us, gawking at the open bridge with its arms stretched to the sky.
I TIPTOE INTO THE hallway of my apartment around four in the morning, when the sun has crept past the cupboard and is glinting on the kitchen stove. In her ghostly nightgown, my mother is shuffling toward the bathroom, her hair, mussed by sleep, slithering down her back in a skinny braid. Robert and I said good-bye in Decembrists’ Square, halfway between his dorm and my house. He was going to see me home, but I wanted to be sure he could find his way back.
“What are you doing up so late?” My mother squints in my direction. It takes her a minute to see that I am dressed in street clothes. “Where have you been?” The light beams in her eyes as she lumbers closer. “It’s the middle of the night,” she says, shielding her face from the sun.
I haven’t told my mother anything about Robert, just as I haven’t told her anything else about my life that is of any importance. I don’t want to face her lecturing, or her guilt-provoking tirades, or her advice. What could she possibly advise me regarding a fledgling love affair with an American, my mother who was born along with the Soviet state? What advice could she give me about anything? In our brief interactions I inform her about my university classes and private lessons—always the summary of the outcomes, never the curves of the process. I recite the courses I’ve taken, the new students acquired. She seems to think she is in control of my life.
“It’s white nights,” I say and look out the window at the tide of the gleaming roofs that roll toward the horizon. “The whole city is awake. Everyone’s out on the streets, everyone’s in love.”
“I don’t care about everyone,” says my mother. “I worry about you. You’re my daughter, and at four in the morning you should be safe at home. Where were you?”
A wave of fatigue rolls over me, a lull of exhaustion. I have been so diligent in slicing my soul in two and keeping the real half to myself, away from the outside, away from my mother, who wants me to be safe.
“Out on a date,” I say, scraping with my fingernail at something stuck to the oilcloth. “With a foreigner, an American. The one who came to see our apartment.”
I see my mother gasp as her face begins to twitch with restrained tears.
“An American?” she squeezes out as if the words themselves would blemish her. “American” and “date” in the same phrase, as I should’ve known, have fused into a powerful compound fraught with explosive consequences. She glowers at me, swallowing the oncoming tears. “Aren’t there any Russian fellows around? Nice university graduates?”
She waits for my response, for some indication that I am open to normalcy. Out of the corner of my eye I see her swallow hard as I deliberately continue to trace the oilcloth flowers with my fingernail.
“What’s wrong with you?” she yells. “You’re exactly like your father—stubborn as a goat.”
Strangely, I feel removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. My mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing a prodigal daughter. Robert’s taste is still lingering in my mouth; American kissing and groping are no different from what they are here. Although my mother’s voice is trembling, suspended on the brink of crying, I can’t help thinking of a joke Nina has told me: A mother barges in on a daughter in bed with a man and laments, Next she’ll start smoking.
On my way to the kitchen door, sharpening my voice like a knife, I turn to my mother, hunched over the table.
“And, by the way, I also smoke,” I say and shut the door behind me.
What comes out of my mouth is driven by anger: at my righteous mother, who refuses to look out the window and see there is no bright dawn on the horizon; at my black-hearted country that inspired her, forged her into steel, and deceived her.
18. Waiting
DEAR LENA, WRITES ROBERT from Copenhagen, where he had to change planes on the way back to the United States. I’m in the airport, waiting for my flight, thinking about you. There are no
border patrolmen with gold epaulets and no guns, but every store sells salted herring, just like in Leningrad. Will write again from the States.
I receive this postcard a month later, when Robert is back in New Jersey, or Texas, having long forgotten about Danish herring, but not about Leningrad. Soon after the postcard, a long envelope arrives with my name written in a careful foreign handwriting, and then a letter appears in my mailbox every week. I miss you, he writes, in English and Russian. He wants me to respond in Russian, so he can practice his grammar. I’ve already begun inquiries into coming back in December, he writes. Getting a visa is a tortuous process and needs to be started early. It’s difficult to get to talk to someone in the Soviet Embassy in Washington—they don’t answer the phones.
Nina just laughs when I tell her about the Embassy phones. In August, we were given temporary full-time teaching jobs in the Philology department we’d just graduated from. Natalia Borisovna pats us on the shoulders and says that our summer work at the American program has strengthened our prospects. After a few years of temporary teaching, if we take an active role in Komsomol and union activities and if some faculty member drops dead or decides to retire, we may be considered for a permanent university teaching job. It’s a remote possibility, whispers Natalia Borisovna, I won’t deny it, but if such an opening happens to come up, I won’t recommend anyone but you. We are very grateful, says Nina, who knows what to say in every social situation. It will be a great privilege and honor to work in this department by your side, she adds.
I am not sure Natalia Borisovna would be so helpful if she knew that a student I met at the American program, where I worked on her recommendation, has been calling the Soviet Embassy in Washington to get a visa to see me again in December. I’m not sure she would be helpful at all if she knew that he sends me a letter every week with reports about his life and graduate studies at the University of Texas. The stories about his teaching assistantship and his Indian roommate are as incomprehensible to me as if they were written in Farsi, the language he tried to learn when he went to Afghanistan as part of the Peace Corps five years earlier. I don’t know what the Peace Corps is, but I suspect it may actually have something to do with world peace, unlike our own House of Friendship and Peace, where I worked as a secretary to the departed director.
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