Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  The small stateroom seemed enormous to me after the cramped rooms in the camp. It didn't take much to seem like luxury. After years of sharing two small cots for all four of us, it was a thrill to be in a room with a bed that felt nearly the size of our whole sleeping area in the barracks. We could all fit on it, and it was our first experience of snuggling together in bed with Mama and Papa. After we got to America we spent all our Sunday mornings in our parents’ bed, drinking Turska kafa, Turkish coffee, and hot chocolate and talking.

  The ship was American. It was our introduction to America, really, and we were crossing during Christmas week. The crew was very nice and they smiled a lot, but I couldn’t understand anything they said. There was a big tree, and they had presents for us. Mine was a long-legged teddy bear, and I loved it. No one had ever given me a present like that before. Mama told me I could keep it when we got off the ship, but I still worried that it was only for the ship. It slept under my pillow when I left the stateroom.

  The second morning of the trip, Mama had gone out to get a cup of coffee while we were still asleep, but suddenly she rushed back in to wake us.

  “Tania, get up. Sasha, dress quickly. There’s a surprise outside!” she cried gaily, while pulling up warm tights and tying shoelaces. I hadn’t heard Mama shouting happily like that in a long time. Maybe I had never heard her sound like that, and I was really excited for the treat.

  We ran up the stairs and found the decks full of people shouting, laughing, catching things that seemed to be flying through the air. Papa lifted me high in the air and carried me toward the railing. Mama and Sasha followed us.

  The ship seemed to be standing still in the water, and near it were some big cliffs with white houses and a big fort. We were surrounded by what Papa called a flotilla—lots of little boats of all kinds. People were tossing coins to the people in the boats, and they were throwing back brightly colored things.

  “Papa, can we get something?” I asked. I was almost frightened by the colors, the noise, and the confusion. But everyone was laughing, so I started jumping up and down on his shoulders and clapping my hands. Papa put me down so I wouldn’t jump off the boat by accident.

  “What would you like?” he asked. Then he put his head near Sasha and me, and smiled. “Shall we get Mama a scarf?” he asked, conspiratorially.

  “Papa, look! That man is pointing toward us,” cried Sasha. “And he has pretty scarves. Let’s get one of those for Mama!”

  Papa shouted some words that I didn’t understand in some strange language. The man shouted back, they laughed, and then Papa said “Si, Señor!” He pulled some coins out of his pocket and wrapped them in his handkerchief, then tossed them. I was worried that the coins would land in the sea. But the man in the boat caught them. Then he wrapped the scarf up in Papa’s handkerchief and threw it back. It came sailing through the sky toward us, and Papa caught it.

  It was gorgeous. Huge and colored in bright blues, reds and greens, it had pictures of the city and fort all over it. It turned out we were at a place called the Rock of Gibraltar. It was the end, Papa said, of the calm seas and the beginning of the Atlantic Ocean, and America was on the other side. And we had a souvenir to take to America with us, a beautiful scarf that Mama wore for many years under her coat when she went downtown.

  Then the ship pulled out into the ocean, and we went down for breakfast. We had a table to ourselves in a big, gaily decorated room. There were lots of spoons and forks and plates and glasses on the table. People speaking English came by to ask what we wanted. My parents spoke a little English, a lot more than Sasha and I did. At first I was unhappy because no one understood me. Soon, however, I felt very important, being served by kind, smiling strangers. I had never seen so many people who smiled so much, even though they didn’t know you. In the camps, hardly anyone smiled—except Vava and Zhenya, of course.

  “Tania, do you want an egg?” Mama asked.

  “No, no egg. I want some of that!” I cried, pointing to a brightly colored box that had a picture of a cartoon animal on it. It was my first taste of American cereal. It was kind of sweet—I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  Sasha ordered a boiled egg, and it came in something else I had never seen: a small cup that was no bigger than half the egg. The waiter sliced the top off the egg in one swift stroke. He then offered to sprinkle the egg from something in his hand that looked like a tiny bowl of sugar. Sasha said “yes,” and the waiter sprinkled the white powder over the soft egg.

  “Why is he putting that on Sasha’s egg?” I asked.

  “It will make it taste better,” Mama replied.

  “Then I want some in my cocoa,” I said.

  “But Tania, that’s salt!” Mama said.

  “I don’t care what it is; I want some.”

  “Zolotko, it won’t taste good,” Papa tried.

  “Yes, it will. Sasha got some, and I want some. I know it will make my cocoa taste better.” It seemed all my life Sasha got the good things, and I was considered too young to have them.

  I am not sure why, but my parents gave in. The incredulous waiter, having understood none of this, finally poured a tiny amount of the white powder into my cocoa.

  The cocoa, of course, was ruined. I bravely sipped at it, pretending it was fine.

  The ship meanwhile, had started listing more dramatically than in the calm Mediterranean. Shortly after breakfast, I got violently ill, and stayed sick to my stomach for most of the journey to New York. I suspect I was seasick, but Mama told me it was because I had that salt in my cocoa. I was angry that she never took my side, but perversely it only made me more stubborn and determined to make my own choices rather than listen to her.

  Fortunately, I recovered in time to stand on the deck with the others, watching and waiting to see something called the Statue of Liberty. But heavy clouds closed in and we saw nothing. Ellis Island had been closed for some time, the flood of immigrants to America had slowed, and our immigration processing, Mama told me later, was almost anticlimactic. All those years of worrying, and then some man in a uniform just looked at our documents, stamped them, and without any emotion waved his hand so the next people in line could be checked. The disembarkation was a blur of activity, and then we set off to find our friends the Karsanidis, who had moved to New York from the Campo.

  Papa and Mama walked to a taxi. It was yellow with a big sign on top, and as easy to find as the Karsanidis had described in their letter. Mama swore she could have said the address in English—she had practiced on the ship—but Papa had a piece of paper that he gave to the driver and we took off.

  America was not very nice.

  It was cold and gray, and the taxi windows kept getting foggy so we couldn’t see much. There were lots of people on the streets, but they were all moving as if they were in a big hurry. Everywhere we looked there were big buildings. You couldn’t see the sky. We had waited all those years for this?

  Finally the driver found the building with the right numbers on it. It was very tall and dirty. We climbed long flights in a hot stairwell and walked through halls that reeked of boiled cabbage and garlic. Sasha and I gagged and made faces at each other.

  We had often discussed where we would live in America, and my mother always promised we would decide together.

  “Mama, we don’t want to live here,” Sasha said, before they even asked. He knew he was speaking for me too. “We want to go to San Francisco and live with Uncle Shura!”

  ”So, you’ve already decided?” laughed my father.

  “I hate New York; it stinks here!” Sasha said. I added, “I thought America would be pretty and warm, not cold and smelly like this. Please, let’s go to San Francisco.”

  “Not all of New York can be like this,” Papa said, unconvincingly. “And San Francisco could be worse. What do you think, Zora?”

  “We told the children they could decide.” Mama said. “Are you two sure that’s what you want? It’s an important decision, you know. We can’t come back
if you don’t like it.”

  “We are, we are,” we both shouted. “San Francisco, San Francisco, we’re going to San Francisco!”

  “Well, it’s been a long time since we could choose where we live,” Mama said, getting teary. “I think we should do what you want. We want you to like living in America.”

  We had no idea what San Francisco was, but by now it seemed magical compared to this place, this New York, that we had instantly hated. It was dirty and dark on the sidewalks, hot in the stairways and stinky in the long narrow hallways. Our friends were nice, but they couldn’t make up for all this. We just kept jumping up and down and shouting until Papa interrupted.

  “Well, now that you have made up your minds, come with me.” Papa took us to the nearby station to buy tickets.

  The very next day we set off on a four-day-and-night trip on a Greyhound bus bound for San Francisco.

  That evening, as my mother was bundling me up to go to sleep in my window seat, Papa suddenly shouted, “Smotrite! Taniusha! Sashura! Sneg! Look! Taniusha, Sashura! Snow!”

  As we stared out at the twilight, the bus driver announced we were approaching Philadelphia. The bus slowed down, and a small country church caught my eye. The first snow I had ever seen fell gently around its steepled roof in a halo. I gasped with pleasure, and smiled, contentedly, as I fell asleep.

  We had made the right choice after all. America was beautiful!

  The four unit house owned by Tolya and his brother Shura in San Francisco in 1956. Zora and Galya are in the window, Tania and Sasha are with their uncle Shura on the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  San Francisco, home

  The Russian community in San Francisco welcomed us. Our sponsors were Shura and Galya. The family of Alex Akalovsky, who was later to serve as Nixon’s translator in Russia, had sponsored them, and in return Mama and Papa sponsored later arrivals. We all crowded into friends’ apartments, illegally, at some risk of being evicted.

  The city was struggling, as many were in those days of emerging suburbia, and we arrived as it neared bottom. Market Street merchants watched their business collapse and downtown deteriorated to a dirty word. The Crystal Palace, a venerable food emporium, gasped a last breath. The ornate and elegant Fox Theater was razed with only minor debate. Cable cars were threatened, and a freeway covered half the waterfront before being stopped dead, half built, by protests.

  There were actually plans in place to dump fill into the Bay and build houses there; much of the bay was lost to farms and developments like Foster City before sanity was regained—thanks to three women in Berkeley and the Save the Bay movement. The inner city rotted, rents tumbled, buildings deteriorated. Many years later San Francisco Victorians regained their cachet, but in the meantime many were replaced by something called “urban renewal” and “housing projects.”

  Meanwhile, values sank in many once vibrant neighborhoods. After the initial months of crowding in with friends, we finally moved into an apartment of our own. My father and Uncle Shura both worked for the Sunbeam Corporation, fixing small appliances. Somehow they quickly saved the minimum down payment required to buy a rundown building on Hayes Street near Golden Gate Park. It had become an inner city neighborhood that people fled for the suburbs. The old Lowell High School was just blocks away, but it was soon shuttered and relocated at the outer edge of the city where Stonestown—the first shopping mall—was also built at the time.

  Old homes were being torn down and Tolya and Shura hauled home abandoned windows, appliances, and hardwood flooring. They rebuilt and painted. Sand from the beach was bagged—at night, to avoid detection—and a giant sandbox for me and Sasha appeared in the backyard. Aunt Galya’s mother and her husband eventually ended up living in one of the apartments, and I was beside myself with joy when Uncle Zhenya and Vava moved in next to us.

  When my grandmother arrived a year or two later, she was squeezed onto a couch in the living room. As far as I know, no one ever mentioned the fact that she had sworn never to talk to my mother or father again after they made her go to France.

  Her personality hadn’t shifted much. She took me to the park every day, but she doted on Sasha—the oldest boy. One evening she snuck into the room Sasha and I slept in—until he got tired of my bedwetting and moved into the dining room—and handed Sasha a dime. She then turned to me and said, “A tyebe nichevo. And for you, nothing.” Sasha shared it with me, as he did everything she gave him, but it made me determined that the world was not going to look down on me just because I was a female. Once planted, that chip on my shoulder just grew bigger.

  Even though I loved being close to Zhenya and Vava and the rest of them, I eventually grew to hate being foreign. I loved my family; I just wished they were more American.

  I had Russian girlfriends from Russian School and Russian Scouts, but I wanted to be more like the American girls. Every day, I went to what other people thought of as school. At our house the local public school, Andrew Jackson, a block away, was called American School.

  I didn’t know what the homes of the little American girls were like, but I was pretty sure they were different from ours. They didn’t wear homemade dresses, and their lunch boxes didn’t have homemade pickles and homemade tortes. I was pretty sure their mothers weren’t making jams and canning grilled peppers. And people spoke American where they lived.

  I didn't dream about being rich, I dreamed of getting dresses from J.C. Penney’s. Most of all, I wanted a store-bought cake for my birthday. Not the kind of cake that Zora produced from wonderful natural ingredients. No. I wanted the kind of cake that shared shelf space with Wonder Bread, the kind that was covered with a pure white butter cream and topped with red roses. The kind that I knew all the little American girls in my class ate on their birthdays.

  My desire had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with fitting in. But there was no easy way to bring up this secret desire at home. Papa once told me his taste buds sang arias to the tastes and aromas of Mama's kitchen.

  I liked being there well enough. Special things from Mama’s baking spread everywhere: chocolate-covered spoons that I got to lick clean; vanilla beans ground into powder and mixed with sugar for chocolate tortes; cooling hazelnuts that had been gently roasted; gentle currents of warm air emerging from the oven door.

  One day I sat on my green vinyl chair at the Formica table. The smell of coffee beans roasting rose from the black iron contraption Papa had built from a frying pan. It sat on the flame and required attention the entire time of the roasting, to avoid burning the beans. Papa was the one roasting that day, but he was taking a break, probably for a cigarette out on the back stairwell.

  Suddenly, clouds of smoke came pouring through the small opening in the top of the pan, accompanied by the acrid stench of burning. In an instant the normal womb-like comfort of the kitchen vanished.

  Before I had time to get too frightened, my mother ran in from her sewing room and took over. The house didn’t burn down, but Papa was evicted from the kitchen—Mama’s kitchen, where he was just a visitor. She grabbed the jezva, the same old Turkish coffee pot that was used in all her homes back in Yugoslavia. Babusya wandered in and reached for the traditional tall elaborately etched brass tube that she used to grind the coffee.

  “Mama, why do you roast your own coffee?” I asked, wondering why everything we did had to be so different from other people.

  “Well, you know, I can’t find the right kind of beans in any store,” she said.

  “What about the Armenian on Clement?” I asked. We referred to all shopkeepers by nationality and location in our house, and no one ever became confused about which one was being discussed.

  “Oh no, his are not even close. I think he makes it for American tastes; it doesn’t have any body to it,” Zora responded. She considered anything for “American” tastes bland, heavy, and full of artificial flavors. “The one on Polk is the closest, but roasting our own is the only sure way of getting it perfe
ct. If your father doesn’t forget about it, that is.” She smiled.

  “What about getting an electric coffee grinder?” Since my father repaired appliances for Sunbeam, our kitchen was festooned with the most exotic reconstructed devices. We even had an electric egg cooker in case anyone didn’t know how to boil an egg.

  “We had one of those grinders for a while; but it’s not as good as doing it by hand. The beans heat up from being rotated at high speeds, and the knives smash them all together. It’s just not the same.” She effortlessly executed the six other things she was doing in the kitchen while I vaguely pretended to do homework. “Besides, Babusya likes grinding the coffee.”

  Babusya just chuckled to herself and kept grinding.

  In those days Maxwell House or Folger's medium roast pre-ground coffee was being percolated to death in most American kitchens. In our house, the coffee making was a ceremony, the drinking a rite.

  “Can I make the coffee?” I asked. I’d seen it done a dozen times a day; I could make it in my sleep.

  “Yes, but be careful. Don’t burn yourself.”

  The water in the jezva boiled. I poured off a little bit into a small Turkish coffee cup. To the water remaining in the jezva, I added five big scoops of the fine black powder, stirring it in carefully. The coffee heated to a boil, then slowly rose toward the top of the jezva. Just before it overflowed, I swished it away from the heat to let it settle back down. I did this three times altogether, stirring it to set the flavor. A lovely brown crown of foam formed over the top. After the third time, I poured the water reserved earlier back into the jezva. This helped the grounds, which remained in the coffee, to settle.

  The aroma now filled the apartment, and Papa wandered back just in time to see the coffee being poured. Uncle Shura showed up at the back door, coming down from his upstairs apartment. With Babusya, they settled into a nice Saturday afternoon chat. No one asked why my Aunt Galya hadn’t come down. We knew she was busy in her kitchen, cooking and baking, just like Mama.